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On Dec. 17, 2021, Russia publicly presented two draft treaties for urgent adoption—one with the United States, one with NATO—which addressed Russia’s existential security concerns regarding the inexorable eastward expansion of NATO and the placement of threatening weapon systems on its borders. Russia demanded immediate written responses to their urgent proposals, in order to brake the rush to war emanating from the West.On Jan. 26, the U.S. and NATO did provide private written responses to Russia. But on Feb. 1 Russian President Vladimir Putin stated at a press conference: “Let me note that we are closely analyzing the written responses received from the U.S. and NATO on January 26. However, it is already clear … that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored.” Putin then turned the tables on the entire matter: He told the press that the U.S. and NATO weren’t really concerned with Ukraine’s security, but were using that issue as a kind of bear trap, as an excuse to launch all-out economic warfare against Russia in order to destroy its economy and prevent the country’s industrialization. “Its main task is to hamper Russia’s development…. Ukraine just serves as a means to achieve this goal … by drawing us into some kind of armed conflict.” The next day, Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov announced that Putin will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Feb. 4, making it clear that the two countries are deeply allied on both economic and security matters. The two Presidents will issue “a joint statement on international relations in the new era and global sustainable development … [that] will reflect the shared views of Russia and China on the most important global problems, including security issues,” Ushakov reported. Helga Zepp-LaRouche today welcomed the emphasis on the underlying economic crisis behind the war danger, and also on the needed total international economic transformation required to forge a durable peace. Recent threats from American and especially British officials of their intention to totally wipe out Russia’s ability to industrialize and develop, are finally waking people up to the reality Lyndon LaRouche warned about for decades. Zepp-LaRouche stated in her Jan. 28 weekly webcast: “The language of this is so brutal, it’s basically saying: Look, we managed with the shock therapy in 1990s, with Jeffrey Sachs in the Yeltsin period, to turn a former superpower into a raw materials producing, third world country, and now we will deny Russia the right to industrialize, by applying such measures. Now, that is a form of a declaration of war already! How can you deny a country to develop industrially?… If you read the language, how this is written, it portrays a mindset which is the mindset of a party declaring war already.” Zepp-LaRouche continued: “We’re sitting on a powder keg: The reason for all the war danger is the fact that the financial system is about to blow up. There are many reports that the so-called ‘emerging markets,’ which is a synonym for the developing countries, that they may have a huge debt crisis if there is the slightest ‘tapering’ of interest rates by the Federal Reserve. So the urgency to go with LaRouche’s Four Laws, and really go in a completely different direction, rebuilding the world economy by having actual development, starting with a world health system, is of the greatest urgency.” Zepp-LaRouche took note of the fact that, in many countries around the world, there are the beginnings of some significant opposition to the war drive, and even to the economic policies that are causing it: some people are becoming conflicted and uneasy, and rightly so. “This is an opportune moment to focus the growing war anxiety in many nations around the world, against the British,” Zepp-LaRouche stated, “who, after all, are the policy authors of the global drive towards superpower warfare. This could ruin their capability for good.” Zepp-LaRouche again drew attention to the unspeakable genocide underway in Afghanistan, where half the population is in danger of starving to death over the winter, in large measure due to the illegal freezing of the country’s assets abroad and the merciless economic sanctions being imposed on the country. Those most immediately threatened include 1 million children who are so malnourished that, were they in a developed country, they would belong in hospital ICU facilities. This is a crime against humanity underway before our very eyes, and it is being committed by the same British and American financial interests that are behind the war drive against Russia and China.

President Putin yesterday called out the War Hawks, who claim they are concerned with "protecting Ukraine's sovereignty." They are using this narrative, he said, as an excuse to draw Russia into an armed conflict, "to hamper Russia's development." A memo released by the White House last week actually stated this as the intention of the new sanctions regime they are drafting. Driving the war talk is not Russian military deployments, but the deepening panic that the Great Reset is in trouble, in large part because Russia and China will not surrender their sovereignty to a global dictatorship of central banks!

