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The Group of Seven nations plans to launch a green alternative to China’s Belt and Road initiative when the leaders meet at their annual summit, according to two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports. The G7 summit will take place under British chairmanship in Cornwall June 11-13.“The strategy, expected to be called the ‘Clean Green Initiative,’ would provide a framework to support sustainable development and the green transition in developing countries, the people said. The initiative will also be on the summit agenda for the leaders.” However, it is not clear whether the G7 will decide to put some money behind the initiative, as the initial purpose was “a pledge toward creating a strategic framework.” G7 member countries also quarrel on where to focus: the U.S. wants to focus on Central and South America, whereas France, Germany and Italy want to focus on Africa, and Japan on Asia. They apparently believe that developing nations are so stupid as to accept CO₂ tradeoffs instead of development. In a related development, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance Mark Carney is struggling to get his Global CO₂ Trading scheme ready by the end of this year. The group set up by Carney, the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, is divided on major issues that have to do with the price of CO₂: Whereas some members are pushing for a global regulating agency, Carney wants prices to be determined by “the markets,” which means they can be manipulated at will. Carney insists with the target of a $100 billion market by the end of the decade—a difficult target to achieve from the supply side.

China Plus World Today Interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche (China Plus is the official English website of China Radio International.) Monday, May 31, 2021 WORLD TODAY: You’re listening to World Today. Denmark’s secret service helped the U.S. to spy on European politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2012-2014, Danish media report. According to a report by Denmark’s radio, the Defense Intelligence Service collaborated with the U.S. National Security Agency to gather information, and intelligence was collected on other officials from Germany, France, Sweden and Norway. Similar allegations emerged in 2013. Then secrets leaked by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged tapping of the German Chancellor’s phone by the NSA. For more, we’re now joined on the line by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a Germany-based political and economic think tank. Thanks for joining us, Dr. LaRouche. HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, hello.WORLD TODAY: Could you first tell us more about what the Danish media have found? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: It’s really a funny story, because all of this information essentially was known in 2015, namely that the NSA used the fact that in Denmark, you have transatlantic cables with which one can spy on everything going on in the East bloc, but also internationally. This all came out in 2015, but nothing really happened. Merkel, at the time, said “Oh, spying on allies—that doesn’t go at all,” but then absolutely nothing happened! Again, last year, the same story was leaked, and nothing happened. So there is apparently one or more whistleblowers in the Danish secret service, who say, this is just too much. This is putting in question the sovereignty of Denmark, the interest of the Danish people. So they kept leaking the same information, and now, this was picked up by a whole network of European media circles—Le Monde and German TV, Norwegian and Swedish TV—and they have been given access to the internal documents of the Danish secret service, and that is what broke. WORLD TODAY: Do you think Angela Merkel will perhaps respond differently this time? And what’s been the reaction to this report so far in Germany, and perhaps other parts of Europe? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I think the intention of this whistleblower is, because he sees that there is no reaction, and therefore he keeps leaking in order to build up the pressure. So, now, [Peer] Steinbrück, who is a former [SPD] chancellor candidate, said this is a scandal. The Norwegian and Swedish ministers said that now they demand an investigation. We have to see what happens, because this all happened already last year, and I think it totally depends, if the population says that if these governments allow that everybody is being spied on then these governments are obviously not defending the interests of their respective populations. So I think we have to see how this unfolds. WORLD TODAY: And following the news of the report on Sunday, Edward Snowden accused U.S. President Joe Biden of being deeply involved in this scandal, the first time around. Why would he say that? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: [laughs] Well, because it’s true! It’s fairly well known for everybody who has listened to Edward Snowden, and there is a whole group of American whistleblowers, who have said similar things, that the NSA is spying on everything—everything going on in the world. They’re spying on emails, laptops, telephone calls, and they collect all of this in gigantic storage facilities. And they’re not looking for a person or a subject, they’re collecting everything. And then, once they have it, later on they can go, and go with search words and call up specific things they want. In reality, this NSA operation has become a world surveillance state. You know, they’re making a lot of noise about surveillance in China and Russia, and so forth, but the reality is, the British GCHQ, that’s the equivalent of the NSA, and the NSA, they’re just collecting everything. And I think that obviously Biden, both in his capacity as Vice President and now as President, is completely on top of that. WORLD TODAY: OK, but why would the U.S. spy on its allies? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Because they think they are the guardian of an unipolar world, and it is, for them, they don’t have any sense that there may be something wrong with that. It’s for them, quite normal and self-evident that they can do that. I mean, you know, the United States, unfortunately—and I think some officials in China have been aware of it—that the United States has turned away from their original values of the American Revolution, where they were created as a republic, and in the recent years—actually decades, one can say—they have turned into an ally of the British Empire, running the world on the basis of the “special relationship,” whereby they think that if they behave like the muscle of the British Empire, then that’s the way how they run the unipolar world. WORLD TODAY: But do you think this is going to have an impact on America’s relations with its key allies, because Joe Biden is seeking to rebuild alliances? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, the question I’m asking myself, and many other people are asking themselves, is: Why is it that there was no reaction after these stories came out in 2015, in 2020? I mean, the Danish clearly knew what they were doing, but they didn’t want to make any fuss about it. They didn’t want to rock the boat. It’s almost like they would prefer to be the slave of the great master, than being kicked out of the club! You know, it’s a complete scandal: It puts into question, all this question about “Western values,” the great Western democracies, human rights, all of these things. Where are the human rights of the European citizens being protected by their governments? I hope that some very clear questions will be asked of President Biden when he attends the G7 meeting. I mean, I doubt it, because these leaders have not shown—they’d rather be part of the “Five Eyes” and “Seven Eyes,” and whatnot rather than defending their own citizens. WORLD TODAY: Thank you, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, a Germany-based political and economic think-tank. You’re listening to World Today.

During the year 1983, in which Republican President Ronald Reagan advanced the seismic change in post-war military strategy known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), stunning the entire trans-Atlantic world by embracing the inspired proposal of 1984 Democratic Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, LaRouche authored a number of documents subsequent to that March 23 achievement. They included his “The Implications of Beam-Weapons Technology for the Military Doctrine of Argentina,” May 1983; “Saudi Arabia in the Year 2023,” June; “A Fifty-Year Development Policy for the Indian-Pacific Oceans Basin,” August; and two December documents, “The Design for a Leibnizian Academy of Morocco,” and “A Proposal To Begin Development of a Long-Range Economic Development Policy for the State of Israel.” LaRouche, besides his participation in many seminars and conferences that year, also took time to describe for all, in “The Science of the Human Mind,” written in October of 1983, what he meant, when LaRouche entitled the much-earlier “Open Dialogue with Leonid Brezhnev: The Content of Policy Is the Method by Which It Is Made.” The rediscovery of the Promethean “principle of power,” the power of labor, technology, and productive work, today under assault by the British Empire’s Great Reset, is the core of the LaRouche economic method, and all policy initiatives that flow from it.Though there are forces that clearly intend to prevent even President Joe Biden from meeting with President Vladimir Putin, using everything, including the bogus Belarus affair to do so, Russia intends to do its part to not play the provocation game. Meanwhile, the physical reality of the coronavirus pandemic and its implications, whether in Palestine, India, or Honduras, are not a game: that deadly reality, even for countries like the once-protected Vietnam, has forced the truth to the fore: “Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.” The bankruptcy of the United States’ policy on making vaccines available to the world in a timely fashion was luridly on display in the press conference addressed by the CDC’s Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Biden’s Covid coordinator who, after blathering about “80 million vaccines distributed to the world by the end of June,” was caught covering up for the fact that over 100 million vaccines are already produced and not about to be used, not counting the 67 million that the states already have, and are having problems finding people to take. The issue, however, is not whether to vaccinate either American children, or Indian physicians. The issue is: What are the hypotheses that must be the foundation for a world physical-economic development policy? Only the philosophical method of mass organizing developed by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, in his “De Docta Ignorantia,” is adequate to the challenge faced by mankind today. One sub-chapter of LaRouche’s May ’83 “Argentina” document is entitled: “‘Mad’ as a Malthusian Dogma.” Truly, the trans-Atlantic thermonuclear war-fighting policies presently being considered, such as “Prompt Global Strike,” reflect a cult-like form of religious belief, not rigorous strategic thinking in the 21st century. Besides being a rejection of the 1983 breakthrough by Reagan and LaRouche, preventive war and thermonuclear first strike is, together with the “Great Reset,” a pathetic front for the inevitable demise of the $2 quadrillions-plus bankrupt financial system. Neither scheme can work, except to exterminate all, or most of the human race. (Malthusianism also often has the ugly habit of destroying its proponents first.) But, though this “new world order” will fail under any circumstances, what will succeed? From a physical-economic standpoint, the opportunity afforded by the merciless, “Masque of the Red Death”-like prompting of humanity to change its ways, by the coronavirus pandemic and its implications, has, for perhaps the first time since the successful LaRouche campaign for the SDI in 1983, brought mankind and its governments, face to face with self-development, or self-destruction. A world health platform, demanded by elected officials, medical personnel, clergy, military, and all persons interested in justice, whether for Palestine, the African continent, or the urban poor in nations all over the world, can overturn every axiom of geopolitics, can take exception to every “rule of law,” can reset “the Great Reset,” solely by forcing an insistence on the idea that the world needs more people, at higher standards of living, achieved even without and independent of the prior resolution of outmoded forms of conflict and division that have characterized the relationships among states up to now. The deeper enemy we are facing, as pernicious as with the Dionysians of the Great Reset, is Kantian pessimism, seen, for example, in the cynical reflections of University of Washington Prof. Karen Levy: “With COVID-19, thinking like a pathogen leads to an inevitable conclusion: Getting the vaccine out to everyone in the world as quickly as possible is not just an ethical imperative, but also a selfish one.” This will, and should, inspire no one. The antidote to this can be found in the optimism of genius. Karel Vereycken recounted in the 2013 article “The Secret of the Florentine Dome” that Antonio Tuccio Manetti (1423-1497), author of “The Life of Filippo Brunelleschi,” who had met Brunelleschi when alive, reported regarding the contest to build the Duomo at Florence: “Even more so since the construction masters were already worrying about the difficulty to have to build a vault that wide and so high: seeing its height and width, its weight, its buttressing and supports, arches, and other armatures, which all had to be raised from the ground, it looked in such a fashion that not only the effort seemed awful, but its realization properly impossible.” To those who invoked that impossibility, Brunelleschi sharply answered that the dome was a sacred building and that “God, for whom nothing is impossible, will not abandon us.” To start the project, he suggested to the wardens of the Opera del Duomo to organize an international conference and invite all the architects, engineers, and masons “as many one could find across Christendom.” So they did, and during that meeting, “From the words of Filippo, the wardens deduced the verdict that such a building so big and of such a nature could not be terminated and that it had been a naïveté, from those architects of the past and of those who conceived the whole project, to believe so. When Filippo said, contesting that wrong opinion, that it could be done, they all answered in chorus: ‘How will the centering [falsework] be done?’ but he insisted again that it could be built without such centering.” Lyndon LaRouche, in “The Issue of Mind-Set” remarked that “The case of Filippo Brunelleschi’s construction of the dome of the famous Cathedral of Florence, typifies the axiomatic sources of the achievements of the Renaissance as a whole. If one examines the nature of the problem which Brunelleschi solved, viewing this as would a physicist in the tradition of Leonardo, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, one is startled, at first, by the fact that, as early as the middle decades of the Fifteenth Century, the catenary was used, not merely as a form, but as a physical principle of curvature, to solve the otherwise insoluble problem of construction posed. Brunelleschi used a ‘hanging chain’ form, to guide the workmen in the construction. Other ruses of a principled nature, used by the same Brunelleschi, including camera oscura constructions, afford the modern investigator the means to peek inside the cognitive processes which the great architect mustered in the course of the most notable innovations used in his work.” Such a construction of a durable world order is the task of the moment. Recalling the Mind-set of LaRouche’s 1983 year of creativity, and its impact on the world, provides the standard, both of the American Presidency and of the dialogue among nations, to which we must aspire.

