March 8, 2022—As forecast with awesome precision by Lyndon LaRouche 10 years ago in a webcast, NATO is crashing the global financial system and the economy all around us, through a world war against Russia. LaRouche broadcast in December 2011, when the regime-change wars had reached the stage of the murder of Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, that “What is intended [by these wars] is a confrontation with Russia, the principal nuclear power on this planet.” London and Washington were threatening world war, he said.The reason? “Most of this bailout debt, the Wall Street debt, the London debt, is unpayable,” LaRouche said. “It is absolutely worthless. It can never be repaid. And the only solution for this thing was to have this war. And if the British Empire came out as the victor in such a war, with the support of the United States, then they would cancel their debts, and they would go about their business. But the population of the world would be reduced, greatly, through hunger, disease, and so forth.” Led by London, Wall Street and Washington, NATO is bringing the world economy down willfully and deliberately, although with “unintentional” and disastrous consequences. Major European governments, particularly Germany’s, fear telling their people that Russia’s [unsanctioned] energy exports to Europe are banned. But they are banned in effect, by intimidation of any company that would think of buying Russian petrochemicals. See the abject apologies of Shell Oil after it dared make an oil purchase. The same is true for metals and fertilizers; Russia is a huge exporter of both. It is possible, even likely, that within a week all Russian exports of natural gas, oil, and fertilizers to Europe and the United States will have stopped. Fossil fuel prices made another huge jump over the weekend into Monday morning, reaching $125 for West Texas Intermediate oil and in Europe 375 euros/MwH (or roughly $3,900 per thousand cubic meters) for natural gas, although they then lost a part of those increases. As for coal, “Monday’s price for thermal coal, used to produce electricity in coal-fired power plants, was $435 a ton. According to Jason Bostic, Vice-President of the West Virginia Coal Association, that’s the highest price in history, by about $200,” reported the West Virginia MetroNews. Over a 48-hour period, the futures prices of half a dozen important metals, and all petrochemicals, have risen by 50-100% each. This cannot happen without hundreds, perhaps thousands of major corporations and banks receiving margin calls because their hedged short positions must be closed out at very great loss. To give an idea of who is unable to pay current margin calls: Peabody Coal, the biggest coal company of all, and it is in formal default as a result; and the China Construction Bank, one of the four biggest state commercial banks in China, which got a grace period of a few days from the London Metals Exchange to try to pay an obviously huge margin call. In addition, a food shock has hit, due to scarcity, which may send food commodity prices up another 50% and spread famine worldwide. The market for financing oil and gas trading is reportedly losing liquidity. Credit default swaps (CDS) on Russian debts are now reportedly considered unlikely to pay out as those debts default; CDS of non-Russian companies linked to the same commodities have suddenly jumped in price, requiring more margin calls. Most Russian commodities like metals have become unacceptable as collateral for any company’s trading credits, meaning those credits must be repaid—more margin calls. In spite of immense amounts of Fed-printed liquidity, the interest rate for borrowing against commercial paper rose by 0.5% on Monday. The repo market expert Zoltan Poszar continues his daily assertions that the interbank lending market is starting to seize up as it did in mid-September 2019, requiring emergency liquidity of hundreds of billions from the Fed. The futures prices will fall back from current unbelievable levels. But the underlying commodity prices will keep marching upward, and the cracks in the international debt and trade credit system will widen until they explode the credit markets. There is one way out: Fast “Glass-Steagall” bank separation, capital and exchange controls by nations; and establishment of “Hamiltonian” national credit banks in every nation.
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Feb. 28—UPDATE: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb. 28 called, through an advisor according to Axios, for the United States and “the West” to establish a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft over significant parts of Ukraine. White House press spokesperson Jen Psaki had to scramble, not jets, but a fast rejection. Psaki said, “Here’s what’s important for everybody to know about a no-fly zone: What that would require is implementation by the U.S. military. It would essentially mean the U.S. military would be shooting down Russian planes.” In short, World War III—with Russia’s strategic nuclear missile force already placed on heightened alert Sunday, Feb. 27. Will this break the illusion so many Europeans and Americans have developed from non-stop war propaganda, that NATO is involved in a painless and heroic defense of heroic Ukraine against evil Russia?Feb. 28: At first view all the economic austerity and suffering from the financial and economic “extreme sanctions” on Russia imposed this weekend, seems to devastate only Russia. Its central bank had to raise its repo rate drastically Monday morning, Feb. 28, from 9.25% to 20% to stop an ongoing 50% collapse of the ruble. That interest rate will contract and do great damage to the Russian economy. The head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen, characterized the economic attacks on Russia on Sunday: “You are essentially directing a financial and economic crisis in another country.” Bank runs which were occurring with perhaps 1 trillion rubles withdrawn by Russians over the weekend. The Bank of Russia central bank barred foreign residents from selling out investments in Russia (capital controls) and required export firms to convert 80% of their sales revenues to rubles as received. The European divisions of major Russian banks are going under. EIR has informed you, with the quotes from senior U.S. officials to document it, that crushing the Russian economy was the objective of NATO’s daring Russia into a war over Ukraine or some other Eastern European nation on the Russian border with potential nuclear missile launchers, like Poland or Romania. China is the other, even bigger obstacle to the trans-Atlantic nations’ as they face a financial crash worse than that of 2008. They cannot drag their dominant City of London- and Wall Street-centered banks through the crisis without imposing the drastic austerity of “the Great Reset” on their people and businesses. They have to eliminate the economic alternative for nations all over the world, represented by the China-Russia partnership. The outcomes now triggered by an economic takedown of Russia will be serious, highly inflationary, and deadly for the world economy and the developing nations in particular. A UN representative of Brazil was right to say on Feb. 27, in the UN Security Council discussion of calling an emergency General Assembly session to condemn Russia, that the effect of these economic attacks on one of the world’s leading fertilizer-producing nations would be famines—fertilizer is already hyperinflating out of the reach of farmers around the world. But also in the NATO nations’ their leaders, suddenly self-righteous warriors for at least the sixth time since they bombed Serbia in 1999, are going to impose serious economic austerity on their people, with bigger and bigger war spending, rapidly rising inflation, shortages of vital products including enough heat, electricity and food. Unless a nuclear war intervenes—and it may. We are in a form of Cuban Missile Crisis “in reverse” right now. The one way out of that is the Schiller Institute’s proposed “strategic architecture” based on the economic development principles of Lyndon LaRouche’s “four economic laws” prescribed in 2014. This petition, calls for an immediate international conference to get nations to cooperate on those principles. Signing it, and discussing it with other people, is the best action you can take to get mankind off the downward slope toward world war, which it is now on.
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Feb. 27 (EIRNS)—Large steps down the slope toward a world war—a thermonuclear war—were taken over this weekend. The most widely publicized was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement this morning that he had told his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Military Staff Valery Gerasimov to put the Russian strategic nuclear forces on high alert.He made his announcement following economic attacks on the Russian banking system, attempting to freeze and steal Russia’s financial reserves and crash its currency and banks, and bans on all Russian flights and all Russian media, while European high-tech arms and soldiers of fortune poured into Ukraine to fight. RIA Novosti quoted Putin as follows: “Western countries are not only taking hostile actions towards our country in the economic realm, by which I mean the illegitimate sanctions everybody knows about very well, but the highest officials of leading NATO countries are also making aggressive statements towards our country. Therefore I order the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff to place the [nuclear] deterrent forces of the Russian Armed Forces onto a special alert status.” We are now clearly in a form of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, nearer than anyone alive then, ever wanted to come to nuclear war. U.S. military leaders wanted then to launch war on Cuba; had President Kennedy not stopped them and negotiated a solution, nuclear missiles would have rained down on America’s Eastern cities. Now U.S. and European political and military leaders, accustomed for decades to brutalizing smaller countries by wars and economic strangulation, want to provoke Russia to war and destroy it. These leaders have surrounded Russia with hostile military—including nuclear—capabilities to a point it could not accept. They moved to make Ukraine—reaching deep into Russia itself—their ultimate anti-Russia military platform. President Putin warned them 15 years ago in a 2007 speech in at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, that Russia could not tolerate indefinitely being surrounded and enveloped by hostile arms. But having lit that fuse of war, they’re now fanning it to the point it may go nuclear. (See Putin’s speech, EIR, Feb. 23, 2007.) Once nuclear weapon attacks begin anywhere, they will envelop the globe. Now an entirely different approach must be taken, where strategic stability is put on the basis of economic development. Now the economic and scientific development policies of Lyndon LaRouche must be on the agenda. They have long been neglected as impossible (like returning to the principles of Franklin Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods credit system); or unnecessary (like crash development of laser and fusion plasma technologies in every nation); or even ridiculous (like nations cooperating to colonize the Moon and explore Mars). Those policies are the last available chance for peace now—the very last chance. The Schiller Institute on Feb. 25 launched a petition in this crisis, “Convoke an International Conference To Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.” “Every person,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche urged today, “should deploy with every capability to distribute this petition and to discuss it.” Get others to discuss it, and to write about it in everything from Internet commentaries to simple letters to the editor. “Just 50 leading individuals in the world promoting this idea could convene an important conference.” Ask why so many millions, 60 years ago this October, were so alarmed that nuclear war was staring them in the face; and now, after 25 years of war and with the world’s second-largest nuclear missile force on high alert, people pretend it cannot happen. Perhaps we were then more morally fit to survive. A real, broad mobilization for this petition and this conference is the only issue which can bring about an alternative to the further slide down toward world war. The petition is literally drawn so that civilization will survive.