At the conclusion of a meeting yesterday with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, President Vladimir Putin reported: “Let me note that we are closely analyzing the written responses received from the U.S. and NATO on January 26. However, it is already clear, and I informed Mr. Prime Minister about it, that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored.” Those concerns, including stopping the eastern expansion of NATO, and reversing and preventing the deployment of strike weapons near Russian borders, are existential for the Russian state. The United States and NATO, it has now become clear, however, do not have the cooperation of the present Ukrainian government for the “defense of democracy” pretext they wished to present to their own largely clueless, mentally-captive populations as justification for their mad adventure.“The march of folly” we are seeing, despite certain efforts which are exceptions to that march, will get us to war, one way or another, if not today, tomorrow, or the day after. Though more and more organizations and individuals are speaking out, opposition to war is not enough. Something original, outside of the geopolitical domain, firmly rooted in the immediate moment but tied to the long-term best interests of humanity, that will restore the very idea of humanity, must be adopted, universally, and now. Thanks to the collaboration of South African, Chinese, and other epidemiologists, we now know that a new bat coronavirus, NeoCov, is capable, under certain circumstances, of transmitting a MERS-CoV-2 like disease to humans with, potentially, the sort of efficiency seen in the Delta and Omicron versions of coronavirus. This has not happened yet, but the proposal recently made by Xi Jinping at Davos for a worldwide collaboration to overcome the impending mass death of millions through as yet unknown, as well as known lethal pandemics, a danger possibly greater than even that last seen 660 years ago with the bubonic plague, is probably the only way that this could be avoided, if it can be avoided at all, at this time. This proposal needs an inspired response from the morally depraved trans-Atlantic sector. The World Health Platform proposal of Helga Zepp- LaRouche, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, and others, is, and has been available. But a morally degenerate elite that has lost the will or moral fitness to survive would never properly respond to Xi jinping in time, particularly if they have just proven themselves incapable of properly responding to Russia, and the immediate danger of accidentally launching thermonuclear war on the planet as a whole—which is what we have seen so far. Nonetheless, the scientific capability to do this exists, and because of the Operation Ibn Sina proposal of the Schiller institute, with respect to Afghanistan and the world generally, a clear plan to do this exists. So why is this really not happening? In a June 1981 EIR document entitled “The Strategic Significance of the Ecumenical Negotiations,” Lyndon LaRouche identified the reasons for the morally depraved character of the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic . “St. Augustine addressed the practical side of the doctrinal issue in his devastating proof that not only the Roman Empire but the City of Rome before the Empire represented a morally degenerate society. Pre-Imperial Rome, according to the Roman historian Livius, was controlled by the Cult of Apollo, the same cult notorious as Aristotle’s master at Delphi, and known in the Middle East by the names of Marduk and Lucifer. Imperial Rome was a result of control of the Roman cults from Ptolemaic Egypt. These were representatives of the forces which the Apostle St. John’s Apocalypse (Revelations) identifies as the ‘Whore of Babylon.’” While the United States is still the world’s oldest and most successful republic, since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, America has been culturally dominated in all aspects of policy-making by the Whore, not of Babylon, but of “Perfidious Albion.” In the last weeks and months, whether at the COP 26 Malthusian “Kill Humanity, Save the Planet” fest, or in the Black Sea military chicken game with the Russian fleet, with the AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-United States) adventure, or the present mad gambit against Russia in Ukraine, itself the latest incarnation of the never-ending Christopher Steele/ Sir Richard Dearlove/Robert Hannigan/GCHQ “Russiagate” assault on the American Presidency—the City Of London has been in the driver’s seat of. Britain is now deploying the “junior varsity” of the United States State Department, not only for the greater glory of BAE Systems and such, but for the self-destruction of the United States itself. That’s why the policy pronouncements are both insane, and continuous. Perhaps it was Ukrainian President Zelensky’s one undisputed skill, his penchant for comedy, that has led him to realize that the joke has gone too far. He does not intend to incinerate his nation. He and others have seen “up close” the mental difficulty the United States has in facing reality in the