An article entitled “A Roadmap to Zero Emissions Healthcare” published in April, uses data from a 2019 Lancet article about health care and climate change, to raise concerns about the environmental “costs” of keeping people in good health. It is an obscenity that these themes are being drawn upon by UN climate leader Mark Carney and other institutions at this time of pandemic and dramatic healthcare deficits.It’s not just cement, motor vehicles, and air conditioners that are destroying the planet, according to these neo-Malthusian crusaders; surgery must be added to the list: “Surgical, obstetric, and anesthesia care is one of the major contributors to climate change within the health sector,” according to an article published this month in The Lancet scientific journal by doctors and researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They worry that the climate impact of current surgical practices will get worse as lifesaving procedures become accessible to the 5 billion people around the world, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, who currently can’t get them. “We do need to get more people surgical care,” says Dr. Aaron Bernstein, co-author of the article and interim director of the Center for Climate Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. “But if we do it in a model that has been developed in rich countries, it will break the climate — and we can’t afford that.” Globally, health care is responsible for about 4.6% of so-called greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2019 report in The Lancet. A quarter of that is from the U.S., despite it having 4% of the global population. “If the health sector globally were a country, it would be the fifth [largest] emitter of greenhouse gases,” says Susan Wilburn, international sustainability director at Health Care Without Harm, an organization working to reduce the environmental footprint of health care globally. The article zeroes in on surgical care, because it’s the most energy- and waste-intensive specialty in health care. Operating rooms can consume three to six times more energy per square foot than elsewhere in a hospital, according to another Lancet study. That’s because heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in operating rooms run on high, even when no patients are in them. The article says that if hospitals ventilated operating rooms only when they were occupied, this would significantly reduce energy consumption. Operating rooms also produce 20% to 30% of a facility’s waste, by some estimates, and a third of its biohazard waste, which must be disposed of specially. The use of certain anesthetic gases, such as nitrous oxide and desflurane, is another major source of greenhouse gases in operating rooms, according to the article. Anesthetics that are injected instead of inhaled, on the other hand, leave a minimal carbon footprint. Perhaps they will next propose that preventing the patient from breathing will further reduce future carbon emissions! “The easiest thing we can do is stop wasting so much,” says Dr. Jodi Sherman, associate professor of anesthesiology and of epidemiology in environmental health sciences at Yale University. “We waste a tremendous amount.”

May 12 (EIRNS)—Schiller Institute Press Release, May 12 FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT schiller@schillerinstitute.org Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute Founder and Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to the Syrian Presidency, Lead Off May 8 International ConferenceThe historic May 8th Schiller Institute International Conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm,” brought together leaders of institutions and governments from around the world to address the exceedingly dangerous global strategic crisis: a rush to confrontation between the world’s nuclear powers; a pandemic threatening to expand with a vengeance; mass starvation threatening dozens of millions in Africa and Asia; and a financial bubble of unprecedented scope which is already beginning to fissure. The conference was keynoted by Schiller Institute founder and Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and it is excerpted below. The full two-panel conference, with 19 speakers from Europe, Asia and the Americas, and two extended discussion sessions, is available here. Extensive transcripts will be published in the next two issues of Executive Intelligence Review. Interviews and/or video clips can be made available for your use. Lift All Unilateral Sanctions! Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche, and many of the speakers, developed in devastating detail, the danger of war over Ukraine; and highlighted the illegal and deadly unilateral sanctions policy of the U.S., pointing especially to Syria and Yemen. She emphatically called for overturning the Caesar Sanctions on Syria and lifting all unilateral sanctions amidst the devastating food crisis threatening the death of millions. The pandemic spike in India is an indication of the danger of the threat to all of a myriad of new mutations. The first panel was joined by, among other speakers, Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to the Syrian Presidency, speaking on the topic, “Restore International Law: Respect Syria’s Perfect Sovereignty” and Col. Richard H. Black (USA, aret.), former head of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Law Division, on “The Immorality of Sanctions: The Case of Syria.” Dr. Shaaban was the second speaker. She thanked Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche for the keynote address saying, “I thought while you were talking that I would love to carry this speech and circulate it the world over, because it is the antithesis of what Western colonial powers are doing. And I would like to say to you how I read that you, Helga, and the Schiller Institute look at humanity. You see humanity, see all of us as global brothers and sisters, while the imperial and colonial powers have always treated us or looked at us as second- or third- or fourth- or fifth-class citizens of the world. They continue to do that because they are only interested in looting our resources, and in making money for themselves while depriving our people of our own resources. I think your idea is great…. Thank you, Helga, for inviting me, always. I think this is the time to make the Schiller Institute a leading narrative, your narrative, to be a leading narrative in the world. I think most people everywhere need this, and want this, and are ready to join party with you and work with you for this noble cause you have been embracing for the last 50 years. Thank you very much.” Zepp-LaRouche: “The March of Folly: Can Mankind Still Extinguish the Now-Lit Fuse of Thermonuclear War?” She said in part: “We are conducting this Schiller Institute conference with an urgent appeal to as many people as possible to help to change the direction in which the political situation is going right now. Because we are on a course which, in a very short period of time—much shorter than most anybody probably realizes—we are on a course of the potential extinction of civilization. It’s not clear where the greater danger comes from: the danger of thermonuclear war, the danger of the pandemic going out of control in combination with world famine, or with the neo-Malthusian virus which has beset the brains of so many people. It is not clear if these neo-Malthusians are more eager to destroy industrial society or if they are simply willing instruments in aiding geopolitical confrontation with Russia and China. “Let’s start with the danger of thermonuclear war: it’s not just one trigger point, one strategic crisis. It is the overall tension between the United States, the so-called Global Britain, NATO, and also increasingly the European Union with Russia and China. It’s becoming so big that any one of the crises around the globe could become the trigger point. It could be a crisis with Russia over Ukraine going out of control, or with China over Taiwan. “It is alarming, and it should alarm all of you, now that more and more people, even such unlikely ones, as Henry Kissinger—who has been not exactly a friend of our organization (which has everything to do with his infamous NSSM-200 paper which he wrote when he was National Security Advisor in 1974), and that he was the enemy and adversary of everything Lyndon LaRouche and his movement stood for—but even Kissinger is now warning that the tension between the United States and China is becoming so all-engulfing for the whole world, that it could lead to an Armageddon-like military clash, extinguishing mankind ‘in a finite period of time.’ This he said about a week ago. “Then the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, in February, informed the Pentagon that they should change the likelihood of nuclear war from ‘not likely’ to ‘very likely.’ He repeated that before the Congress. On May 6, the New York Times had an article by Peter Beinart, who said that the Biden policy towards Taiwan is truly reckless, that we are very close to war, mainly because the Democrats had abandoned the One-China policy last year. “If it would come to such a war, given the fact that China has 39 air bases around the region of Taiwan, the United States has only two, the United States would lose any conventional war, and if it would think of using regional nuclear weapons, the danger is that it would go into an all-out global nuclear war…. “On March 21st, Adm. Philip Davidson, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command, said we must be absolutely prepared to fight and win such a war, should competition turn into conflict. Then, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. John Aquilino, who will replace Admiral Davidson, said we are much closer to such a war ‘than most think.’ And H.R. McMaster, the former National Security Advisor to Trump, said the most dangerous time in his view is the period between the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party later this year, and the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year. So, that is, indeed, very close.” Convene a P-5 Summit “What is to be done? There is a solution, but it is important to take all these problems at once. Because when you have a systemic crisis such as I have described, it is not enough to solve a little of this and a little bit of that crisis. We have to create a completely different system. President Putin, in January 2020, called for an urgent meeting of the Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council. I think that is what must absolutely happen now. Such a summit should be called because of the danger of World War III, a pandemic out of control, a world famine, the danger of a blow-out of the financial system, and it must lead to an immediate implementation of the following program. Build Modern Health Systems Everywhere “Given the pandemic, the only way to stop that and future pandemics, is to create a world health system, which means a modern health system in every single country. Because if you don’t stop the pandemic in even the poorest country on the planet, it will come back; there will be new variants, new strains, which eventually could make obsolete the vaccines which already have been distributed. So, we are in a race against time. We should do in every single country, what was done in Wuhan when the pandemic broke out. Build hospitals! This can be done with the Army Corps of Engineers, with aid organizations. In one week, one can build a hospital for 1,000 people. Then, these modern hospitals need well-educated doctors, nurses. You need lots of clean water; 2 billion people in the world have no access to clean water. You need lots of electricity; this cannot be done without infrastructure. So, the building of a modern health system in every country can and must be the beginning of overcoming the underdevelopment of the developing countries for good. “We have to have a program of global poverty alleviation, exactly as it was intended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he called for the Bretton Woods Agreements, which were never fully implemented because of his untimely death. But now, we need exactly that. It must start with global Glass-Steagall banking separation, which then must be followed by the creation of a Hamiltonian national banking system in every country. We need a credit system, which then can become a New Bretton Woods system. Then we can finance the extension of the New Silk Road into Southwest Asia. “The solution to overcome the death and starvation in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and other crisis areas is obvious. When President Xi Jinping was in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt in 2015, he offered to extend the New Silk Road into the entire region. That program—and the Schiller Institute has worked on a comprehensive program for the entire region—can be implemented if, in such a P-5 UN Security Council meeting, it is agreed, and then the neighbors of Southwest Asia—Russia, China, India—all work together, and the United States and European nations agree to cooperate in the reconstruction of this region that has been destroyed by these endless wars. This will then extend the New Silk Road with international cooperation from other countries. Japan and South Korea and other nations should all be involved in the reconstruction of Africa. A Human Future of Discovery and Development “Geopolitical confrontation can then be replaced with crash programs for the development of thermonuclear fusion power, in which major breakthroughs have occurred recently. Rather than extending geopolitical confrontation into space, we should have international cooperation to build a village on the Moon, and soon a city on Mars. “The Hubble Telescope has discovered that there are at a minimum 2 trillion galaxies. I would like you to really put your mind on that thought, and then think how stupid it would be that we, as a human species, who are the only species which can potentially be the immortal species because of our creative reason, that we would destroy ourselves in thermonuclear destruction. I think we should have the ambition not to be more stupid than the animals, because there is no animal species which would ever conduct such behavior.”

