THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 2020

Volume 7, Number 56

EIR Daily Alert Service

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

• Urgent: Helga Zepp-LaRouche Calls for Immediate Banking Holiday
• Speaking as ‘Wartime President,’ Trump Invokes Defense Production Act to Accelerate COVID-19 Response
• Coronavirus Pandemic ‘War Game’ in October 2019, With 65 Million Dead; How Did the West Not Know It Was Coming?
• Pompeo Won’t Abandon Geopolitics Despite Coronavirus Pandemic
• Iraq Complains to UN About Illegal U.S. Airstrikes
• Fed Begins Bailout of the City of London-Wall Street Primary Dealer Banks
• Cuban Doctors Play Crucial Role in Combatting Coronavirus Internationally
• Pompeo Won’t Abandon Geopolitics Despite Coronavirus Pandemic
• Iraq Complains to UN About Illegal U.S. Airstrikes
• Fed Begins Bailout of the City of London-Wall Street Primary Dealer Banks
• Cuban Doctors Play Crucial Role in Combatting Coronavirus Internationally
• To Defeat the Coronavirus, Europe Turns to Its Classical Music
• China Working Overtime To Produce Equipment for the World in the Global Fight Against COVID-19
• British Automakers Retooling 3D Printers to Spur Ventilator Output and U.S. to Gear Up Soon
• Southern Hemisphere Nations HAve Weakened Immunity to Resist the Coronavirus
• IAEA Giving Nuclear-Derived Technology to Developing Countries to Quickly Identify Coronavirus

EDITORIAL

Urgent: Helga Zepp-LaRouche Calls for Immediate Banking Holiday

March 18 (EIRNS)—Helga Zepp-LaRouche today issued the following emergency recorded statement, which is posted on the LaRouche PAC website:

This is Helga Zepp-LaRouche speaking. I am the founder and president of the Schiller Institute.

It is absolutely clear, that after the rollercoaster, dramatic losses of the financial markets in the recent days, the systemic crisis is spinning out of control.

The only remedy to prevent a further devastation of the real economy, a dramatic increase of mass unemployment and the loss of lives of the poor and vulnerable segments of the population is to close down the financial markets.

This is the necessary first step, to then use this banking holiday to implement the reorganization of the financial system, starting with a global Glass-Steagall separation of the banks, exactly as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1933.

The measures which were taken by the European governments and the United States, such as credits for enterprises, delays in tax payments, and even possible direct handouts of money—the so-called helicopter money—while intended to keep the functions of industry, institutions and the workforce going, will not be sufficient, because the system is hopelessly bankrupt.

Most of the enormous amounts of liquidity which have been injected into this bankrupt monetary system after 2008, and in an escalated way after September 17, 2019, has just increased the activity of the casino economy and the frenzy of the speculators. The effort by the central banks to maintain that speculative sector can only lead to a hyperinflationary blowout as in Germany in 1923.

The closing of the financial markets must be accompanied by an immediate emergency summit of the most important governments of the world: the United States, China, Russia and India—supported by others, to determine the urgent reorganization of the financial system and the establishment of a New Bretton Woods system, as it was intended by Franklin D. Roosevelt and called for by Lyndon LaRouche, to restart the physical economy worldwide.

Such immediate steps are indispensable, since the coronavirus pandemic can only be brought under control if the spread of the virus is stopped and an adequate health system is established in every country.

This is a test, to determine if humanity has the moral fitness to survive.

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

Speaking as ‘Wartime President,’ Trump Invokes Defense Production Act To Accelerate COVID-19 Response

March 18 (EIRNS)—In today’s White House press conference of the coronavirus task force, President Donald Trump described himself as a “wartime President,” and announced that shortly after the press conference, he would be invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA), “just in case we need it,” which grants him the authority to take whatever action he deems necessary to defeat the “invisible enemy” of the novel coronavirus.

“If we need to use it [the DPA], we’ll use it at full speed ahead,” the President said. It will allow for the production of respirators, personal protection equipment (PPEs) and N95 masks, he said.

Enacted in September 1950 as part of the Korean War mobilization, the DPA grants the President broad powers that would certainly be appropriate in responding to the current COVID-19 emergency. These include mobilizing sectors of industry, revamping regulations to ensure allocation of materials, services and facilities, and control of the civilian economy to ensure availability of scarce or critical materials. Among other things, the DPA also grants the President the authority to requisition property, force industry to expand production and the supply of basic resources.