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Feb. 21—Russian President Putin’s determination to preserve Russia’s nuclear deterrent and prevent hostile NATO-armed, even nuclear-armed states on its doorstep, is only the outward issue of the present war crisis. The driving cause is two economic partnerships or alliances in the world, and the fact that one of them—led by the trans-Atlantic NATO nations—is sinking economically and heading for a financial implosion, a “second 2008” or worse.Leading European Union and World Economic Forum officials have flipped out at the revelation on Feb. 4 that the growing China-Russia economic cooperation of 2021, had become a full economic and strategic partnership between the world’s leading infrastructure-building and poverty-fighting nation and the world’s leading nuclear and nuclear energy power and leading food exporter. Cooperating, they could shortly be the leading spacefaring power as well. The fantasy of destroying that alliance has become a motive for war. The financial elite of London and Wall Street decreed in recent years a “Great Reset,” less dramatically called the Green Deal, and it has turned the economic stagnation ruling since 2008 into a deepening recession. Look at what was caused in 2021 by seven years of rapid forced “green” disinvestment in fossil fuels and nuclear (annual investment cut by more than half outside Russia and China) caused in 2021. Global energy production stagnated; global electricity generation dropped. Corn, wheat and seed oil production are falling in 2022 due to fertilizer hyperinflation and shortage. The “green” replacement for fossil fuels and nuclear does not function. Worldwide, the solar- and wind-power share of total energy production was still just 4% in 2021, according to a long review of the situation by Gail Tverberg today. Disappearing wind power caused serious economic damage in 2021 in the central U.S. Plains, across Northern Europe and across Northern China—China alone solved the problem quickly. Technology for large-scale storage of intermittent power is still far off. Combined with vast money-printing by central banks to provide “an asset and money economy” where the productive economy is shrinking, this has triggered inflation heading for hyperinflationary blowout. Check the Feb. 18 note on The Carson Report of Joseph Carson, former chief economist for AllianceBernstein investment bank: “The current inflation cycle is unlike anything seen before. The 1970s and 1980s inflation cycles centered on consumer and producer prices, while assets prices (equities and real estate) powered the 1990s and 2000s inflation cycles. Today’s inflation cycle has all of the above. And based on the broad price index, the current inflation cycle is as big as the 1970s and the dot.com and the housing bubble combined. (Note: CPI less shelter has risen 9.1%in the last year, the biggest increase since 1981. Including a market-price shelter … lifts CPI to double-digits. The old producer prices for finished goods are up 12.5, while core intermediate and crude prices have increased by 23% and 13.5%, respectively….)” Now sanctions over Ukraine, openly intended and designed by U.S. Treasury and National Security Council officials to crush Russia’s economy, are being discussed and demanded by the NATO powers. Against the world’s largest fossil fuels exporter, they will wreak worldwide havoc, as China helps Russia withstand them, as it has withstood others. World energy reserves are already so low, oil and natural gas are being “priced to destroy demand,” as JPMorgan’s chief oil trader described it on Feb. 17. Or in Gail Tverberg’s description in the above-cited analysis, the option of pricing into a deep recession. Sanction Russia’s major banks so that they cannot make loans? What about the biggest U.S. and European banks, which already control most deposits and don’t make loans? Thus arises the motive to force war, to destroy the alternative represented, for developing nations in particular, by China and Russia. But their partnership alone, with the Belt and Road Initiative of infrastructure building, is not sufficient to a solution for all nations. That demands a new strategic agreement or conference based on a completely different economic policy from the collapsing casino game Wall Street and the City of London are playing. Guiding that policy should be the well-known but not implemented (except significantly in China) Four Laws spelled out by Lyndon LaRouche. These include Glass-Steagall laws in every nation, Hamiltonian national banks in every nation, and crash programs to conquer space with fusion and plasma technologies.
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Feb. 14—The Biden Administration, with a very bad misjudgment of the real condition of Afghanistan after 20 years of NATO’s war there, made a rushed pull-out and then moved to seize all the country’s cash and punish its people with no food, medical care or shelter in the dead of winter. It never even told America’s NATO “allies” what it was doing. It’s leaving a country destroyed.Can the Biden White House now be allowed to make an even worse disaster in Europe—even a nuclear disaster—in a crisis, the “Ukraine crisis,” which could set off a war to destroy humanity itself? The more and more angry and aggressive bluffing of Russia by the Biden Administration over Ukraine has brought us closer to nuclear war than we have ever been since October 1962, when the whole world was terrified by the Cuban Missiles Crisis. One possibility is that Biden and his dubious national security team is looking for a victory to sell at home, by telling us Russia will invade Ukraine next week, tomorrow, any minute … and then when Russia does not invade, telling us Biden’s threat of crushing economic punishment stopped Putin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said this was the “elaborate charade” yesterday on Twitter. Former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock put out the idea in a column today, writing for the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her own way, hinted at it Sunday on “ABC This Week”: “If we were not threatening the sanctions and the rest, it would guarantee that Putin would invade…. So, if Russia doesn’t invade, it’s not that he never intended to. It’s just that the sanctions worked.” But we cannot rest on hope that this is political fakery. The Biden White House is punishing Afghanistan incompetently, but with a vengeance. It wants to punish Russia and destroy its economy. Senior White House officials said it in a background press briefing Jan. 25: The goal is “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard…. Undercut Putin’s aspirations to exert influence on the world stage.” The officials vowed, “we’re talking about denying to Russia downstream products that are critical to its own ambitions to develop high-tech capabilities in aerospace and defense, lasers and sensors, maritime, AI, robotics, quantum, etc. … And so, as we build this effort with our allies and partners, we’re willing to work with any country in order to deny Russia an input that it needs to diversify its economy.” With that goal, Biden’s team—which had “everything under control” in Afghanistan—is daring Russian President Putin to go to war. It is squeezing Ukraine’s President Zelensky so hard that he feels compelled to contradict every Russian invasion forecast that London and Washington make. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her widely read analysis Feb. 6, said “We Are 100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture.” Two European bankers put out a call for France to block Ukraine’s entry to NATO and leave the NATO strategic command, now, anything to stop the march toward war. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went to Ukraine today to say, “The issue of [Ukraine’s] membership in the alliance [NATO] is not on the agenda,” so Russia should stop worrying about it. But the NATO weaponry America is pouring into Ukraine and around it is unprecedented: Ukraine’s Defense Minister admits it now has far more anti-tank missiles than Russian tank targets. We all need to mobilize ourselves, not to “watch and wait,” as most were scared into doing in October 1962. There is no John F. Kennedy here to solve this. The solution is to compel more breaks toward negotiation, and to attack the cause, the threat of hyperinflationary collapse which the Biden Administration and Federal Reserve have done so much to bring on themselves and us. Our next D-Day is Saturday, Feb. 19, the Schiller Institute’s all-day conference with the message of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Feb. 6 article: We need a new security architecture, one based on economic recovery and development. Register for the conference and organize others.
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The din of war in the trans-Atlantic media, the drumbeat of “Russian attack and invasion,” has now reached a crescendo. Can there still be some Leonard Bernstein of London who will raise the orchestra of the intelligence services to a still louder pitch, until American and European publics actually believe that a Russian military invasion of Ukraine is underway? Will some stiff-necked journalists continue to demand actual evidence?On Feb. 5 the Financial Times took the podium, with “U.S. Believes Russia Plans Nuclear Exercise To Warn West over Ukraine.” It declared with the London media’s usual evidence-freedom that “U.S. military and intelligence officials believe Russia is planning a major nuclear weapons exercise this month as a warning to NATO not to intervene if President Vladimir Putin decides to invade.” This nuclear weapons exercise should be in September, the FT decides, but the bully Putin is going to hold it in February or March instead to intimidate NATO when the invasion goes ahead. The invasion that, according to NBC on Sunday, Biden Administration officials believe is coming “any day now.” “Russia generally holds its annual nuclear exercises—which involve testing intercontinental ballistic missiles from land, sea and air—in the fall,” wrote the FT. “But the U.S. believes Putin has decided to hold them earlier this year as a show of strength in the event that he orders his military to further invade Ukraine” probably in “mid-February to the end of March.” Then a somewhat unintelligible—perhaps crazy—analyst from the Hudson Institute is quoted, of this hypothesized February nuclear exercise, “It would be an incredibly provocative and foreboding message if they did that simultaneously with an invasion of Ukraine.” What the FT presented as its war scoop—similar to Bloomberg News’ short-lived headline, “Russia Invades Ukraine,” on Feb. 4—actually was already apparently stated to the Congress Feb. 3 in closed-door, classified testimony by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and DNI Avril Haines, and then leaked to Fleet Street. What about the fact that the United States right now is holding nuclear weapons exercises, called Global Lightning 2022, which exercises are intended to simulate an extended nuclear war, with first strikes—nuclear and conventional—retaliatory second strikes, responses to those strikes, and on, with more and more of the nuclear arsenals being fired? Nothing such inconveniently directed threat matters, facing the “Russia is invading Ukraine” drumbeat. But it does matter to its real target, the human race. Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a new article said of Global Lightning, “This nuclear war plan includes not only nuclear weapons but various other lethal systems such as missile defense systems, directed energy weapons such as electromagnetic pulse weapons and lasers, cyberattacks, and Space Force attacks from space. Who would be able to survive such a prolonged nuclear war?” There are some signs of motion toward a solution: French President Emmanuel Macron’s negotiation with Russian President Vladimir Putin gave signs of immediate, possibly productive follow-up from both sides. But the real solution can only be found in the direction Zepp-LaRouche indicated. The financial system is an immense mass of unpayable debts preparing to crash again, worse than in 2008, and the City of London and Wall Street can survive it only if they beat down Russia and/or China before it crashes, distracting millions in the process from perceiving the failing monetarist system. A new paradigm of economic as well as moral and cultural relations among the great powers is the antidote both to the coming financial crash, and to the resort to unsurvivable war. A New Bretton Woods credit system is urgently needed which can save Afghanistan and other war-destroyed nations, and build modern healthcare systems in every country to save people from pandemics.
