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In her Dec. weekly webcast today, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for the U.S., NATO, and the nations of Europe to immediately sign the two strategic treaties presented by the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, as an urgent first step to get the world off its current trajectory towards nuclear war.“I think it is an absolute, urgent necessity for NATO and the United States and European countries to agree to sign such a legally-binding agreement with Russia,” Zepp-LaRouche stated. “What Russia is now demanding in written legal terms is nothing more than what was promised to them in 1990 by the U.S. and NATO,” promises which were never kept. Instead, NATO kept expanding eastward up to Russia’s very borders; and defensive and offensive weapons systems, along with troops, have accompanied that expansion. “The situation is extremely worrisome,” she stated, “because there are people committed to this brinksmanship, hoping that Russia and China will back down. But I don’t think that that’s in the cards. The policy of encirclement of Russia and China is continuing, even though Russia has said that their red line has been reached… There must be a recognition that we are on a terribly dangerous road, and people must voice their opposition to this policy, loud and clear, before it is too late.” Zepp-LaRouche urged her listeners to use this Christmas period to help organize others to speak out against this looming disaster and related crises—such as the danger of starvation of tens of millions in Afghanistan as a result of British, American and NATO financial warfare—and to mobilize in favor of the policy alternatives long championed by Lyndon LaRouche.

In the course of his 50-minute press briefing yesterday on the draft strategic treaties which Russia presented to the United States and NATO this week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at least three times that Russia is ready to open negotiations now, “immediately,” “tomorrow,” in some third country on those treaties, if the U.S. accepts. Members of the Russian team which will participate in the negotiations have already been selected, he reported.From the outset, he cautioned that the two drafts “are not a menu from which one can pick and choose this or that. They are complementary and must be considered as a whole,” in full knowledge that the drafts contain articles excluding NATO expansion to the east and deployment of threatening weapons in the proximity of Russia, which Western capitals, thus far, reject. But discussions are required, when peace between nuclear powers is at stake, he reminded. “We urge the American side to regard the Russian proposals with the utmost seriousness…. The global situation remains rather tense, and it is in our best interests to find ways to resolve this [problem].” Russia and the U.S. are “great nuclear powers,” and therefore have “a special responsibility for security in Europe.” What responses has Russia gotten? We haven’t heard a yes, but we haven’t heard a no, he answered at one point. At another, “for the moment we are ready to give them time.” Asked what the Americans may request in turn, he replied, “I have no such information. We have to wait; it is a work in progress.” He refused to entertain any “scenarios” of what could happen should Russia’s request be ignored. “I do not want to fuel tensions; I want to take a fire extinguisher in the form of those two draft texts, and using this fire extinguisher, I would like to douse certain embers.” But, he also made clear there are limits. NATO’s flagrant refusal to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate concerns can only lead to further dangerous escalation, and “we cannot tolerate this anymore…. Washington and NATO allies should stop hostile activities directed against our nation, including unannounced military exercises, dangerous approaches and maneuvers of warships and warplanes, and stop the military development of Ukrainian territory.” Asked how Russia could stop the U.S. from dragging out the negotiations, Ryabkov emphasized reality; the current opposing security interests between the U.S, NATO and Russia require negotiations and “a creative approach and responsible policies.” If the negotiations start, we will take stock of the progress as the negotiations proceed. He noted wryly, we have done part of the job for our American colleagues. We have stipulated everything with contractual language cross-references. There is even a translation, and the translation has been improved with the sources, so everything has been given. They have only to sign the document. It can be done, he said. “I would propose they take our proposals seriously, and use them as the basis on which to begin negotiations.”

By Helga Zepp-LaRouche Dec 11—In view of the political orientation of the new government in Berlin, it seems almost hopeless to demand Germany’s immediate exit from NATO. But if Olaf Scholz is serious about the oath of office he took two days ago when he took office as Federal Chancellor, namely that he “wants to dedicate his energies to the well-being of the German people, increase their benefits and protect them from harm,” then he has to set this exit in motion immediately. Because in NATO, and especially in the U.S.A. and Great Britain, there are influential forces who, for geopolitical reasons, toy with the existence of Germany and beyond that, of all of humanity. The real reason for the global military muscle play on multiple fronts is the systemic collapse of the neoliberal system, which they are trying to cover up with a complex confetti shower of anti-Russian and anti-Chinese narratives. Some weeks ago, a media scenario was set up about the alleged preparation for a Russian military invasion in Ukraine, of the existence of which the U.S. National Intelligence Director, Avril Haines, tried to convince the NATO ambassador in Brussels, but Russia emphatically denied it. For weeks there were simultaneously a series of provocations— such as a NATO maneuver in which a nuclear attack on Russia was rehearsed and U.S. planes flew within 20 kilometers of the Russian border—as well as drone attacks in eastern Ukraine and daring “reconnaissance flights” in the Black Sea. Russia accused NATO of crossing several “red lines” in Ukraine and of failing to respond to protests about it. In the run-up to the virtual summit proposed by President Biden at the height of the tension between Biden and President Putin, Putin demanded legally binding agreements that NATO would not expand further east to the Russian border, which Biden initially rejected with the argument that one does not accept Russia’s “red lines”; while NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg emphasized that Russia has no right to develop “spheres of influence.” Amid the escalation of tensions, the second-highest ranking Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, threatened a first strike with nuclear weapons: “Military action could mean that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea and we rain destruction on Russian military capability.... We don’t rule out first use nuclear action.” Tulsi Gabbard, former Congresswoman from Hawaii and a lieutenant colonel in the Hawaii Army National Guard, commented on Wicker’s tirade: “Anyone who would propose or even consider what he is saying as an option, must be insane, a sociopath or a sadist.” Wicker is no exception with his proposals, which would destroy not only the American people and the whole world, but also the Ukrainians, whose democracy is supposedly being protected. The same rhetoric comes from the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the administration and the media, the same neoconservatives and neoliberals who dragged the country into the regime change wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. One can only agree with Tulsi Gabbard. Anyone who has followed the escalating propaganda against Russia and China, which has come from practically the entire political spectrum in the United States in recent years, will be reminded of the saying, that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. The Reality of Ukraine and Iran The content of the two-hour conversation between Biden and Putin is not yet public. In any case, Biden contacted four NATO partners regarding the legally binding assurance of a limitation on NATO, and announced further consultation with all NATO partners. And of course, all European governments know the true story of the Victoria Nuland-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014, the active role of neo-Nazis from the tradition of Stepan Bandera in this coup, and the lie about the alleged annexation of Crimea by Putin, which was in reality the sovereign choice (by voting) of the people in Crimea that, in view of the neo-Nazi terror in Kiev, they would rather belong to Russia. Perhaps it is time for the European governments to admit the truth about the events in Ukraine, in which they were naturally involved with their charitable foundations, before World War III breaks out on a fake narrative of Putin’s alleged aggression. But even if the acute Ukraine crisis can be temporarily defused—Biden speaks of postponing Ukraine’s NATO membership for ten years—the acute danger of a world war remains. The second source of danger from which a war could spark and spread is the situation surrounding the nuclear program in Iran and the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action —ed.] treaty, which the Trump Administration had terminated. Although CIA Director William Burns has just confirmed that the secret service is not aware of any indications that Iran is working on a nuclear weapons program, Israel also sees the civilian nuclear program—to which Iran is entitled under international law—as a threat to its lifestyle, as Israel’s Defense Secretary Benny Gantz pointed out during his visit to the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Austin affirmed that the United States was determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But the most dangerous situation is undoubtedly the US-China conflict over Taiwan. After the world got dangerously close to World War III as the situation in Ukraine worsened, a number of American political experts spoke out—and this is new—about the American habit of staging pretexts for the initiation of military operations. The retired diplomat Peter Van Buren referred to the explosion of the battleship USS Maine in the port of Havana in 1898 (the cause of the Spanish-American War [was] not a Spanish terrorist attack, but a boiler explosion); the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, with which the United States entered the long-planned Vietnam War; and of course the 2003 Iraq War, in which everyone involved knew beforehand that the WMD story was a lie, as Nancy Pelosi has publicly admitted. Endless Wars Do Not Protect Human Rights With regard to China, Van Buren wrote, it “appears to be the next war now searching for a reason.” Since China refuses to invade Taiwan and thus provide a pretext for war fever in the United States, he wrote that there could be a less problematic outcome, an arms race for hypersonic weapons. “But what if the U.S. has its mind set on a real war, as in Vietnam and after 9/11, and needs a palatable reason to be found?” asks van Buren, only expressing what has long since become obvious. Can it be assumed that these and many other “false flag” incidents are known to western governments and parties? Apart from maybe a few inexperienced backbenchers — absolutely! That is why the participants who took part in President Biden’s “democracy summit,” which should more likely be called a hypocrisy summit, are about as trustworthy as the organizers of the notorious “carpet bus rides,” where plush carpets are foisted upon unsuspecting pensioners as “real Persians.” The idea that this is an alliance of the “good guys,” a community of values that campaigns for democracy, human rights and freedom, against the “bad guys,” the autocratic regimes that oppress their populations, is an advertising story with which a spoiled product is intended to be disguised with cosmetic plasters and sold. At least since the U.S. administration and its “allies” left Afghanistan in an absolutely catastrophic state after 20 years of war (withholding money that belongs to the Afghans and thus exacerbating the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet, where 24 million people are threatened with cold death from starvation), none of these flawless democrats should use the words “human rights” any more. We should speak of the millions of dead, injured, and refugees as a result of the endless wars built on lies. And what about Julian Assange, whose only crime was exposing war crimes? He is being murdered by legal means before the eyes of the world. The list could be much extended: The martial “pushback” policy of the EU using Frontex against refugees who are only refugees because they are the victims of the “endless wars”; the refugee camps, which Pope Francis compared to concentration camps; the consequences of the Malthusian policy of the Klaus Schwabs of this world, which sees the attempt to overcome poverty as the greatest threat to the “climate” and thus says any development must be stalled for decades through “conditionalities.” On the other hand, the success story of the “autocratic” governments does not look so bad: China has not only lifted 850 million people of its own population out of extreme poverty, but given developing countries the chance to overcome poverty and underdevelopment for the first time. The United States has almost 800,000 coronavirus deaths with a population of 330 million people, while China has fewer than 5,000 deaths with 1.4 billion people. Perhaps—the Eurocentric carpet sellers might want to think about this—human life is worth more to the “autocratic” regimes? Germans should really urgently draw the conclusion that remaining in a military alliance which, in the event of a crisis will result in their annihilation, may not be such a good idea. There is, indeed, an alternative to NATO’s policy of confrontation which has been obsolete since 1991. There is an urgent need to establish an international security architecture that takes into account the security interests of all nations.