form of “the Other,” be that in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ukraine. A recent example: Take Tony Blinken’s ham-fisted attempt to stop Argentina’s President Fernandez from visiting, first, Putin, and then China’s Xi Jinping, where an MOU on the Belt and Road Initiative is to be signed. On top of that, Brazil’s President Bolsonaro will visit with Putin Feb. 14. Brazilian Vice-President, Gen. Hamilton Mourao (ret.) says that he doesn’t think that Russia plans to invade Ukraine, or that Bolsonaro should not visit Russia because of tensions with the United States. “Let’s remember that Brazil is part of a group with Russia, the BRICS, through which we have a partnership with Russia. Russia is an important country for doing business…and we can’t give that up.” This is the real world, the world of physical economy, the world of what was once termed the American System, but which has been rejected in the United States since the largely-successful 1980s campaign to destroy the reputation and influence of Lyndon LaRouche. In all those areas now in the existential crosshairs—from the spread of lethal pandemics, to the collapse of the international monetary system and what to do about it, to stopping the danger of thermonuclear war though an ecumenical dialogue of cultures, to joint missions on the industrialization of space, and the production of advanced high-density energy platforms based on a revolution in nuclear power plant production, including thorium reactors, HTGR reactors, fission/fusion hybrids,etc.—the writings and campaign of Lyndon LaRouche, featured through the pages of Executive Intelligence Review, has provided a record of what to do, and how to do it. POSTSCRIPT: VERNADSKY, PASTEUR, LAROUCHE In the course of his 1981 discussion of the topic, “The Tragedy of U.S. Education” with a group of academicians in Poland, Lyndon LaRouche may also have provided an idea useful for the next ecumenical and scientific step that could be taken to advance the recent proposal made by President Xi Jinping for an international collaboration of scientists and economists to join together to fight the coronavirus. “Now, we have a case of a very famous Ukrainian-Russian scientist, who probably is one of the most important figures for the 21st Century, Academician Vernadsky. Vernadsky was a student of Curie (the son of Curie, the son-in-law of Pasteur), as well as of [Dmitri] Mendeleyev. Vernadsky went beyond this, but [he was] in the same school of Mendeleyev, of Pasteur, and actually the French school of Arago before them. He went through this, to develop a conception of what he called ‘biogeochemistry.’” “By working in the school of Mendeleyev—he studied originally under Mendeleyev in Petrograd—[he] showed a way of thinking about the relationship between living processes and what we call non-living processes. He demonstrated, for example, that the atmosphere, the oceans, and most of the area on which we live on the surface of the Earth, is a biosphere. These things he called the”natural products of life." That is, one could measure a change in the characteristic of the planet, produced by the continuous action of life, or life transforming the planet. He went further, in his work during the 1930s, and defined what he called the “noösphere,” that is, the action of human cognition in transforming the biosphere, and transforming the relationship of man to the universe. “Vernadsky was also the founder of nuclear science in Russia and Ukraine….” Can the investigation of the work of Vernadsky, and Lyndon LaRouche’s observations on Vernadsky from the standpoint of physical economy, provide a way to initiate an international dialogue that takes up the method of inquiry required to make breakthroughs in the field of biology and medicine, the harnessing of thermonuclear power, and the redefinition of the presently bankrupt notions of ecology and environment, from the standpoint of investigating Vernadsky’s scientific conception of the noösphere? How might that dialogue be proposed by a “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites” in terms of the collaborations among people in many different nations, and across disciplines, to address both the short-term emergency of saving humanity from an onslaught of infectious disease, and the long-term investigation of the very nature of life, and of creativity as a unique form of life distinct from all others?

Russian President Putin yesterday issued a public statement on the response of the U.S. and NATO to his demand for security guarantees. He said that "the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored." Meanwhile, the Brits threaten tougher sanctions, against anyone doing business with Russia! There is further confirmation of the European Union's war on people, in a report on how Green policy will reduce food production in many crops between 10% to 30%. This will drive up food prices further for more wealthy Europeans, but take food off the table for up to 400 million people in poorer countries, which will have to export their food to EU countries. Watch the Schiller Institute video, "Why Are Farmers NOT Allowed to Produce Food?"