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After a tremendous increase in fertilizer prices since 2019, and particularly during the course of 2021, the world stands on the brink of a substantial drop in global food production in 2022, at a time when mass starvation has already hit Afghanistan, Yemen, and six nations in Africa. If dramatic actions are not taken to reverse this process right away, more than 100 million more human beings can be added this year to the ranks of those in danger of starvation, which already number more than 200 million in the latest judgment of the World Food Program and its head David Beasley.The causes of this terrible toll of hunger and starvation are mostly a failed economic model which must be replaced; but in Afghanistan, they are viciously geopolitical and we must undo this punishment now. Regarding the economic failure: The World Bank Fertilizers Price Index for the world, which in April of 2020 was at 66.24 and in January 2021 had risen slowly but steadily to 82.96, by December 2021 had exploded to 208.01, more than tripling in 20 months. The rise of 60% in just the last two months of 2021 has particularly devastated farmers around the world. Their situation is even worse in the Northern hemisphere where fertilizer (and pesticides) for the spring planting look entirely inaccessible. The Wall Street Journal’s Jan. 21 article, “‘Farms Are Failing’ as Fertilizer Prices Drive Up Cost of Food,” reported that despite global food prices having risen to the highest level in a decade, rapid food inflation is almost certain to continue in 2022 due to fertilizer prices and accessibility. This, the paper understates, “would exacerbate hunger—already acute in some parts of the world.” World wheat output is set to drop by 10 million tons in 2022, according to the French agriculture analysis firm Agritel. The effect on maize production will be worse. Corn/maize production costs are rising 15-20% in the major producers America and Ukraine. Lower yields of many foods and agricultural products are projected around the world in 2022. Amid widespread famines already in 2020-21, and loss of informal agricultural work in the developing countries, food may enter global shortage in 2022. And according to the International Fertilizer Development Center, exceedingly high fertilizer prices could result in a reduction of agricultural output in Africa alone, which will be “equivalent to the food needs of 100 million people.” Although this monumental fertilizer price increase coincides with sharp rise prices of natural gas and is exacerbated by them, it is far larger, and far more widely and evenly spread around the world, than the natural gas spikes. As corn/maize growers in the United States insist, the gas price spike is not the primary cause of the fertilizer shock and loss of food production. In fact, as fertilizer use and price both rose in 2019, the International Fertilizer Association forecast that global production and use would drop after 2019, as they did—by roughly 10% in 2020-21. The huge fertilizer price rise after 2019 went along with sharp price rises across the whole range of important global commodities for industry and agriculture; its cause was wild money-printing by the major trans-Atlantic central banks starting late 2019; and global monopoly of production by a few big firms. Four monopolies control 75% of nitrogen-based fertilizer distribution: They are Nutrien Ltd., (Canada-based), Yara (Norway-based), CF Industries (U.S.-based), and Mosaic (part of Cargill, U.S.-based). Afghanistan is a terrible special case, where when NATO countries withdrew their forces after 20 years of destructive war, they retaliated with a punitive cutoff of international aid and development investment, and the United States Treasury seized Afghanistan’s own financial reserves. A German official just back from Kabul reported in Tagesspiegel Jan. 30 that 7 million children are starving now in Afghanistan; 1 million, he said, would be in hospital ICUs if they were in Europe. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said of the plight of Afghanistan’s population, and the world threat to food-growing this year, “This is the greatest threat to civilization, not nuclear weapons.” She demands, now with many others, that the frozen Afghan funds be released to restore the lost liquidity in the entire economy; and has launched Operation Ibn Sina, to make the nation an exemplar for building a modern healthcare and public health system in every country in the world. To do this the United States must cooperate with Russia, China, and India in particular. And it must break up both its biggest banks with Glass-Steagall, and with anti-trust acts break up the food monopolies.
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Today’s “news” is that the three full months of escalating British and U.S. accusations that Russia is “imminently” about to invade Ukraine, along with a crescendo of threats to “crush” Russia when it does, are getting so wild that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to reject them publicly and tell American officials to “calm down” and give him some economic aid. But British media still escalate, now putting the most provocative possible words in President Joe Biden’s mouth. Their purpose is to provoke the war they accuse Russia of, then attempt to destroy Russia’s economy.But because Russia has moved more and more into an economic and strategic partnership with China, this is the most dangerous form of bluffing. The United States and European economies are being corroded by “Green New Deal” technological primitivism; their banking systems are facing a hyperinflationary explosion. The partnership of Russia and China is more than strong enough for a new Cold War; but the best would be to cooperate with the United States in international development, and in a new credit system that can replace a bankrupt “everything bubble” of debt. China’s 2021 GDP growth was reported 8.1% over the year. U.S. GDP growth in the fourth quarter was 6.9% relative to the third quarter, but for the full year 2021 it was just 5.7%. Moreover, more than 70% of the fourth-quarter U.S. growth was attributable to businesses building up their inventories; the remainder, to increased consumer spending. China’s national planning and reform body attributed its faster growth to greater and growing investment in research and technological innovation. The other key factor is technology in infrastructure; China is investing $300-$400 billion a year in new infrastructure, led by high-speed transportation and new power supplies in many countries. Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” visit to a Pennsylvania bridge that collapsed just before he arrived was poignant; but putting another bridge there is not going to raise America’s economic productivity. Because U.S. growth for the fourth quarter only was supposedly higher in that quarter than that of China, Biden on Jan. 27 lied to the American people, saying that afternoon, “For the first time in 20 years, American GDP grew faster than China.” But the opposite is true. And just under $16 trillion equivalent, China’s GDP, even in nominal dollar terms, is now more than two-thirds that of the United States at just over $22 trillion, and will overtake it in coming years. China’s industrial production grew by 9.6%, fixed asset investment by 4.9%, job creation was at 12.69 million, according to the National Bureau of Statistics release Jan. 17. China’s real disposable personal income, after inflation, rose by 8.1% in 2021. On the other hand, Americans’ average real weekly wages fell by −2.4% over the year. U.S. Industrial production was 3% lower than its peak level of mid-2018; manufacturing output was 5% lower. And regarding labor productivity, with labor forces growing fairly rapidly in both countries in 2021, a long-term trend nonetheless continued: China’s productivity growth was 1.6%; that of the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 0.6% for the first three quarters of 2021, the latest figures available. The Chinese banking system’s loans outstanding, offered both to the domestic economy and to many countries in the Belt and Road Initiative framework, rose by 11.7% in 2021; loans outstanding of the U.S. banking system grew by less than 0.5% over the year. Americans and people of the NATO countries should think: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s idea of saving Afghanistan from the Soviet Russia, produced al-Qaeda, and a country destroyed by 40 years of war; Tony Blair’s neo-cons’ idea—saving Iraq, Syria and Libya from Russia—produced ISIS. The crazy idea of saving Ukraine from Russia, would give us a country run by neo-Nazis; but before we even get there, it’s producing a new Cold War against the effective partnership of Russia and China, and may produce a world war. Rather than this insane pursuit of a global superpower military confrontation, Americans in particular should look at what Russia and China are actually doing. They are developing their economies, making loans for high-technology infrastructure projects in third countries, developing advanced nuclear power technologies, jointly working toward a base for scientific work on the Moon in the 2030s, and looking for the United States to join in the projects of the Belt and Road Initiative China started in 2013. And the trans-Atlantic nations’ economies need a New Bretton Woods credit and monetary system or their banking systems are going to explode again, soon. This is the way to do it.
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With the sounding of a “Russian coup coming in Ukraine” siren by British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Jan. 22—to push the British demand to hit Russia now with the financial super-sanctions that were supposed to be threatened to deter war—it has become clear that there is no “unity of the NATO allies and partners” on dealing with Russia in the Ukraine missiles crisis.Rather, there is a British drive to force Russia to invade Ukraine or capitulate; a beleaguered but definite German opposition to the British war drive; a French President who wants to negotiate but is trying to look good and get re-elected; and a weak American President who would like to avoid war. If war, even world war, comes, it will be war imposed on the weakened American Presidency by the City of London and Britain. Not a second Crimean War, but a war for revenge against Russia and China for resisting and ruining the grand Glasgow global climate summit in November, leaving the British ministers who ran that summit in angry tears as it ended in failure. That included Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “BoJo” the nasty clown, who is discredited and inches from a no-confidence vote by his own Conservative Party MPs. “His resolve has hardened” against Russia, his spokesman announced on Jan. 22. The New York Times coverage of the new fake was headlined, “Britain Pursues More Muscular Role in Standoff with Russia on Ukraine,” although it’s always U.S. muscle Britain uses. Even the nervously hyper-aggressive U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not respond to the newest British war fable, beyond “We’re taking that seriously,” when it was thrown at him today by “Face the Nation’s” anchor Margaret Brennan, who raved as if she had taken some British meth with her coffee before the program. Against the London-Kiev demand that the supposed financial super-sanctions be imposed on Russia tomorrow, Blinken noted the obvious, “We’re using them as a deterrent. You would lose their deterrent effect.” He did not include the equally obvious, “and push Russia toward war”—the British intent. Blinken repeatedly stressed two points: “We have rallied allies and partners across Europe in a very intense way in recent days”; and “We are also responding to some of Russia’s concerns in further talks, and we expect them to respond to our concerns.” The Russian Embassy in London stressed today that the British were outside the process of negotiation with Russia: “The U.K. Foreign Office continues with a series of provocative statements on the situation around Ukraine…. These rallying cries come against the background of an obvious deterioration of British expertise on Russia and Ukraine. …The words by Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss about Ukraine having suffered from various invaders, ‘from the Mongols to the Tatars,’ is one example. Then came the ‘news’ of Russia intending to establish a puppet regime in Kiev led by a former Ukrainian MP—one that happens to be under Russian sanctions for being a threat to national security,” referring to Yevheniy Murayev. Germany does not want to allow the British war drive to succeed. Its Navy Chief Vice Adm. Kay-Achim Schönbach was forced to resign by media attacks, when he stated that what Putin “wants is respect. And my God, giving someone respect is low cost…. It is easy to give him the respect he really demands—and probably also deserves.” It is now widely reported that Chancellor Olaf Scholz was asked to Washington for consultations with President Biden and declined to go until some later time. Germany will not permit Baltic nations to which it has sold German weapons to pass them on to Ukraine, and the breakneck British shipments of lethal weaponry are having to be flown over Danish airspace because the U.K. does not dare ask Germany for flyover permission. The Biden Administration is about to respond in writing to Russian President Putin’s proposed agreements to keep NATO missiles and warfighting arrangements out of Ukraine and off Russia’s border—“and stating our concerns” about Russia, Blinken said today. The United States has decided it wants Russia to agree not to publish these responses, most likely because such publication will either infuriate the warmongers around BoJo’s government and inside the City of London, or cause more doubts in Germany, France, and perhaps other “allies and partners.” The most important question now is, what will American citizens do to direct their flailing government toward solving the most important problems facing humanity? That requires cooperation with at least Russia and China as a means to reverse the American industrial economy’s decline toward “green” suicide, and involve the United States in building new public health systems and infrastructure development programs around the world. London’s Malthusian policy of deindustrialization by war can’t be tolerated.