Wednesday December 8th, from our special correspondent: Guess what? There's going to be another summit! Aren't you so excited? Joe Biden and Boris Johnson are getting their tuxedos pressed at this moment. This one is about DEMOCRACY--by which they naturally mean slavery. To be classified as a democracy, you must meet at least 4 of the 5 following criteria:1) You must have an absolute monarch as your head of state, as in the UK, where this monarch has the authority to abolish the elected parliaments of the UK, Canada or Australia at will, the right to arrest and jail anyone without trial or cause, or the right to abrogate the wealth of the subject population, through bail-out, bail-in, or any other means the Great Reset deems necessary. 2) You must be a nation where nobody will ever know the actual victor of key elections, such as the USA's 2000 Gore vs Bush election, 2004 Bush vs Kerry election, and 2020 Trump vs Biden election. Who actually won any of those elections? Who cares, what the heck. 3) You must have absolute dictatorial control over all print and electronic media. Any dissenting voices must be either totally blacked out or crushed by jailing or assassinating of dissenting voices. 4) While promoting extreme violence and murder in television and movie entertainment, you must act outraged when such violence actually occurs in the real world, as with mass shootings and other such events. "How could anyone have ever thought such a thing could happen when they see it every day on TV and at the movies?" 5) Your citizens must have the right to have fierce debates between liberals and conservatives on whether to eat dog poop or cat poop for dinner. This fiery debate must also descend down to the level of college campuses, talk shows, local gambling houses, whore houses and bars. Everyone gets to have an opinion as long as it is stupid. Apparently Russia and China are NOT invited. They didn't make the cut.

Nursing unions from 28 countries have called on the United Nations to support a temporary waiver on patents for COVID-19 vaccines, and warned of a “crisis of global vaccine apartheid” that could lead to more new variants like Omicron and Delta spreading around the world. In a letter sent on Monday, the unions accused the European Union, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway and Singapore of “protecting the profits of big pharmaceutical companies at the expense of public health,” by opposing the so-called TRIPS waiver backed by around 100 nations.As of late September this year, 73% of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines had been given in just ten countries, the letter said, adding that rich countries had obtained 7 billion doses of the vaccines. That compares to just 300 million doses available to people in low-income nations. The unions, which represent around 2.5 million healthcare workers worldwide, urged the UN’s special rapporteur on physical and mental health, South African doctor Tlaleng Mokofeng, to take action on what it called “the crimes of the governments of some of the world’s richest countries.” In October 2020, South Africa and India began to press the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to approve a waiver of parts of the multinational Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, in order to improve access to vaccines in poorer countries. Supporters of the proposal at the WTO argue that a waiver would temporarily lift the patents on the world’s COVID-19 vaccines, making them easier and cheaper to produce. A WTO conference due to discuss the TRIPS waiver was postponed on Friday due to the Omicron outbreak. Failure to back the measure would mean “the violation of the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health,” the letter coordinated by organisations Global Nurses United and Progressive International alleged. On average, only two fifths of health and care workers worldwide are fully vaccinated against the virus, the letter said. In Africa and the Western Pacific, that rate falls to fewer than one in 10. The WHO estimates that between 80,000 and 180,000 healthcare workers may have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began. In recent days, the spread of the Omicron variant—first detected in South Africa—has prompted some world leaders to express support for the proposal. On Friday, U.S. president Joe Biden said the variant showed why it was important to secure the waiver quickly. “The news about this new variant should make clearer than ever why this pandemic will not end until we have global vaccinations,” Biden said in a statement. On Saturday, Norway’s foreign minister, Anniken Huitfeldt, suggested that the country’s new government would break with the previous administration’s opposition to opening up vaccine patents. “No one is safe until everyone is safe. Six percent of the population in African countries is vaccinated. The proportion of vaccinated must go up for everyone’s sake. For their sake, but also for ours,” she told Norway’s Verdens Gang newspaper. Signers of the petition include leading nurse/health care unions from Australia (Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation), Brazil (Federação Nacional dos Enfermeiros), Canada (Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions and Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec), Costa Rica (Asociación Nacional de Profesionales en Enfermería [A.N.P.E.]), Curacao (Curaçaose Bond Van Werknemers in Verplegende en Verzorgende Instgellingen), Dominican Republic (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Enfermería), Greece (Pan-Hellenic Federation of Nursing Staff (PASONOP), Guatemala (Sindicato Nacional de los Trabajadores de Salud de Guatemala), Honduras (Asociación Nacional de Enfermeras/os Auxiliares de Honduras), India (United Nurses Association), Ireland (Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation), Israel (Israeli Nurses Association), Italy (Nursind), Kenya (Kenya National Union of Nurses), Malawi (National Organisation of Nurses and Midwives of Malawi), New Zealand (New Zealand Nurses Organisation), Paraguay (Asociación Paraguaya de Enfermería), Philippines (Filipino Nurses United), Portugal (Sindicato dos Enfermeiros Portugueses), Rwanda (Rwanda Nurses and Midwives Union), South Africa (The Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa [DENOSA]), South Korea (Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union), Spain (Sindicato de Enfermería [SATSE]), Sri Lanka (Government Nursing Officers’ Association), Taiwan (Taiwan Nurses Union), Uganda (Uganda Nurses and Midwives Union), the United States (National Nurses United), and Uruguay (Sindicato Unico de Enfermería del Uruguay [SUEU]).

The contrast between the flop of the Malthusians with the failure of their "climate summit", and the successful deliberation at the 2-day Schiller Institute conference demonstrates that there is an urgency in breaking with the present paradigm, and achieving cooperation among all leading nations. The dividing line is between Trans-Atlantic nations sticking with neoliberal, colonial policies, and geopolitical provocations, and those nations committed to cooperation for economic development. Helga developed this contrast, as it exists regarding all major crises, from addressing the humanitarian disaster facing Afghanistan; the crisis at the Poland-Belarus border; the COVID pandemic, which is surging through Europe; and dealing with hyperinflation, caused by the decision to bailout bankrupt corporations, rather than invest in developing new manufacturing centers at the frontiers of science. She called on viewers to join the Schiller Institute, at a moment when historical decisions are being made. The changes we have proposed will work; but, if these changes do not take place, the West will collapse, due to moral bankruptcy.