Jan. 28 -- On January 20, Jeremy Grantholm, founder of the asset management firm GMO, warned that a "superbubble", comprised of stocks, housing and commodities, will soon pop, wiping out $35 trillion in assets. This would be the fourth superbubble collapse in the last one hundred years, he said, citing stock bubbles which imploded in 1929 and 2000, and the housing bubble in 2008. He stated that: "...we face the largest potential markdown of perceived wealth in U.S. history." However, no one is listening, he complained, because superbubbles "are often the most exhilarating financial experiences of a lifetime." Among those not listening, he identified the U.S. Federal Reserve and the other central banks, which he reports do not "seem to recognize the danger. As if to prove his point, {Bloomberg Business} ran as its headline for its lead story on January 27, "America's Economy Is Booming", citing statistics which show a "better-than-expected" GDP growth in the latest quarter. Further down in the article was a mention of the decision taken at the Fed Open Market Committee earlier that day, to move ahead, finally, with "tapering", scaling back the Quantitative Easing program and raising interest rates. It reports ominously, "Traders are bracing for higher borrowing costs, with money markets now expecting almost five interest-rate increases from the Federal Reserve this year and another four from the Bank of England." This unacknowledged contradiction, of the disconnect between the "good news" of a growing GDP -- which measures monetary expansion and not goods production of the real economy -- and the fears of the effects of an interest rate spike, demonstrates precisely why the Fed and others cannot "recognize the danger." Backing Grantholm's view are a spate of articles and reports on the unsustainability of various forms of debt, especially of the danger of default among poor, heavily-indebted countries. David Malpass, President of the World Bank, warned that the "risk of disorderly defaults is growing....Countries are facing a resumption of debt payments at precisely the time when they don't have the resources to be making them." Larry Elliott, financial correspondent for the {Guardian}, elaborated on this in his January 23 column, writing that debt payments by developing sector countries have more than doubled since 2010, and will increase more if the Fed raises interest rates. In 2010, 6.8% of government revenues went to debt repayment; in 2021, this rose to 14.3%. There are fifty-four countries in a "debt crisis", and nearly 50% of that debt is owed to private lenders, that is, banks and investment funds -- including those where many people have placed their retirement and pension funds -- and another 27% to institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Further, reports proliferate of the accelerating rates of delinquency in personal debt, such as home mortgage payments and credit cards, while the website www.wallstreetonparade.com has been documenting that the Federal Reserve has been pumping trillions of dollars into the major private banks -- such as JP MorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Citibank -- since the 4th Quarter of 2019, through the Repo lending window, to prevent a collapse of corporate debt, or a chain-reaction default on derivatives. What Is "Irrational Exuberance"? At a time when stock valuations were soaring in the mid-1990s, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan delivered a speech to the free market fanatics of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on "The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society". In his speech, on December 5, 1996, he spoke of the overall favorable climate for continued appreciation of stock values, referring to a combination of low interest rates and low inflation. He then asked, "But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?" In attempts to untangle typical Greenspan Fedspeak, this was interpreted as a dismissal of such a concern, designed to continue to fuel speculation, while offering a cover in case the stock bubble did pop, as it had in October 1987 in the same week he became Fed chairman. The speech to the AEI came at a moment of euphoric belief in "American Exceptionalism" and the U.S. as the unipolar Superpower, bolstered by the "victory" in the Cold War, which U.S. leaders hailed as a result of the unparalleled strength of the U.S. military, and the limitless economic potential fueled by the wonders of a "free market" economy, which the U.S. was celebrating as the successful transition from a "heavy" industrial economy to a "new (weightless) economy". The "weightlessness" refers to an explosion of funds flowing into "new financial instruments", the vast majority of which had little or no tangible assets to back up their trading value. Greenspan's attempt to dismiss the dangers inherent in this shift should have been definitively shattered by events of the next years. In 1997, the speculative bubble in Asian stocks and real estate popped, as currency exchange speculators, led by George Soros, rushed in to rake in profits. In 1998, the collapse of the Russian GKO bonds led to a devalued ruble, default on domestic debt, a moratorium on foreign debt payments, and a near-collapse of leading U.S. banks, requiring a bailout fund organized by the Fed of more than $16 billion. This was largely due to the effort, run by western financiers, to impose on Russia an economic transformation through "shock therapy", which was a thinly-disguised looting operation, dismantling Russia's physical economy and making it dependent on raw material exports. The economic and demographic collapse which followed brought Vladimir Putin