Trump told reporters at one point, “We are ordering thousands and thousands of ventilators.”

Significantly, Trump concluded his opening remarks to the press conference, by pointing to the example of Franklin Roosevelt’s war mobilization during World War II—he didn’t mention Roosevelt by name—to discuss actions he’s taking today. “In World War II, young people in their teenage years volunteered to fight.  They wanted to fight so badly because they love our country.  Workers refused to go home and slept on factory floors to keep assembly lines running.  The numbers of ships that they built during World War II—to this day … nothing like that has ever been equal. They were doing ships literally on a daily basis. Nobody has ever seen anything like it.  To this day, nobody has seen anything like what they were able to do during World War II.

“And now it’s our time.  We must sacrifice together because we are all in this together and we’ll come through together. It’s the invisible enemy. That’s always the toughest enemy: the invisible enemy.  But we’re going to defeat the invisible enemy. I think we’re going to do it even faster than we thought.  And it will be a complete victory.  It’ll be a total victory.”

Coronavirus Pandemic ‘War Game’ in October 2019, with 65 Million Dead; How Did the West Not Know It Was Coming?

March 18 (EIRNS)—On October 18, 2019, a war-game exercise called Event 201 was conducted in New York City by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The introductory statement on the website for the event reads: “In recent years, the world has seen a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to approximately 200 events annually. These events are increasing, and they are disruptive to health, economies, and society. Managing these events already strains global capacity, even absent a pandemic threat.  Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes a global pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic … would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.”

The exercise resulted in 65 million people dying internationally. Other similar exercises have been held over the past years. An 11-minute video of the enactment is horrifying.

How is it, then, that the nations of Europe and North America were not prepared, and even worse, waited nearly two months after the early January mass action by China to counter and contain the virus—including disseminating the genome internationally—before any serious action was taken to counter the pandemic’s spread to their own populations?

It is not a matter of wild conspiracy theories about who is to blame, or if it were the result of biological warfare—it is a far more fundamental issue: Why did the distorted economic paradigm infecting the Western elites, and the underlying British Malthusian insistence that the world is overpopulated, override the basic human impulse to prevent the mass loss of life?

The Trump Administration, and most of the European governments, are now taking appropriate emergency measures. But, as NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly asserted, we were not prepared for this scale of a pandemic. This cannot be explained other than that the “short-term profit” drive of the “free market” British System has so destroyed the Hamiltonian American System—based on government-directed creditary policies to enhance productivity through science and infrastructure—that the leaders deserted their republican responsibility to the people. The fascist green agenda fed this Malthusian psychosis.

Recognizing the cause is the necessary first step to a solution.

STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

Pompeo Won’t Abandon Geopolitics Despite Coronavirus Pandemic

March 18 (EIRNS)—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demonstrated in spades yesterday why President Donald Trump must fire him. During a press briefing and in new actions taken, Pompeo showed that he’s incapable of abandoning the bloody axioms of geopolitics with respect to Iran, Syria and Russia even in the face of the global coronavirus pandemic. When the U.S. needs to be reaching out to more countries for cooperation with the rest of the world to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, Pompeo continues, instead, to issue indictments and impose sanctions in the spirit of the old, dying regime change—permanent warfare paradigm.

With respect to Iran—just days after China and others called on the U.S. to remove the sanctions due to the humanitarian disaster there—the State Department imposed yet more sanctions yesterday, blacklisting nine entities based in South Africa, Hong Kong and China, as well as three Iranian individuals, for engaging in “significant transactions” to trade in Iranian petrochemicals, reported Reuters. While he did not name them, Pompeo said the step included blacklisting Iran’s armed forces social security investment company and its director for investing in sanctioned entities.

Separately, the Commerce Department said it will add 6 people—including 5 Iranian nuclear scientists—and 18 corporations, to the U.S. “Entity List” for aiding Iran’s nuclear program, Pakistan’s unsafeguarded nuclear and missile programs, and Russian military modernization efforts.

Iran has reported more than 16,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and about 1,000 deaths

Iraq Complains to UN about Illegal U.S. Airstrikes

March 18 (EIRNS)—Baghdad has submitted complaints to the United Nations about last week’s U.S. airstrikes against Kataib Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shi’ite militia that the U.S. military blames for rocket attacks on U.S. troops housed at Iraqi bases. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has sent two similar statements to the U.N. and the Security Council complaining about U.S. bombings against the Iraqi forces,” said Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Al-Sahaf, reported TASS.