The only possible outcome of the October 31-Nov 12 Glasgow 26 “Halloween” Climate Summit, will be the mutually- assured self-destruction of the nations of the transatlantic world, as well as others intimidated enough to be compliant with the Conference’s unattainable goals. Russia, China, India, and several other nations have already made known their intent to ignore many of the daft draft proposals. The antidote to this ghoulish outlook is contained in the book {There Are No Limits to Growth} written by Schiller Institute co-founder Lyndon LaRouche and published by the Club of Life. A panel will engages in a symposium-style discussion. Speakers include scientists and academicians Dr. Kelvin Kemm, Dr. Maria Assunção Arraújo, Prof. Jacob Goldsmith, as well as organizers Anastasia Battle, Kynan Thistlethwaite and others

“All Moral Resources of Humanity Have To Be Called Up: Mankind Must Be the Immortal Species!” Following the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system by President Richard Nixon on August 15, 1971, Lyndon LaRouche, the late statesman and economist, warned that continuing on the path of the same such monetarist policies would inevitably lead to the danger of a new depression, new fascism, and a new world war—which this time would be thermonuclear—unless a just new world economic order was constituted.Now, fifty years later, we are exactly at the point that LaRouche’s prescient forecast had warned against. The signs of the hyperinflationary blowout of the financial system are evident in the explosion of energy and food prices, and even leading officials, such as Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, have stated, as recently as October 12, that the inflation is not “temporary,” as they had once claimed. The financial oligarchy, being aware that their speculative system is finished, is trying, with one last gigantic effort, to prolong the mad casino game for yet another round, under the ruse of the “Great Reset.” The oligarchy hopes to create another last bubble by “Shifting the Trillions” into green technologies, which means turning the clock back to the development level that existed before the industrial revolution. With the level of energy flux densities mandated for a decarbonized economy, the population density would also drop precipitously to those pre-industrial levels—which is what they in fact desire. The form is different; the content is the same: It is the fascist policy of Hjalmar Schacht. It is from that deranged point of view that those (primarily Asian) countries which are rising are dubbed “rivals,” “adversaries,” and “enemies.” And that is where the danger of a new world war arises. Fortunately, the alternative of a just new world economic order is already developing. China’s BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) has become the rallying point for some 150 nations, all determined to follow the Chinese model of overcoming poverty and underdevelopment with the help of scientific and technological progress. This policy is very much in cohesion with the vision of Lyndon LaRouche and his movement, which he initiated in the 1970s, working out concrete development plans for Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States. These development plans have been put forward and published by the Schiller Institute beginning in 1991, first in the form of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, and then in 2014 with the report of “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-bridge.” It is more urgent than ever to put politics back on the basis of natural science and classical culture. The basis for a new paradigm in international relations will be created, if it is based on a dialogue of the best cultural traditions of mankind. These subjects will be discussed in four panels. Panel One: Saturday, November 13, 10 a.m. EST “Can a Strategic Crisis Between the Major Powers Be Avoided?” This panel will address: • The U.S.-China conflict, AUKUS, Taiwan; • U.S.-Russia relations; • LaRouche’s “Four Powers” conception (U.S.-China-Russia-India); and • A new paradigm in international relations. Panel Two: Saturday, November 13, 2 p.m. EST “The Science of Physical Economy” This panel will address: • The motives behind the Great Reset; • Hjalmar Schacht today; • Afghanistan and Haiti as game-changers; • The global role of London’s “Dope, Inc.;” and • The need for a World Health System. Panel Three: Sunday, November 14, 10 a.m. EST “There Are No Limits to Growth in the Universe” This panel will address: • The science involved in climate change; • The revolution unleashed with a fusion based economy; and • Mankind is becoming adult: In space! Panel Four: Sunday, November 14, 2 pm EST “The Beauty of True Human Culture” This panel will address: • What is more destructive? The squid game or drugs? • Drug legalization and the New Opium War; • Why China is winning the “system competition” with the “West;” • Aesthetic education; and • Dialogue of classical cultures.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced today that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not be traveling to Glasgow to participate in the COP26 international climate change conference. Peskov would not even confirm that Putin would speak remotely, by videoconference connection, when asked by the press. He only offered: “The Russian side will be [represented at the conference], of course, we are in contact with the organizers, which is why we will tell how it will be [organized] later…. We should understand the format, in which it will be possible to speak at the videoconference, at which moment and so on. There are many factors here that we have to discuss with the organizers.”Reuters headlined its account: “Russia Says Putin Won’t Fly to Glasgow, in Blow for Climate Talks,” and commented ruefully: “The no-show by the leader of the world’s fourth-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases is the latest setback, with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also uncertain to attend.” But it gets worse for the Green New Deal Malthusian gang. NPR reported (to their chagrin) that the same governments that have made “lofty commitments” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, “are still planning to extract huge amounts of energy from fossil fuels,” according to a new report from the United Nations. The report published Oct. 20 details how the largest fossil fuel producers plan to carry on using coal, gas, and oil. According to this report, it will more than double the amount of fuels in 2030. Nor do they have the U.S. in their pocket. Although President Biden is bending over backwards to “show the flag” as an “environmental warrior” at Glasgow, he is being stymied by the steadfast resistance to his attempt to abandon coal by two Democratic senators, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and now Montana’s Jon Tester, both of whom are opposing Biden’s tax on carbon dioxide and methane emissions. “I’m not a big fan of the carbon tax. I just don’t think it works the way it was explained to me,” Tester said.