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At a bad time for the British and U.S. war party which is striving to put down Russia and China in confrontations over Ukraine and Taiwan, China’s annual economic data release has shown that its economy again grew faster than that of the United States in 2021. And more important, China’s credit channel is fully open both for domestic industry and Belt and Road loans, while U.S. banks’ lending cannot grow until the dominant Wall Street megabanks are broken up and reorganized.This time, financial analysts and business economists in New York and London had widely and confidently predicted, early in 2021, that the U.S. economy’s supposed “red-hot recovery” from what was alleged to be simply a pandemic-induced recession, would cause it to outgrow China’s economy both in 2021 and 2022. They were proven wrong. China’s GDP grew by 8.1% over the year, and *South China Morning Post) reported that former World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin now estimates China’s economy may become the world’s largest by GDP in 2028, rather than 2030 as he had previously forecast. Industrial production grew by 9.6%, fixed asset investment by 4.9%, job creation was at 12.69 million, and retail sales grew by 12.5%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics release Jan. 17. China’s real disposable personal income, after inflation, rose by 8.1% in 2021—and for urban areas, by 7.1%—while Americans’ average real weekly wages fell by 2.3% over the year. In a strategic crisis in which an effective partnership of Russia and China has stopped a “color revolution” attempt in Kazakhstan and is pushing to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, this development makes reality clearer for American policymakers. The feared U.S. Treasury sanctions, including anti-China tariffs, do not work against these two major economic and scientific powers, although they devastate developing-nation adversaries and are killing or exiling millions of Afghans. Sudden coal shortages, price spikes and even blackouts in late summer, triggered in China by London’s global Green New Deal, were handled quickly by regulatory action while Europe struggles. These economic facts of life will also affect the Federal Reserve and the dominant dollar. The People’s Bank of China was actually lowering interest rates and the reserve requirement ratio for banks as 2021 ended. The Fed supposedly plans several rate increases to “control inflation” which is out of control at 7% for consumer goods and almost 10% for producer goods. But its data presumably show the Fed’s governors that the U.S. real economy is again contracting, after failing to regain even early-2020 pre-COVID levels of activity. Seriously raising short-term interest rates, and the impact on long-term rates, could not only blow out the “everything bubble” of debt, but trigger another deep recession. U.S. industrial production dropped slightly, −0.1% in December, and is just about equal to late 2019 and −3% lower than its level of mid-2018. Manufacturing output fell by −0.3% in December and is about 5% below the mid-2018 level; again, equal to that of late 2019. Construction investment and employment are lower than in 2018, particularly in “public and government structures,” although contractors are expecting new highway and bridge contracts from the $1.2 infrastructure legislation just passed. Retail sales also fell in December, as a reaction to inflation of consumer goods. But the most dramatic contrast in the economies, is effective credit policy: Outstanding loans by China’s banks, including overseas lending, grew by 11.7% for the year; and although the big Wall Street and regional U.S. banks are crammed with trillions in excess deposits through Federal Reserve quantitative easing programs, American banks’ loans outstanding grew by less than 0.5% in 2021. An initiative for a new international credit and monetary system, a Rooseveltian New Bretton Woods, could now originate from the Eurasian “strategic triangle” nations of China, Russia and India and be proposed to the United States as a solution for strategic crises—jointly seek the benefit of third countries. This must begin with modern medical facilities and food aid for Afghanistan and other war-destroyed nations, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute propose.
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So many institutions of the U.S. intellectual establishment are now echoing the Schiller Institute and demanding the release of Afghanistan’s aid and reserve funds—15 think-tanks and organizations in a Jan. 8 joint letter to President Biden and others on their own websites—that there is clearly a horrible realization: United States financial and economic sanctions are murdering an innocent people, for insufficient loyalty to NATO occupying forces. Any citizen who thinks this crime is unrelated to the threat of an imminent, much bigger conflict over Ukraine, is mistaking moral posturing for morality.In the U.S.-Russia meetings now going on in Geneva about NATO in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, moral posturing by U.S. diplomats has quickly and completely replaced the personal diplomacy between Presidents Biden and Putin which seemed to give hope of a solution. After the bilateral U.S.-Russia stage of the meetings on Jan. 10, State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the United States would never consider keeping Ukraine out of NATO, “had not intended to reach any agreement” with Russia, and did not even “consider the talks as a negotiation.” He concluded his briefing with a talking points list of Russian “malign activities,” to claim that Russia, and only Russia, had to de-escalate and make concessions, to allow NATO forces and missiles to complete their long advance right to Russia’s borders—while Russian troops must vacate their own western border regions and “return to their permanent bases.” Secretary of State Tony Blinken added, at the same time, a gratuitous attempt to gloat over Russia’s assistance to the government of Kazakhstan to control rioting and attempted insurrection. Unless President Joe Biden intervenes personally again, Russia’s proposed agreements have been bluntly and permanently rejected. This is the equivalent of Nikita Khrushchev having refused ever to consider withdrawing Soviet missiles from America’s southern border in the terrifying Cuban Missiles Crisis of October 1962. At that time, tens of millions of frightened people around the world had already imagined what that refusal would mean. Even if the consequence now is “merely” a conventional conflict in Ukraine, U.S. former chief weapons inspector and military expert Scott Ritter gives an idea why that would not go well for NATO forces. What if the consequence is only the “complete rupture of relations” threatened by Putin and a deep and immediate Cold War. The nation with the world’s most rapidly expanding and technologically advancing economy, and with the greatest anti-poverty and development influence in Africa, South and East Asia, is firmly in partnership with Russia. This is clearly shown once again in the suppression of the apparently failed “color revolution” attempt in Kazakhstan. If the Biden Administration has decided the United States will attack and confront Russia and China together in a new Cold War—opposing them in space, fighting their policies of exporting nuclear power to third countries, demanding they stop using coal for power, attacking China’s Belt and Road and poverty eradication policies, and so on, who will it have in its corner? Why, the British Empire, of course—those green royals and Bojo the Clown and Her Majesty’s forces eager to deploy into Ukraine. What will America have in reserve? No development credit institution; a weak economic recovery from a deep recession; a labor force 3 million workers and 3.5 million jobs down from two years ago; declining real incomes; a Federal Reserve creating economic calamities worldwide, as the IMF warned Jan. 9, trying to stop the inflation it caused. But far worse than any of this is the ongoing strangulation of the people of Afghanistan by U.S. sanctions. It is causing a growing cascade of deaths by starvation, by freezing in homes with no winter fuel, in a nation for which the United States clearly bears responsibility after 20 years’ war and occupation. Murdered for the sin of not sustaining a puppet government when NATO left it. These sanctions are a crime against humanity. With this Afghanistan as its “banner,” nations will instinctively shun an Anglo-American attempt to make the rules for the world. There would be perverse new meaning, as Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today, to the phrase “Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires.” This must be prevented, reversed. The policy must be changed to one of development, by Helga LaRouche’s Operation Ibn Sina. The Schiller Institute’s urgent organizing for this objective, will take its next step forward with a webinar on Martin Luther King Day, Monday, Jan. 17.
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As the year 2022 opened marking economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s 100th birthday, the heads of state and government of the five nuclear weapons states, which are also the permanent members of the UN Security Council, consulted as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has insisted they must do, and issued a declaration, for the first time, that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” (see the Declaration in Documentation). The words were used by Presidents Biden and Putin following their Dec. 7, 2021 video conference; and this declaration will now sit over the U.S.-Russian-NATO negotiations on the Ukraine crisis Jan. 10-13.But the fundamental reason for optimism here is not so much the words of this declaration as that the five powers’ leaders acted together against global war. Helga Zepp-LaRouche had publicly called on them to do exactly two years ago—Jan. 3, 2020, in the dangerous period after the assassination of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani—and has urged it on them many times since. On Jan. 15, 2020, two weeks after Helga LaRouche’s first call, Russian President Putin called for a P5 heads-of-state summit to deal with problems of peace, security, and terrorism—and he, too, has repeated that proposal several times since; and his spokesman emphasized today that it is still necessary after this “nuclear war never” declaration. Already by early March 2020, Helga LaRouche had identified the COVID pandemic—demanding a modern healthcare system be built in every country—as the new requirement for such a major-power summit. This must be done on an emergency basis in Afghanistan, along with food aid and power supply guarantees to save millions of lives. It is the start of, through physical-economic development, the real name for peace; and it points to a new international credit system like FDR’s Bretton Woods, in place of the crash-prone casino we have now. These are the missions uniquely reachable through what Lyndon LaRouche called “the four-power agreement” of America, Russia, China and India. That makes today’s “P5” declaration significant beyond its words. The declaration was posted simultaneously at roughly 11:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time on all five Presidents’/Prime Ministers’ websites. “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the statement says. “As nuclear use would have far-reaching consequences, we also affirm that nuclear weapons—for as long as they continue to exist—should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war. We believe strongly that the further spread of such weapons must be prevented.” This rebukes those mad war-hawks like Sen. Roger Wicker who have been raising the “option” of a nuclear first strike on Russia over Ukraine. The five signers also reaffirm the importance of addressing nuclear threats, as well as their commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its obligation “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date.” They “reaffirm that none of our nuclear weapons are targeted at each other or at any other State.” They also declared: “We intend to continue seeking bilateral and multilateral diplomatic approaches to avoid military confrontations, strengthen stability and predictability, increase mutual understanding and confidence, and prevent an arms race that would benefit none and endanger all. We are resolved to pursue constructive dialogue with mutual respect and acknowledgment of each other’s security interests and concerns.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “We hope that, in the current difficult conditions of international security, the approval of such a political statement will help reduce the level of international tensions.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized that Moscow still considered a summit between the world’s major nuclear powers to be “necessary.” China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu was quoted by the official Xinhua that the pledge “will help increase mutual trust and replace competition among major powers with coordination and cooperation.” But it is only a step that these nations’ leaders must be kept to. The trans-Atlantic banking and financial system is headed for hyperinflation and crash. What the world absolutely needs is a major-power negotiation process which involves at least India as well, to launch a new international credit system capable of funding real economic development, “TVA-like” thorough development of poorer regions, advanced nuclear power development, technological progress led by space science and fusion power crash programs. The guide and planner of this process, and the world’s leading fighter for it, was Lyndon LaRouche. This begins LaRouche’s year.