“We reiterated there that the U.S. forces’ presence on Iraqi soil is aimed at providing assistance such as military training, consulting and armaments to fight against terrorists of the Islamic State, calling on the Security Council to prevent such illegal steps by the U.S., which is fully responsible for casualties and destroyed infrastructure,” the spokesman stressed. According to Al-Sahaf, Washington, which claims that these strikes were driven by self-defense, is trying to avoid international responsibility. He emphasized that any combat operations or movement of U.S. forces without the government’s consent are “provocation, … a hostile act and a flagrant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and of the terms of their presence in the country.”

ECONOMY

Fed Begins Bailout of the City of London-Wall Street Primary Dealer Banks

March 18 (EIRNS)—The Federal Reserve yesterday announced (again, under Section 13(3) Federal Reserve Act, “unusual and exigent circumstances…”) a Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF)—continuing to repeat its steps in Wall Street’s huge bailout of late 2007 and 2008. This is, for the first time in this crisis, a direct bailout of the bank holding companies. “The facility will allow primary dealers to support smooth market functioning and facilitate the availability of credit to businesses and households,” the Fed said in a Tuesday afternoon, March 17, statement transparently unrelated to its actual bailout purpose.

The facility allows the New York Fed to offer 90-day loans directly to the primary dealer banks, which provide liquidity to the interbank market—or did until lately, when the Fed has had to do that. Under the PDCF, banks and broker-dealers access loans by offering collateral; and again, the real purpose is to provide a fixed computed value to these securities on the banks’ books, which securities are actually plunging in market value.

The Federal Reserve statement said: “Collateral eligible for pledge under the PDCF includes all collateral eligible for pledge in open market operations (OMO); plus, investment grade [as low as BBB] corporate debt securities, international agency securities, commercial paper, municipal securities, mortgage-backed securities, and asset-backed securities; plus equity securities [common stocks]. The pledged collateral will be valued by Bank of New York Mellon according to a schedule designed to be similar to the margin schedule for lending by the Discount Window, to the extent possible.”

This PDCF was the biggest direct Fed bailout of Wall Street in 2008, and invites all sorts of toxic securities to be given whatever value their owners want by handshakes with Bank of New York Mellon personnel, and turned into new cash to buy more toxic securities, etc. “Primary Dealer banks” does not mean the commercial banking units of the Big Six and London/German banks; it means their holding companies, and therefore all their investment banking, brokerage and trading units.

The claim that Section 13(3) Federal Reserve Act permits this, is absurd; it allows only that the Fed go beyond its usual limitation—lending against Treasuries and Treasury-guaranteed securities only—and include AAA or similarly highly rated corporate securities. Nonetheless this was done in 2008 to prevent the necessary massive writedowns of Wall Street assets, and is being done again.

NEW WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER

Cuban Doctors Play Crucial Role in Combatting Coronavirus Internationally

March 18 (EIRNS)—For decades, missions of Cuban doctors have been deployed around the globe, usually to impoverished nations in Africa, Asia and South America, to provide crucial medical treatment for populations suffering from infectious disease. They have been on hand to treat Ebola, cholera, HIV-AIDS, Zika and other diseases, operating on what are their core principles of “humanism and love.” This, despite the fact that Cuba has been subject to a U.S.-imposed economic blockade for 40 years, as well brutal U.S. sanctions, which have intensified under the Trump Administration.

Cuba has established several top-notch scientific and medical institutes, as well as a sophisticated biotechnology and biomedicine capability. It produces Alpha-2B interferon, which the Chinese have used successfully in treating coronavirus. Thousands of its doctors have been trained at the National Scientific Research Center, founded in 1965, of which the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center, which began producing interferon in 1981, is an offshoot.

In the current coronavirus crisis, several nations have requested that the Cuban government send their doctors to help respond to COVID-19. These includes Italy’s Lombardy region, Venezuela and several Caribbean nations, to name a few. Epidemiologists, microbiologists and infectious disease experts have just arrived in Venezuela bringing interferon with them. Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced that the first contingent of 21 Cuban nurses will be arriving on March 21. Officials from St. Kitts and Nevis have requested that Cuba help “in creating infrastructure and a plan to treat” those infected with COVID-19.

