WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 2019 Volume 6, Number 85 EIR Daily Alert Service P.O. Box 17390, Washington, DC 20041-0390

• U.S.-China Trade Talks Resume in Beijing; Will a Strategic Deal on the Belt and Road Follow?
• Xi-Jinping Exhorts Chinese Youth To Remain Revolutionary, Patriotic, and Think of Mankind

• Portuguese President and Xi Meet, Agree To Deepen Cooperation, Including in Third Markets
• State Department Announces Cold War Strategy Against China
• Top U.S. Naval Officer Describes Provocative Strategy Towards China
• The New British Terror Wave and the Belt and Road
• One America News Not Letting Up on British Empire Role in Coup Attempt vs. President Trump (Neither is Brutalproof.net!)
• Who is the Real ‘Moron’ Here?
• $2 Trillion Infrastructure ‘Deal’ Looks Entirely Dependent on Trump
• Global Times Op-Ed Considers Coming Financial Crisis ‘Will Be Far Worse Than Crisis of 2008’

EDITORIAL

U.S.-China Trade Talks Resume in Beijing; Will a Strategic Deal on the Belt and Road Follow?

April 30 (EIRNS)—After the conclusion of the enormously successful Second Belt and Road Forum, Beijing today is the venue for the next round of U.S.-Chinese negotiations, which could well lead to a Trump-Xi summit in Washington, D.C. in the near future. Although the topic of the negotiations is nominally a trade deal between the two countries, the actual underlying issue is whether or not the U.S. comes onboard with the defining global process of the Belt and Road Initiative. The British are visibly nervous that this could happen, notwithstanding the low level of the U.S. representation at the Forum itself.

The problem that the British face is not only that most nations in the world are by and large shifting the center of their attention to the Belt and Road Initiative. The truly aggravating factor, from their standpoint, is that President Donald Trump is hammering away at the British (not Russian) role in the failed coup d’état against him, and is again threatening to release all the classified documents on the matter. They understand that President Trump is perfectly capable of burying the “special relationship” with the United Kingdom, and shifting into a working alliance with China, Russia and other nations instead, an alliance centered on rapid economic growth and a new security architecture.

With everything to lose, Britain’s hand is behind a wave of rabid anti-China propaganda, punctuated this week by a call to arms from Kiron Skinner, the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. And the same hand is behind the renewed war and irregular warfare (terrorism) actions, from Venezuela, to the Taiwan Straits, to U.S. domestic terrorism.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who is in Beijing for the trade negotiations along with Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, told Fox Business on April 29: “There are still some important issues. We still have more work to do. If we get to a completed agreement it will have real enforcement provisions,” adding that those provisions are “close to done” and only need “a little bit of fine tuning.” After the Beijing talks, Chinese lead negotiator Vice Premier Liu He will come to Washington, D.C. on May 8 for follow-up talks.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche today summarized what is at stake in the following terms: “The epochal question is really: Will we be able to move civilization into a new paradigm where geopolitics stops, where we find a way of cooperating for the common aims of mankind, and have the kind of global reconstruction of the world economy which Lyndon LaRouche devoted his entire life to? This obviously goes along with the kind of revolutionary breakthroughs in science and culture LaRouche was responsible for. All of this is within reach, but it does require, emphatically, that the British Empire be defeated and that the U.S. be brought on a path to join the new dynamic of the New Silk Road, which is really a synonym for this new set of international relations.

“That is really what the fight for Lyndon LaRouche’s exoneration is all about. That is why it is the pathway which most directly leads to the creation of a New Paradigm.”

THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

Xi Jinping Exhorts Chinese Youth To Remain Revolutionary, Patriotic, and Think of Mankind

April 30 (EIRNS)—In his speech last night to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the May 4th Movement, given to thousands of youth assembled in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and broadcast to the nation (and internationally), Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed China’s youth, urging them to never forget that generations of youth who faced great problems allowed China to get where it is today, and to aspire to be pioneers and contributors to create new miracles for China, through hard work, morality and patriotism.