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As Presidents Biden and Putin spoke for nearly an hour by phone Thursday, with war-hawks throughout the NATO countries’ governments and think-tanks demanding complete NATO encirclement of Russia, the problem these two leaders should be talking about was expressed in a news headline: “With famine looming over Afghanistan, millions struggle for every meal.” (NBC News, Dec. 30). What does it profit the United States if it gain the encirclement of Russia and China with bases and missiles, and completely lose its soul by letting hundreds of millions die of starvation and pandemic? The sanest experts are warning: Even as you reach for that encirclement and impossible military superiority, you are likely triggering a war which will go nuclear and destroy civilization!Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche has repeated again on Dec. 29 in addressing a commemorative event: President Biden should accept the draft treaty proposed by President Putin and agree that Ukraine, on Russia’s border and part of it for centuries, will not join NATO. Long-time CIA analyst and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Ray McGovern, agreed. And on “The Critical Hour” radio broadcast Dec. 27, McGovern brought out that no media or officials are mentioning that 10,000 of the Russian troops who had moved closer to Ukraine in November have now been withdrawn back away from it, and called this a critical part of a negotiation that should be leading to a resolution of the standoff in January. Danish Russia expert Jens Joergen Nielsen, in an interview with EIR today, said he would tell Biden, “It is wise for you to engage with Putin, because the alternative is war.” And retired German Bundeswehr Inspector General Harald Kujat, on radio today, said the security of the NATO nations will be improved if Ukraine is not admitted. But this is not merely a discussion of “strategy,” but of the common aims of humanity, for which the United States was a powerful and leading force. In 1988 Lyndon LaRouche, after five years of “strategic” crisis in which he had forecast the dissolution of the Soviet Union while others forecast it would invade Western Europe, went to Berlin and publicly proposed a “Food for Peace” solution, in which the Western nations would develop the agriculture of Poland so that it could feed itself, and the Soviet Union would accept the unification of Germany. No one else thought these possible, but they occurred then; and promises were made to Mikhail Gorbachev that unified Germany would be the last NATO state; promises then broken by NATO to lead to today’s U.S.-Russia standoff. LaRouche widened his proposals in a “Food for Peace” conference in Chicago in December 1988—“Who will give us this day our daily bread?,” he asked on behalf of hundreds of millions, just weeks before he was imprisoned. Now, a modern healthcare system must be built in Afghanistan; its financial reserves released from U.S. sanctions; and food aid and food production made possible. President Putin proposed this as well, during the current negotiations with the Biden Administration, on Dec. 23. This is a matter for American, Russian, and Chinese collaboration for the common welfare of mankind, or millions will starve in the post-war destruction of that country. Therefore, accept the non-alignment of Ukraine. Take the path out of this potentially thermonuclear standoff into collaboration against pandemic and famine; on to the exploration and colonization of space; on to the development of nuclear power and fusion energy technologies. Those should be the missions of great powers, not to encircle and intimidate each other until the irreversible, unsurvivable war breaks out.
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The pace of intensifying U.S.-Russia tension over Ukraine increased over this past weekend, so that what seemed within hope of stabilization two weeks ago when Presidents Biden and Putin video-conferenced, now looks more and more like a countdown toward war in Europe involving the nuclear superpowers.A senior White House official, quite possibly National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, told CNN on Dec. 19, Sunday, that there is only a “four-week window” to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine. “What we have been doing is very calculated,” the official said. “But we only have about a four-week window from now.” The official said U.S. planned sanctions “would be overwhelming, immediate and inflict significant costs on the Russian economy and their financial system.” The next day, Dec. 20, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told journalists that the Biden Administration had not responded to President Putin’s on Dec. 15 proposed treaties on arms control, according to the EurAsian Times news site. They included the assurance that Ukraine would not join NATO and that further forward deployments of U.S. and NATO forces and missile systems toward Russia’s borders would stop. "‘No, they [the Americans] have not responded yet," said Ryabkov; “we are waiting, we will see what they answer. So far, we have seen only all sorts of public statements.” Among those public statements was a NATO general’s plan for U.S. troops’ forward deployment to Bulgaria and Romania, to NATO bases at the Black Sea. And both Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko and Arms Control Negotiator Konstantin Gavrilov ominously referred to “Russia’s military-technical and military means” as the only alternative to a negotiation on Russia’s treaty proposals. Ukraine’s own government continued, in the person of Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba talking to the Washington Post Dec. 19, to demand more “military means” and troops from the United States and the U.K., and to demand that the United States spell out publicly the “overwhelming and immediate” damage that the U.S. Treasury is preparing to do to the Russian economy and financial system, and do it with London whether the continental European allies agree or not. In October 1962 it was the U.S. southern border that was being approached, closely, by Soviet soldiers and missiles in Cuba, which threatened a devastating first strike. Today, it is the relentless march of NATO closer and closer to Russia’s borders. Sixty years ago President John F. Kennedy said, “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.” And, he said, that this, “in an area well-known to have a special and historical relationship to the U.S., is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.” [emphasis added] Moreover, in 1962 U.S. military chiefs were demanding an invasion of Cuba to destroy missile and other forces, and President Kennedy was holding them back, with difficulty. Had Kennedy and Khrushchev not reached a negotiated resolution to the Cuban Missiles Crisis, what was likely to have happened? Hundreds of millions of people around the world were terrified of an imminent nuclear war. How were President Kennedy’s demands—that the Soviet Union remove, and never again try to place nuclear-capable missiles and aircraft virtually on the U.S. border, and “in an area [with] a special and historical relationship to the U.S.”—different from President Putin’s agreement proposed on Dec. 7 to President Biden, that the United States ensure that Ukraine would not join NATO and thereby have U.S. and NATO forces and missiles of various types placed right on Russia’s border? And “in an area with a special and historical relationship” to Russia, in fact for centuries part of it. Here is the difference: Kennedy and Khrushchev both wanted a solution, and not one in which the other President and nation were humiliated, or crushed by “overwhelming, immediate” national damage! That is what must be negotiated between Presidents Biden and Putin now, putting to the side the war-hawks—some of whom are clinically insane, to publicly propose a nuclear first strike on Russia as Sen. Roger Wicker did on Dec. 7. But it must and can happen if citizens now stand up to demand it, and remain optimistic that these two nations can block the ominous path of escalation and superpower war. Let them spend their efforts instead in providing food, healthcare and reconstruction to Afghanistan. Listen to Kenney’s Oct. 22, 1962 address here.
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Whoever thought that U.S.-Russia tension, and the threat of war between the superpowers, would diminish naturally with the Dec. 7 videoconference summit between Presidents Biden and Putin, hoped in vain. Despite remarks by President Biden himself, the extreme belligerence of Secretary of State Blinken and British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss at the G7 ministerial meeting Dec. 10, and their refusal to step back regarding Ukraine joining NATO, have combined with a wild nuclear bombardment threat by Senate Armed Forces Committee second ranking Republican member Roger Wicker, to keep the crisis just as intense, and even to raise its pre-war-like temperature. The inevitable Russian response came today.No citizen can assume that war will be averted except with the strength of his or her own efforts in the direction pointed by Schiller Institute Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s article-length statement over the past weekend, which cites former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s sharp call for sanity on Twitter. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned today, Dec. 13, that Russia would be forced to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe in response to its conviction that NATO will do the same in Ukraine after placing “ABM” missile launchers in Poland and Romania. “It will be a confrontation, this will be the next round, the appearance of such resources on our side,” he told RIA Novosti news agency. Ryabkov said Russia would do this if NATO continued refusing to engage with it to prevent that escalation. He cited “indirect indications” that NATO was closing in on re-deploying intermediate range nukes for the first time since the 1980s—including NATO’s restoring last month the 56th Artillery Command which operated nuclear-capable Pershing missiles during the Cold War. And Russian President Putin told British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today, according to Reuters, that NATO was directly threatening Russia with potential war by expanding military activity in Ukraine.
