EDITORIAL
The World Is at a Showdown Moment—A New Paradigm vs. the Entire Geopolitical Apparatus in the West
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—The provocation launched by the government of Ukraine on Sunday—deploying three military ships into Russian territory without the required notification—has achieved the intended results. Russia seized the ships, Poroshenko declared martial law, and Nikki Haley spread her usual filth at the UN Security Council, blaming Russia for an “outrageous violation of sovereign Ukrainian territory,” and “another reckless Russian escalation,” while claiming to be speaking for the President. She was not—in fact, President Donald Trump just minutes later said: “We do not like what’s happening, either way, we don’t like what’s happening and hopefully it will get straightened out.” The press immediately denounced Trump for “not singling out Russia.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov addressed the reality: “The fact that it was done under the goodwill and direct order of the leadership [in Kiev] is undoubtable.” He also addressed the fact that the provocation was aimed not only at Russia, but at President Donald Trump as well: “We cannot guarantee that those political forces in the United States that are seeking to break down Trump’s presidency will not venture new provocation. On the contrary, further provocations and attempts to destroy our relations are highly likely.”
Lavrov further said that “If martial law is declared, then radical nationalists may feel that they have been given a free hand.” Indeed, bands of black-hooded Ukrainian neo-Nazis have attacked the Russian Embassy in Kiev, and the Consulates in Lviv and Kharkov, burning cars, tires, Russian flags, and throwing molotov cocktails into the compounds. It is feared that the extremely unpopular Poroshenko will cancel the scheduled elections in March under a provision in the martial law code.
The immediate target is the Trump-Putin meeting being planned to take place on the sidelines of the G20 Summit on Nov. 30-Dec. 1 in Argentina. Similarly, the planned Trump-Xi Jinping meeting at that Summit is the target of a barrage of anti-China, anti-Belt and Road attacks coming from the Anglo-American think tanks and their press whores.
Were President Trump to use these meetings to impose a new paradigm among these three great powers—the U.S., Russia and China—utilizing the considerable power granted to the President over foreign policy in the U.S. Constitution, he can end the British Empire’s drive to use the U.S., yet again, as the “dumb giant” to fight the Empire’s wars, this time a world war against Russia and China, which would leave no winners.
The timing is crucial. The Western financial system has gone into gyrations, as the gurus of London and Wall Street can no longer hide the scope of the multiple monetary bubbles ready to burst. GM today announced the closure of three plants in the U.S. and Canada, with nearly 15,000 layoffs of factory and white-collar workers. The wildly inflated corporate leveraged bond market is today’s “subprime mortgage” bubble, while the record rate of stock buy-backs is no longer enough to prop up the stock bubble.
But rather than run for cover, it must be faced that these bubbles are not the real economy. Money is not the economy. Real production and technological advances which lift the productivity of labor globally—that is the real economy, as clearly understood by Alexander Hamilton and his fellow “American System” economists, including Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Dexter White in forging the Bretton Woods system at the end of World War II.
Were President Trump to use this pregnant moment to bring Russia, China, India, Japan and others together, to restore the Bretton Woods structure, ending the speculation in currencies and junk bonds which loot the real economy, and joining in the New Silk Road development process which is now transforming Africa, Asia, Ibero-America, and even several countries in Eastern and Southern Europe—if he were to adopt this approach at the G20 meetings, the otherwise inevitable crash could be avoided, and a true new economic and cultural Renaissance could be set in motion among all nations.
Our responsibility is to convey this reality, and hope, to the American people and people around the world—that the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche have been proven to be true in the real world over and over again over the past fifty years. Now the time has come where those ideas are capable of being understood by a rapidly expanding layer of the population. It is this knowledge in the minds of the citizenry which is the essential ingredient needed to give the President the backing and the direction he needs. These last four days before the G20 are a moment of great opportunity, which must not find a little people.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
Roger Stone Associate Corsi Says He Won’t Sign a Plea Deal with Mueller
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi told CNN today that he is refusing to sign a plea deal offered by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, CNN reported.