The May 4th Movement was a reaction to the sell-out of China’s interests at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919 and a reaction to how the 1911 Xinhai Revolution had been overcome by warlordism. The May 4th Movement was essentially initiated by the students at the university, but then was transmitted to larger parts of the population. Out of the ferment of the 1919 May 4th Movement, the Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921. The celebration this year is clearly aimed at instilling the same sense of idealism and sacrifice that was shown by the youth of those days. It is also a call to action to mobilize Chinese youth around the higher values and to subvert the dangers of “consumerism” and “pop culture” which Chinese youth in this age of “globalization” have not been immune to. It is no doubt also a concern that the younger generation, who must carry China forward on its path of rejuvenation, must also acquire the necessary moral outlook that will allow them to take it further.

“Tell every Chinese person that patriotism is one’s duty, is an obligation,” Xi said. “For Chinese youth of the new era, ardently loving the motherland is the foundation of building the body and of talent. In the new era, Chinese youth should consciously establish and practice the core values of socialism, and be good at drawing morality from the traditional virtues of the Chinese people. As long as the banner of patriotism is being held high, the Chinese people can unleash great powers in the endeavors to transform China and the world. Consciously resist mistaken thoughts such as the worship of money, hedonism, extreme individualism, and historical nihilism.” Xi cited a Chinese adage that those who do not work hard in youth, suffer grief in their old age. “Hard work means doing a good job, and finishing all tasks,” he said.

He also issued an appeal to the parents and the teachers and the party officials, who come into contact with young people. “We must care for our youth better; guide them, but listen to them, be friends with them. The young must learn from the elderly, but the elderly from the youth, too. Youth work has been the top priority for the CPC since its founding. People who join at a younger age who are willing to fight for the people for their whole life, is what gives the CPC vitality, 100 years later,” he stated.

Xi said that every generation will be faced with its own set of circumstances and problems with which they have to grapple. And the key to dealing with these will be the creativity of the people. He cited a number of people, both Chinese and others, who at a very young age either accomplished heroic deeds or made important scientific discoveries (pointing to Einstein, among others): “Young people represent the future of the people. Youth are full of vitality, passion, imagination and creativity.”

Xi reminded them at the end that they must keep the whole world in mind, the Belt and Road, and the shared future for humanity. “You must contribute to the people, the nation, and to mankind,” he told the youth.

Portuguese President and Xi Meet, Agree To Deepen Cooperation, Including in Third Markets

April 30 (EIRNS)—After participating in the Second Belt and Road Forum, Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa held a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping on April 29, where the two governments agreed to advance on their Memorandum of Understanding signed last November during Xi’s visit to Portugal. According to Xinhua, Xi told his guest that “China regards Portugal as an important partner in the joint building of the Belt and Road. The two countries should deepen cooperation in fields including trade, investment, energy, infrastructure and electric vehicles…. China is willing to work with Portugal in achieving more outcomes in the cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries including Portugal.”

Rebelo de Sousa responded that Portugal is prepared to “deepen ties with China in economy, trade, investment, technology and culture, and expand third-party market cooperation.”

This focus on third-party projects launched by China with its growing roster of bilateral partners, is an important part of the qualitative advance in the Belt and Road Initiative. Italy and China signed such an MOU emphasizing joint projects in Africa; Switzerland has also signed an MOU pointing to third-party projects; and China’s overall approach to BRI cooperation with Portugal and Spain has from the beginning been focused on the role those two nations can play in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking nations in Ibero-America and Africa.

STRATEGIC WAR DANGER

State Department Announces Cold War Strategy Against China

April 30 (EIRNS)—Kiron Skinner, the protégé of establishmentéminence grise George Shultz appointed by Mike Pompeo to the critical position of Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, told New America’s Future Security 2019 forum in Washington on April 29 that she is currently drawing up a strategy for confronting the “fundamental long-term threat represented by China.” Skinner stated her project should serve as the equivalent to George Kennan’s infamous 1946 “Letter X” call to arms for the Cold War against the U.S.S.R.

Skinner’s entire career has been associated with the hard core of the Anglophile geopolitical war party which grabbed power after Franklin Roosevelt died. The Dick Cheney crowd. The establishment elite which does not agree with President Donald Trump that “good relations with China and Russia is a good thing.” She was the principal research assistant for Shultz, the creator of the Bush, Jr. government; is close to John Bolton and Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; served on Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee with Kissinger, et al.; is a lifelong director of the NATO-promoting Atlantic Council; etc.