in as acting President in January 2000; he has devoted the last two decades to reversing that collapse, with an emphasis on rebuilding Russia's scientific tradition. Most devastating to Greenspan's attempt to dismiss the danger of this transition in the U.S. was the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which occurred beginning in the fourth quarter of 2000. He addressed this by creating a new bubble, with an emphasis on trading mortgage-backed securities and derivative transactions, which then collapsed spectacularly in September 2008. Greenspan, who left the Fed in 2006, admitted in October 2008 -- after the collapse of the housing bubble -- that he had "found a flaw" in his model, but offered an excuse. As a bubble develops, he rationalized, "almost everybody is bullish, expects the market to go up, and is fully committed....This is the reason," he explained, "why everybody missed September the 15th, 2008" referring to the day of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Not Everybody "Missed" It Among those who did not "miss it" was former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who told the {Welt am Sontag} on August 1, 1999, that "many people are enthusiastic about the United States [economy]. But these people do not realize that the stock market boom is totally over-valued, and that there are psychopaths who are driving the stocks upwards." The most clear and consistent critic of the advent of the modern bubble economy was American economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, who called attention to this in the late 1960s, then famously in his attack on the August 15, 1971 decision by President Nixon to take down the post-war Bretton Woods system. LaRouche, who was responsible for advances in understanding the method behind the success of the American System economic model, applied the scientific/philosophical approach of the German genius Gottfried Leibniz, to develop his conception of "physical economy". For example, as the Dow Jones stock average and profits from mutual funds were soaring in 1999, driven by wild investments in the tech bubble of the dot-coms, LaRouche wrote on August 14, 1999, that this "is not to be seen as a sign of prosperity, but directly the opposite. This so-called 'boom' -- in financial asset price hyperinflation -- is actually the highly-elevated fever that signals, and will bring about the financial system's approaching collapse." Shortly after he wrote this, the dot-com bubble began a rapid and deep unwinding. LaRouche's prescience was again seen in a July 25, 2007 webcast, when he stated that the present financial system, driven by the mortgage-backed securities bubble, "can not continue to exist under any circumstances, under any Presidency, under any leadership, or any leadership of nations. Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general, immediate chain-reaction type of collapse. At what speed we don’t know, but it will go on, and it will be unstoppable! And the longer it goes on before coming to an end, the worse things will get." Following the 2008 meltdown, he offered a specific approach to reversing the ongoing downward plunge resulting from the adoption of British neoliberal policies in the name of "share-holder values", which repeatedly create bubbles which benefit the super-wealthy, while devastating the real economy. He presented his idea for a global bankruptcy reorganization in an address to the Rhodes Forum on October 9, 2009. "I have picked out four nations [the U.S., Russia, China, India], as absolutely crucial, that they must cooperate, because with their cooperation, and with that of others who join them, it will be possible to take reorganization of the world economy, by eliminating financial derivatives—just cancel them; they're worthless paper, cancel them. Go back to the honest debt of nations, go to a commercial banking standard, and create new credit to replace the worthless old debt. By creating new credit, and launching physical production programs, in infrastructure and other terms, we could, by agreement among nation-states, prevent a general collapse, and actually launch a program of orderly recovery. And these problems that we now face could be solved." He continued: "The problem is, that the world is dominated by financier interests, which are essentially parasitical in character. Our industries, our agriculture, our infrastructure is decaying, worldwide—especially in the Americas, especially in North America, and especially in Western Europe. Western and Central Europe is a disaster area. They no longer have national security, economic security: They're dominated by the British, entirely, under the British system, which was established in the context of the breakdown of the Soviet Union and East German economy."At that point, the British succeeded, with the support of [French President François] Mitterrand, and with the support of George H.W. Bush, the President at that time, in imposing upon Germany, and other nations of Western and Central Europe, conditions which are destructive. And the Western European economy is generally bankrupt, today, hopelessly so. It could be reorganized, through bankruptcy reorganization, but presently the whole system of Western and Central Europe is hopelessly bankrupt, as other parts of the world are." The present crisis can only be solved by adopting LaRouche's unique approach, based on restoring the principles of "physical economy", and rejecting all forms of British, neoliberal monetary schemes. It is not just "Superbubbles" which are collapsing, but the entire system, which is built on the ideological delusions of those billionaire predators running it, and profiting from it.