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In the incoming German government there are two 'Green' Party ministers—Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Economics and Energy Minister Robert Habeck—who epitomize a grave threat also emanating from others in governments across the trans-Atlantic nations. With one hand they are anti-carbon climate extremists, who demand sacrifice of the economy—reliable power, heat, livestock growing, farming, industry and all—to "the planet"; with the other, they demand war preparations and diplomatic and military confrontations with Russia and China, two of the major nations that refuse to sacrifice their economies to "the planet." At a much higher level than these two new ministers, among the financial oligarchy whose centers are the City of London and Wall Street, there are the likes of British central banker and now UN envoy for Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney, who organizes bankers publicly to order companies—"Get out of fossil fuels and carbon or disappear." Carney's close "Green Deal" colleagues and friends are Prince Charles, Sir Michael Bloomberg and like billionaires, for whom President Joe Biden spoke at the "FLOP26" so-called climate summit in Glasgow, when he said that China's President Xi and Russia's Putin "would have to answer to the world for not showing up" at that summit. Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, along with the elites of the Atlantic Council, Chatham House/Royal Institute of International Affairs, focus their confrontations and provocations on the claim that Russia's about to invade Ukraine, and China is about to attack Taiwan. But the more and more obvious failure of the "Green New Deal" and the threat of energy hyperinflation and financial crisis, makes them take blaming adversaries for that failure to its extreme—which may bring on war. As former Army Colonel and former Virginia State Senator Richard Black warned yesterday, either of these confrontations could become nuclear war. Just at this crisis point, a Nov. 30-dated report from the New York Federal Reserve Bank began to acknowledge that the very strategy associated with banker Carney and Prince Charles—"shifting the trillions" of investment funds out of all carbon-related industries and into a green finance wave, or bubble—is hastening the global banking crisis they are afraid of. The report, "How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?" found that these disasters are not bad for larger banks at all, to put it mildly. But more seriously for the Carney-Bloomberg "shift the trillions" cabal, the report concluded that "our findings suggest that potential transition risks from climate change warrant more attention than physical disaster risks." We emphasize "transition risks" because "the fundamental transition" has become the underhand for Green New Deal among Prince Charles/Carney forces. Here is Charles at Glasgow: "What is needed is a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector. With trillions at its disposal ... it offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition." Now the International Energy Agency, a creation of the Davos World Economic Forum, has upped its already economically absurd "forecast" of global additions to electric power capacity in the next five years, to say that 95% of it will be wind, solar and biomass electricity. Back in 2018 the London Guardian, writing about then- Bank of England Governor Carney, observed that "climate risk" for many companies was the risk that Carney's carbon-disclosure bank committees would go after those companies and force them to go green or face disinvestment or bankruptcy. Now, the New York Fed admits "banks could face outsized losses" from the "transition to a low-carbon economy"—in other words, from the Green New Deal. These findings are summed up in a Dec. 2 op-ed by Michael Shellenberger, "The Real Threat To Banks Isn't From Climate Change: It's From Bankers," featuring Mark Carney on its cover photo. That is exactly the direction from which a banking crisis and financial crash are now coming. For a decade, central banks have been printing money to inflate away the vast "everything bubble" of primarily corporate debt since the 2008 crash. It didn't work until the addition of the Green New Deal, the drive to "shift the trillions" to unreliable and anti-productive zero-carbon technologies, which are unleashing hyperinflation and chaos. So the financial elite and political leaders driven by them want to distract with anger, hatred, in some cases even hysteria against the adversaries, Russia and especially China, which continue to push for economic development in underdeveloped countries as well as at home, and which stiffen resistance in the developing world to "climate colonialism." Now, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today, we go to a Putin-Biden videoconference "summit" tomorrow midway between peace and war, "that gives you an idea how close we are actually to a brushfire which could go all the way up to nuclear war." Insisting on development in the countries which have suffered the worst crimes from the war party—she is focused on Afghanistan—is the way to fight that threat.
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National political leaders across much of the world are making, and being solicited by their media combines to make, alarmist statements and to spread panic about a new variant of the COVID virus, about which scientists know very, very little thus far. Not one of those leaders, at least not those of the so-called “advanced” economies, has yet found the honesty to acknowledge the truth that the emergence of dramatically altered variants confirms. The failure of these “economically advanced” nations to spread vaccines, modern health facilities and public health capacities as rapidly as possible throughout the underdeveloped countries, was humanly negligent, morally indifferent and deadly foolish. It invites the virus, circulating freely among the billions of unvaccinated, to create new forms and again threaten the entire world with death and economic destruction.A few, like former British Prime, and currently WHO Ambassador for Global Health Financing Minister Gordon Brown, have stated this truth in clear terms since Nov. 26 when the “Omicron” variant of COVID was identified. But governments in Europe, in particular, have preferred to spread panic about some new “African threat,” or “force of nature,” to hide the specter of their own negligence in dealing with this world pandemic for nearly two years. They do not know, at this point, that this particular, Omicron variant is capable of threatening such a new COVID world pandemic. But they spread panic by suggesting that it is. They are led—as in “Green Deal” fakery—by clownish British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has banned travel from 10 African nations (so far), and said, “Our scientists are learning more hour by hour, and it does appear that Omicron spreads very rapidly, and can be spread between people who are double vaccinated. There is also a very extensive mutation which means it diverges quite significantly from previous configurations of the virus, and as result, it might—at least in part—reduce the protection of our vaccines.” Thus Boris, embellishing his Black Africa scare, invents what “his scientists” do not, in fact, know at this point—the South African Medical Association chair has made that clear—and in doing so, he gives false ammunition to anti-vaccination agitators around the world. The European CDC and others join him. What national governments do know, they will not acknowledge, although an honest acknowledgement of it even now, could change everything for the better. They have flip-flopped and posed before their own populations, as Boris Johnson has, on how much vaccination is “enough,” on “herd immunity” nonsense, on hospital capacities and staffing needs, on masking mandates; and ignored the need to protect the entire world against a global pandemic like this one. And if they do not admit that now and reverse their negligence, a COVID variant to truly panic about, will arrive. The sane worldwide collaboration of virologists to provide accurate and responsible public health advice to populations about the COVID pandemic, called for by former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, is really urgently needed now. Being circulated by the Schiller Institute, Dr. Elders’ statement says, "I am calling upon virologists and medical experts throughout the globe to undertake an international, coordinated and integrated educational campaign to establish a sane approach to deal with this and potentially future pandemics…. “• What is public health and how must we join forces to implement tried and tested basic public health measures, including sanitation, clean water and nutritious food, and the provision of preventive and ameliorative medicines, including vaccines, essential to defeating this pandemic? “• What is the comparative efficacy of the various vaccines and other measures now deployed in different nations and regions in preventing serious illness and death? “• How do we provide adequate numbers of hospitals, health facilities and medical personnel in every nation, including the systematic recruitment of youth community health workers to assist now, as the pandemic is brought under control?…. “What the world now requires, to address the ensemble of diseases we could be facing, is the establishment of a modern healthcare system in every nation, including food, clean and safe water, electricity, decent housing, sanitation, roads and other infrastructure.” We can add here, that it is just as certain, that the sanctions which deprive Afghanistan of currency, remittances, electricity and functioning hospitals since August 15 guarantee the immiseration and death by starvation this winter, as well as another wave of desperate migration. Here also, the Schiller Institute’s alternative, having the United States and others release Afghanistan’s national reserves to its government, and integrating it into the Belt and Road Initiative for economic development, is clear and urgent.
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President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 58 years ago today. It is a national and human tragedy that since JFK was killed, the United States, in six decades, has not embarked on any scientific crash program to achieve any fundamentally new frontier of technology, beyond those already underway under his Presidency. Those were the human exploration of Earth-Moon space; the investigation of bio-medical properties of nuclear isotopes; the expansion of revolutionary TVA water control systems to new Western dams with the intention to build the North American Water and Power Alliance “great project.”The first of these three was allowed to atrophy; the last of the three was allowed to die with President Kennedy and its other movers, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and Sen. Frank Moss. As Lyndon LaRouche and his movement have never stopped explaining, the next frontiers for crash programs are dominated by fusion power, super-hot plasma technologies for industry, and nuclear propulsion for space travel. We will never go beyond the Earth-Moon system without it. And developing the Earth-Moon system and then going beyond it, with nuclear and fusion propulsion for really rapid space travel, will be the “driver” for the scientific and technological breakthroughs of this century. For years cynics have said, “Fusion power is always 30 years away.” No! Any fundamental technological breakthrough has always been 30 years away, because we have had “leaders” who’d rather fight small wars and sleep on any real technological progress. The laser-industrial revolution promised in the 1970s already? Didn’t happen. Our Strategic Defense Initiative? Never got funded. Magnetic levitation rail corridors? Not here. You’ll find them in China. Computer controlled five-axle machine tools? Fast cargo systems between ports and rail? Didn’t try for them. Hypersonic vehicles? We slept on it for a decade or so. And now small modular nuclear reactors are the latest technological breakthrough to stay always “10-20 years away.” On behalf of a great deal of mankind, American and European leaders have been snoring the loud sleep of technological inertia for decades. But it has been clear all along that the most important frontier for science, for higher education, for the capacities of the human species, is fusion energy. Now the U.S. Congress has been told, on Nov. 17, that in August, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—almost as a secondary by-product to their military program—approached achievement of a “burning” or self-sustaining fusion plasma, where the energy produced by the fusion process would exceed that required to ignite it. Joel Dejean, an engineer and a LaRouche Independent candidate for Congress in Houston, commented on the hearing: “What happened in August is that they achieved, with an input energy of 1.9 megajoules … the output energy from the fusion that occurred was 1.3 megajoules, or 70% of breakeven. And during the time when the tablet was contained by its inertia, and when the fusion was occurring between the deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of hydrogen, that experiment generated over 10 quadrillion watts of power, in that few hundredths of a nanosecond. Now, this is a significant breakthrough, and they’re proceeding with upgrades in the experiments, to actually get to breakeven, where you get more power out than you put into the experiment.” But as Dr. Tammy Ma, a plasma physicist at Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, made clear in her testimony before the House Energy Subcommittee hearing, its near-achievement of laser fusion breakeven came in the course of its ongoing scientific research into the performance of nuclear warheads. She explained that the Livermore National Lab has no development program for inertial confinement fusion energy, the technology where the breakthrough was seen! Other reports are that the scientific work itself might soon have been shut down, had it not made this surprising leap forward in fusion research—a wake-up call, an opportunity to be seized! In fact the entire nation has no fusion program with serious national funds, 41 years after Congress claimed it was going to fund such a breakthrough-oriented program in the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act of 1980. More young students are getting motivated to work on fusion energy. But they have to look to small private companies, with proprietary funding, whose work is so proprietary it’s almost classified, although there appear to be some breakthroughs being achieved there as well. This must be changed. Wake up! Fusion can be achieved! Our scientific understanding of the basic energetic process of the universe can be revolutionized through the combination of crash programs for fusion and NASA’s Moon-Mars mission. Lyndon LaRouche put down this urgent revolution as one of his “four economic laws to save the nation” in a June 8, 2014 policy paper. And that is what it must be.