Corsi was a Mueller target on the theory that Corsi was an intermediary between Trump political advisor Roger Stone and WikiLeaks. Corsi said he was offered a deal to plead on one count of perjury.
“They can put me in prison the rest of my life. I am not going to sign a lie,” Corsi told CNN today.
Last week Corsi acknowledged that he was in plea negotiations with Mueller’s office, and said he expected to be indicted for “giving false information to the special counsel or to one of the other grand jury.” [sic]
Today Corsi said that he believed he would be lying by signing the plea agreement, because he did not willfully mislead anyone. He described his experience with Mueller’s team as “like being interrogated as a POW in the Korean War,” CNN reported. After two months of interrogation, Corsi said prosecutors believed that they had caught him in various lies, and did not appear to believe him when he said he could not recall certain events.
Roger Stone, in a statement today following Corsi’s comments, said that Mueller was harassing Corsi, “not for lying, but for refusing to lie,” and continued to maintain his own innocence. Stone said, “It is inconceivable that in America someone would be prosecuted for refusing to swear to a false narrative pushed on him by the Mueller investigators.”
CNN added that Corsi had injected himself into Stone’s situation last year when he claimed that one of his own articles for InfoWars inspired Stone to predict, in October 2016, that there would be trouble coming for Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and after that, WikiLeaks had started releasing thousands of Podesta emails. Stone has denied wrongdoing regarding WikiLeaks’ releases during the 2016 campaign.
Adam Schiff Asks, ‘Are Trump’s Finances Affecting Foreign Policy?’
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday broadcast, House Intelligence Committee chairman-in-waiting Adam Schiff, a leading anti-Trump hysteric, left no doubt as to where he would focus his efforts for the coming two years.
“One of the issues that the Republicans would not allow us to investigate when they were running the committee,” Schiff told host Dana Bash, “—and I don’t think Congress has looked into this at all, and I don’t know that Bob Mueller has—is whether the Russians have been laundering money through the President’s businesses, and this is the financial hold that the Russians may have.”
From Trump’s relations with the Russians, to that of the Saudis, all is colored by his (yet-to-be-discovered by Schiff) secret financial relations, Schiff stated.
“What is driving this?” Schiff asked, referring to Trump’s defense of the Saudis in the Oct. 2 Jamal Khashoggi assassination. “Is his personal financial interest driving U.S. policy in the Gulf? Vis-à-vis the Russians? We don’t know, but it would be irresponsible not to find out,” he said.
“It would certainly explain the otherwise bewildering conduct of the President in Helsinki, many of the President’s comments, pro-Putin comments. It would explain why his sons have said at various times they don’t need money from U.S. banks, they get all the money they need from Russia or a disproportionate of their assets come from Russia.
“Is this, again, the—the hidden hand of American financial policy, a Russian financial hand? We do need to get an answer to that and be able to tell the American people, yes, it’s true, or, no, it’s not. The American people deserve to know that the President has their interests in mind, not his pecuniary interests.”
Schiff declined to comment when Bash raised the report that the committee is recruiting money-laundering and forensic accounting experts in preparation for those probes.
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Lavrov States Ukrainian Provocation To Be Used Against Trump
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—On the eve of the meeting in Argentina between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainian provocation in the Sea of Azov will be used by the political opposition in the U.S. against President Donald Trump, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Nov. 25, according to a TASS report.
“We cannot guarantee that those political forces in the United States that are seeking to break down Trump’s Presidency will not venture new provocations,” he said in an interview with the “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin” program on Rossiya-1 television network. “On the contrary, further provocations and attempts to destroy our relations are highly likely to follow. But it in no way means that dialogue is unnecessary.
“When the president of a great nation is ready to speak with the president of another great nation, I think it is our duty to spare no effort to facilitate such contacts,” he said. “The more so as certain progress has been recently seen in restoration of dialogue channels and at other levels, including between the Russian and U.S. Security Councils.”
The translated transcript of his interview is posted to the Foreign Ministry website.