Fireside Chat with Dennis Small and Dennis Speed, host Thursday, October 14, 2021 DENNIS SPEED: Welcome to tonight’s Fireside Chat with Lyndon LaRouche, of The LaRouche Organization. We are involved, as I think people know, in a day of action today; this is worldwide. Our focus was specifically around Afghanistan and the releasing of the funds of the approximately $8-9 billion being withheld from the government of Afghanistan by primarily the Treasury Department of the United States, as well as the IMF and World Bank, and other related institutions in Europe. We have reason to believe that the State Department today has reiterated its policy to not release those funds. But we’ll hear more about that and other such matters when we get into our briefing. I’ll also just indicate that for those of you who might have been involved in that day of action today, I would ask you to get in the queue when we get to that part of the presentation to give us whatever report or reflections you have on what happened today.What we are going to do is go right to Dennis Small with a little preface from me. What’s been happening for the past week is that there’s a kind of comeuppance that reality is becoming to bonk the trans-Atlantic world with. It’s come out in various forms, for example, the Prime Minister of China made it clear that at this point, China is not intending to try to abide by the dictates—although they’re fantastic dictates—of this sort of Green New Deal mafia globally. They’re not going to try to fulfill the coal reduction requirements, CO₂ emissions reduction requirements related to coal. President Vladimir Putin is wondering whether he’s going to attend, I don’t think that means that we know the Russians are planning to not participate. But we also know that from the nation of India, which is the second-largest consumer of coal in the world, they have been clear for months that they have serious questions about the entire conception of the COP26 Glasgow, Scotland set of initiatives, if you want to call them that. Meanwhile, the royals and others are making statements which are almost Romanov-like in their detachment from reality, with Prince William talking today about how people should not be going into space, but there should be an Earth shot, not a Moon shot; trying to talk about how wonderful his father was, and how prescient he was—Prince Charles, that is; the weird and wacky Prince Charles. So, there’s a kind of comeuppance with reality. Some people in Britain noted that the British response to COVID, in which they had attempted to talk about herd immunity, was—they didn’t use the word “inhuman,” they simply said it was grossly wrong, and the talked about how the approaches coming out of China or what they called Asia and Southwest Asia were far superior to what happened out of the trans-Atlantic world. But with that said, it doesn’t mean that reality is going to prevail. You have a Malthusian outlook, and that Malthusian outlook is not merely toward other nations, it’s also something that has infected the trans-Atlantic world itself; the United States and various countries in Europe. Therefore, there’s a kind of detachment that is self-destructive and even suicidal. In order for that to be turned around, something new has to appear on the horizon. Now, that something new is something that has actually been written about by this organization and acted upon by this organization for well over 45 years. Sometimes that comes through candidacies, and I’ll note that 45 years ago, there was an election in 1976, and at that time we were running a third party—the U.S. Labor Party. We had candidates for Congress and Senate in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Michigan, all over the country, wherever we were. We were doing that in tandem with Lyndon LaRouche. This was not a campaign for votes, this was a campaign to put forward what we called the International Development Bank. It was an idea of a complete alternative to what the institutions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund were putting forward. And similar to the situation we see right now with Afghanistan and what is being asserted as what should be trans-Atlantic policy, that madness has to be directly opposed by a force which is vigorous, insightful, insouciant, irreverent, and happy about its role. There will be some other things we’ll reference; there was a statement that came out from the Schiller Institute which we’ll probably refer to during the course of things which exemplifies that, co-written by Guus Berkhout of the Netherlands, the initiator and cofounder of what’s called CLINTEL, or Climate Intelligence Group, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and head of the Schiller Institute. So, there’s a lot going on. We want to get right into what that is. We’re going to begin with Dennis Small giving us a briefing, an international perspective. Then we’ll go into some reports and reflections on what has happened today. DENNIS SMALL: The topic that I want to address, because I think it goes to the heart of the explanation of the cause behind the other things happening in different areas, is the hyperinflation and depression which is now exploding around the planet. To look at its cause, and of course, its cure. I’m doing to do this by describing a couple of key situations. I’m sure you’ve all heard the reports in the press of how what really causes inflation is supply or demand effects. If the supply drops, or the demand increases, that supposedly will cause prices to increase, and so on and so forth. You can read about this in all the textbooks on economics. You can go to Harvard authors, and they’ll basically tell you that there are two kinds of inflation. There’s cost-push inflation, there’s demand-pull inflation; all of which is a bunch of poppycock. It’s simply absolutely not true. The situation we’re facing is a lot more stark than that. If you were to wake up tomorrow morning, or Monday morning of next week, and find that you could not get any money out of the ATM machine. And that when you thought that it was just a broken ATM machine on the corner, and you went to the bank, the doors of the bank were closed. And you went to another bank, and there policemen in front of it, and crowds gathering. When you went to the drugstore to buy your medicine you need for your urgent cardiac condition or high blood pressure medicine or what have you, the pharmacy is not open, or it has supplies which are being rationed out in tiny doses. Would that sort of a situation concern you? You may think that I’m exaggerating and that this is just sort of a hyperbolic situation, an exaggeration of what’s going on. But it is not, because this is exactly the barrel that we’re staring down at this moment. I think that after I finish reviewing a few situations, a half-dozen situations internationally, I think you will realize that this evaluation—which is Lyndon LaRouche’s evaluation as to the systemic nature of this crisis—is actually far more accurate than anything anyone else is saying, and that therefore it points us in the direction of a solution. If you look at 2021, and look at what’s been happening with certain prices, which are always explained away in the media as the result of supply and demand, the price of cotton has risen 47% over the course of this year. Is that because there has been a 50% increase in the demand for cotton? That many more people want shirts? Or, you have to get cotton for other purposes? The index price of fertilizers has risen to the point that it is double what it was one year ago; a 100% increase. Is that because all of a sudden nobody is producing any fertilizer, and therefore, the supply dropped and the price doubled in a year? Let’s look at the energy situation in the United States and in Europe. The cost of oil in the United States since the beginning of 2021 is 65% higher than it was. The price for Brent crude is about $83 now; the highest in years. But that’s only a 65% increase. The cost of natural gas in the United States has risen 112% this year. So, we’re talking about an increase of these basic energy inputs—oil and natural gas—of 1.5 to 2 times over the course of less than a year. Is that because OPEC stopped producing oil all of a sudden? That the 1% drop in oil production—I’m just making that number up, but it doesn’t make much difference. That that 1% drop in the supply of oil has led to a doubling of its price, a 100% increase of its price? We are told that we are rebounding so rapidly from the COVID pandemic and that production is just whizzing along in many parts of the world, and therefore, the cost of electricity has doubled? Do they really think we’re that foolish? Maybe they do. In Europe, the cost of a megawatt-hour of electricity—I’m switching units here, because these are just the sample numbers that we have, but I think you’ll get the idea. The cost of a megawatt-hour of electricity on average in Europe in December of last year was 43 euros. In March of this year, it had more than doubled to 100 euros; and as of today, October 2021, the average cost of a megawatt-hour of electricity in Europe is 389 euros. It has risen from 43 to 389 euros in less than a year; that’s a ten-fold increase. Has there been a ten-fold increase in the demand for electricity? Has there been a ten-fold collapse of the supply line of electricity? One starts to wonder, maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with supply and demand and other fairy tales. Citibank has issued a projection of where things are going to stand by the end of this year, in terms of the situation in Europe. They’re saying that the cost of millions of BTUs [British thermal units] will rise to a level of anywhere from $30-100 per million BTUs. I apologize for the switching around of units, but Citibank itself does a conversion of this. They say if $100 per 1 million BTUs is hit, that’s the equivalent of a barrel of oil costing $580 per barrel. It’s now breaking the roof at $83. This is a projection for what could be happening by the end of this year. Break it down into specific situations. Italy: the cost of people’s electricity bills is going to be increasing by as much as 900% by Christmas time, according to Italian accounts. Is that because people are going to be consuming 900% more electricity? Give me a break! In Spain, the megawatt-hour of electricity rose from 40 euros in 2020, to 200 euros now; a five-fold increase. India, which uses a large amount of coal, as Dennis was just reporting a moment ago, imports a large amount of their coal from Indonesia. The cost of a ton of coal imported from Indonesia has risen from $86 per ton in April of 2021—this year—until today it has gone from $86 per ton to $162 per ton. It has doubled in six months. Half of the coal plants in India have less than a 2-day supply of coal on hand. They may run out and stop producing electricity. In Lebanon, this is already happening. It’s lights out in Lebanon. The two major government electricity companies, which produce the majority of the electricity in the country, have been forced to shut down. The drop in electricity supplies has been so drastic that they are estimating that there is an immediate danger to the actual engineering integrity of the grid itself. This has everything to do with the IMF policies and banking policies imposed upon them. You might be beginning to get the idea that none of this is explained by all the reasons which are provided. It so happens that the cost of energy is not determined by supply and demand; not cost-push inflation or demand-pull inflation. The cost of energy is determined on the Amsterdam spot market; it’s a speculative spot market. When speculators jumped into it, and started speculating on the future price that they will be able to sell their barrel of oil, or their kilowatt of electricity, or what-have-you, then you know damn well that people are going to withhold the supply that they may have on hand, because they know that the price is going up, according to the speculative markets. So, if you have a speculative market which is fed by countless trillions and a quadrillion and some of dollars, this is going to drive the price of everything up as this speculative feeding frenzy goes ahead. Which is why you have a situation across all areas where you have these massive increases in prices. It has nothing to do with supply and demand, or rebounding from the pandemic—which isn’t happening—going on anywhere. That’s energy; one major sector. Let’s look at another major sector which affects everything everywhere else in the economy, as happens with energy. Let’s take the case of cargo; shipping things around the world. The basic unit for shipping is a container, which is known as a TEU, a 20-foot equivalent unit. The cost per TEU of shipping from the United States to China each one of these units, was about $2000 one year ago. Today, if you can find one of these things, the cost is $20,000. It’s a ten-fold increase in one year. Because there’s all of a sudden a shortage of TEUs? The cost of shipping from Chile in South America to the United States, the TEU unit to ship which was $1500 a year ago, is now $18,000; a 12-fold increase. Chips; 90% of the world’s supply of electronic chips—not potato chips, electronic chips—are produced by one company in Taiwan. There are reports in the technical media dealing with the chip industry, that there is documentation that substantially more supplies of chips are being shipped to companies than are being released in the products of those companies. More in than out. What does that tell you? People are hoarding. Why would hoarding be going on? Because there is speculation on the price of chips. An engineer colleague of ours in Mexico reported on a recent organizing phone call just like this one that we had with supporters of our movement in Mexico, he’s an expert in the field of plastics and petrochemical plastics. He was ashen-faced, reporting that the cost of PVC tubing has gone up from 28 pesos just a few months ago to 60 pesos; more than a doubling. He said the cost of aluminum is four-fold more than it was before. But it can’t be bought; there is no aluminum to be had, there is no steel to be had. The cost of shipping cargo from China to Mexico or back? Two times what it was; they can’t even import stuff from China for that reason. And, you may be interested to know that there is a spot market on cargo, just as there is on energy. It’s not a question of going to the corner or going to the 7-11 and saying I need 6000 TEUs. No, it’s bid on, on a speculative market, and there are three major shipping companies around the world that have the corner on this market. And it works exactly the way all raw materials markets work, which is not supply and demand, it’s a speculative spot market, a forward market. So, let’s say you have in your possession, or you have bid to have delivery in your possession 10,000 TEUs. There’s no way in the world you’re going to rent those out at a mere $20,000 today, when you have every reason to believe that three months down the line you can make a killing at $30,000. So, you’re going to withhold that from the market. So, you have an in-built speculative process going on here. This isn’t the cause of the crisis, because what’s happening is not price inflation. What I just described to you isn’t what’s going on. What’s going on is that there is a massive shock devaluation of the value and the worth of the U.S. dollar. That’s why, the dollar being the unit of measure internationally other than the places that have been driven out of it like China, or increasingly Russia or other countries—Iran and so forth. But with the dollar being the international reserve currency, when the dollar no longer can buy what it did before, this takes the form of drastic increases in prices—a two-fold increase, a four-fold increase, a ten-fold increase. What’s happening is, the dollar is being turned into the used toilet paper it has, in fact, been increasingly for the past 30-40 years; exactly as Lyndon LaRouche described. That’s why it’s very possible we will all wake up one morning, very possibly during the fourth quarter of this year, and find that you can’t buy anything for love or money; especially not money. Love might work, but the dollar is not going to be worth anything. You cannot find anything to buy. You will get runs on banks; you will get runs on ATMs. Paper money will disappear. It will go up in smoke. The $1.8 quadrillion in speculative assets will go up in smoke in the form of the equivalent of a financial nuclear chain reaction. A nuclear chain reaction does not go like dominoes falling down, one knocking the next, knocking the next, and so on. That’s not how it works. One blows out two; two blows out four; four blows out sixteen; etc., etc. It’s a chain reaction, and that’s what we are seeing signs of going on in the world today. The cause of this is not the speculation per se; the cause of this is systemic. The cause of this is explained by Lyndon LaRouche’s Triple Curve function, which I’m going to—of necessity—assume most of you are familiar with, since we don’t have a screen to show it on, or for you to look at. If you don’t know what is, look it up: LaRouche’s Triple Curve, or his typical collapse function, which describes the process of what happens in an economy as an inter-linked single function which includes on the one hand, monetary and financial aggregates and their rate of growth, which are increasing hyperbolically as we’ve seen. As against a physical economic process of the actual physical economic requirements of a society which is plunging. LaRouche repeatedly explained that the Triple Curve—he didn’t call it the Three Curves—it is a single function. It is a single, inter-related function which is not arithmetic, it’s not geometric, it’s not hyperbolic, because the physical economic process is a non-linear process either of growth—where you have technological leaps; where you have discontinuities because of advances in technology. Or, in the alternative, in a collapse it is also non-linear. That’s why, when you see a collapse beginning, like we’re seeing today, this is not a gradual slide. It happens by a ratchet-type plunge. And people look around and say, “Where the Hell did this come from?” The answer is, "If you’d been listening to Lyndon LaRouche, you wouldn’t be asking that question, because he warned of exactly this process that we’re now seeing and is underway. It is the systemic collapse that’s going on. On top of that, you have two other processes that are directly related to the systemic collapse and are pushing it in the direction of a complete collapse. But it’s because we have this systemic breakdown going on that these things have the effect they do. One is the Green Reset policy, which is inducing a situation of forced cutbacks in energy and industry, and everything that’s required to keep a society going. So, this is exacerbating the physical economic collapse at an accelerating rate. The other related process is the one of speculation which we were just describing, where you’ve got $1.7 or $1.8 quadrillion chasing around the world speculating. Therefore, it’s having the kind of effect that we’re seeing here today. Mark Carney, who is in favor of the Green Reset, has stated very clearly yet again earlier this week that the policy is straightforward. We have to change what he calls “the plumbing” of the international finance system to make sure that the plumbing takes the funds and the resources into a Green speculative bubble of $150 trillion—those are his numbers. And that makes sure as well, that plumbing does, that nothing goes to actual productive activity. That’s the policy, and the Federal Reserve is in the process of making a major policy shift as well, adapting to this hyperinflationary blow-out going on with a depression collapse. There’s no way they can adjust anything that’s going to actually function in any event. I want to conclude by reading a paragraph or two from Lyndon LaRouche from remarks he made on October 22, 2001. This is 20 years ago. I meant it when I said that people wouldn’t be asking silly questions if they’d been listening to LaRouche for the last 20 years. Almost exactly 20 years ago, LaRouche said the following: “The reason that I’ve been so successful in forecasting, is because I think systemically. Therefore, I understand how a systemic collapse unfolds, as opposed to a stock market prediction, which is what every idiot likes to talk about. I make forecasts, not predictions. Forecasts which are based on the systemic characteristics and the boundary conditions within which the system operates. That’s why I have always been right, and every one of my critics, whether inside the organization or outside—has always been wrong.” Then he turns to explain very succinctly 20 years ago, what’s going on: “So, you have a situation globally in the United States and outside, in which the total amount of debt service being extracted from the economies is increasing cancerously, and the debt service payment requirement accordingly. This is collapsing the actual productive power of nations and their populations precisely at the time that the amount of debt to be paid is increasing. So, there’s no possible way that the present international monetary financial system could be continued without collapsing civilization into a generalized and prolonged New Dark Age, out of which most nations will disappear and the human population will drop rapidly during the course of this century to below 1 billion. And the first drop-down will tend to be a big one. “So therefore, we’re in a situation in which anybody who doesn’t support my proposals on bankruptcy reorganization of the international monetary and financial system, does not support the measures which I’ve proposed for this purpose, has to be an idiot.” The good news, of course, is that the solutions are at hand, once this causal systemic process is recognized. Lyndon LaRouche’s solutions, which we can discuss in the period that follows, are readily available and can be implemented. In fact, the Russians, the Chinese, and others are already on board. We are in a situation where—well, I was going to say, “We can turn on a dime.” We’re not going to be able to turn on a dime; we’ll have to turn on a dollar, because of the deflation of the dollar’s value. But the change can be made, and it can be made quickly. And that’s precisely what we’re intent on bringing about.