After a tremendous increase in fertilizer prices since 2019, and particularly during the course of 2021, the world stands on the brink of a substantial drop in global food production in 2022, at a time when mass starvation has already hit Afghanistan, Yemen, and six nations in Africa. If dramatic actions are not taken to reverse this process right away, more than 100 million more human beings can be added this year to the ranks of those in danger of starvation, which already number more than 200 million in the latest judgment of the World Food Program and its head David Beasley.The causes of this terrible toll of hunger and starvation are mostly a failed economic model which must be replaced; but in Afghanistan, they are viciously geopolitical and we must undo this punishment now. Regarding the economic failure: The World Bank Fertilizers Price Index for the world, which in April of 2020 was at 66.24 and in January 2021 had risen slowly but steadily to 82.96, by December 2021 had exploded to 208.01, more than tripling in 20 months. The rise of 60% in just the last two months of 2021 has particularly devastated farmers around the world. Their situation is even worse in the Northern hemisphere where fertilizer (and pesticides) for the spring planting look entirely inaccessible. The Wall Street Journal’s Jan. 21 article, “‘Farms Are Failing’ as Fertilizer Prices Drive Up Cost of Food,” reported that despite global food prices having risen to the highest level in a decade, rapid food inflation is almost certain to continue in 2022 due to fertilizer prices and accessibility. This, the paper understates, “would exacerbate hunger—already acute in some parts of the world.” World wheat output is set to drop by 10 million tons in 2022, according to the French agriculture analysis firm Agritel. The effect on maize production will be worse. Corn/maize production costs are rising 15-20% in the major producers America and Ukraine. Lower yields of many foods and agricultural products are projected around the world in 2022. Amid widespread famines already in 2020-21, and loss of informal agricultural work in the developing countries, food may enter global shortage in 2022. And according to the International Fertilizer Development Center, exceedingly high fertilizer prices could result in a reduction of agricultural output in Africa alone, which will be “equivalent to the food needs of 100 million people.” Although this monumental fertilizer price increase coincides with sharp rise prices of natural gas and is exacerbated by them, it is far larger, and far more widely and evenly spread around the world, than the natural gas spikes. As corn/maize growers in the United States insist, the gas price spike is not the primary cause of the fertilizer shock and loss of food production. In fact, as fertilizer use and price both rose in 2019, the International Fertilizer Association forecast that global production and use would drop after 2019, as they did—by roughly 10% in 2020-21. The huge fertilizer price rise after 2019 went along with sharp price rises across the whole range of important global commodities for industry and agriculture; its cause was wild money-printing by the major trans-Atlantic central banks starting late 2019; and global monopoly of production by a few big firms. Four monopolies control 75% of nitrogen-based fertilizer distribution: They are Nutrien Ltd., (Canada-based), Yara (Norway-based), CF Industries (U.S.-based), and Mosaic (part of Cargill, U.S.-based). Afghanistan is a terrible special case, where when NATO countries withdrew their forces after 20 years of destructive war, they retaliated with a punitive cutoff of international aid and development investment, and the United States Treasury seized Afghanistan’s own financial reserves. A German official just back from Kabul reported in Tagesspiegel Jan. 30 that 7 million children are starving now in Afghanistan; 1 million, he said, would be in hospital ICUs if they were in Europe. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said of the plight of Afghanistan’s population, and the world threat to food-growing this year, “This is the greatest threat to civilization, not nuclear weapons.” She demands, now with many others, that the frozen Afghan funds be released to restore the lost liquidity in the entire economy; and has launched Operation Ibn Sina, to make the nation an exemplar for building a modern healthcare and public health system in every country in the world. To do this the United States must cooperate with Russia, China, and India in particular. And it must break up both its biggest banks with Glass-Steagall, and with anti-trust acts break up the food monopolies.

As war mongering loonies from U.S. and U.K. intelligence and diplomatic circles keep foaming at the mouth about Russia's "invasion plans", saner voices are being heard. Even Ukraine's President Zelensky doubts U.S. intelligence reports of an imminent invasion, which has made him a target for the War Hawks who ran the 2014 Maidan regime change coup, as inadvertently revealed in an article in the {Washington Post}. With nuclear war as a real possibility if the war hawks are not stopped, it is time to place them in an asylum, and let diplomacy take over.