UN Security Council Not Helping Resolve Kerch Strait Crisis, Declares Russian Envoy Polyanskiy
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is not helping resolve the problem around the Kerch Strait incident, Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy told the emergency session yesterday, TASS reported today.
The UNSC had earlier rejected the Russian-proposed agenda for the meeting regarding Ukraine’s violation of the Russian border in the Sea of Azov. The Kerch Strait separates the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov between the Taman Peninsula on the Russian mainland and Crimea. Russia charged yesterday that three Ukrainian warships illegally crossed Russia’s state border entering its territorial waters, and were carrying out dangerous maneuvers, reported TASS Nov. 25.
Polyanskiy continued, “You are now more concerned not with how to resolve the problem, but with which agenda to pick for today’s session,” Polyanskiy said. “To be honest, this reminds of the confrontation on the playground.”
According to him, the confrontation in the Kerch Strait “has been planned in advance with absolute connivance of Western countries, which already gave de facto permission to their Kiev mentees for any actions.”
“As we are getting closer to [the Ukrainian presidential] election scheduled for March, the bankrupt Maidan team needs a serious escalation, and ideally war,” the diplomat said, adding that, without this, they will not be re-elected. “Another dose of ‘anti-Russian fever’ is needed so that people, who have been becoming poorer over the last five years, believe once again that Russia is to blame for all their misfortunes, not their government and their Western ‘puppeteers,’ ” Polyanskiy said.
The diplomat advised his listeners “not to worry” about Russia’s state borders: “Our country has never struck first, but can defend itself. The population of Crimea is under good protection, just like the populations of other Russian regions.”
Addressing his Western colleagues, Polyanskiy said that their five-year “anti-Russian political project, which could simply be called ‘Anti-Russia,’ is currently crumbling in front of everybody.” “You all know very well the real, not declared rates of ‘Maidan reforms’ and other dangerous and destructive processes that push Ukraine closer to the edge,” he said.
Netflix Series on Mexican Drug Cartels Targets Lies About Marijuana
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—Netflix has a series called “Narcos: Mexico.” The first hour begins with a dialogue in the background of pictures of the death and destruction wrought by the drug trade on Mexico and its people, which goes directly at the horror of the pro-cannabis operation in the U.S.:
“Do you smoke pot? I guess it’s OK if you do. There are laws now that say it’s cool. I don’t agree with them, but it’s not up to me. They say it’s a gateway drug—and it is. It sure is in this story. If you smoked pot in the late ’70s, whether you knew it or not, that pot probably started life in the same place this story begins—Sinaloa, the third leg of what they called the Mexican golden triangle, the birthplace of Mexican dope smuggling, and the guys who would go on to run the game. With its fertile fields, and hills full of opium poppies and Mexican marijuana, the pot heads, and the Sinaloa scumbags who operated there, it was a Garden of Eden.”
From the first chapter, it is a dramatization of real events and real people who set up, first, the massive marijuana operations, then expanded into all the other drug smuggling that is now in place. The introduction also describes that this is a story with no happy ending.
Drone Warfare Provokes Dehumanization of Both Victims andOperators
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—A new report in RT, published on Nov. 22, reveals that the dehumanization of the drone warfare goes well beyond just the victims, and includes the operators, who ultimately cannot separate themselves from the horror they instill over their computer screens. With citations to multiple articles, the proof is that this has been a wide-ranging and well-known problem for the U.S. Air Force for quite some time.
As far back as 2015, the Daily Beast had drawn attention to a serious “outflow” problem that the USAF was experiencing among its drone pilots, this ostensibly due in part to the “unrelenting pace” of operations. “Even when the Air Force began to offer six-figure salaries,” says RT, “it did not stem the outflow from the program.”
In 2016, researcher Laurie Calhoun authored a book, We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age. In addition to increased risk of developing alcohol or drug addiction, drone pilots additionally suffer from PTSD—normally seen in victims of direct combat—this, however, caused by what Calhoun called “moral factors.”