HARLEY SCHLANGER: Welcome to the Schiller Institute conference, “The Moral Collapse of the Trans-Atlantic World Cries Out for a New Paradigm.” I’m Harley Schlanger, and I will moderate the first panel, which is entitled “The March of Folly: Can Mankind Still Extinguish the Now-Lit Fuse of Thermonuclear War?”As we meet, the survival of the human race is imperiled as perhaps never before. We face the danger of a new world war, including the possible use of nuclear weapons; of a systemic breakdown of the real physical economy, which keeps more than 7-plus billion people alive, and the collapse of which bring with it famine and an out-of-control pandemic. But these threats do not arise from the so-called “malign intent” of Russia and China. Despite the accusation of the leaders of most governments and parties in the trans-Atlantic world who charge them with aggression against the so-called rules-based order. Nor do they come from so-called manmade climate change, being used to club nations into giving up their sovereign rights, to submit their nations and citizens to a deadly looting process enforced by a central bankers’ global dictatorship committed to radical population reduction. This is the intent of those who demand a submission to a rules-based order. The use of the U.S. military to impose a unilateral world order which rejects principles of international law in favor of the dictates of arbitrary rules which serve the narrow interests of the City of London and Wall Street. In our deliberations today, let’s be inspired by the words spoken by President John F Kennedy on June 10, 1963, shortly after the successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis which threatened to unleash a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In speaking for the adoption of a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Kennedy said: “What kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.” He continued saying that by directing our attention to our common interests, differences can be resolved. “For in the final analysis,” he concluded, “our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Four years later, Pope Paul VI summarized this view with his encyclical Populorum Progressio proclaiming, “Development is the new name for peace.” Achieving this has been the life’s work of the economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, and has been the mission adopted by the Schiller Institute since it was founded in 1984 by his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today, we have a distinguished panel of speakers representing many nations guided by this common goal. I will introduce them after the first speaker. But it’s most appropriate to begin with a keynote by the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s my honor to introduce Helga Zepp-LaRouche. HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I greet all of you wherever you may be around the world. I’m telling you that we are conducting this Schiller Institute conference with an urgent appeal to as many people as possible to help to change the direction in which the political situation is going right now. Because we are on a course which, in a very short period of time—much shorter than anybody is probably realizing—we are on a course of potential extinction of civilization. It’s not clear where the greater danger comes from; the danger of thermonuclear war, the danger of a pandemic going out of control in combination with a world famine, or with a neo-Malthusian virus which has beset the brains of so many people where it is not clear if they are more eager to destroy the industrial society or if they are willing instruments to the geopolitical confrontation against Russia and China. So, let’s start with the danger of thermonuclear war. It’s not just one trigger point, one strategic crisis. It is the overall tension between the United States, the so-called global Britain, NATO, and increasingly also the European Union with Russia and China. It’s becoming so big that any one of the crises around the globe could become the trigger point. If could be a crisis with Russia over Ukraine going out of control, or with China over Taiwan. It is alarming, and it should alarm all of you that now more and more people—even so unlikely ones like Henry Kissinger, who has been not exactly a friend of our organization, which has everything to do with his infamous NSSM-200 paper which he wrote when he was National Security Advisor in 1974. That he was the enemy and adversary of everything Lyndon LaRouche and his movement stood for. But even Kissinger is now warning that the tension between the United States and China is becoming so all-engulfing for the whole world that they could lead to an Armageddon-like military clash, extinguishing mankind in a finite period of time. This he said about a week ago. Then the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Charles Richard, recently in February, informed the Pentagon that they should change the likelihood of nuclear war from not likely to very likely. He repeated that in front of the Congress recently. Just two days ago, the New York Times had an article by one Peter Beinart, who said that the Biden policy towards Taiwan is truly reckless, that we are very close to war, mainly because the Democrats have abandoned the One-China policy already last year. Biden is now receiving envoys from Taiwan, as he did for his inauguration. Then, the article quotes Graham Allison, the historian who thinks that a danger of a Thucydides trap exists, by saying that people have to be sure that China would be more willing to go to war than accept losing Taiwan. In light of the history of China, this is very likely. If it would come to such a war, given that China has 39 air bases around the region of Taiwan, the United States has only two, the United States would lose any conventional war. If it would think of using regional nuclear weapons, the danger is that it would go into an all-out global nuclear war. I advise those people who don’t think that that is true, to read the papers by Ted Postol over the difference between conventional and thermonuclear war, where it is the logic that once you use one nuclear weapon, all will be used. And also to listen to what Tulsi Gabbard said recently in an interview with Tucker Carlson, where she said that to have this geopolitical confrontation with Russia is completely crazy. Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons which, in a conflict, would hit every U.S. city in less than 30 minutes. This would bring about excruciating death and suffering over the American people; millions would lose their lives, and flesh would be burned from their bones. That would be the end of the world, and this could come much sooner than anybody thinks. Also, the Australian press is warning that Taiwan may be a trigger for a catastrophic war, and that is not just a question of if, but when. That China has become the enemy for no other reason than it has dared to eclipse the U.S. as the most powerful economy. On March 21st, Admiral Philip Davidson, the head of the Indo-Pacific Command said we must be absolutely prepared to fight and win such a war, should competition turn into conflict. Then, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral John Aquilino, who will replace Admiral Davidson in his position, said we are much closer to such a war than most think. And [H.R.] McMaster, the former National Security Advisor to Trump basically said the most dangerous time in his view is the period between the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party later this year, and the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year. So, that is, indeed, very close. The Taiwan Defense Minister already announced that they will now mass produce long-range missiles capable of striking deep into the inside of the Chinese mainland. So, the situation around Taiwan could be the trigger point for a global war. But so could the situation over Ukraine. With the developments in Ukraine, you had an escalation in the recent years of an incredible demonization of President Putin. But it has nothing to do with Crimea, because as Putin correctly said, if it would not have been Ukraine, they would have found some other reason. The narrative of what is going on with Russia, Ukraine, Crimea is completely upside-down. It did not start with the so-called annexation of Crimea; it started with the EU association agreement for Ukraine at the end of 2013, which was rejected for good reasons. Then, that led quickly to the demonstrations on the Maidan, which escalated into the coup, leading to a Nazi coup in February 2014. As a consequence, in which coup Victoria Nuland, who is now again in a position in the State Department. Then you had the development where the people of Crimea voted to join Russia. You have right now [U.S. Secretary of State] Blinken and Nuland in Ukraine. This is a very dangerous game, because they’re there to further the building of U.S. bases in Ukraine to support the demand by the Ukrainians to join NATO. That is reaching then a point where Putin has recently said that people in the West should not cross red lines, because if it would occur, the response would be asymmetric, swift, and hard. Russia is a nuclear superpower, and this could lead, if it would be provoked to answer in such a way, to the annihilation of mankind. Scott Ritter, who warned that the “weapons of mass destruction” were a fake story in Iraq, recently commented on the Defender Europe 2021 large maneuvers, which are going on right now along the Russian border. He basically said that all that this demonstrates is that NATO is absolutely inferior compared to the Russian troops in a conventional way. That therefore, the danger would be that if it comes to a conflict, it could go nuclear. There was a RAND Corporation study in 2016 entitled “War with China; Thinking Through the Unthinkable.” They basically say it would be better to have the war with China now than in ten years, because the gap will close and China would probably win such a war later on. The same RAND Corporation had a study in 2019 called “Extending Russia; Competing from Advantageous Ground,” which is a 354-page piece in which they describe how one should overextend Russia economically, militarily, and propaganda-wise. Number one, conduct economic warfare. Hinder the oil exports; block export of natural gas; block the construction of pipelines, such as Nord Stream II; escalate sanctions; escalate the brain drain. Escalate the situation with Ukraine; bring lethal weapons to Ukraine; support the rebels in Syria; topple Lukashenko; increase the cost for Russia in the South Caucasus; go for color revolution in Moldavia. Discredit the election process in Russia, like Navalny; cause unrest in Russia, go for a color revolution. Put military bombers, missiles at the border to cause permanent stress for Russia. Provoke Russia into a costly arms race. If you listen to that so-called study, you have the exact script for about everything that happened in the last two years. This conference actually was caused to happen by the urgent appeal by Cardinal Mario Zenari from Syria. He has been issued a call saying that as a result of the combination of ten years of war in which the United States was allied with al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS—these are my words, not his—which was aimed to topple the legitimate elected government of Syria, the pandemic and the co-called Caesar sanctions, we have now a situation where more than 90% of the Syrian population are below the poverty line. I just should note that the Caesar sanctions are based on the same kind of fraud as we have seen used as a pretext for all of these endless wars, like the chemical weapons supposedly used by the Syrian government which was a fraud by the White Helmets; or the babies ripped out of incubators in 1991, which was a lie. Then you had the so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003. Yellow cake from Niger, but this was all a complete lie. Unilateral sanctions such as these Caesar sanctions are, from a standpoint of international law, completely illegal. We will hear about that from Professor Koechler shortly. The only kinds of sanctions which are allowed would be those which are agreed upon by the UN Security Council. Otherwise, unilateral sanctions are a form of warfare, which targets the poor, the old people, the children. It is the idea to drive the pain of the population so high because of lack of food and medicine, that eventually it will cause an uprising and conduct regime change. Brian O’Toole, who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former advisor to the U.S. Treasury, and he worked for the CIA, is an expert in so-called “behavior economics.” He said that this is a strategy to raise the pain meter—what an insane expression. For Russia, it would only be 10% of this pain meter, and it would be important to drive it up to 70% by cutting Russia off of Swift, the connection to the international financial system, and to cut off Sberbank from financial transactions. For Syria, a continuation of these Caesar sanctions means the deaths of many thousands, maybe millions of people. But the people who are conducting this say literally, “So what?” I’m not exaggerating! Madeline Albright said on a “60 Minutes” program with Leslie Stahl, that the half million children who died in Iraq as a result of the sanctions—these were children under the age of 5! She said, it’s a very hard choice, but the price was worth it. David Beasley, the head of the UN World Food Program, just made a documentary about the famine in Yemen, called “Hunger Ward” which I would urge everybody to watch. He showed how in Yemen, there were little girls with arms as thin as my finger. They had hollow eyes and their skin was like parchment because of the starvation process. But I think Mrs. Albright should have nightmares every single night where each of these 500,000 dying children from Iraq look at her and haunt her. Looking at her with their dying eyes, and this would continue until this woman has a human feeling. The situation is much worse, because according to the UN World Food Program, the new report they published, “2021 Global Report on the Food Crisis” says 55 nations are in extreme need of food. And Syria, because of the sanctions, the war, the depreciation of their pound, there is now a very high number of food insecure people. The food prices from December 2019 until 2020 increased by 236%. That means that all together in all of these nations—40 nations—34 million people are in acute danger of starvation in the coming months. Beasley, at the SIPRI—the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research—called on all nations to mobilize urgent support to avert mass deaths of millions of people. Actually, a number of people which is very quickly going to be as much as all of World War II deaths. He mentioned that the UN Security Council Resolution 2417 was passed unanimously in 2018, and that resolution very clearly that hunger cannot be used as a weapon of war. There are right now, 155 million people in acute food insecurity. These people are in countries like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, norther Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Zimbabwe. The COVID-19 pandemic in India has already officially caused 238,000 deaths. But according to experts, it is 5-10 times higher, because they count only the people who die in hospitals, not the people who die in the countryside. The few planeloads of aid, which are being sent by international countries, is just a drop in the ocean. The head of the African CDC said that they are horrified by looking at India, because most of the vaccinations which came to Africa was produce there, and now with the crisis exploding in India they are worried that no more vaccine is coming. It is also clear that we are looking at mass deaths in Brazil and many other places. If you look at this picture as a totality, and that is what we have to do, the chickens are coming home to roost. We are now at the exact point Lyndon LaRouche predicted in 1971 when Nixon destroyed the old Bretton Woods system and went on a course of monetary liberal policies. Lyndon LaRouche at that point said that if you continue on this course, it will come to a point where you are faced with the danger of a new depression, the danger of war, and the danger of a new fascism. My late husband was also absolutely correct when he warned already in 1973 that the IMF conditionalities would mean that new pandemics would come and that would eventually be a total threat to civilization. The financial system is about to blow. We are looking at a situation where, after the 2008 systemic crisis nothing was done to remedy the root causes. Just quantitative easing and pumping money by the trillions. Now we are looking at the potential of a hyperinflationary blow-out like it was in Germany in 1923. In 1923, the Reichsbank printed money to pay the war debt and the reparations. First you didn’t see much of it, but then in November 1923, it exploded. It was the complete expropriation of the life work of the people. Yesterday, Bank of America put out a report saying that we have just a transitionary hyperinflation. This is visible because all the commodity prices are going up, but that this will soon translate to an increase in consumer prices. A transitionary hyperinflation is as much as being a little bit pregnant. However, that hyperinflation is the necessary result of all of this policy of further speculation in the last period is known to all the big players. This is the real reason why they are betting to create one last super-bubble by going for the Great Reset, the great transformation of the decarbonization of the world economy, the Green New Deal. It is the illusion that if they pump now in the next ten years another $60 trillion into the financial system, that that would somehow save their earnings and their system. But it would just mean a gigantic transfer of wealth again from the poor to the rich. This is already on the horizon. It’s happening because the EU is implementing the Green New Deal, the Biden administration is doing it. While that only threatens the de-industrialization of the so-called advanced countries, for the developing countries it means mass death on top of the crises I already mentioned. The Indian Energy Minister, Mr. Singh, recently said that the Green deal may be OK for the industrialized nations, but absolutely not for the developing sector. Alone in Africa, 800 million Africans don’t have access to electricity. It would mean—and these are my words now—it would mean an absolute massive reduction of the population, and it is also clear that this is their intent. What is to be done? There is a solution, but it is important to take all these problems at once, because when you have a systemic crisis like what I’m describing with these different elements, it is not enough to solve a little of this and a little bit of that crisis. You have to create a completely different system. President Putin, in January 2020, called for an urgent meeting of the Permanent Five Members of the UN Security Council. I think that is what must absolutely happen now. Such a summit should be called because of the danger of World War III, a pandemic out of control, a world famine, the danger of a blow-out of the financial system. It must lead to an immediate implementation of the following program: Given the pandemic, the only way to stop that and future pandemics, is to create a world health system, which means a modern health system in every single country. Because if you don’t stop the pandemic in even the poorest country on the planet, it will come back; there will be new variants, new strains, which eventually could made obsolete the vaccines which already have been distributed. So, we are in a race against time. We should do in every single country what was done in Wuhan when the pandemic broke out. Build hospitals! This can be done with the Army Corps of Engineers, with aid organizations. In one week, one can build a hospital for 1000 people. Then, these modern hospitals need well-educated doctors, nurses. You need lots of clean water; 2 billion people in the world have no access to clean water. You need lots of electricity; this cannot be done without infrastructure. So, the building of a modern health system in every country can and must be the beginning of overcoming the underdevelopment of the developing countries for good. We have to have a program of global poverty elimination, exactly as it was intended by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he called for the Bretton Woods, which was never implemented because of his untimely death. But now, we need exactly that. It must start with a global Glass-Steagall banking separation which then must be followed by the creation of a Hamiltonian national banking system in very country. We need a credit system which then can become a New Bretton Woods system. Then we can finance the extension of the New Silk Road into Southwest Asia. The possibility to overcome the death and starvation in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, the solution is obvious. When President Xi Jinping was in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt in 2015, he offered to extend the New Silk Road into the entire region. That program, and the Schiller Institute has worked on a comprehensive program for the entire region, can be implemented in such a P-5 UN Security Council meeting. It is agreed, and then all the big neighbors of Southwest Asia—Russia, China, India—all work together and the United States and European nations agree to cooperate in the reconstruction of this region, which has been destroyed by these endless wars. Then, naturally, the New Silk Road with this international cooperation, including other countries like Japan, India, South Korea should all be involved in the reconstruction of Africa. We have to replace geopolitical confrontation with a crash program of cooperation for the development of thermonuclear fusion power, where in the recent period, major breakthroughs have occurred. Once we have fusion power, we will have a safe energy source for the whole human population, and we will also tackle the problem of limited raw materials, because you can separate isotopes with the fusion torch procedure and create new raw materials. We have to have international cooperation in space. Rather than extending geopolitical confrontation into space, we should have international cooperation to build a village on the Moon, and soon a city on Mars. We should listen to the head of the Mars mission and the head of the Energy Ministry of Abu Dhabi, Miss al-Amiri, who already some years ago made a beautiful speech where she stuck her finger in the air like this—please put on the video—people should look at what is at the end of her finger to see what the sky will tell them. Can you put on the video, please? [video] SARAH AL-AMIRI: The Hubble Space Telescope was pointed at a region that small [pointing her finger]. And it came up with this image. This image, the dots of light that you see in these images are not stars, they’re galaxies. There are hundreds of billions of stars in each one of those dots in that small region of sky that we look at. [end video] ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Now, the Hubble Telescope discovered that there are at a minimum 2 trillion galaxies. I would like you to really put your mind on that thought, and then think how stupid it would be that we, as a human species who are the only species which can potentially be the immortal species because of our creative reason. That we would destroy ourselves in a thermonuclear destruction. I think we should have the ambition not to be more stupid than the animals, because there is no animal species which would ever conduct such a behavior. Thank you.