As its Sunday newsletter said, throughout this week The LaRouche Organization was out in force. It had activists in front of the UN building in New York City, the Treasury buildings in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Reserve building in Houston, Texas. They were wielding a Schiller Institute leaflet titled “UN ‘World Food Systems Summit’—Is Global Depopulation What’s Really on the Agenda?”Schiller Institute founder, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has been urging that the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, burying a decades-long British geopolitical policy of regime-change wars, creates a turning point in history and a tremendous opportunity. It can become merely a step in NATO turning to total confrontation with China and Russia. But Afghanistan’s urgent development needs—for which the United States, having destroyed the nation’s economy, bears responsibility—can be a lever to cause a dramatic shift in foreign policy coming from America and the West in general. Helga Zepp-LaRouche is not the only one to recognize the necessity and potential for such “unexpected” policy changes. Two former U.S. Surgeons General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders and Dr. David Satcher, endorsed Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s initiative on Afghanistan. She was also interviewed on Pakistan’s “PTV World” broadcast on her insistence and fight to achieve a paradigm defined by peace through development. Over the past several days, by putting forward the steps necessary to build a new economic infrastructure in Haiti and allow it to arise from its imposed poverty, the Schiller Institute has begun a discussion with and among the Haitian diaspora who want to lift up their country. As Lyndon LaRouche proposed a decade ago, his movement has again proposed now, that the United States and Haiti should make a treaty between them, and which other major economic powers may enter as well, committing not just to promise help, but to achieve economic development and security over a sustained period of time. So the Institute’s Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites is showing again that this terrible moment of global pandemic, famine and war can compel a shift to a new paradigm, engaging at least the United States, China, Russia, and other major powers to cooperate against those evils which are now causing human numbers to decline across the globe. Acknowledging the possibility of swiftly moving in Afghanistan to create healthcare systems and everything that goes into supporting them, is the first step to awakening a new moral character in the populations of the trans-Atlantic nations. These populations are being told that human deaths due to floods, earthquakes, poverty, or otherwise, are simply inevitable, attempting to deepen a depraved indifference. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, speaking to a conference of French colleagues and co-thinkers in the Solidarité et Progrès party in Paris, put it this way: "When it became known that Biden would go ahead with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, I said, this is a unique chance to change the paradigm: If we get the neighbors of Afghanistan, the Central Asian republics, Pakistan, Iraq, Russia, China, and India, all to agree to develop and really reconstruct the economy of Afghanistan, and then get some European nations and the United States to all collaborate in the reconstruction of Afghanistan—which is the moral obligation of those forces which conducted the war for 20 years—then, in the very small, we can start the beginning of a new paradigm of international cooperation. And that can become the first step in overcoming the geopolitical confrontation between the United States, the British, the EU, and Russia and China, which otherwise will lead to World War III. “What is needed is a change in thinking. The neighbors, those neighboring countries which I just mentioned, they all are already thinking in this way…. So, now, the big task for us in Europe, and in the United States, is we have to find support from these nations in the West to participate.”