“Everyone drank,” stated one operator. “There was a lot of coke, speed, and that sort of thing. If the higher ups knew, then they didn’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure they must have known. It was everywhere.”
Later that year, investigative journalist Sonia Kennebeck produced “National Bird,” a documentary in which she spoke to three other whistleblowers exposing the “dark reality” of the drone program. Not surprisingly, the USAF has eventually found itself in the position of “whistleblower suppression,” as more and more operators continued to come forward, the pressure being more unbearable than the consequences of standing up.
As the New Paradigm image of man replaces that of the imperial killer, the demise of computer-assisted warfare will be an early victim.
ECONOMY
General Motors To Lay Off 15,000 Workers and May Close up to Five Plants
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—General Motors announced a company-wide restructuring today that will lay off 14,700 factory and white-collar workers in North America and may closed up to five major plants, saying the restructuring will cut costs to allow it to focus more on electric vehicles and autonomous cars.
GM said in a news release that it would halt production at three assembly plants: Lordstown Assembly, in Warren, Ohio; Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly in Michigan; and Oshawa Assembly in Oshawa, Ontario. It also plans to close transmission plants in 2019 in White Marsh, Maryland, and Warren, Michigan.
“The actions we are taking today continue our transformation to be highly agile, resilient, and profitable, while giving us the flexibility to invest in the future,” GM Chairwoman and CEO Mary Barra said in a statement that projected $6.5 billion in cost cuts in 2018. “We recognize the need to stay in front of changing market conditions and customer preferences to position our company for long-term success.”
GM shares rose 6% by late Monday morning, Nov. 26.
The layoffs include 8,100 white-collar workers, some of whom will take buyouts, and others who will be laid off. Most of the affected factories build cars that won’t be sold in the U.S. after next year; they could close, or get different vehicles to build. These decisions will be part of the contract talks with the United Auto Workers union next year.
Ford also announced cutbacks, reducing its salaried workforce by the second quarter of 2019.
President Donald Trump, asked about the announcement, said today: “Well, we don’t like it. I believe they’ll be opening up something else. And—I was very tough. I spoke with her [Barra] when I heard they were closing. And I said, ‘You know, this country has done a lot for General Motors. You better get back in there soon. That’s Ohio, and you better get back in there soon.’ ”
Can there be any doubt that the U.S. needs a New Paradigm?
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
The Philippines Released Its Memorandum with China on Joining the Belt and Road
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—The government of President Rodrigo Duterte today released the Memorandum of Understanding it signed last week with China to work together on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Called the “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on Cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative,” the introduction is quite powerful and informative:
“Recognizing that the P.R.C. seeks to take its remarkable economic progress and development even further by offering to assist in the development of other countries, to help build stronger economies, and therefore more and richer markets for the commercial and cultural exchanges along the ancient Silk Road Route, which it hopes to enhance with its BRI, and
“Recognizing that the most sustainable growth of a country should not be at the expense of another, and that national progress is not a zero-sum game. Sustainable progress requires an understanding that only in a common prosperity lies the sustainable growth and prosperity of great nations.”
Turkey Becomes the Latest Country To Free Itself of Soros
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—George Soros’s Open Society Foundation NGO in Turkey has announced that it is pulling out of the country, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had made life difficult for the regime-change master imperialist. Erdogan accused Soros of supporting protests to divide the country, including support for Turkish opposition figure Osman Kavala, who is accused of financing and organizing anti-government demonstrations in 2013, and being linked to the Fethullah Gülen movement, which is accused of running the failed coup attempt in July 2016.
Kavala is an advisory board member of Open Society Foundation. He has been in jail without charge for the past year; another dozen or so associates were arrested last week. He is British-educated, sponsors Amnesty International and other British operations in Turkey. Erdogan called him “the red Soros of Turkey.”
Turkey now joins Hungary in having rid itself of the Soros regime-change threat.