Register for the May 8 Schiller Institute conference. European Conference Call Excerpt with Helga Zepp-LaRouche Tuesday, April 27, 2021 Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think we have to wake up the international population much more than even we have been doing so far, because in going through the intelligence in preparation for this phone call, when you are looking at the picture as a totality, it is absolutely horrifying. To start with what I think could be really a detonator of the situation, you remember that when Putin gave his speech on April 21 to the Federal Assembly, he said there are red lines which cannot be crossed, and then he said there was an assassination attempt against Lukashenko and a coup attempt against Belarus, and that that had really gone too far.So now the director of the Russian Federation Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, is saying that they are investigating the possible involvement of the U.S. government in the planning of a potential, supposed military coup in Belarus, and that sudden investigation of the plot of a military coup against Lukashenko is going on, and that the opposition politician Grigory Kostusev, and the political analyst Alexander Feduta, the lawyer Yuri Zenkovich, according to Lukashenko were involved in an assassination plan against him, and he accuses U.S. special services and U.S. leading forces to be responsible. And also quoting the head of the Belarus KGB, the project plot was planned for the summer, June or July; the military coup was planned for May 9 in Minsk, during the parade for Victory Day, and that this would have been sponsored from abroad. Then according to a report in the Belarus TV station ONT, the implication is that Michael Carpenter, one of the most important foreign policy advisers of U.S. Vice President Biden and director for Russia at the National Security Council; afterward he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control, was a key figure behind the supposed coup attempt in Belarus, and that next week more interesting new details about this story would be made known. I find this absolutely incredible, because we published in the recent period, a lot of the activity of Michael Carpenter, who is among other things, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He was in the in the Obama administration, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control; director for Russia in the National Security Council; and he’s now Managing Director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, he made some waves when he accompanied the Ukrainian neo-Nazi then-Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Andriy Parubiy on a trip to Washington, and when he was questioned concerning Parubiy’s connection to the Nazi movement which was involved in the Ukraine coup in 2014, he defended Parubiy as a patriot and fantastic leading personality. Carpenter was also together with Biden, the author of an article in Foreign Affairs publication of the Council on Foreign Relations for January/February 2018 “How To Stand Up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies” He’s obviously close to Biden. I find this absolutely incredible, because if this turns out to be the case, we could be closer to World War III, than anybody realizes: Because this is exactly the kind of stuff which happens in the forefront of world wars. And we should also note the fact that, today, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin announced on April 26 that China will support Russia in front of the sharpened Western sanctions. He said: “China has all along maintained that differences should be properly resolved through consultation as equals on the basis of mutual respect. We reject the approach of wantonly resorting to unilateral sanctions or threat of sanctions…. China and Russia are comprehensive strategic partners of coordination in the new era. We will continue to understand and support each other in safeguarding our respective sovereignty, security and development interests.” And we should keep in mind that when Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov met in the Chinese city of Guilin on March 23, they were already talking about such an increase in the global governance partnership between Russia and China. Then one should also remember that just last week, on April 19, the U.S. Strategic Command announced what they called a “preview of the Posture Statement Review,” it’s addressed to U.S. Congress every year, and there they tweet: “Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.” StratCom is the same thing, what the Commander Adm. Charles Richard had told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, last week [April 20] that the Chinese nuclear capabilities are advancing so rapidly that it’s not worth to update it, because it’s going so fast that each new report is outdated; and that a portion of China’s nuclear arsenal has been recently primed for ready use, that is launch on warning. And then, we should remember that Tulsi Gabbard had warned against this kind of anti-Russia brinksmanship, where she had in the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show [April 12], said that “such a war would come at a cost beyond anything that we can really imagine.” An entirely accurate picture of “hundreds of millions of people dying and suffering seeing their flesh burned from their bones.” She is one of the few people who are warning about that, but it is an absolute scandal that there is no discussion. However, I will come to that in a second. I think there are indirect indications that some people in Europe are slowly waking up, that this confrontation against Russia is insane. But one should see this, what I just reported about the accusation concerning the possible plot against Belarus, also in the context of the absolute increased tension with Czechia, where now, after President Milos Zeman, who is generally reasonable concerning Russia—he had been attending the Rhodes Conference several times—in any case, he had said that the Czech secret services would know that there was no Russian involvement in this 2014 blowup of this ammunition depot [in Vrbetice]. Now, as a result of his saying that, the leader of the Czech parliament is investigating the possibility of a suit against Zeman for high treason, because supposedly he would have revealed state secrets in this speech; and he or some other speaker announced that there is already a collection of signatures on a petition to the Senate, a constitutional complaint that he was being responsible for treason. Obviously, this story was at the bottom of why the 60 Russian—that’s not a little, I mean, there’s almost nobody left—60 Russian diplomats have been expelled from the Czech Republic. And then you have a similar process going on with Poland. So naturally the hand of the British is visible: Chatham House had an article on that story of the 2014 explosion in the Czech ammunition depot, in which it states that this is the key issue to which Europe must respond, that the failure to do so would be inexcusable and be highly dangerous. [“Europe Must Admit Russia Is Waging War,” And they say that these are the same Russians who were responsible for the Salisbury poison attack on the Skripals in 2018, and this would be tantamount to an act of state terror, on the territory of a NATO and EU member state. So, Lavrov responded to that, by basically saying, this indeed the territory is where the EU should investigate this. And he said that Zeman’s statements were absolutely reasonable, but the attack on him means that “those who make such statements have already decided everything for themselves, decided that there are no alternative explanations other than the guilt of Russia.” Also as part of this insane war-mongering environment, Politico reports that U.S. spy agencies are now looking to declassify more intelligence on Russia and China’s “malign behavior,” and there is a memo signed by 9 of the 11 U.S. military four-star commanders, demanding that more intelligence for the information war against Russia and China should be published, that the world must know what Russia and China are doing. I think if you look at this, it’s really hair-raising: If you have the accusation that Russian and Belarus secret services that the U.S. is involved, and they’re naming this guy Michael Carpenter—I have not had the time to talk to the U.S. before making this briefing, but I think there is a story behind it, which either it turns out to be true, and then it’s really serious and extremely dangerous; or it’s some fake, which I doubt very much that you would joke with such stuff—I just want to say that this is extremely alarming for the state of affairs. Now, the reason why I think that some Europeans are waking up, is because, for a two days or so, the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has slightly modified his tone, saying there cannot be a continuation of the confrontation with Russia; and in contrast to what Green Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock is saying, who blasts Russia and China, and is on a complete confrontation course, and she is the invited guest of the conference by the Atlantic Council on May 5. But Maas is calling for de-escalation, and so is Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who, in an interview with Neue Zürcher Zeitung said that he’s against more sanctions against Russia, that there must be a de-escalation, and that peace in Europe is possible with Russia, and not against it. So, I think we should try to talk to many people and get a reason, what is really the perception in Europe about this state of affairs. Because if there would be any kind of escalation, it would be nuclear, because the U.S. forces and the NATO forces in Europe will not be involved in a war against Russian forces—that’s a complete joke—and the whole discussion about “low-yield nuclear weapons,” the modernization of nuclear weapons, I think it would affect European countries immediately, and it would be the end of Europe: That’s what we should really realize…. OK, so I will not go through a whole plethora of other subjects, because I think what I said in the beginning is the most worrisome, and that means that our upcoming conference on May 8 is more urgent than ever before, to really get a resistance against the war danger, against the sanctions, against all of these policies, which can only mean a disaster as the outcome, and we should really try to convince people that we need a moral resistance against this kind of decadence which could very well be the beginning of the hours and days before World War III. So, I think we really need a mobilization: I know people have all reasons why we are overworked, and this and that, but I think in light of what I said in the beginning, it is really horrifying. And people have to wake up, because it doesn’t register! It does not register! People have been numbed, and become so indifferent, that if we don’t break through that, I think the outcome will be a disaster. So I can only say that we have already some very interesting speakers: I hope to be able in a day or two, to put together a preliminary list of speakers and titles, which we will put out as soon as it is together. But it shapes up already as very interesting, both on the strategic crisis, and also on the continuation of the work of the Committee of the Coincidence of Opposites. So we should really go in all out effort to build this conference as a platform for anybody who wants to have a voice of reason and discuss solutions.