While the Biden cabinet continues to rant against an imagined Russian intention to invade Ukraine, and while Russia, China and Iran continue to be painted by European and American political and media pundits as evil villains out to destroy the freedom and prosperity of the Western world, there is a mounting backlash emerging against the madness, from leading figures and average citizens as well.Start with the lead story in every media outlet, every day and every hour, for the past two months: “Russia has amassed over 100,000 troops, tanks and related military hardware on the Ukraine border in preparation for an invasion, stealing freedom and democracy from the heroic Ukrainian people.” But let’s hear what the Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov has to say about this supposedly existential danger: “The situation on the Ukrainian-Russia border at this time is no different from what it was in the spring of last year. Now there are no significant actions or phenomena.” Even Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the U.S. to stop shouting that war is imminent, that it is a “mistake.” But don’t make the mistake of concluding that this means there is no chance for a war between two nuclear powers, threatening civilization itself. As EIR Economics Editor Paul Gallagher proves in the current issue of EIR, the war is being driven by the onrushing collapse of the Western financial system (see: “The U.S.-NATO Hidden War Threat: The Green New Deal”), not by the imagined “aggression” by Russia, China or Iran. Former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, in a very polemical manner, ridiculed the war hysteria which is based on thin air: The war threat in Ukraine, she said, “is a picture that emerges but does not quite correspond to reality—it is a reality that the media have manufactured…. The British in particular are jumping into the breach,” while “more and more weapons and even troops from NATO countries” are being shipped into Ukraine, despite the mass destruction that would hit all of Europe if war were to break out. Now look at Iran, where the Biden Administration has refused to reverse the dangerous and imbecilic scrapping of the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) nuclear agreement with Iran, which was abdicated by the Trump Administration in 2018. Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces from 2015 to 2019, told Al-Monitor that then-Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu had conspired with his Mossad chief to pressure the Trump Administration to scrap the Iran deal, without even consulting the Israeli military as to the consequences. Eizenkot not only asserted that the result was Iran’s expanded enrichment of uranium, bringing them closer to a nuclear weapon capacity, but that Iran had done so “with legitimacy,” since the JCPOA allowed them to do so when the U.S broke its agreement. The madness of the British and American threats and war preparations, said Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche today, are “no different in mentality than the troglodytes, killing their neighbors with stones—except now they have nuclear weapons.” The Anglo-American war party does not intend to “compete” in the new multipolar world, in which China and Russia are now “near peer” powers to the declining trans-Atlantic nations. Rather, they imagine that they can stop the rise of China and Russia through sabotage, financial warfare, and the hideous “sanctions” policies. A “senior administration official” who briefed the press anonymously on Jan. 25 regarding the intended sanctions to be imposed on Russia, did not hide this illegal and immoral fact: the intention, he said, is to “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard.” This is clearly also the policy toward China, where the Biden Administration has refused to drop the destructive sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration against Huawei and many other Chinese companies (in fact, the Biden team has increased such sanctions), using political means to sabotage the economic development of China. As Zepp-LaRouche noted, this is the exact opposite of the Peace of Westphalia, the foundation of the modern nation-state, in which sovereign nations respect the sovereignty of others. But the backlash is growing. Americans, who have been drawn into manufactured debates over such things as vaccines, climate, and party politics, while the economy is exploding and the world is “sleepwalking into thermonuclear World War III,” increasingly recognize that the world is descending into chaos, and they are looking for answers. Those answers were always there, in the form of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws, but were hidden from the population by the illegal prosecution of LaRouche and the blackout of his ideas, by the same corrupt institutions and individuals who brought us to this sorry state of affairs. This backlash demonstrates that this is a moment of great potential, of optimism rather than fear and anxiety, as the sleepwalkers are awakening to the danger, and need only be given the proper tools to bring the world together, to build the new paradigm for mankind.

Harley Schlanger gave a presentation on Saturday, January 29, at the LaRouche Organization Manhattan Project. Here is the transcript from the presentation. THE BRITISH HAND BEHIND THE U.S./NATO WAR DRIVE HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, everyone. I want to just give a little bit more background on the reasonable nature of the Russian demand for a new security guarantee, and then look at that from the standpoint of the threats and the bullying that Helga was talking about, and then go back to the deeper question of what’s really going on here, who really is behind the war drive. Because it’s really very difficult to believe that the Russians have any intention to invade Ukraine, for reasons that were just explained by Helga. So, what’s going on here? Putin’s proposal was a highly reasonable one. After 30 years of broken promises, after 30 years of Western moves toward the Russian border, wars launched, regime-change operations carried out, psychological warfare inside Russia, blaming Russia for use of chemical weapons, and on and on. After 30 years of that, Putin basically said, look we want legally binding written guarantees on three major points, which you just heard from Helga. No further eastward motion of NATO. This was promised in 1990 and again in 1994, and it’s been violated ever since. No membership in NATO for Ukraine. There are a lot of reasons for this, but basically Ukraine is a divided country, there’s no unity