Brits Are Now Seeing Russian Bears Everywhere
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—One can almost pity the poor Brits, caught up in their web of Russiagate lies. They are close to the point of being spooked by their own shadows. The latest victim is a children’s broadcast, “Masha and the Bear,” a Russian-produced animated show with a global following, translated into 36 languages, having one of the largest worldwide audiences on YouTube, with over 4 million subscribers and 40 billion views.
Now, after failing to find any connections to Vladimir Putin—the show has no state funding—the British Empire has nonetheless become convinced that this mischievous but lovable one-toothed peasant girl and her overshadowing bear friend have been “stealthily indoctrinating” susceptible youth with (presumably authoritarian) messages. Masha “punches above her weight,” one “intelligence expert” cum TV critic told The Times, the British Empire’s newspaper of record, on Nov. 16. “It’s not far-fetched to see her as Putinesque.”
Really? Commenting on this latest outbreak of paranoia in a nuclear-armed global adversary, Dmitry Loveyko, the head of the cartoon’s production studio Animaccord, told Sputnik: “It’s seriously difficult to comment on it, only with a great deal of irony.” He went on, “The Times would have been better off writing that Masha behaves like [former U.K. Prime Minister Winston] Churchill.”
Gibraltar Strait Crossing Coming on the Agenda
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—On the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Spain for a three-day visit beginning on Nov. 27, Spain is showing new optimism concerning the realization of some long-debated infrastructure projects. For instance, connecting Europe and Africa by a tunnel or bridge across the Gibraltar Strait has been a vision for quite some time, but with Spain’s growing relationship with the Belt and Road, the project may be moved to the active agenda. The Spanish “China hands” in Cátedra China have decided to put the tunnel on the national agenda and raise the possibility of Chinese financing to make it possible; and there is serious commitment also of the “Mediterranean Corridor” people in developing the North African Trans-Maghreb “mirror” corridor. These are very big projects; their realization may therefore take some years.
As for the tunnel variant, the German company Herrenknecht signed an agreement on Sept. 25, 2017, to study the feasibility of developing a tunnel boring machine (TBM) capable of working within the geotechnical parameters of the Gibraltar tunnel which the Zürich Technological Institute (ETH) was in charge of providing. In particular, this is important for a TBM operating in the rocky formations, particularly the softer sedimentary material, the breccia, which the tunnel has to cross. If the conclusions of that first phase of study are promising, wrote the Spanish government agency for developing the Gibraltar Tunnel, SECEGSA, when announcing the agreement with Herrenknecht, the expected second phase would be for Herrenknecht to develop a first-concept design for that TBM, based on the expected technological development in the immediate years ahead.
SCIENCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE
InSight Makes Successful Mars Landing, To Map the Interior of the Planet
Nov. 26 (EIRNS)—At 2:53 p.m. EST (19:53 UTC) today, NASA accomplished its eighth successful landing on Mars. The spacecraft’s entry and descent through the Martian atmosphere and the landing were observed by two tiny cubesats—the first to operate outside Earth orbit—that were launched with InSight and trailed behind it on the way to Mars. They sent back data of the landing from InSight in real time, as compared to NASA’s two orbiters—Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter—which would have to be in the right position to receive the data from InSight and then relay it back to Earth, often hours later. InSight has radioed that all is in order. The first photo sent back by the lander shows just what was expected—a featureless plain, providing a quiet environment for InSight’s subterranean experiments.
This mission will require much patience on the part of the scientists. It will take months to deploy and calibrate the instruments. Elizabeth Barrett from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained at a post-landing press conference that the team must “assess the health of the spacecraft and the instruments.” They will “deploy seismometers, and then deploy a wind and thermal shield for protection” of these extremely delicate instruments. They will “calibrate, and deploy the heat probe underground,” to measure the heat flow. This entire process takes two to three months. But InSight is designed to be operating on Mars for two Earth years (one Martian year), so there will be plenty of data.
The goal is to create a three-dimensional map of the interior of Mars.
At the press conference, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he had talked to the President and Vice President and that they are “overwhelmingly proud.” He said even people off the Earth were watching the mission, referring to the astronauts on the International Space Station.
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