With the Ukraine crisis careening rapidly towards a strategic showdown, President Joe Biden called President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to propose that the two leaders hold “a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months to discuss the full range of issues facing the United States and Russia,” according to a White House read-out. The intent would be for “the United States and Russia to pursue a strategic stability dialogue on a range of arms control and emerging security issues.”Even as Biden was speaking with Putin, his emissary, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, was in Brussels egging on Ukraine into a flight-forward demand to join NATO immediately, which all sides know is a tripwire for Russia. At the same time, the U.S. has deployed two warships into the Black Sea, which Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov described as a provocation “designed to test Russia’s nerves.” He warned that U.S. military support for Kiev is turning Ukraine into a “powder keg,” and that “if there is any aggravation, we of course will do everything to ensure our security and the safety of our citizens.” What more is behind the Biden-Putin phone call is unclear at this writing. But two things are clear: 1) that the Ukraine flashpoint and the broader war danger are driven by the systemic collapse of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system, which has also unleashed a pandemic, famine, and mass unemployment across the planet; and 2) that no solution for any single crisis will work, unless the entire civilizational collapse is addressed and reversed. “I think it is dawning on more and more relevant people that we are looking at a potential complete and utter failure of civilization,” Schiller Institute founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated today. “You cannot respond to any one crisis, or collapse, or danger, as an individual phenomenon; you have to really address the entire picture as one. Because either we can catalyze some moral response from people who are willing to recognize that what is going on is a civilizational collapse, or else I think we are on a short road to disaster.” Zepp-LaRouche added: “I find it quite remarkable that this subject of a civilizational failure is becoming an issue among numerous important people, the most recent one being UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who yesterday reviewed the global response to the COVID-19 crisis and the situation of world famine, poverty, and unemployment, and he told a gathering of the UN ECOSOC that no element of the multilateral response has gone as it should. He said that last year more than 3 million people died of Covid, 120 million have fallen into extreme poverty, and the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs have been lost. And the crisis is far from being over. He said that the crisis is ‘putting multilateralism to the test, and so far, we have failed.’ He added that a complete paradigm shift was needed.” Zepp-LaRouche went on to draw a moral line in the sand: “You have these absolutely incredible pictures of children dying right before the world’s eyes in Yemen and elsewhere, but that doesn’t stop the richest people in the world from having made a $5 trillion increase in their wealth in the last year. How can a Bezos or a Gates or all of these other creeps like Soros, how can they live with themselves, when they know that their mass of wealth is built on the corpses of so many millions of people? I think we should say it that way,” she insisted. She urged LaRouche movement organizers to not be diplomatic, but to get under people’s skin. “I think anybody who sees the combination of the war danger escalating, the famine killing millions of people in several countries, COVID raging—they must react. And against this, the leading elites are showing they are utterly incapable of dealing with this crisis.” “But I’m convinced that this fight can be won,” Zepp-LaRouche concluded, “because it beats the alternative.” The old paradigm is crashing, but if we do our job right, a new paradigm can be won, she stated. But to do that, “I think that the moral question needs to be addressed.”

In an interview with China Radio International on April 8th, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke positively of yesterday’s phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. These are two important nations, and stability and progress are useful. Zepp-LaRouche expressed her agreement with Merkel’s opposition to the notion of blocs, which are a form of the geopolitical thinking that led to the two world wars of the 20th century. This stance by Merkel can have a positive impact on the rest of the EU.“Where would the world be as a whole, without the rise of China?” Zepp-LaRouche asked, pointing to the victory for mankind of bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. China’s economic growth despite the Covid pandemic is an important positive development for the world. Although there is a mixed situation of China relations among the EU member states themselves, the situation with the EU bureaucracy in Brussels is that it unfortunately follows the policies of London and Washington, such as in imposing sanctions on China over Xinjiang. The EU is in a terrible state. It failed to handle the Covid crisis. It stands to gain significantly with cooperation with China. Some Europeans are still looking at China as though it were still in the Cultural Revolution, rather than after the results of the Reform and Opening Up. Since China does not pose a threat to Europe, why would Europe need the U.S. as a guarantor of its security? NATO is not providing for the security of Europe, but rather quite the opposite, by carrying out repeated troop exercises towards the borders of Russia. Confrontation is no path forward. On the Biden administration, Zepp-LaRouche said that she had seen nothing positive from the new U.S. administration with regard to Europe. Biden has continued sanctions against Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Europe and is pushing Europe towards an alliance against Russia and China. Europe must support its own independence. A world health system is desperately needed, as new Covid variants emerge, possibly overcoming the immunity conferred by the vaccines already developed. This requires the necessary infrastructure to support health, and the urgent development of the underdeveloped parts of the world.

The U.S. Army has completed yet another document outlining how it’s preparing for, if not permanent war, at least for a permanent state of confrontation with Russia and China, in the name of “deterring” “great power conflict.” The document, entitled “The Army in Military Competition: Chief of Staff Paper #2” (Chief of Staff Paper #1 was “Army Multi-Domain Transformation, released and reported last week), makes the case for the service’s role in great power competition short of war with Russia and China.”Winning matters," the document says, " and a streak of continual successes in activities from humanitarian assistance to combat operations makes a powerful statement."“I want all readers to understand that military competition is an ‘infinite game,’” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville wrote in the preface. “We can define winning in competition in many ways: deterring conflict, upholding our interests, remaining the security partner of choice, keeping allies and partners free from coercion and subversion, and discouraging adversaries from malign actions because they know that these acts will not succeed. What we must remember is a win today is an opening for new competition activities tomorrow.” In other words, competition is neverending. War, in fact, if it comes to that, is just one form of competition in a continuum of competitions. “Military activities during competition can be either defensive or offensive; lethal or non-lethal; unilateral or multilateral; employ conventional, irregular, and special operations forces from each of the military services in multiple domains,” McConville argues. “Armed conflict is one element of … the competition continuum”—which includes even “general state conflict.” A constant component of the “continuum of competition” is the “narrative”, and in that narrative, reputation is everything. “A reputation for strength and reliability is a significant competitive benefit that might cause adversaries to seek less ambitious objectives or, in some instances, to choose not to compete at all and seek cooperation instead,” the document reads. “The Army contributes to narrative competition by being a lethal, competent, credible force and being recognized as such by key audiences among allies and partners as well as adversaries,” the paper states. “Simply being a world-class force and demonstrating that quality through successful operations conducted in a manner consistent with institutional values fosters a positive reputation for the U.S. Army,” the document goes on. For the Army, “maintaining high standards and being a partner of choice for military education, exercises, capacity building and equipment sales” is important to winning in narrative competition, according to the paper. The document is clearly an exercise in self-delusion, among other things, in that it makes no reference to the fact that Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya are all in chaos as a result of U.S. or U.S.-led military interventions. No narrative will cover these failures with a story of a “competent, credible force” though it has proven to be lethal to an untold number of civilians.

Today the regular Friday briefing by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was an extraordinarily hot occasion, in which U.S. policy, the CIA in particular, was called out for conspiracy to create the Uyghur human rights “issue” in Xinjiang with deliberate intent to contain China, and similar frauds were concocted and carried out in Iraq and Syria. Spokeswoman Hua Chunying, director of the ministry’s Department of Information, conducted the proceedings. Before the regular press briefing began, a video of Daniel Dumbrill was shown, delivering remarks at an event titled, “Genocide in Xinjiang,” shown on a Discovery Zoom Panel.Then Hua Chunying announced, “I’d like to show you one more short video,” and played a clip of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (ret.). Below is her full statement, taken from the Ministry posting today. Note that, during the tense Q&A which followed, she expressed special appreciation for the statement released on March 23 by Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche and international co-signers, “Declaration of China Experts from all over the World.” HUA CHUNYING: “We’ve just watched this video clip together. I wonder what you think of it. The speaker is Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and retired U.S. Army Colonel. He was speaking at the Ron Paul Institute in August 2018 on the threefold purposes of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, one of which is to contain China. He said undisguisedly that ‘the third reason we were there [in Afghanistan] is because there are 20 million Uyghurs [in Xinjiang]. The CIA would want to destabilize China and that would be the best way to do it, to foment unrest and to join with those Uighurs in pushing the Han Chinese in Beijing from internal places rather than external.’ [Note that Wilkerson and the Ron Paul Institute are outspokenly opposed to the”endless wars," and he was likely not “confessing” to bad acts, but “exposing” the bad acts of others. Hua’s words are nonetheless deadly accurate—ed.] “Doesn’t it feel like a déjà vu? In an April 2019 speech at Texas A&M University, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasted, ‘we lied, we cheated, we stole. … We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.’ This is what the U.S. has said and done. “In 2003, the U.S. launched military strikes against Iraq on the grounds that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties and more than 1 million homeless. Years later, the U.S. admitted that the evidence of Iraq’s holding weapons of mass destruction was nothing more than a small tube of white laundry powder. “In 2018, the U.S., the U.K., France and some other countries launched air strikes on Syria, claiming that the Syrian government forces used chemical weapons against the Syrian people. The air strikes led to hundreds of thousands of casualties and displacement of innocent civilians. But the evidence of the so-called use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government turned out to be nothing more than a staged video directed by the White Helmets, a group funded by U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies. “In 2019, during the disturbance over proposed legislative amendments in Hong Kong, the CIA worked hand in glove with National Endowment for Democracy to sponsor, instigate and even commanded anti-China, destabilizing forces in Hong Kong to launch vandalizing, looting and arson attacks, and storm the Legislative Council building in the name of fighting for democracy and freedom in an attempt to spark a ‘color revolution’ in Hong Kong . “Now, the U.S. and its several Western allies are targeting the pure and white Xinjiang cotton. They imposed sanctions on relevant Chinese individuals and entity over the false accusation of the sensational ‘crimes’ of ‘forced labor,’ ‘forced sterilization’ and even ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang. “However, as admitted by the former U.S. official in the video clip you watched, the so-called Uyghur issue in Xinjiang is just a strategic conspiracy with an attempt to disrupt China from within and contain China. In this ‘play’ staged by the U.S., some politicians and media outlets in the U.S. and its ally countries played a very disgraceful role. Some of them colluded with anti-China forces to scrupulously pursue rumor-mongering and smearing campaigns against China with unfounded pretexts. And some, out of ideological prejudice, would rather believe in lies concocted by a handful of anti-China elements than listen to the voice of the 25 million people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang and face squarely the basic facts of development and progress in Xinjiang. They are full of righteous indignation in ‘defending’ human rights in Xinjiang by citing some so-called ‘credible’ witnesses or information. Now, after watching this video of Lawrence Wilkerson, will they believe in the words of their government official or continue to trust those clumsy actors of the play? “Facts have proved time and again that the Xinjiang issue is by no means about ethnicity, religion or human rights, but an issue of fighting separatism, terrorism and interference. The U.S. has crafted the so-called Xinjiang issue, not because it cares for the Uyghur people. Otherwise, why did it attack Muslim countries under the pretext of counter-terrorism following the September 11 attack, leading to deaths and family separations of tens of millions of Muslims? And why did they put in place the one and only ‘Muslim ban’ in the world and discriminate against and persecute Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the U.S.? Their true intention is to undermine China’s security and stability and stop China from growing stronger. “We solemnly inform the U.S. side that today’s China is neither Iraq nor Syria, still less the late Qing Dynasty downtrodden by the Eight-Power Allied Forces. China is open and above board. All malicious lies and rumors against China will fall apart before facts and truths. We have full resolution, determination and capability to firmly defend national sovereignty, security, dignity and honor. “My friends, I believe you will make a clean cut with all the lies and disinformation about Xinjiang after watching this video clip. Let the curtain fall on this U.S.-staged play.”