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In the brilliant Sunday Nov. 14 morning panel—“There Are No Limits to Growth in the Universe”—of the Schiller Institute’s just-concluded conference, half a dozen leading physicists and climatologists defied the supposed “scientific consensus.” They demonstrated that changes in Earth’s climate result from solar and galactic cycle changes; that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide do not cause these changes; that warming is largely beneficial; and that mankind meets such changes by adaptation through new infrastructure such as sea gates and flood-control systems. These scientists courageously discredited, as completely unscientific, the Malthusian “global climate change summit” just concluded in Glasgow, and now aptly called “FLOP26.” How could anyone believe that the bankers, billionaires and royals at Glasgow cared anything about “global warming”? They repeated exactly what their Malthusian predecessors declared 50 years ago, who had never heard of “global warming” and had no idea the Earth’s temperature was headed in any direction! They demanded lower living standards, shorter lives, fewer human beings. At the Bucharest UN World Population Conference in 1974, the top Malthusians there—David Rockefeller, Club of Rome chief Aurelio Peccei, and UN official Lester Brown had never heard the golden voice of Al Gore on CO₂, or global warming. And yet, they made the same statements about reducing human living standards and human population—especially in underdeveloped nations—as the top Malthusians at Glasgow, Prince Charles, Klaus Schwab, Mark Carney, Sir Mike Bloomberg, et al. And Peccei’s Club of Rome had published, with vast funds, the book Limits to Growth in 1972, to claim that human population was overburdening the Earth’s resources and had to be reduced. Aurelio Peccei in Bucharest: “But the basic fact remains that this phenomenal multiplication of human beings is a runaway occurrence of such magnitude that incalculable strains and tensions will be injected into a system already dangerously prone to crises. Man will wipe out the wilderness…. The availability of cheap, plentiful energy—nuclear or otherwise—in the hands of an immature mass society is more likely to propel it toward disaster than any energy shortfall.” Klaus Schwab today: Infrastructure development to lengthen and improve life in developing countries “reveals the central conundrum of the combat against climate change. The same force that helps people escape from poverty and lead a decent life is the one that is destroying the livability of our planet for future generations. The emissions that lead to climate change are not just the result of a selfish generation of industrialists or Western baby boomers. They are the consequence of the desire to create a better future for oneself.” Aurelio Peccei in Limits to Growth and in Bucharest, without today’s buzzwords “climate” and “emissions,” yet “knew” that too many human beings, living too fully and well, used resources and interfered with the accumulation of great fortunes by banks and billionaires in the form of huge bubbles of debt. So he claimed these growing human populations would “ruin the planet.” That Rockefeller-funded colonialist spawn of Malthus, just like today’s billionaire-funded head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, sadly concluded that “Third World” people should not be born, or had to die earlier. Lyndon LaRouche, his future wife Helga Zepp, and his movement declared political war on Peccei et al. in 1972, for resurrecting “Hjalmar Schacht’s fascism”—Hitler’s central banker and economics minister—which would have worked and starved millions to death with or without cyanide gas. Today the British-led Malthusian geopoliticians of the City of London and Wall Street don’t even bother to cite the fraud of “anthropogenic climate change” when they decide that millions of Afghans must die this winter because the Taliban government cannot be allowed to use Afghanistan’s reserve funds; that millions of Haitians must die because no plan of economic and scientific development for Haiti is possible—when the Schiller Institute has already designed and won support for a very powerful one! Having held this extremely influential conference, with YouTube’s attempt to keep it off the Internet having been defeated, Helga Zepp-LaRouche declared that the Schiller Institute must now “go full speed ahead” with its initiatives to force release of the Afghan funds; to build Haiti up “from charcoal to fusion energy”; to get at least the United States, China and Russia collaborating and ensure a modern healthcare system capable of fighting pandemics in every country on Earth. Every life must be valued: “Mankind Must Be the Immortal Species.”
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Two paths are before the world, in particular the trans-Atlantic world of North America and Europe, which thought that it had conquered and “ended history” 30 years ago, and instead has become dominated now by London- and Wall Street-centered financial oligarchies, and fallen behind.When the Berlin Wall came down, Lyndon and Helga LaRouche set out a path of rapid Eurasian economic development by building new platforms of infrastructure, initiated by Lyndon LaRouche’s Poland agricultural development-for-peace proposal of 1988, delivered in a press conference in Berlin, later televised in his Presidential campaign. But since the bombing and fighting in the Balkans began, the British-directed path of the United States and Europe has been expanding NATO and fighting wars in less developed countries for three decades. This, while the path of development, economic and industrial, has been ignored and abandoned even in the “advanced” nations, denied to the rest. Withdrawing from those wars now, one by one, slowly, does not undo their devastation of the countries where they have been fought. Those devastating wars and neglect of economic progress have set, now, nearly 300 million migrants wandering the world in a deadly global pandemic, large numbers of them living in poverty in camps and moving tent cities; and a tiny fraction of them, at the Polish border in Belarus, have become the focus of European sanctions and actions against Belarus and Russia which are threatening war again. The same migrants, arriving at Italy’s coast, are taken in every day at European Union orders! That is geopolitical madness, born of economic stagnation outside of military industries, born of technological stagnation and anti-scientific ideology, born of no new human productivity for many decades. Over these two days, Nov. 13 and 14, the Schiller Institute’s international conference is presenting the path of development and potential, resulting peace: the economic reconstruction of the destroyed nations Afghanistan and Haiti by cooperation of the great powers America, Russia, and China; the building of modern health systems in every nation to fight pandemics; the rebuilding of our physical economic powers informed by Lyndon LaRouche’s principles; the development of individual human creativity. The conference is titled, “All Moral Resources of Humanity Have To Be Called Up: Mankind Must Be the Immortal Species!” This conference’s two days of full discussion of this work agenda, by officials, scientists, other leading experts from all over Eurasia, North America, and the developing nations, is being conducted and broadcast on the Internet for the benefit of national leaderships and to move them to cooperative development for peace. Listen to Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s concept on what is possible in Afghanistan in her conference invitation. Let’s set the right stage for the Monday videoconference of Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, so that it can be something other than a tense standoff. We need to hear the end of the shameful claims blasted out of the Glasgow climate summit for the last two weeks, that mankind is pollution upon the Earth. Those hypocritical royals, billionaires and bankers led by Prince Charles will sacrifice much of the human population to the lifestyles of a feudal oligarchy if we don’t stop them. Glasgow stank with the pessimism about humanity, bred of 50 years’ constant deindustrialization and sidelining of scientific and technological advance. Let’s clear the atmosphere of it. Join and spread the Schiller Institute conference!
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It is clear from the remarks of Prince Charles’s central banker Mark Carney, Sir Michael Bloomberg, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the Glasgow “Suicide Summit” called COP26, that they have a) great financial momentum in organizing the worldwide 1% to cut off new fossil fuel investment, and b) a great problem—the “green finance” investments are failures.New, greenfield investment in fossil fuel energy for power and heat has essentially stopped worldwide, outside of two great Asian national powers. A horrifying 90% of all new electric power capacity additions in the world in 2020-21 were wind and solar power installations, according to the heavily biased International Energy Agency. But this worldwide anti-productivity energy transition, together with its inseparable companion, trillions in money-printing by major central banks, has unleashed disastrous power failures from Texas to Northern Europe to the Indian Subcontinent and even to China, and triggered waves of hyperinflation. Faced with this failure, the biggest honchos of the global Green New Deal promised a “war-like” mobilization, in Prince Charles’s words. This mobilization, he and Mark Carney made clear, is of the 1%—what they are pleased to call “the private sector” but is really the trans-Atlantic world’s biggest banks, money-managers, and billionaires—to cut off fossil fuel heat and power, nitrogen fertilizer, carbonized steel, cement and construction materials, and industrialization from the billions of the 99%, and greatly reduce their numbers. The director of the British government’s Green Finance Institute, Rhian-Mari Thomas, informed Bloomberg News Green, “This is the finance COP”; and the political leaders there are all imploring the “private sector”—i.e., London and Wall Street—to take over. Carney, in his presentation Nov. 3, said that $130 trillion in investment capital has been promised, under certain rules to ensure cut-off of new fossil fuel investments, including by 35 of the 50 biggest banks in the world. Carney signed the banks up to his and Sir Michael’s Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). All the big City of London, Wall Street, and Frankfurt banks have joined GFANZ. Results? Sure. About 90% of all electric power additions in the world in 2020-21 have been wind parks and solar farms. Disasters, not profits, have followed. The Prince of Wales’s one-percenters have two problems. The first is that those 35 megabanks in GFANZ do not include any Asian giants, from China, Japan, India, or South Korea; nor, of course, any Russian financial institutions. Like their governments, these banks refuse to commit to Carney. China, in an extraordinary blast in the Global Times CCP paper today, accused Indian leader Narendra Modi of betraying the poor of India by making any kind of zero-carbon pledges at Glasgow. That made it crystal clear where China stands: Economic development and fighting poverty, not “climate,” come first. And secondly, the new “green finance” investments look good only on glossy paper. Already on Nov. 2 at Glasgow, Fink said that “deploying that capital is going to be far harder than securing the commitments. On Nov. 3, Carney acknowledged it:”There needs to be some—only some, limited—financing for a transition," Carney said—meaning a transition by energy companies from fossil fuels to so-called renewable power sources, battery storage schemes, green farming schemes, etc. “And there have been problems with the transition.” And again today, when Carney claimed in his speech that the pot behind him had $130 trillion in it: “The money is here—but that money needs net zero-aligned projects.” Carney told Bloomberg News in a Nov. 1 interview that the banks in GFANZ want “a wholesale rewiring of the global financial system so that every financial decision takes climate into account.” Dreams of Schachtian control as in the Nazi economy of the 1930s. That takes the power of central bankers. And Carney has that, in the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System. What he doesn’t have, is new technologies for “green finance” that are productive, energy-dense, reliable, and which alert populations will tolerate. And he doesn’t have real banks! Instead he has immense “zombie banks” which are loaded by their central banks with trillions in deposits, speculate with half of them, and don’t lend the other half. The best way to make the wheels fall entirely off Prince Charles’s and Mark Carney’s $130 trillion green finance mobilization to try to hurry us to our deaths, is to break up those banks with Glass-Steagall Acts in every major nation.