According to the Washington Examiner’s report, Skinner presented the conflict with China as a “clash of civilizations…. It’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian,” said this non-Caucasian black woman.

Skinner views the conflict which she is out to manufacture with China as bigger than the conflict with Russia. Russia is a mere “global survivor…. We see [China] as a more fundamental long-term threat. In China, we have an economic competitor, we have an ideological competitor, one that really does seek a global reach that many of us didn’t expect a couple of decades ago….

“We have to take the rose-colored glasses off and get real about the nature of the threat,” she insists. “We’re now looking more deeply and broadly at China. And, I think State is in the lead in that broader attempt to get something like a ‘Letter X’ for China, what Kennan wrote. You can’t have a policy without an argument underneath it.”

Top U.S. Naval Officer Describes Provocative Strategy Towards China

April 30 (EIRNS)—Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said yesterday that the deployment of two U.S. destroyers through the Taiwan Strait on April 20 is the expression of a strategy in which the U.S. will be making the first moves “so that we can force our competitors to respond.” To justify this overt justification of provocations, he told an audience at the New America Foundation that “in the ideal world we would want our competitors to respond to our moves instead of us responding to them…. We would want to make many of the first moves on our own.”

“It’s easy to think of this as a bilateral approach, but it’s really a regional approach we have that is trying to make all of our allies and partners more resilient” through constant U.S. operations and training events, Richardson said. Running so-called Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) near Taiwan and tiny islands constructed by China in the South China Sea not only reminds Beijing that its claims are allegedly illegal under international law and not recognized by Washington, but, Richardson said, “it goes to this idea of response time as well, so we can respond and anticipate” actions of competitors. “The idea that our competitors are responding to [us] rather than always being in response mode ourselves.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Gen Shuang made clear during his regular press briefing on April 29 that U.S. Navy provocations in the Taiwan Strait risk damaging U.S.-China relations. “China closely followed and monitored from start to end the U.S. warships’ sailing through the Taiwan Strait and has expressed concerns to the U.S. side,” he said. “The Taiwan question is the most important and sensitive element in China-U.S. relations. We urge the U.S. to abide by the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiques and prudently and properly handle issues related to Taiwan to avoid negative impact on China-U.S. relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”

The New British Terror Wave and the Belt and Road

April 30 (EIRNS)—In modern history, the British Empire has always been the mother that has given birth to terrorism as a form of modern irregular warfare. There are compelling reasons to believe that the British have now unleashed a new global wave of terrorism whose strategic target is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In addition to the April 21 Sri Lanka massacre, there was the synagogue shooting in San Diego April 27 and now the foiling of an alleged major terror attack planned for Long Beach, California. This last case reads like a classic FBI-sting operation from start to finish.

The coverage in the New York Post is typical of the widespread media coverage of this latest incident. “A U.S. Military veteran who recently converted to Islam was busted for a domestic terror plot in Southern California that he said was revenge for the New Zealand mosque attacks, officials announced Monday. Mark Steven Domingo, 26, was arrested Friday night after he received what he believed was a live pressure cooker bomb as part of an FBI sting operation. The former U.S. Army infantryman who served in Afghanistan, planned to set off the IED ‘in order to commit mass murder’ at a planned white nationalist rally in Long Beach, federal officials said.”

The FBI had contacted Domingo through online chatrooms, where he allegedly said in an online video: “America needs another Vegas event.” He also conveniently announced that if ISIS ever built operations in the U.S., he would gladly join them. He was arrested when he was scouting out one of his potential target sites with his undercover FBI contact.

In parallel with these events inside the U.S., the leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared in a video released for the first time since his infamous sermon at the Great Mosque in Mosul, Iraq in July 2014. In the new video, in which he looks a little grayer but otherwise healthy, Baghdadi praised the Sri Lanka bombings and said that they were carried out in revenge for the defeat of the Islamic State’s caliphate in Syria. According to the Washington Post, he also thanked the attackers for their pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State, without claiming a direct role for the group in orchestrating the bombings. He also promised a long and bloody war. Our battle today is a war of attrition to harm the enemy, and they should know that jihad will continue until doomsday, he said.