Mainstream headlines over the past 24 hours screamed “Russia, Russia, Russia,” all over again: “U.S. Intelligence Report Says Russia Attempted to Interfere in 2020 Election” (CNN); “Putin Targeted People Close to Trump in Bid to Influence 2020 Election, U.S. Intelligence Says” (Washington Post); “Russia Tried to Help Trump Win 2020 Election” (EUobserver). The just-declassified “Intelligence Community Assessment of Foreign Threats to the 2020 U.S. Federal Elections” asserts that the “IC,” as they like to call themselves, has determined, with “high confidence,” that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.”On cue, President Joe Biden this morning declared to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he believes Putin “is a killer,” but he “will pay a price” for this. What price? “You’ll see shortly…. I’m not going to announce what I’m doing, but he’s going to understand that it’s not free,” he replied. Wiser U.S. citizens will recognize this report as another example of how, since the days of Truman, we have elected U.S. governments which come and go, but so far, our British-serving “military-intelligence complex” continues undisturbed. This “IC Assessment” just released by Biden’s Director of National Intelligence is the declassified version of the classified report produced on Jan. 7, 2021, under the Trump administration, by the same “IC” which hounded President Donald Trump for his entire administration. Furthermore, the case against Russia is pivoted around the absurd charge that Ukrainian legislator Andriy Derkach was acting as a Russian agent, when he released audiotapes in 2020 of then-VP Joe Biden muscling then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to dump Ukraine’s Attorney General Viktor Shokin, in order to protect the Ukrainian oil company Burisma for which Hunter Biden worked. In brief, Derkach had gone after a political opponent, Poroshenko, long before the 2020 election, on corruption inside Ukraine—which Biden was part of. He would have had to censor himself about internal corruption in order to “not interfere” with the 2020 election. Yet the IC report asserts: “We assess that Putin had purview over the activities of Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who played a prominent role in Russia’s election influence activities … revolv[ing] around a narrative—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine. Russian intelligence services relied on Ukraine-linked proxies and these proxies’ networks—including their U.S. contacts—to spread this narrative to give Moscow plausible deniability of their involvement.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced today that Russia’s Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov “has been summoned to Moscow for consultations in order to analyze what needs to be done in the context of relations with the United States.” Zakharova emphasized in her short statement that Russia’s concern is to discuss what Russia might do to prevent U.S.-Russian relations, already in a blind alley for some time, from “irreversibly” deteriorating:“The new U.S. administration took office about two months ago and the symbolic 100-day mark is not too far away, which is a good occasion for trying to appraise what Joe Biden’s team has managed to do and where it was not very successful. The most important thing for us is to identify ways of rectifying Russia-U.S. relations, which have been going through hard times as Washington has, as a matter of fact, brought them to a blind alley. We are interested in preventing an irreversible deterioration in relations, if the Americans become aware of the risks associated with this. “This is what we will talk about during the consultations that the Foreign Ministry and other relevant agencies will hold with the Russian Ambassador to the United States.” Earlier in the day, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had responded sharply to the “absolutely unfounded” charges that Russia, under orders of President Putin personally, had interfered in U.S. 2020 election on behalf of Donald Trump, as claimed in the U.S. Intelligence Community’s bogus “assessment” of foreign interference in those elections issued on March 16. The report provides “no proof,” but is based on files “far from being of high quality … most likely, as an excuse to put the issue of new sanctions against our country on the agenda,” Peskov charged. “This line is harming the already ailing Russian-U.S. relationship… [and] is far from encouraging certain efforts, the manifestation of at least some political will to normalize these relations.”

Since the time of the February release of the EIR Special Report, “The Great Leap Backward: LaRouche Exposes the Green New Deal,” to spur action to defeat the Malthusian policy of genocide called variously the Green (New) Deal, the Great Reset, and Stakeholder Capitalism, there are now certain important initiatives of opposition. In the U.S. on March 8, Missouri plus 11 other states filed suit in federal court, to block President Biden’s Executive Orders mandating sweeping green “reset” policies—opposing both their harmful content, and their mode of enforcement by unlawful executive decree. The lawsuit’s arguments are straightforward.First, the lawsuit charges that the green policies will cause deep damage to the states involved and nationwide, by cutting manufacturing, suppressing agriculture, decreasing energy supply and reliability, impoverishing people and other destructive impacts, now and for decades to come. Secondly, the suit charges that the White House does not have the authority to declare policy in these areas; only Congress has the power and responsibility. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche today observed the importance of this initiative internationally. “This is a major break,” to be used against the green onslaught. Initiatives for the public good, in particular, should be made in Europe, ground zero for the abominable EU Green Deal, and for parallel programs in Britain, host to the next UN Climate Summit in November in Glasgow. The lawsuit charges that Biden’s Executive Order 13990, titled, “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science To Tackle the Climate Crisis,” wrongfully issues binding numbers for the “social cost” of greenhouse gases to be then used in federal regulations as an excuse to reduce essential economic activity. One section of the lawsuit states what is at stake, domestically and worldwide: “If the Executive Order stands, it will inflict hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of damage to the U.S. economy for decades to come. It will destroy jobs, stifle energy production, strangle America’s energy independence, suppress agriculture, deter innovation, and impoverish working families….” Moreover, the suit charges that “U.S. agricultural and energy production—which these actions [the Biden orders] would stifle—have global benefits … which enrich the entire world, and yet the Biden Administration gave them little or no weight in its calculation of the ‘social cost’ of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen oxide.” The leader of the legal initiative is Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a likely Republican Party candidate for U.S. Senate, and the other states likewise have Republican Party governments, but this is not a party question, nor a mere “issue.” The co-plaintiffs are core states of the Farmbelt—Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Montana, Ohio, and Indiana, along with Missouri, plus Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah. The defendants include not only President Biden, but 10 federal departments, especially Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, Interior, and similar agencies. Another action forcefully opposing the global green “great leap backward” comes from Russia. On March 2, President Vladimir Putin held a major national meeting on the significance of coal. With all the relevant ministerial leaders present, and leaders from mining, transportation, industry, and others, Putin reviewed the economic geography and goals involved. Russia produces about 400 million tons a year, from five major regions, where some 11 million people live. He stated that half of the output is exported, and very important to the Asian Pacific region. He called for increasing coal shipments eastward from the Kuznetsk Basin by 30% between now and 2024. Putin commented pointedly about the recent energy failure in the United States, in apt remarks about how “adjustments” in energy policies should be made when needed, as they are being made in Russia. He said, “As for the long-term prospects of the global coal market beyond the current decade, I know that there are different forecasts in this regard. It is no secret that some of them suggest a significant contraction…. We also know what is happening with this. Texas froze because of the cold weather. And the windmills had to be thawed in ways that are far from environmentally friendly. Maybe this will also cause adjustments.” Meantime, the backdrop to these positive moves to defend and expand essential economic activity, is the fact that the monetarist financial system itself is crumbling and in urgent need for Glass-Steagall type financial reorganization. An indicative event in Germany is the recent failure of the Greensill Bank in Bremen. Some 50 municipal depositors, e.g., in Giessen, are in the lurch for funds they need for city infrastructure and operations. Zepp-LaRouche stressed today that in this context of imminent financial crash and the green onslaught of self-destruction of national economies, the continued pursuit of geopolitics will inevitably lead to war. There is no alternative but to get to a new paradigm. In light of this, the upcoming international Schiller Institute conference is a critical point of intervention. Spread the opportunity. Spread the momentum! It is March 20-21, titled, “World at a Crossroad: Two Months Into the New U.S. Administration.”

Press statement by Helga Zepp-LaRouche Feb. 24, 2021—Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and international leader of the international Schiller Institute and widow of the renowned American economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, announced today that, through counsel, she has issued a letter to the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) and its Treasurer, Barbara Boyd, demanding that they “immediately cease and desist, both now and in the future” from “using Mr. LaRouche’s name, likeness, and potentially other confusingly similar terms.” The letter states that such use “is likely to cause confusion among consumers since they may believe that you [Boyd] (as an individual), LPAC, and/or the goods and services being offered are somehow associated with, licensed by, or authorized by our Client [Helga Zepp-LaRouche].” Among the remedies required are that Boyd and LPAC “Immediately take all necessary actions to change the name of your political action committee, and the name of any Affiliated Entities, to one that does not include the term ‘Lyndon,’ ‘LaRouche,’ or any formative or iteration thereof, and agree to refrain from using the infringing terms now and in the future on any website, company e-mails, letter head, advertisements, or other marketing literature or correspondence.” To provide the background and context for this action, Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche issued the following statement:“What had been since 2004 the official website of the political action committee founded by my late husband Lyndon LaRouche, the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC), has had its content taken over by a group of individuals associated with Barbara Boyd, the Treasurer of that PAC, in a direction which I consider contrary to the central policies that my husband stood for. While my husband was still alive, he was responsible for the overall policy direction of the PAC. But since he passed away in February 2019, Mrs. Boyd and her associates, without my permission, have taken over the content of the website and the PAC’s activities as a whole and have embarked on a path that I believe misrepresents both my and Mr. LaRouche’s positions. “My requests for the PAC to adhere to the policies of the LaRouche movement and to not associate the LaRouche name with policies that were inconsistent with our views, which started to occur within the PAC immediately after the death of Mr. LaRouche, were rebuked to such an extent that Mrs. Boyd and a group of individuals sharing her views issued a document in November 2020 proclaiming their ‘irrevocable’ independence from the leadership of the LaRouche movement, myself included, founded by my husband over 50 years ago. “While paying lip service to some of Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas, and using video footage of him, in reality the political positions of the PAC increasingly diverged from the policies of the LaRouche movement and my late husband by, for example, excluding any substantive evaluation of the international strategic situation, in favor of focusing almost entirely on internal U.S. politics, principally on issues that were in line with the policies of Donald Trump. They increasingly failed to publish articles and videos that were critical of Trump on topics on which Lyndon LaRouche had personally frequently criticized Trump, such as his praise of the Wall Street financial bubble; the anti-China policies that came to dominate his presidency; and so on. For example: “In a Jan. 26, 2021 video posted on the LPAC site under the headline ‘Make Impeachment Drive Backfire, Build Movement to Rescue Republic,’ Barbara Boyd stated: ‘If you believe they [people] are beasts and that you can have a social credit system, which is really what we’re putting into place here with the cancel culture—if you behave certain ways, you get social credits for doing x, y, z, and w; if you’re nasty or make stupid comments, or step out of line, you get negative credits. That’s what they do in China. That’s what they do in any totalitarian society.’ “These positions reflect the beliefs of Mrs. Boyd, not Mr. LaRouche or the LaRouche movement. I disagree fully with that characterization of China, and Lyndon LaRouche expressed beliefs to the contrary of this characterization repeatedly throughout his life. “As the mischaracterizations of Mr. LaRouche’s political positions grew, I and the vast majority of the members of the LaRouche movement, both in the United States and internationally, felt we had no other choice than to support the creation of a new organization and associated website: ‘The LaRouche Organization’ (TLO), founded in December 2020, to ensure Mr. LaRouche’s name and likeness are only associated with his true policies and positions. The difference between TLO and the PAC becomes clear if, as one example, one compares the intention expressed in the TLO founding statement ‘Who We Are,’ which says: “‘The sole purpose of The LaRouche Organization (TLO) is the dissemination of the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche and the spread of his life’s work, his analytical and scientific method of thinking, with the intention of realizing the solutions he offered to the many crises now facing mankind.’ “Contrast this to the February 14 ‘marching orders’ expressed on the LPAC site under the rubric ‘Your Role in the “New Politics”’: ‘Do battle for the Republican Party; force the traitors and the “weak ones” out, and restore it to the tradition of Abraham Lincoln.’ “Mrs. Boyd and her associates launched a redesigned website for the PAC in February 2021, which notably excludes two pages or topics which were formerly there: “First, the extremely rich documentation of the 40 years of organizing activities that Lyndon LaRouche and his international associates were involved in across five continents of the planet. Intentionally or not, I believe that removing that history gives the false impression that Mr. LaRouche was only concerned about matters in the U.S. This negates his passionate commitment to mankind as a whole. “Second, the new PAC website also omits the record of the role of Mr. LaRouche and his international movement in the evolution of a new paradigm around the New Silk Road. Mr. LaRouche wrote numerous economic programs for Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe beginning in the 1970s, and he spent a good portion of his life working and campaigning in and for the development of these countries. “Mrs. Boyd and her associates have every right to establish a political action committee to express the views of Mrs. Boyd; but I believe they do a grave disservice to the late Lyndon LaRouche by misrepresenting — by commission and omission — his views by associating his name with their endeavor. For all of these reasons, we have hired legal counsel to stop all use of Lyndon LaRouche’s name and likeness by the PAC and to preserve the integrity of his vast work.” For further information: press@laroucheorganization.com or (551) 209-3978