By Helga Zepp-LaRouchePDF of this statement The catastrophic failure of NATO in Afghanistan, and with it the policy of 20 years of wars of intervention, couldn’t be more dramatic. It is not only that the war was lost; it is paradigmatic for the whole spectrum of misconceptions of the Western liberal system. It is therefore to be welcomed when President Biden announces that the withdrawal from Afghanistan marks the end of the entire era of the use of American military power with the aim of “remaking” other countries. But if this reorientation only means that we will no longer busy ourselves out in the boondocks with the “endless wars,” but instead will concentrate all forces on the “new challenges”—namely the confrontation with Russia and China—then the lesson from this shameful disaster has not been learned and we are embarking on an even worse catastrophe. But the wound is still fresh, the shock of defeat has shaken the whole Western world and the chance exists for a completely new approach.A Brown University project to ascertain the costs of U.S. wars since September 11th, for which we are about to mark the 20th anniversary, has calculated that the total costs for the military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc. are $8 trillion and at least a million people have lost their lives. This breaks down to $2.3 trillion for the Afghanistan war, $2.1 trillion for the Iraq/Syria war zone, $355 billion for military operations in Libya, Somalia, etc., $1.1 trillion for Homeland Security programs, and $2.2 trillion for the upcoming care of U.S. veterans who were deployed in these wars, a large number of whom suffer from secondary physical and mental illnesses. At least 15,000 U.S. military personnel and roughly the same number of international NATO troops were killed. Around 70 million people are refugees from these wars. Hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed, an unknown number of civilians perished, and the majority of the troops were essentially occupied with protecting themselves in a hostile environment. They had just as little idea of those people and their culture at the beginning of the 20 years, as at the end of it, as was known to the public no later than with the publication of the Afghanistan Papers in 2019. The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan is appalling. World Food Program Director David Beasley, who visited Afghanistan last week in August, announced that 18 million Afghans are starving—more than half the population—and 4 million are at risk of starvation next winter without massive help. The WHO fears a medical disaster in view of the scarcely existing health system in the midst of the COVID pandemic, and only around 1 million people are vaccinated so far. Can the people of Western countries have any idea what kind of suffering the Afghan population has had to go through in the past 40 years of war, and must still endure at this point in time? In view of this almost unimaginable tragedy, it is downright absurd and deliberately misleading that in the context of the “endless wars” one still speaks of “nation-building.” What was built in Afghanistan when half the population is starving? If the U.S.A. and other NATO members had invested only 5% of their military spending in the real economic development of Afghanistan, this horrific debacle would never have occurred. Modern Health System and Agriculture So far it has not been apparent that there is any real rethinking in the United States or Europe. Because this would not mean merely that one is willing to “talk to the Taliban,” but that one is correcting the entire premise of the policies of the last 20 years. If Biden is serious about ending the entire era of the wars of intervention, then U.S. troops must finally comply with the vote of the Iraqi Parliament, which demanded their withdrawal in January 2020. Then the murderous Caesar Act sanctions of the U.S.A. against Syria must be ended immediately, which to this day contribute to holding over 90% of the population to a standard of living below the poverty line. Beyond that, especially during a pandemic, we must end the policy of sanctions against all countries; they have no UN mandate, and they only strike at the poorest sections of the population and often kill them. What the U.S.A. and the European nations have to do now, if they ever want to regain credibility with respect to “values” and “human rights,” is to offer real help to the Afghan government that is being formed, e.g. by building a modern health system. One of the things that is urgently needed now is a whole system of modern hospitals, in connection with a system for the training of doctors, medical professionals and a training program for young people who can help the population in all rural areas to familiarize themselves with the hygiene measures required in a pandemic. With the help of partnerships, such a system could be linked to medical centers in the United States and Europe, as is already in place with other countries in the developing sector. In view of the famine, in addition to the airlift that David Beasley of the WFP is setting up from Pakistan, which can bring food into Afghanistan, a comprehensive offer of agricultural support is needed urgently. If we are to stop the farmers from falling back to the cultivation of poppy plants for the production of opium out of sheer necessity, then the development of agriculture, integrated into the general economic structure, must be supported. With the agreement concluded with the Taliban in 2000, the former UN drug commissioner Pino Arlacchi demonstrated that the abolition of drug cultivation is possible and that the religious convictions of the Taliban can be met. Provided that the sovereignty of Afghanistan and the new government is absolutely respected, and it is guaranteed that such aid in building up agriculture is not mixed with a political agenda, various pilot projects based on the model of Jawaharlal Nehru’s green revolution could be started with the regions that are ready to do so. There are committed young and older farmers in the United States and Europe who would be willing to participate in such a peace mission to improve agricultural production in Afghanistan in such a way that the famine can be permanently eradicated. In view of the repeated droughts, such programs would of course have to go hand in hand with irrigation programs and general water management. An Aid Coordinator Who Is Trusted It must first and foremost be about helping the Afghan people in a gigantic emergency that they did not cause themselves, and this is only possible if a basis of trust is established with the new government, regardless of all ideological reservations. The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites therefore proposes that the U.S. and European governments choose the person to coordinate such an aid program, who has shown in the past that such a policy can work: namely, Pino Arlacchi. It would guarantee that Afghanistan’s sovereignty would be respected and that no attempt would be made to impose Western standards, since he has already won the Taliban’s trust in the past. Such a redefinition of policy towards Afghanistan naturally also means completely turning away from thinking in geopolitical categories, rejecting the idea of politics as a zero-sum game in which the rise of China and Asia are automatically understood as the decline of the West. With his visit to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the new head of government, Abdul Ghani Baradar, signaled that his government is counting on cooperation with China and the integration of Afghanistan into the New Silk Road. The Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, has proposed an international conference for the country’s economic development to discuss which projects must have absolute priority in order to overcome the emergency. If the West has learned anything from the millennium defeat in Afghanistan, then it must cooperate impartially with Russia, China, and neighboring countries in Central Asia, Pakistan, Iran and India in building not only Afghanistan, but all of Southwest Asia. The slogan “to end the endless wars,” which got Tony Blair so excited, is not imbecilic—what is imbecilic is the policy of colonial wars of intervention he proposed. This was not only moronic, but criminal and murderous, and has destroyed the lives of millions of people or plunged them into unspeakable suffering. The architects of this policy should be held accountable. But if the cycle of violence and revenge is to be overcome, then a new policy must be on the agenda: The new name for peace is development, as Pope Paul VI once said. Afghanistan is the one place where the United States and China can begin a form of cooperation that can be a baby step toward strategic cooperation putting humanity’s common goals in the foreground. Ultimately, its realization indicates the only way that the end of mankind in a nuclear Armageddon can be prevented. In any case, German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer does not seem to have learned anything from the “severe defeat,” if all she can think of is the demand for “more military independence for the EU.” The “lack of skills” of which she speaks does not only refer to the failure of European resistance to the U.S.-driven withdrawal from Afghanistan. If the self-induced decline of the West is to end, we need an honest analysis of why the neo-colonial liberal social model has failed, and above all we need a renaissance of our humanistic and classical culture. Our attitude towards the construction in Afghanistan is the test case of whether we are able to do so.

The final flights bringing foreigners and Afghan refugees out of Kabul are now in process, with President Biden sticking to the Aug. 31 deadline. A second U.S. drone attack today, in Kabul, claimed to take out a car with several intended suicide bombers inside who were heading to the airport. The profound issue facing the world today is whether or not the U.S. will join with China, Russia and the countries in the region to begin an economic development process for this war-torn nation, to become the prosperous crossroad of Eastern and Western civilizations, or to become again an impoverished center of terrorism and drug production. If the former, such a transformation would serve as a model for the development of the other nations destroyed by the Anglo-American regime change wars over the past 20 years, establishing the notion of “peace through development” as the necessary new paradigm to replace the failed geopolitics of British imperialism.In Iraq today, the government held a ten-nation conference entitled “Conference for Cooperation and Partnership,” including France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait, U.A.E. and Jordan. Like Libya and Syria, Iraq’s industrial infrastructure was utterly destroyed by the insane and illegal regime change war, falsely justified through lies by Tony Blair and the Bush-Cheney administration. While China has offered to bring the Belt and Road process into Iraq through an oil-for-infrastructure plan, this has been repeatedly sabotaged by foreign interests and manipulated intrigue within Iraq, just as the reconstruction of Syria has been prevented by the vile U.S. “Caesar Sanctions,” punishing any country which offers to invest in Syrian reconstruction. These imperial sanctions policies must be ended if the current descent into a new Dark Age is to be reversed. The Schiller Institute has provided the framework for the world to come together behind Afghan development in a series of conferences and publications (see “Afghanistan—A Turning Point in History After the Failed Regime-Change Era” and “Will Afghanistan Trigger a Paradigm Change?”). This approach—to end the geopolitical division of the world into warring tribes, and to address the common aims of mankind—is not just a good idea, or a naive dream. The choice of peace through development, which has driven every renaissance throughout history, is the only option to end the current global crises—the out-of-control pandemic; the exploding financial bubble; the threat of thermonuclear war; and the cultural decay dragging the Western nations into a drug-infested perversity reminiscent of the last days of the Roman Empire. The upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11 will be the occasion of a Schiller Institute conference celebrating the cultural and intellectual ideas required to defeat this evil, and to bring about, at this moment of profound phase-change in human history, the necessary creative direction required of our citizens, and citizens around the world (details of the conference will be available soon). Anticipating that event, the Schiller Institute has announced the publication of the first issue of a new quarterly magazine of art, science and statecraft, Leonore. The announcement of the new publication asks: “What would a world look like if every young person could fully exercise their creativity?” Leonore will be sent automatically to every sustaining member of the Schiller Institute. Click here to become a sustaining member.