Baghdadi’s appearance for the first time in nearly five years demonstrates not only that he is still alive, “but also that he is able to reemerge to his supporters and reaffirm the group’s us-vs-the-world message after all the progress made against the group,” Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, told the Post. The main purpose of the video, the Post states, seems to be to signal to followers that the Islamic State not only survived but is expanding worldwide, despite the loss of territory in Syria and Iraq.

Indeed, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, in remarks in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on April 29, warned that Afghanistan is becoming a bridgehead for the spread of ISIS across Central Asia, which also happens to be a crucial region for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. “It is important to note that after the rout of the so-called Islamic State, terrorists are moving from Syria and Iraq to other regions, including Central and Southeast Asia,” Shoigu said, during a defense ministers meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. “As a result, cross-border crime is growing, a breeding ground is emerging for extremist and separatist movements and terrorist cells are coming into existence. The most complex situation is developing in Afghanistan,” the Russian defense chief said.

“The U.S. presence in that country for many years has not solved existing problems,” Shoigu stressed. “Special concern is caused by the strengthening of the positions of the ISIL, which is using the country as a bridgehead for further expansion into the region.”

U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

One America News Not Letting Up on British Empire Role in Coup Attempt vs. President Trump

April 30 (EIRNS)—Conservative cable news network One American News Network (OANN) yesterday followed-up its April 24 story on the central role the British Empire played in the “Russiagate” coup attempt against Donald Trump, by taking its demand for an answer right to the British Embassy gates in Washington, D.C.

OANN tried to contact the British Embassy before it broadcast its first story on April 24, on “how the U.K. surveilled Trump’s 2016 campaign, and then, through the so-called Five Eyes agreement, passed on the collection product to the Obama Administration.” That story was centered on an interview with former CIA analyst and patriot Larry Johnson. No answer.

After the President’s “Wow!” tweet on OANN’s story set off “an international firestorm,” OANN reporter Neil McCabe requested a meeting with the U.K. Ambassador or his staff. No answer.

McCabe then rang the bell at the Embassy gates, waiting for a response—filming, of course. A security officer told him the Embassy staff was “too busy” to meet.

President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, however, confirmed to OANN that “the legal team is pressing for a full accounting of how foreign intelligence agencies, like Great Britain’s, cooperated with the Obama Administration to spy on the Trump campaign and create the Russian collusion hoax,” McCabe reports.

Giuliani told OANN: “I am quite confident that after a full and complete investigation, it will be discovered that there was both foreign interference and there was misuse of our intelligence services and law enforcement agencies for the purpose of finding as much dirty information, even manufactured information, on members of the Trump campaign.”

McCabe pointed out that last week’s denial issued by GCHQ to President Trump’s tweet on Larry Johnson’s charges—that “the allegations that GCHQ was about to conduct wiretapping the then President-elect are nonsense”—denied a charge that no one had made. And that two years ago, when it suited their Russian collusion line, mainstream media played up the British role (he showed a CNN clip doing just that). And that, as mainstream media also reported, it was Britain’s MI6 and the Australians who “battled” to get President Trump not to declassify the surveillance records on Carter Page in September 2018.

McCabe promises that OANN “will continue to cover this story as it unfolds.”

Who Is the Real ‘Moron’ Here?

April 30 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton thinks Trump is “a moron,” Bolton’s former aide for 15 years, Mark Groombridge, told the New Yorker. The magazine titled its long profile of Bolton, published online yesterday, “John Bolton on the Warpath: Can Trump’s National Security Adviser Sell the Isolationist President on Military Force?”

Groombridge told the New Yorker that when he briefs the President, “John is thinking, ‘To the extent I can modify or mollify the President’s actions, I will.’ He is truly a patriot. But I wonder how he goes into work every day, because deep in his heart he believes the President is a moron.”

Bolton felt it advisable to take time off from tweeting support for Venezuela opposition leader Juan Guaidó’s attempted coup d’état today, to answer Groombridge’s story. “A recent article quoted an embittered former employee whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in several years. He has no knowledge of my thinking. His remarks are contrary to my views, and completely off the mark. The reporter never asked for comment,” he tweeted.