The website of the United Arab Emirates’s Space Agency answers the question, “Why Are We Exploring Mars?” succinctly: “The red planet has captured human imagination for centuries. Now, we are at a junction where we know a great deal about the planet, and we have the vision and technology to explore further. Mars is an obvious target for exploration for many reasons. From our pursuit to find extraterrestrial life to someday expand human civilization to other planets, Mars serves as a long-term and collaborative project for the entire human race.” In a fascinating interview with Space.com on Feb. 8, the day before orbital insertion, U.A.E. Space Agency chair and Minister for Advanced Sciences Sarah al-Amiri described how Hope was designed for its mission as “the very first holistic weather satellite of Mars,” mapping the dynamics of Mars’ weather system throughout the entire day, in every region of Mars, over the course of an entire Martian year, through the combination of its three key instruments, shifting its orbit (from closer in to farther out), and monitoring Mars’s lower and upper atmosphere, and the interactions between them. “Our objectives from the get-go,” she emphasized, “are to ensure that Hope’s science is complementary to other missions and [therefore] usable to various science groups, and also new in nature so that it can continue the vast exploration efforts by different nations about Mars.” Hope is a product of national determination and international cooperation which exemplifies how other developing countries and regions can also leapfrog into being space-faring nations. The U.A.E. is a young nation—founded only 50 years ago—but its founder, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, recognized that “money is meaningless if not mobilized for the good of man,” the country’s oil wealth “valueless without national human resources qualified for and capable of building up the country” through science and industry. It was that understanding that led far-sighted leaders of the U.A.E. to invite physical economist Lyndon LaRouche to deliver the keynote address to a two-day regional symposium on “The Role of Oil and Gas in World Politics,” at the U.A.E.’s Zayed Centre in June 2002, and to develop both nuclear power and space programs. Space Agency chair al-Amiri argues that the purpose of U.A.E.’s space program is that of “stimulating a lot of change within the U.A.E.’s economy that today more than ever should have a solid foundation in science. The best way to do that, from what we have been experimenting with as a nation, has been an exploration mission to space.” To develop its Earth-orbit satellite program in the 2000’s, the U.A.E. turned to South Korea to jointly design and build its first two satellites, then launched from Kazakhstan. Its Space Agency was founded in 2014, and the goal of sending a probe to Mars by 2021, the 50th anniversary of the nation’s founding, adopted quickly thereafter. By 2018, the U.A.E. space team was able to design and build a satellite itself. To meet the tougher technical challenges of building a spacecraft for another planet, the U.A.E. Space Agency partnered with three U.S. universities: the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Arizona State University, and the Space Sciences Lab at the University of California, Berkeley campus. Hope was then launched to Mars on a Japanese rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center! A veteran of NASA Mars missions, now based at Northern Arizona University who worked on the design of one of Hope’s instruments, Christopher Edwards, told the Wall Street Journal that the Hope mission “is like nothing I’ve ever experienced in the spacecraft program so far. There’s a huge training aspect to it and a huge collaborative aspect that is like nothing else.”

After the successful orbital insertion of U.A.E.’s Hope, Assistant Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate Thomas Zurbuchen, tweeted to the U.A.E. team that “your bold endeavor to explore the Red Planet will inspire many others to reach for the stars. We hope to join you at Mars soon with @NASAPersevere.” Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency wrote that U.A.E.’s success, “gracing U.A.E.’s 50th anniversary, is an inspiration to the world. All the best!”Egypt is one country that is definitely inspired. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi “hailed” the arrival of the Hope probe to Mars, Egypt’s Mena news agency reported. He wrote on his official Twitter account: “I proudly watched the arrival of the Hope probe to Mars, which is an unprecedented step in the field of scientific research, and heralds a scientific renaissance in the Arab region,” and sent greetings to “the sisterly United Arab Emirates, the leadership and the people, and to all its geniuses who planned and designed this experiment in an attempt to create a new reality, despite all the extreme challenges at the present time. The experience will not be the ultimate in exploring new horizons in our big world, as the Arab mind is ambitious and does not know the impossible.” Egyptian Space Agency head Mohamed el Qousi told an online symposium sponsored by the U.A.E. Space Agency the same day, that Egypt, “with all its expertise in the field of space and satellites, is looking with great admiration and appreciation to the U.A.E. model in making a positive change in the Arab world,” Egypt State Information Service reported. El Qousi called the “U.A.E. an inspiring model for Arabs,” lauding “the noble global scientific goals … achieved for humanity” by its Hope mission. He also reported that Egypt is working on a project to build “35 education satellites for the benefit of students, specialists and engineers to give them the opportunity to learn, perform programming, and control those satellites… as part of Egypt’s quest for scientific and technological expansion in the fields and activities of space.” The Egyptian report described the subject of the symposium as discussing “prospects for Arab cooperation in the space field, especially in light of Egypt’s great expertise in the field of space and satellites, as well as its highly efficient human resources.” No mention was made of other Arab countries participating, but it is possible that others were involved. After all, the tower building in Dubai was lit up last night at one point with the words: “Arabs to Mars!”

One would never mistake the U.S. Congress as a place where actual work gets done on behalf of the American people. As Democrats prepare their insane drive to impeach former President Donald Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) Jan. 17 charge that “the enemy is within the House of Representatives,” has exacerbated already sharp divisions and encouraged a vendetta against any Republican who dared to defend, or just side with Trump. Similar polarization is evident in the Senate, where the Senate Ethics Committee is now investigating Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, for the “crime” of having questioned the election certification during the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, as the Constitution allows him to do.Pelosi now claims that House members will have to pay additional money to protect themselves in their Washington, D.C., offices and in their home states, allegedly because Trump is “fanning the flames” of violence and insurrection, endangering the safety of House members, while his allies in the House are also threatening fellow legislators, because they want to bring guns onto the floor of the House. Pelosi has ordered the installation of magnetometers outside the House chamber so that no one can enter with weapons. Any member who refuses to be screened will be fined. As former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard warned on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle” Jan. 29, Pelosi’s remarks are “incredibly dangerous,” given how divided and “on edge” the country is. If there is evidence that Members are being threatened, she said, that’s serious, and law enforcement should be brought in to investigate. But if there’s no evidence to substantiate Pelosi’s claims, she added, then this is simply “inciting further division and further harm potentially, and further destroying the possibility of our country coming together.” How dangerous Pelosi’s remarks are is seen in the hysterical attacks underway to punish or expel Republicans because they support Trump or allege that vote fraud did occur on Nov. 3. One target is Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green, an ardent and outspoken Trump supporter, who won her seat on Nov. 3 with 75% of the vote. In the past she has supported QAnon and made controversial remarks in 2018 and 2019 that she later retracted. But Democrats now want her removed from the House Education and Labor Committee and Budget Committee for making “incendiary” remarks. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) called Taylor-Green “a cancer for the Republican Party,” who peddles “loony lies and conspiracy theories.” Yesterday, Reps. Debbie Wasserman Shultz, Ted Deutch of Florida, and Jahana Hayes of Connecticut introduced a resolution demanding Green’s removal from the two committees, to “reduce the future harm that she can cause in Congress, and deny her a seat at committee tables where fact-based policies will be drafted.” This is a “suitable punishment and a proper restraint of her influence,” said Wasserman Shultz, RT reported. Last weekend, Pelosi accused House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) of being the leader of the QAnon party for appointing Green to the two committees in the first place. Wasserman Shultz is warning that if Republicans don’t act on the resolution, she will then bring it to the House floor for a vote. According to RT, House Democrats want to actually force a vote on Greene’s expulsion, forcing Republicans to take a position on the matter. (Observers with memory will recall Ms. Wasserman Shultz’s nasty efforts to undercut the campaigns of Sen. Sanders and Rep. Gabbard on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016.)

Is Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) orchestrating the anti-Putin campaign of Aleksey Navalvny? As reported in yesterday’s Briefing, RT and Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), believe that is the case, and RT broadcast a 2012 video of the executive of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, asking a British Embassy official and reputed MI6 agent for millions of dollars. The video shows James William Thomas Ford, said to be operating under the cover of First Secretary at the British Embassy, meeting with Ashurkov at a restaurant in 2012. [https://www.rt.com/russia/514291-navalny-aide-funding-alleged-british-spy/] While RT said the FSB believed Ford to be an MI6 agent, but gave no proof, what little facts can be found on the internet, do point in that direction.A search on the website of Her Majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), came up with one hit. In May 2013 Ford was a member of the British delegation at the annual U.K.-Russia Human Rights Dialogue. The delegation was led by the FCO’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia Director Colin Roberts, who raised a number of issues including the impact of the new NGO “foreign agents” law. Referring directly to Ford, the FCO document said, “British Embassy official James Ford, who participated in the talks, expressed gratitude to Russia for hosting the dialogue in Moscow….” Ford gives the following profile of himself on his Twitter account (https://twitter.com/jamesforduk?lang=en) which he opened in 2011: “British diplomat in Brussels. European foreign policy. Russia, Turkey, Balkans, Middle East. Previously in Moscow, Paris, Ankara. English-Swedish family.” The above entry is dated Aug.14, 2019 reporting that Ford drove by car from his previous posting in Ankara to Brussels. The page is current with tweets and retweets through January 2021. While the rest of the entry appears typical for a diplomat, mostly retweeting official statements. Ford’s posting in Turkey is of particular interest. He was first secretary between 2015 and 2019 according to the publication of the Turkish Foreign Ministry of the foreign diplomats. What is interesting is that the British Ambassador to Ankara between 2014 and 2017 was Richard Moore, who is now Chief of MI6 and in reality was always an MI6 agent. There is one Turkish media report of him announcing an official meeting with the governor of Hakkari province Idris Akbiyik in March 2019. The picture of their meeting includes no comment of what they discussed. Hakkari is a province at the extreme southeast, in Turkey’s Kurdish region, bordering the Kurdish regions of both Iraq and Syria. The province is the hotbed of PKK terrorist activity. Akbiyik, like all provincial governors, is appointed by the government and is also responsible for security. Akbiyikl was appointed as the new mayor of Hakkari Municipality after Cihan Karaman of the Peoples’ Democratic Party was arrested as part of an terrorism investigation. Accompanying Ford to that meeting was another first secretary, named Alfred Isaac Munro Le Prevost who is now posted at the British Embassy in Bosnia dealing with human rights. There is apparently nothing else to be found on the internet about Ford.

As China’s first domestically produced third generation reactor goes online, Chinese nuclear officials said that they would begin to consider mass production of this type of reactor in order to export to the rest of the world. Yu Jianfeng, chairman of CNNC, said this week that the corporation will accelerate the progress of mass constructing Hualong One reactors and developing a new series of technologies in a bid to promote the Hualong One to export and achieve the target of carbon neutrality. [Ed. note, "carbon neutrality" is nonsense, but third generation nuclear reactors are certainly not.]With a design life of 60 years, the Hualong One reactor adopts a 177-reactor core design that refuels the fuel every 18 months. It innovatively uses a combination of “active and passive” safety systems and a double-shell containment, which meets the latest international nuclear safety requirements. The installed capacity of each Hualong One unit reaches nearly 1200 MWe, and each unit is able to generate nearly 10 billion kWh of electricity annually, meeting the electricity demands of 1 million people, within a setting of a moderately developed country.