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Despite the constant media hype and pressure to conform, the world will little note the arguments among all the power brokers and “influencers” at the ongoing G20 and climate summits, about whether they’re succeeding or failing in their evil and incomprehensible objective of sacrificing the human species to “the planet.”We will rather be stirred by the real and urgent need to save human lives, and to better lives, in the crises those summiteers create, but refuse to discuss! The city in Romania, Timosoara, which has had all electric power cut off because it could not pay carbon taxes to the EU, must get it back. Most people facing this Winter amid a hyperinflation of costs of energy and shelter will not be moved by what the global temperature will be in 80 years, but by whether we can save and improve the lives of the least of us, now. The G20 summit, fixated on “climate change” and lacking the critical input of the Chinese and Russian presidents, undertook no action to change the desperately urgent situation of the people of Afghanistan—punished because the war there did not end satisfactorily to NATO. The huge but failing two-week Glasgow Climate Summit will not even discuss Afghanistan, or Haiti, though their collapses are dangers to the world as well as threatening the loss of human lives in the millions. What will move people most are powerful ideas about what can be done to redeem our immortal species, what forceful and creative actions can be taken “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Such is Schiller Institute president Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Operation Ibn Sina,” to catalyze the action to rebuild Afghanistan, by identifying it with its native son who was the world’s leading medical authority for centuries—when today, nearly all its hospitals have closed in destitution. Such is the Schiller Institute design for economic development of Haiti, at last, after two centuries of neglect and worse. And such is the New Bretton Woods plan inherited from Lyndon LaRouche, for the United States, Russia, China and India to end this hyperinflationary breakdown by launching a new international credit system based on FDR’s design. It can begin by setting long-term, nation-to-nation agreements on trade in the key energy commodities, bypassing the criminal speculation on “spot markets.” These ideas are as beautiful as space travel, as a breakthrough to fusion energy for the world. Those who grasp them have to organize all-out for them now, as a general inflationary breakdown is threatening and millions of people are perishing from famines and pandemics. The center of the mobilization for them now is the Schiller Institute’s international conference Nov. 13-14, “All Moral Resources of Humanity Have To Be Called Up: Mankind Must Become the Immortal Species.” Registration here.
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In the late 1990s Lyndon LaRouche drew a picture of the coming death of the American and European productive economies in the crash he saw coming. LaRouche called his instructive graphic “The Triple Curve—a typical collapse function.”The Triple Curve shows the case in which productive economic activity—industry, infrastructure building, agriculture, mining, construction—is declining at a worsening pace; the total volume of debt burdening the economy is growing at an increasing pace; and the money supply is also growing at an increasing pace to keep the debt liquid. That nation or region will go into physical-economic collapse unless financial reorganization policies are forcefully introduced and quickly backed by credit for economic development. And when the money supply is artificially increased more rapidly even than the debt itself—at that “crossover point” a financial crash is looming. In mid-2007 LaRouche publicly announced that that crash was unstoppable except by a complete reversal of financial and economic policy, and it came in late 2008. Observe the path of inflation in commodities since then. Take a representative sample of 20 major international commodities: oil, coal, natural gas in Europe, natural gas in the United States; soft red wheat, hard red wheat, rice, beef, chicken, shrimp; lumber, rock phosphate, rubber, aluminum, tin, lead, nickel, copper, zinc, iron ore. During the five-year period from July 2000 to July 2005, almost all these commodities rose in price by between 50% and 100% on the way into the 2007-08 crash. The crash itself deflated the great majority of them, along with the prices of financial assets (stocks, bonds, other securities, derivatives), which collapsed. For a decade, the major central banks intervened on a scale never seen before that time, with tens of trillions of dollars to “support” financial assets, vowing that by doing this, they would also restore inflation and economic growth. The value of financial assets of all kinds grew steadily, during some of that time explosively, and global billionaires sprouted like mushrooms after a storm. But from July 2010 to July 2019, the prices of all of the commodities above (with the sole exception of beef) declined, by anywhere from a few percent to 70%. But at the August 2019 central bankers conference in Wyoming, Mark Carney and a gang of central bankers and executives at BlackRock, Inc. determined to push “regime change” and take central bank control over government spending and private sector investment flows in order to launch a dramatic shift into “green finance,” sometimes called the Great Reset. QE5 started on Oct. 4, 2019. The COVID pandemic then cut off production across the world. The Federal Reserve and ECB in March 2020 launched a completely unprecedented pace of QE of more than $250 billion/month between them. The so-called “Green New Deal” was driven forward, which—it is now very clear—reduced productivity, cut production of all fossil fuels, and spread energy chaos. In a “Fed-Treasury partnership” brokered by BlackRock, Inc. the U.S. Treasury borrowed $5 trillion in “COVID relief” funds in a year through the CARES Act and the American Rescue Act, to drive private sector spending. “Trillions were shifted” toward the new green finance bubble. The worldwide collapse of production and productivity, since very early in 2020, continues: Look at the American productive economy: Since 2019 it has shrunk by 500,000 productive jobs, 5.5 million overall jobs, and lost 3% of industrial production. The American workforce itself has shrunk by 5 million since 2019. With that going on, the $14 trillion Fed-plus-Treasury-plus-European Central Bank money-printing policy meant that the Triple Curve collapse function would now end in a combination of an economic breakdown and an explosion of inflation. And in fact, in just the two years between July 2019 and July 2021, all 20 of the above commodities’ prices rapidly inflated: the agricultural commodities by 20-25%; the rest by far more, up to 250% in two years. Most of these inflated in the range of 20-50% in those two years. In the energy commodities, the inflation has accelerated further from July until this present end of October. This is the hyperinflationary process described by LaRouche’s ’Triple Curve" collapse function. During that earlier period LaRouche also named the actions which must be taken to stop such a spiral and start recovery. Long-term, state-to-state contracts for energy commodities, freezing out speculators in “paper gas,” “paper oil,” etc. What LaRouche insisted on in 2001, when oil first rose above $100/barrel, Russian President Putin demands now for natural gas supplies. Glass-Steagall reorganization of banking, breaking up megabanks speculating with deposits. “Hamiltonian” national banks in every nation, to participate in the credit for projects of new infrastructure, as pioneered anew by China with the Belt and Road Initiative. Funding of development with the most advanced energy-dense technologies, and of crash programs in fusion energy development and space exploration. Rapid increase of food production, to double it worldwide, and building of new health systems—obviously, the focus immediately falls on Afghanistan, Haiti, and other nations where economic life has collapsed. This outlook is the subject of the Schiller Institute’s Nov. 13-14 international conference, “Mankind Must Be the Immortal Species,” for which registration is here.
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The chances for Joe Biden’s administration to legislate a Green New Deal and take it to the Hallowe’en Summit of COP26 are now essentially zero, as even the Democrats’ in Congress have resisted—or generated resistance by their climate extremism, as the case may be. So Biden has turned, again, to executive orders and regulations, this time to try to show them off in Glasgow. This is because the Clean Energy Performance Program, core of Biden’s Green New Deal, appears to be firmly opposed by at least Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). That would have required all utilities generating/selling electricity, to increase their share of “renewable,” or interruptible power by at least 4% every year. It would make adding any more reliable form of baseline power a very difficult proposition for almost any utility.Following the Oct. 15 all-of-government executive order in the form of a “Fact Sheet” from the White House, on Oct. 21 the Financial Services Oversight Council issued a report to its member regulators telling them to crack down on bank investments and security issuances connected to fossil fuel exploration and power generation. The FSOC report/directive was issued on the same day that the mighty climate warrior of the banking world, Mark Carney, attempted, in an interview with CNBC, to definitively declare trillions of dollars of oil, coal and gas assets “stranded”—barred from exploitation—around the world. Said Carney: "We have … too many hydrocarbons, enormous stranded assets, whether it’s in coal, three-quarters of coal, half of gas, roughly the same of oil, we have too many fossil fuels. [emphasis added] The FSOC is not an advisory body. Chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, it is the council created by the Dodd-Frank Act of the 15 major U.S. financial, securities, and insurance regulators—the Treasury, the Office of Controller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, CFTC, SEC, etc. Its “report,” and this is its first report in 12 years’ existence, is actually a directive by the Treasury to the regulators, which will lead to regulations being issued to banks and other financial firms. MarketWatch quoted one enthusiastic financial Greenie: “To unlock that Dodd-Frank power, we need to establish climate as a systemic risk. On this the FSOC was unequivocal — it is a threat to the financial system and all agencies in the FSOC, including the Fed, agreed. That unlocks regulatory power. That’s a big deal.” And MarketWatch itself overstated Biden’s case: “At minimum, a closer alliance presented in the report for diagnosing and reporting climate-change risk for financial markets may help President Biden’s standing at the pivotal UN climate-change talks (COP26) that kick off in Glasgow in a little more than a week.” But tremendous damage could be done. Consider: The first regulation expected, imminently, is an SEC rule requiring that companies included their “climate risk exposure” in their earnings reports. These reports, usually issued quarterly, have become crucial to companies, and if they have to tell investors that their quarterly results are achieved by taking on media-hated “environmental risk,” they believe their stocks and bonds will be shellacked—it’s already happened to the major oil companies. This is only one indication of the gouging of carbon-related investment these 15 regulators can do under Treasury orders.
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