When President Joe Biden made it clear in his afternoon statements to the press following his virtual meeting with the G7 nations, that he was sticking to his August 31 Afghanistan pullout deadline, a somber pall appeared over 10 Downing Street, Porton Down, and Gee Street in Clerkenwell, home of the Tavistock Institute. The dismayed Nigel Kim Darroch, Baron Darroch of Kew, said," It is going to take quite a long time for the West as a whole—because it is a Western failure, a Western disaster, this is not just the UK and the US—to recover from all this, to recover our reputation." He of “flooding the Trump zone” fame had to reckon with the hard truth that the multiple attempts to stop Biden from carrying out the promised Afghanistan withdrawal had not worked, and that the public relations stunt known as “Global Britain” had just been revealed to be “Windsor castles made of sand.”Retired Admiral Mike Mullen, former Joint Chiefs of Staff head from October 2007 till September 2011—that is, under both Bush 43 and “Bush 44,” Barack Obama—confessed that he, Obama, and that entire administration had been wrong, and Joe Biden had been right, about whether or not to “surge” in Afghanistan with 40,000 troops in 2009. Biden had opposed the surge, suggesting 10,000 troops who would fight terrorism at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and otherwise train the Afghan military. Biden “had it right back then…I give him credit for that,” Mullen said. He is the first to exercise the conceptual option of what Ray McGovern has called “metanoia.” When Metanoia (“Beyond-Thought”) was personified, it was often as a goddess, cloaked and sorrowful, who inspired both regret and reflection, leading to repudiation of wrong judgements. Those who have been afflicted by chronic misjudgment of current history for the past several years due to “the pestilence of partisanship,” particularly after Lyndon LaRouche’s September 2012 observations on the post-Cheney/Obama “Bush 43/44” death of the political party system in America, are baffled by the present moment. Caitlin Johnstone, in an August 22 article entitled “Bush-Era War Criminals Are Louder Than Ever Because They’ve Lost the Argument,” observed: "After the US troop withdrawal established conclusively that the Afghan ‘government’ they’d spent twenty years pretending to nation-build with, was essentially a work of fiction, thus proving to the world that they’ve been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history. But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken. “The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former Prime Minister. who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of ”obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’." Blair has long believed and practiced through Responsibility To Protect the idea that Global Britain must be vigorously defended down to the last American. But those that refuse to understand the British “Babylonian priesthood special relationship” to the United States, “can’t touch this,” and remained intentionally unenlightened. A statement written by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on the situation said: “The SCO member states reaffirm their intention to assist Afghanistan in becoming a peaceful, stable and prosperous country, free from terrorism, war or drugs, and are ready to join international efforts to stabilise and develop Afghanistan with the central coordinating role of the UN.” Afghanistan joining the Belt and Road Initiative is the pathway forward, and the United States, using the very real need for a world health platform, can turn its attention to joining these nations while simultaneously retooling and re-employing its own nation for that battle. Over two-thirds of the American people want the war to end. The Presidency has moved to honor that desire, and to complete that policy in Afghanistan. As for the evacuation’s chaos: has anyone considered that the fact that factions in the United States turned down the offer to coordinate efforts in Afghanistan, including evacuation efforts, with the Russians, and possibly others, contributed to the instability? Or that an announced and implemented anti-Covid-19 world health initiative, begun months ago, along the lines of what Helga Zepp-LaRouche had proposed in conference after conference since June 2020, would have also helped to “pre-stabilize” the conditions of withdrawal in Afghanistan prior to evacuation? Even now, and for a small percentage of the $2 trillion known to have been spent in the war in the past 20 years, the United States could help win the peace in Afghanistan, through a world health platform construction program involving all the nations of the area. Lyndon LaRouche said, in a 1991 interview given in prison: “Whether I remain in prison or not is essentially at the pleasure of the President, or the Presidency. The legal grounds for removing me from prison, by removing the sentence, by removing the conviction, exist…. The evidence exists. As to whether that evidence and that procedure will be acted upon, will be up to the political pressures acting upon the Presidency. I am here because the President wishes me here, and for no other reason. If the President were to change, then I probably would—the law would be allowed to release me from prison.” LaRouche, who campaigned as a Presidential candidate more than any other individual, realized that the institutional powers of the United States Presidency were of a different nature than the compromised capabilities of a prime minister. When the power of the Presidency of the United States is deployed for the good, it is immense, the greatest in the world. Biden’s completion of the withdrawal that Trump started, despite British-inspired Pentagon and State Department pressures to do the opposite, is, if completed, an example of that.

The British press is in a complete state of hysteria, as evidenced by the headlines reported in the BBC’s own blog. “Blair Attacks Biden’s ‘Imbecilic’ Retreat as Kabul Chaos Ceepens,” blares the Sunday Times. The Telegraph notes Blair’s attack on Biden, adding the subhead: “America shuts Kabul airport as Raab forced to turn to China and Russia for help in Afghanistan.” And on and on.Blair, a member of the Queen’s Privy Council, rounded on Biden (as the Sunday Times puts it). “We didn’t need to do it,” he wrote yesterday. “We chose to do it. We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’.” Biden used the term when he announced the withdrawal. Blair said: “For Britain, out of Europe and suffering the end of the Afghanistan mission by our greatest ally with little or no consultation … we are at risk of relegation to the second division of global powers.” The Sunday Times reports that “Ministers have warned that Britain will have to tear up its foreign policy after the debacle in Afghanistan, amid flaring tempers about America’s decision to cut and run.” The paper cites an unnamed minister who denounced American “isolationism” and said that the government would have to “revisit” the recent review on defense and foreign policy because the United States was no longer a reliable ally. “America has just signaled to the world that they are not that keen on playing a global role,” the minister said. “The implications of that are absolutely huge. We need to get the integrated [policy] review out and reread it. We are going to have to do a hard-nosed revisit on all our assumptions and policies.” Then the imperial “old sow” was let loose: “The U.S. had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the First World War. They turned up late for the Second World War and now they are cutting and running in Afghanistan,” was this minister’s conclusion. The tensions have reportedly extended to the troops on the ground in Kabul. Military sources have also told MPs that as tensions rose last week, there were clashes with the U.S. on the ground and “heated words” between British and U.S. commanders at Kabul airport, including one “stand-up” row.

Can the current eviction crisis in the United States can be addressed in a manner similar to what Lyndon LaRouche proposed in 2007 to address the upcoming housing and banking crisis engulfing the nation at that time? In February 2009, the LaRouche movement circulated the following updated version of Lyndon LaRouche’s proposed Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007, as a draft resolution for state and local governments:Whereas, the failure the leadership of the United States Congress to pass the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007 proposed by Lyndon LaRouche in his July 25, 2007 webcast, has transformed a dire situation from one that could have remained manageable through the Autumn of 2007, into a breakdown crisis of not only the U.S. economy, but of the world economy; Whereas, the Congressional leadership instead chose a course of insulting treatment of state and local legislative and associated bodies within the states, who clamored for the Congress to enact the HBPA, as shown in the HBPA’s passage by five state legislatures, and more than 90 city councils across the United States, in addition to hundreds of endorsements by trade union and other constituency leaders individually; Whereas, the repeated attempts approved by Congress to bail out financial institutions with cumulative trillions of taxpayers’ and Federal Reserve money, have utterly failed; Whereas, forcing the leadership of the U.S. Congress into more responsible behavior on the HBPA now, is perhaps the only chance to begin to move things in a direction which could lead to saving the United States of America itself from the deepest physical depression in its history; Therefore, be it resolved, that the City/State of ______________________ hereby endorses the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act of 2007, as initiated by economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. This Act includes the following provisions: Congress must establish a Federal agency to place the Federal and state chartered banks under protection, freezing all existing home mortgages for a period of however many months or years are required to adjust the values to fair prices, and restructure existing mortgages at appropriate interest rates. Further, this action would also write off all of the speculative debt obligations of mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and other forms of Ponzi schemes that have plunged the banking system into bankruptcy. During the transitional period, all foreclosures shall be frozen, allowing American families to retain their homes. Monthly payments, the equivalent of rental payments, shall be made to designated banks, which can use the funds as collateral for normal banking practices, thus recapitalizing the banking systems. These affordable monthly payments will be factored into new mortgages, reflecting the deflating of the housing bubble and the establishment of appropriate property valuations, and reduced fixed mortgage interest rates. This shakeout will take several years to achieve. In the interim period no homeowner shall be evicted from his or her property, and the Federal and state chartered banks shall be protected, so they can resume their traditional functions, serving local communities, and facilitating credit for investment in productive industries, agriculture, infrastructure, etc. State governors shall assume the administrative responsibilities for implementing the program, including the rental assessments to designated banks, with the Federal government providing the necessary credits and guarantees to assure the successful transition. And therefore, Be it Further Resolved, that a copy of this resolution shall be forwarded to members of Congress from the state, and also be delivered to the President of the United States, for immediate implementation.