In less than a week, the three exciting, much-anticipated visits to Mars are set to begin. On Feb. 9, the “Hope Mars” probe launched by the United Arab Emirates will reach Mars. On Feb. 10 China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft will reach and enter Mars’ orbit. The craft weighs five tons, and will slow down its engines enough to be tugged into Mars’ gravitational pull. On Feb. 18, NASA’s Perseverance rover is to make its landing onto the surface of Mars.Taken together, these achievements signify humanity’s potential to develop, and increase “natural” resources, on Mars, the Moon, here on Earth, and untold places beyond. As the saying goes, “the sky’s the limit,” and in fact, mankind has the power to literally expand the sky! What we urgently need, is to turn this spirit loose on Earth right now. What stands in the way is the anti-human, anti-development movement, ironically named “green,” which is downgrading production and conditions of life, insisting there are limits to growth. They hold that people foul the universe. Implementing this outlook is the fast track to de-population and war. Among the reasons this green thinking, embodied in the “Davos Agenda” of the Great Reset—now defensively renamed Stakeholder Capitalism—is being pushed so hard is that the financial system serving its core originators and backers is itself blowing out. The ESG con game (“environment, social issues, and governance”) offers them the prospect of short-term green bubbles, while they plot to put in place dictatorship over what’s left of the human race. What is required is a new system of financial practices of credit and investment, deployed in the interests of building up the productivity and achievements of nations and peoples. The thinking and programs of statesman economist Lyndon LaRouche have never been so necessary. There is a dramatic demand for his outlook and policies, ranging from activists in France—the Yellow Vests, sovereignists, and other groups—to the millions of disenfranchised in the United States, to the farmers in India. In the United States, the latest green push is to shift agriculture policy away from food and fiber production, into “carbon sequestration,” for contributing to an early “Net Zero” of CO₂. At his Senate hearing yesterday for Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack—who never knew a policy he couldn’t peddle—gushed how committed he is to change over from traditional agriculture to the new green mandate. For example, he said he can’t wait to use the FDR-era Commodities Credit Corporation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has some $30 billion in it, for a new purpose of funding carbon reduction programs, not commodities. Thus, the 75-year-old agency, which has been concerned, however effectively or not, with real farmers, real food needs (such as school lunch programs) and real food—butter, wheat, corn—is now to be a destructive kook operation. Vilsack told the Senators that the CCC is “a great tool to pursue what will encourage carbon capture. I hope you would allow me the opportunity to utilize that.” Instead of this insanity, we need the “spirit of Mars” to guide a mobilization to deal with the pandemic and famine, and, in the course of that mobilization, to establish a high-productivity economy in the process. Today an internet seminar was held, centered in Germany, on this perspective, focusing on the need for rapidly building a world health security system. Speakers reported on lessons from China’s experience, including the physical logistics involved, as well as the emergency financial measures that must be taken for accomplishing these goals. It requires a whole new paradigm of thinking, said Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who gave the keynote address. She stressed international collaboration, not the conflict politics which endanger full scale war. An example of the new paradigm, of leadership in the mutual interests of nations comes from Argentina. President Alberto Fernández earlier this week spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They discussed not only the need for more Sputnik V vaccine in Argentina, but joint projects of various kinds in the future, including infrastructure and aerospace. Fernández has accepted an invitation to visit Moscow. In May, Fernández will be in Beijing conferring on cooperative ventures. China has sent 42 planeloads to Argentina in an air-bridge bringing medical supplies to fight the coronavirus. Zepp-LaRouche said yesterday in a briefing with European associates, "The only way the world will get out of this absolutely insane mess it’s in right now, is a new paradigm around cooperation around fighting the pandemic: There is not going to be any solution if there is not a modern health system in every country, and that must be the beginning of overcoming the underdevelopment in the developing sector and the so-called Global South. And obviously, for Germany and other European countries—as Hungary has already done—to start overcoming their ideological prejudices and actually cooperate on such lifesaving questions as fighting COVID-19, is a very important step. I think it also reflects the fact that, as [Chancellor Angela] Merkel said in her speech to the virtual Davos, that she is not interested in having new blocs being built, and she even mentioned in her speech, ‘the Great Reset, do we really need that?’…. “So I think all of that makes our task more urgent, more clear, because the time bomb is ticking. The danger of a blowout of the system is clearly in the air. The madness of what it would mean if there is more green policy, green transformation, means the end of European and U.S. industry, so we are not in the least in safe quarters. There are only tiny silver linings on the horizon in the cooperation around the vaccines and we should build on it.”

Seguramente, la historia reflexionará sobre el estado de la civilización occidental a principios del siglo 21, con asombro y confusión. ¿Cómo --se preguntará la historia—pudo una civilización que produjo tales saltos en el conocimiento científico, una música y una poesía tan profundas, un sistema política basado en los derechos del hombre y no en los derechos de una oligarquía, cómo pudo tal civilización caer tan lejos, tan rápidamente?El Congreso en Estados Unidos, una nación que una vez representó lo más alto de la cultura occidental, ha desechado a la razón misma. Un Presidente senil llama por la unidad, mientras que su partido declara que todos los miembros del partido de oposición que ejercieron su derechos constitucional de cuestionar el evidente fraude electoral generalizado, son culpables de insurrección, mientras que impulsan un proceso de juicio político anticonstitucional en contra de un ciudadano particular, que una vez fue Presidente, con la intención de privar de sus derechos a sus 75 millones de partidarios, declarándolo incapacitado para hacer campaña para ningún cargo público. Las personas que aplaudieron a la turba anarquista que destruyó grandes partes de ciudades estadounidenses durante todo el verano —quemando estaciones de policías y edificios federales, asesinando policías— están hablando de que una manifestación preparada de antemano contra el Capitolio de EU, repleta de agentes del FBI, que sea el equivalente de la guerra de la Confederación contra la República, o incluso la guerra de Al-Qaeda contra la civilización. Lo que está detrás de esto es la bancarrota absoluta del sistema financiero occidental, en tanto que los banqueros que dirigen ese sistema imponen una nueva forma de dictadura fascista a las otrora naciones soberanas de la civilización occidental. De aquí en adelante, declaran los banqueros, la política económica no serán dirigidas por los representantes electos por el pueblo, sino por los mismos banqueros, en un “cambio de régimen” del sistema financiero occidental. Ya no se va a emitir crédito en proyectos que promuevan el interés nacional, para la producción de bienes y servicios que se requieren para avanzar el bienestar general, ni siquiera para aumentar la motivación económica de los empresarios, sino únicamente en conformidad con su intención de acabar con la sociedad industrial para salvar al planeta de las emisiones de carbono, con base a la mezcla de insensateces anticientíficas más absurda que hemos conocido desde la Edad de Piedra. La aristocracia maltusiana del castillo de Windsor está encantada con su plan macabro para llevar a la población del mundo a lo que ellos imaginan como la “capacidad de carga” de la Tierra, que está en el rango de un mil a 2 mil millones de personas. En el proceso, Wall Street y la City de Londres están creando una nueva “burbuja ecológica verde”, en un intento desesperado para oxigenar y mantener por unos meses más al sistema bancario en bancarrota. ¿Cómo es posible esto? Las drogas tienen algo que ver con esto. La destrucción de la cultura clásica y el advenimiento de la era de la fealdad, tiene muchísimo que ver con esto. El control total que ejercen unos satánicos sobre los medios y el sistema también ha contribuido, para hacer realidad el sueño de Bertrand Russell, de poder convencer a la gente de que la nieve es negra. La Organización de LaRouche, y la Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) publicaran la semana próxima un documentopara exponer este nuevofascismo ecologista verde, y para proporcionar las ideas necesarias para derrotarlo. Tenemos poco tiempo; el mundo se enfrenta hoy a una crisis general de desintegración social, y al peligro extremo de una nueva guerra mundial, que en la era de las armas termonucleares, podría acabar con toda la civilización. Por otro lado, si las ideas que hicieron posible que surgiera el Renacimiento Dorado, que impulsaron el Renacimiento Confuciano de la Dinastía Song, que fomentaron las eras de Renacimiento de la cultura islámica y de la cultura india, si estas ideas poderosas pueden ponerse al frente, como sucedió luego de las anteriores eras de tinieblas, entonces el mundo puede unirse y trabajar por una era de paz por medio del desarrollo, el desarrollo de la Tierra, de nuestro sistema solar, y más allá. Las ideas de Lyndon LaRouche están hoy más vivas que durante su vida. Él dijo una vez que cuando el mundo se enfrente a una crisis de desintegración, la gente va a voltear a su alrededor en búsqueda de quienes han venido diciendo la verdad, en vez de las mentiras que nos trajeron el colapso. No hay solución alguna para ninguna de las partes de esta crisis sin que se solucione toda la crisis global, e irónicamente, una solución como esa es hoy más accesible que nunca antes, precisamente porque el alcance de esta crisis de la humanidad está sin duda delante de nosotros. Los Presidentes de China y Rusia abordaron esa verdad en sus discursos ente el Foro de Davos la semana pasada, los cuales se van a publicar en el próximo ejemplar de la revista EIR. Helga Zepp-LaRouche abordó esa verdad en su discurso del día de Martin Luther King el pasado 18 de enero. Su discurso se publicó en la edición de EIR del 29 de enero. (Una unión más perfecta por medio de la Coincidencia de los Opuestos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHhtqM3UOjY&feature=youtu.be) Ya es tiempo de que todos los hombres y mujeres actúen, para que dominen estas ideas profundas, por el bien del potencial inmortal de la humanidad.

Two days ago, Argentine President Alberto Fernández spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin for a broad-ranging discussion on topics of mutual interest, key among which was the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine. Argentina has already acquired almost 1 million doses of Sputnik V, has begun its national vaccination campaign, and is scheduled to receive much larger quantities weekly for some months. At the same time, Fernández has been in contact with Chinese President Xi Jinping to pin down a contract for the first 1 million doses of the Sinopharm vaccine, with a goal of eventually purchasing 30 million doses. For the past year, Argentina has maintained an effective “air bridge” with China, receiving a total of 42 planeloads of medical supplies needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.Fernández’s discussion with Putin covered a range of topics, including Russian investments in infrastructure and aerospace as well as an invitation to Fernández to visit Russia, which he readily accepted. Fernández thanked Putin effusively for providing his nation with Sputnik V and said he hoped to receive as much as possible as it has proven to be so effective, Página 12 reported him as saying. The report published by the British medical journal The Lancet confirming Sputnik V’s safety and effectiveness has received wide coverage in Argentina, much to the chagrin of the neoliberal political opposition which has attacked both the Russian and Chinese vaccines. Putin promised not only to continue meeting the terms of the contract with Argentina, but also to also make Sputnik V available to other Ibero-American nations. Fernández pointed out that Putin’s display of solidarity toward developing nations is very different from “other” unnamed nations that make it impossible for vaccines to be exported. The Russian leader further stated that he was very pleased at how joyfully Sputnik V had been received by the Argentine public—an exuberance also seen among Bolivians last weekend when the first 20,000 doses of Sputnik V arrived in that country. Vaccine production is being ramped up in Russia, and Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russia Direct Investment Fund, the sovereign investment fund, announced in a press conference that he is already in discussion with several Argentine companies, “so that we can produce Sputnik V [in the country]…. We will sign contracts with some producers,” so that production can begin in the next three months, Cronista Comercial reported him saying Feb. 2. Dmitriev wouldn’t name the companies involved, as negotiations are ongoing, but said they are “highly qualified.” The AstraZeneca vaccine is already being produced in Argentina by the national mAbxience lab.