To Defeat the Coronavirus, Europe Turns to Its Classical Music

March 18 (EIRNS)—From the balconies of Italy, to those in France and Spain, across Europe, Classical music is being played, sung and welcomed even in “lockdown,” to rally the love of mankind required to defeat a pandemic.

From Italy, Liliana Gorini, chairwoman of LaRouche’s Italian movement, Movisol, reports:

“Nessun dorma,” the aria from Puccini’s Turandot, the last stanzas of which end, “Dilegua, o notte,/ Tramontate, stelle/ Tramontate, stelle/ All’alba vincerò!” on a high C (“Disappear O Night, Go down Stars, At dawn I shall win”), has become the hymn of all Italians since the total lockdown one week ago. It started with the video sent by tenors and sopranos from China who had studied singing in Italy, each singing a line from the aria, and then all joining together chorally singing the last word, “vincerò!” The video immediately went viral.

In the days which followed, a “flash mob” started, in which all us, being confined at home in order to defeat the spread of COVID-19, are invited to go out on our balconies every night at 6 p.m., and play or sing “Nessun dorma” and the Italian national anthem. Since “Nessun dorma” is a difficult aria, people played it with Spotify, CD player, anything they had at home. Some dug out their musical instruments—trumpets, guitars, etc. to participate. Other neighborhoods have sung popular songs of their regions. The reactions on Facebook were similar: “It moved me to tears, in this way we are not alone any more. We are united to win this battle.”

The Italian example inspired a German music teacher in Bamberg, Bavaria to do the same. He organized all the people on his street—men, women and children, with a large Italian flag held up by two—to go out on their balconies and sing “O bella ciao,” a popular song of the Italian Resistance against Fascism. He dedicated the video to Italy, saying in good Italian “in this time of difficulty, ‘vi siamo vicini,’ we at your side.”

Then, on Monday came a call for all musicians of France to play Bach on their balconies at 12 noon, issued by Classical Revolution France, “a group of professional musicians and good amateurs who aim to convey Classical music directly from the concert hall to unusual places like bars and cafes. The place will be even more unusual than usual: all the balconies of France will be able to act as stage,” they wrote. “Open your windows wide—there will be music playing at noon. We start with the first cello suite by Bach…. Take your instrument and stand at the window on Tuesday—we need you!”

Likewise, in Spain, a group of music teachers organized a movement for people to sing or play a specific song out of their windows at the same time each day. Their first piece was Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy.

China Working Overtime To Produce Equipment for the World in the Global Fight against COVID-19

March 18 (EIRNS)—China has ramped up production of medical equipment to meet the growing needs of countries faced with fighting the coronavirus. Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co., Ltd. said the Italian government had procured nearly 10,000 devices for fighting the disease, most of which are for patient monitoring, from the Guangdong-based medical equipment giant, whose products were part of the Chinese medical aid that arrived in Italy on March 12. Shenzhen-listed Guangdong Biolight Meditech Co., Ltd. on March 17 disclosed that it had since March 2 received orders for nearly 2,000 pieces of medical equipment from eight countries including Italy, France and Germany. Zhejiang Dali Technology Co., Ltd, a manufacturer of infrared thermometers, said production is running at full tilt to meet growing orders at home and from Asia, Europe, and America. Oriental Energy Co., Ltd, a major alkane resources operator, said it had exported over 3,000 tons of Y381H, an essential fiber for making the melt-blown non-woven fabric used for making face masks and protective suits, to countries including India and Vietnam since February.

Mask-maker Great Star Industrial Co., Ltd, has received the EC declaration of conformity document approving the quality of its products for sale in the EU. At least 10 Chinese producers of detection kits for nucleic acid and antibody testing have also won approvals to enter the EU market. Meanwhile, 14 novel coronavirus testing kits developed by five Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University, have obtained the CE marking, which allows them to be marketed across the European Union, according to the Ministry of Education.