In the course of her briefing to the European organization yesterday, Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for the creation of a trans-national task force for scientific truth, tasked with deploying the “united front” of forces that were assembled in embryo at the Saturday “There Is No Climate Emergency” Schiller Institute conference. The first sobering scientific truth is that there is no reason for the 300 million-plus people on the planet now in danger of starvation to go hungry. There is no reason for anyone on the planet not to have electricity, now, with the technologies available. There is no reason that anyone has to walk three hours or more to retrieve sometimes-contaminated water, when fresh water can be made readily available. That truth was established by the conference speakers—farm leaders, scientists, retired military officers, nuclear engineers, and Schiller Institute representatives.“We have to only solve one problem, and that is to make sure that this very powerful message gets out in a much stronger way than we have been doing so far,” Zepp-Larouche said. I think the worst thing we could do is to sit on our hands and be happy that this event took place, and not make sure that we do the utmost to really get it to all scientific organizations, to all people concerned with nuclear, with blackouts, with energy in general, related issues. So I really want to put this out as a task, that we make a list, many lists of all organizations that should know about that, and start building up our outreach in a much more systematic way, than we have been doing… And the argument that we don’t have the manpower, I think, is not a good argument. Because if that is the argument prevailing, then our efforts will be noble and good, but not sufficient. And I think we really have to start making this outreach question a really central idea, because otherwise we would not have the impact which we could have. “So given the fact that this will be a major issue probably escalating between now and the COP-26 (Glasgow) conference, I think we have to have the aim to derail this story, that there is a consensus among the scientists about the causes of climate change….. So, maybe we can think about a supra- or trans-national task force where we start to really work together to make sure our impact on the scientific organizations, and I mean that in the generic form, that that becomes much, much bigger….” There are notable statements on the theme of the true human identity of all mankind being located in our capacity for fundamental scientific and technological breakthroughs, which you will find reported in the items reported below. Those statements, interestingly, are from thinkers and patriots from Russia, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Uzbekistan, Argentina—but generally not from the United States, France, Germany, or the trans-Atlantic world. With the exception of the forces associated in one way or the other with Lyndon LaRouche, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, or the initiatives of the Schiller Institute and affiliate organizations, almost all policy pronouncements presently being made, deny an essential premise—that the problems facing, not only humanity, but life and non-life as well, are susceptible to resolution through the power of creative reason. This method of creative reason, as expressed and contained in the “negative ontology” and “negative theology” of Nicholas of Cusa, is the subject of the dialogues being carried out in the organizing process that began last Saturday, that culminates in the August 14 LaRouche Legacy retrospective on LaRouche’s successful forecasting method, and is escalating with this week’s discussion of “A True Proposal For Peace Through Development, for Afghanistan and the Globe.” LaRouche’s documents such as 1984’s “The Present Scientific Implications of Vedic Calendars from the Standpoint of Kepler and Circles of Gauss,” and the later January 1985 “The Implications of Tilak’s Theses for the Scientific Potential of India Today,” as well as “The Science of the Human Mind,” may be suddenly very much appreciated, for example, by persons in Bolivia who speak about “Millenarian people armed with advanced technology” as being unstoppable, or like the foreign minister of Paraguay, Euclides Acevedo, who, at the occasion on July 24 of the founding of the Latin American Space Agency, said: “We may not yet have satellites to place in orbit, but we are beginning to place in orbit those enemies of success, those apostles of failure, the mediocre and the resentful.” When the President of Uzbekistan invokes, as he did on July 16, the identity of South and Central Asia as composed, not of ethnicities or language groups, but of an intense dialogue of civilizations among scholars like Ibn Sina, Al-Farabi, Al-Kwarizmi and others, this shows the way out of geopolitics. The fact is, that LaRouche and his associates are not only familiar with the terms of such a dialogue, but hold the key to a creative restatement, including through the conducting of public “Socratic” dialogues in the streets, of the principle of the power of Ideas, that is at the core of the Platonic method, This was embodied in 2005’s “The Principle of Power” collaboration among LaRouche and scores of his youth colleagues, as directed by the LaRouche Science team, “The Basement.”That earlier scientific dialogue in Europe, from 1439 until 1517/25, resulting in new discoveries and inventions, and the machine tool designs for their multiple and even mass replication, created the most rapid expansion of potential population growth in history, and greatest real wealth. Yes, the pandemic spread of the coronavirus and its multiple variants, along with the possibility of new fungal and other mutations, demonstrates the accuracy of LaRouche’s 1973-74 warning about “a biological holocaust on the horizon,” were his policies not adopted. Nonetheless, the adoption by President Ronald Reagan of LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) policy in March,1983 demonstrated that the United States Presidency can be moved to greatness, just as Martin Luther King had successfully moved that Presidency in the Spring and early Summer of 1963. In a world where the Belt and Road Initiative does nothing if not remind America of its once-productive identity, the Zepp-LaRouche proposal for Afghanistan collaboration among Russia, China, Pakistan/India, and the United States, and others, is a bold attempt to replicate, albeit in secular form, what Cusa sought to do at the Council of Florence in 1439. While such policy formulation as LaRouche accomplished in 1983 is a scientific matter of the highest order, it is of the very specific nature that LaRouche described in the remarks that began the Saturday conference, which can be viewed, and which are only partially excerpted here: "What is the Good, as if it were known only by one person, in defiance of the contrary opinion of every other living person? And how could that Goodness be proven? That is the question which preoccupied Socrates: What is the Good? Man is properly motivated by nothing but the love of the Good! That love of the Good, and its efficient self-service, is the essence of efficient self-interest… “What is the Good? How can we observe the Good, empirically? Well, first we look at the difference between ourselves and the beasts. And then we have to study economics; not the kind that is preached in Washington, or in the universities today, or by the so-called economics profession, but physical economy—real economy. The power of a species, or of an individual, to produce the material and cultural conditions necessary for the existence of that species.” It is the conveying of that underlying idea of the Good, in the course of happily wrecking such ideological evils the scientific climate-consensus lie, and proposing a policy of peace through development for Afghanistan, which is the self-chosen task of the proposed trans-national task force for the advancement of scientific truth.

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced on June 20 that Washington was preparing another package of anti-Russian sanctions over Alexey Navalny and against Russian companies participating in the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia underneath the Baltic Sea to Europe.Sullivan’s announcement happened on the same day as Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov arrived to resume his post in Washington, after having been recalled for consultations to Moscow on March 20. Sullivan’s remarks drew a sharp response from the ambassador. “This is not a signal we all expected after the summit,” Antonov stressed. “I don’t think it is possible to stabilize and normalize relations between countries by means of sanctions. The current task is to normalize dialogue. First of all, we need to restore wrecked dialogue mechanisms. It is sad that our American colleagues are opting for a path that will not lead us to a positive result our presidents were oriented to.” Antonov continued: “The task is to simply work and implement the positive words that were pronounced by the presidents. Russian diplomats, who are working here, are ready to improve Russian-U.S. relations.” A few hours earlier, he took a commercial Aeroflot flight to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, where he was met by Russian diplomats. On arriving in Washington, Antonov said, “Back in Geneva, unlike many of my colleagues, I was very particular about the summit results. I said that I trust deeds more than words. I said let us wait and see what our American colleagues are going to do,” he told journalists upon arrival from Russia. When it comes to plans to impose more sanctions, “What you said—I feel I have seen something of the kind, that we have been through this.” Antonov also said he hoped to meet with his American counterparts in the coming days to determine where things stand. “Let me meet with the American colleagues,” he told journalists. “Everything will be clear in some ten days. So far, it is too early. We do have very serious problems. We are ready for a constructive dialogue, ready to try to resolve all the problems,” TASS quoted him as saying. Interestingly, President Biden and President Putin held a phone discussion on April 13, at which they discussed the need for a face-to-face summit between them. Then, on April 15, President Biden signed an Executive Order with a truckload of sanctions, including expelling 10 Russian diplomats, and sanctioning 32 individuals and companies for alleged interference in the 2020 election, and on and on. After years of not responding to illegal U.S. sanctions, Russia responded. Antonov had already been recalled to Moscow a month earlier. On April 16, the Foreign Ministry announced expulsions of U.S. diplomats on a one-to-one basis for every Russian diplomat expelled. Ending the activities of State Department-controlled NGOs in Russia. And U.S. Ambassador to Moscow John Sullivan was summoned to the Foreign Ministry for what was previewed as a “difficult discussion.” It was shortly afterward revealed that Sullivan was invited to return to Washington for consultations, indefinitely.