The conflict between the President and Bolton portrayed in the New Yorker article is summed up in the statement from some unnamed Western diplomat: “The trouble for Bolton is, Trump does not want war. He does not want to launch military operations.”

An unnamed former official who worked with Bolton is cited: “Bolton has a Hobbesian view of the universe—life is nasty, brutish, and short.”

Bolton expressed his bestial view of humanity himself in a December 2009 interview with Fox News: “Homo sapiens are hard-wired for violent conflict, and we’re not going to eliminate violent conflict until Homo sapiens ceases to exist as a separate species. And the whole notion you could even think about eliminating it, not just in our lifetime but soon thereafter, I think reveals a fundamentalmisunderstanding of human nature.”

$2 Trillion Infrastructure ‘Deal’ Looks Entirely Dependent on Trump

April 30 (EIRNS)—A dozen Congressional Democrats left a 90-minute meeting on infrastructure legislation at the White House today claiming that they had agreed with President Donald Trump on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the President plans to propose ways to fund the plan, at another White House meeting in three weeks.

President Trump’s extraordinary “good will” at the meeting appears to have made possible whatever progress was made, as Schumer acknowledged to media afterwards. The President

• sent his Budget Director Mick Mulvaney (who is also Acting Chief of Staff) to California to speak at the Milken Foundation conference, thus absenting him from the White House meeting (even from Los Angeles, Mulvaney bitched and moaned and openly hoped the meeting would fail to achieve any results);

• showing great political confidence, made no demand for, or even mention of Congressional Democrats ending their grand Watergate inquisition into his administration;

• made no comment about Schumer and Pelosi having demanded climate change funding be included in the “plan”;

• accepted the $2 trillion figure, and the onus of responsibility to find such credit. The New York Times quoted participant Sen. Thomas Carper (DE): “By the end of the meeting, he [Trump] said, ‘I have responsibility to lead on this front as well, and I’m prepared to do so.’ ”

Schumer acknowledged Trump’s good will in a press conference afterward; apparently, he, too, refrained from raising his “precondition” that the President agree to reverse the 2018 tax cuts to pay for infrastructure.

Although it is reported that the Gateway Project—Schumer’s baby—came up, there was clearly no substance in the form of any infrastructure or science-driver mission; and the ideas for generating funding—if any—will be the source of battles. President Trump, nonetheless, has a chance to override this.

It could be noted that on a completely different flank of the economy, Trump sent this Twitter message today: “China is adding great stimulus to its economy while at the same time keeping interest rates low. Our Federal Reserve has incessantly lifted interest rates….”

COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Global Times Op-Ed Considers Coming Financial Crisis ‘Will Be Far Worse Than Crisis of 2008’

April 30 (EIRNS)—China’s Global Times features an op-ed by German analyst Frank-Jürgen Richter, founder and chairman of Swiss think tank Horasis, and who was previously a director of the Davos World Economic Forum. The article states that “A new global economic crisis might be on the horizon…. Unilateralism, fragmented regulatory bodies and a depleted arsenal of tools for reviving economic growth will mean that the next recession is likely to be more prolonged and more devastating. There are multiple reasons why the next crisis will be far worse than the crisis of 2008.”

Those reasons, says Richter, are largely political: “The general public and, more precisely, the middle classes in Europe and the U.S. no longer trust their governments. There is a general lack of national, regional and global leadership. A deep-seated resentment of globalization is boiling over worldwide. A great portion of the world perceives itself to be globalization’s losers. This resentment is exemplified by the ‘Yellow Vest’ protests in France. U.S. President Donald Trump’s rise is also partly based on this resentment—he was mostly elected by globalization’s losers.”

Richter continues: “In 2009, collaboration helped avert disaster as G20 nations pledged to borrow and spend what they could, and to abstain from new tariffs. But today’s political landscape is characterized by discord and economic nationalism—and joint action seems far less likely. Without communication and concerted action, the next crisis is likely to prove far more intractable.”

What to do? That is not exactly Richter’s long suit: “Central banks and governments must share information and align strategies…. Governments should work together now to devise mechanisms to automatically trigger spending increases at the onset of turmoil.”

Richter attended the April 25-27 Belt and Road Forum, during which he also gave an exclusive interview to China Daily.

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