In addition, the following items have also been dispatched by China to virus-stricken nations:

• An aircraft carrying 500,000 medical masks from China arrived at Zaragoza airport in northern Spain on March 17, as confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country rose to 11,178.
• A team of 12 medical experts from east China’s Zhejiang Province was sent to Italy on March 17 to aid the anti-coronavirus fight on the Apennine Peninsula.
• Some 300,000 face masks donated by Chinese charities arrived in Belgium on March 16.
• China donated 2,000 fast test kits for COVID-19 to the Philippines on March 16.
• Beijing will donate protective supplies including medical isolation gowns and gloves to the cities of Seoul, Tehran, Tokyo and Yokohama to help with their novel coronavirus control. Some 200,000 medical isolation gowns, 100,000 pairs of gloves, 200,000 pairs of shoe covers, and 200,000 disposable medical caps will be delivered to these cities.
• South China’s Guangdong Province has donated more than 80,000 testing kits to countries including Iran, Japan, Iraq and Peru.
• Central China’s Hunan Province has donated supplies to aid the novel coronavirus fight in Laos and the Republic of Korea.

British Automakers Retooling 3D Printers To Spur Ventilator Output, and U.S. To Gear Up Soon

March 18 (EIRNS)—In recent years, the largest number of the world’s ventilators were located in North America, secondly, in Europe, then in Asia, with very few in Central and South America, and next to none in Africa. Having ventilators is crucial wherever COVID-19 strikes. European nations are now scrambling to acquire more. It is absolutely necessary to have wartime mass production to serve South and Central America, Africa and Southwest Asia where production is nonexistent. A full-scale gear-up is urgent. Among the notable developments are initiatives featuring 3D printing.

In Britain, the auto sector intends to build 20,000 ventilators within weeks. Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Land Rover are in the program. Also, Vauxhall and Airbus, which are set to close down because of the virus, but could retool their technologies, such as 3D printers, to make parts for ventilator manufacturers to increase their production. Helen Ford, head of government relations at Vauxhall, owned by the French automotive group PSA said, “We’ve offered our services as an assembly plant and we have 3D-printing capability at Ellesmere Port [car factory] too.” Memories of Detroit retooling the auto industry to make tanks and aircraft in World War II are appropriate.

A meeting of 60 British industrial firms, called by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has started mapping how to build ventilators on a mass scale. In the U.K., Breas Medical, which makes ventilators, has increased its staffing levels and was moving to a seven-day workweek to cope with the demand, but their production lines are still quite small, coming out with fewer than 1,000 machines a year. The car-making sector has many relevant features, including sophisticated computer-aided design software, 3D printing, and also controlled-environment production spaces, important for medical equipment.

SCIENCE

Southern Hemisphere Nations Have Weakened Immunity To Resist the Coronavirus

March 18 (EIRNS)—As the novel coronavirus begins to move into the Southern Hemisphere, which is now entering the autumn season, and then followed by winter at the end of May and early June, reflect on the fact that these are populations that for many years have suffered from a variety of infectious diseases—HIV-AIDS, Ebola, cholera, Zika, Lassa fever, dengue—and whose immune systems are severely compromised.

Add to that the lack of healthcare infrastructure or trained medical personnel, as well as political unrest and conflict and the picture is one of catastrophe. Africa is the second most populous continent, but accounts for only 1% of healthcare spending, the Wall Street Journal reports. In a coronavirus outbreak, there’s little money for new ventilators or other life-support equipment. Ugandan public health expert Chris Kaganda told the Journal that “there is insufficient equipment for early detection of the disease, inadequate personnel with the appropriate knowledge and skills to treat patients infected with coronavirus. The perennial low immunity due to malnutrition and other diseases such as HIV/AIDS may compound the transmission and fatality.”

Currently, 26 of Africa’s 54 nations have confirmed coronavirus cases. The deputy director of Africa’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Dr. Ahmed Ogwell, told Kenya’s The Nation on March 10 that CDC-Africa is underfunded. “Domestic funding for disaster preparedness is very thin. We have made governments aware of this regularly but we are not seeing an outpouring of allocations.”

IAEA Giving Nuclear-Derived Technology to Developing Countries To Quickly Identify Coronavirus

March 18 (EIRNS)—Responding to requests from 14 nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is providing test kits using a nuclear-derived technology for diagnostic purposes to identify the novel coronavirus.

The technique uses ionizing radiation to provide data on the DNA make-up of a pathogen, and its characteristics. The technique can identify the virus in a matter of hours. In addition to sending the diagnostic kits and other material, the IAEA is carrying out two-week training courses for medical professionals from developing countries. The countries participating in the first training class in “detection techniques” are: Cambodia, Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam.

There will be training classes for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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