inside the country. It’s not a secure country; there’s a corrupt oligarchy. Its membership in NATO would require overriding most of the requirements that exist for NATO membership. So, why the push to bring Ukraine into NATO? That gets to the third point. The danger of the deployment of offensive weapons in Ukraine on the Russian border, as Putin has said, within 5-7 minutes of Moscow launch time. So, the Russian proposal is, let’s go back to the end of the Cold War. Let’s go back to 1997 in particular, and write an agreement which will give security guarantees to Russia, which include a guarantee that Russia will not be the target of a surprise attack from the West. In response to this, we’re seeing, as Helga pointed out, Blinken going into the meeting with Lavrov a week ago, saying we’re not going to give in to your requests. We’re not taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table. You can’t tell us what to do. You don’t have a right to spheres of influence; no nation has a right to spheres of influence. Well, what kind of sophistry is that? The United States sphere of influence is the whole world. We have troops and bases in close to 100 countries around the world, many of which are far removed from the geographic location of the United States. This idea of sphere of influence—what about the Monroe Doctrine? This is where you see the sophistry, but it goes further, because they’re making very serious threats. In particular, there was a January 25th meeting at the White House, and a memo from this meeting was produced. What they said is, they defined what they mean by severe economic measures. They said they will hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize the economy. So, the sanctions that would be imposed—and there are some people who say these sanctions should be imposed preemptively, before Russia invades Ukraine. Well, the idea that you’re going to stop the industrialization or the modernization of the Russian economy? That’s economic warfare. That’s what’s being talked about in the White House. To deny Russia access to modern technologies. Well, the Russians are coming up with some of their own, like the hypersonic missiles, they’re working with the Chinese. But they say to prevent Putin’s intention to diversify from exporting oil and gas. This goes back to the argument that Russia is basically a gas station; that it makes all its money with the profile of a Third World country from raw materials. And let’s keep it that way so they can’t develop modern technology. That’s a wartime, aggressive prewar operation coming from the White House. Is that really what Biden intends? We don’t know. We hear this from Blinken, we hear this from spokesmen from the administration. Biden himself said the United States will not get involved in a war in Ukraine, but that our allies are totally united behind the U.S. desire to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and democracy. Which as I pointed out before, is a joke, given that the sovereignty of Ukraine was violated by the United States and its allies, including people like George Soros and non-governmental organizations in the February 2014 coup. But the other question that’s coming up now: Is NATO really unified? Well, there’s a discussion between Macron and Putin where the main discussion topic was reviving the Normandy Four proposals for the Minsk Accord, which essentially is being violated by Ukraine. Ukraine signed an agreement in which they said they would negotiate with leaders of the breakaway republics, so-called. The Donbas region. But they refused to do it; they say they want to negotiate with Russia. But Russia says, this is part of your country. Instead of deploying half the Ukrainian army on the river facing the Donbas, why don’t you meet and discuss this with the leaders of the people who are demanding more autonomy? So, Macron said that he agrees with Putin that this process should be strengthened. What that means is that Germany and France, who are the other two signers besides Russia and Ukraine, must put pressure on Ukraine. Then you had a video conference between Putin and the Italian-Russian Chamber of Commerce, or the Russian-Italian Chamber of Commerce. A dialogue in which Putin said again, Russia has no intention to invade Ukraine. But mostly, they talked about trade issues. This did not sit well with the European Union, which initially tried to dissuade the Italians from having this, and then responded that this was an inopportune thing to do, given the Russian threat to invade Ukraine. There’s another group, the German Committee on East European Economic Relations, which wants to have a similar video conference with Putin. It’s apparently coming under pressure also. In their request, they cited former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who once said, “The highest good is the maintenance of peace.” This is what is the intent behind these kinds of discussions. We’re seeing the emergence in Germany of something very interesting. The old tendency towards Ostpolitik—Eastern politics—which goes back to the Willy Brandt administration from 1969 to 1974. Where the discussion was of a change in relations through rapprochement, détente, negotiations. This, of course, was something that was very antithetical at the time to the British-U.S. control over NATO, although Nixon himself then launch certain discussions with Russia. These are a little more murky, but in any case, this tendency is now re-emerging in Germany in spite of the vitriolic tendency of the war party in the Greens who are in the Cabinet. I’ll just review very quickly this Zelenskyy-Biden call, because it gets to the question that I want to go into in more depth, which is: Who is trying to sabotage a peaceful resolution? A reporter from CNN named Matthew Chance, who by the way just happens to be a British subject. We haven’t investigated this enough yet, but that in itself is telling. He apparently either made up a source, or found a source who told him something that was not true. That Biden said to Zelenskyy during the meeting that the Russians will come in and sack Kiev; there will be harmful impact, and you better be prepared for that. It was also said from a CNN editor that Biden said that Russia will definitely invade when the ground freezes. A Zelenskyy spokesman denied that Biden said that. A National Security Council official named Emily Horn said that CNN is citing anonymous sources who are spreading falsehoods about the call. Why should we be surprised that something like this comes from a British subject through CNN, which is a totally disreputable psychological warfare operation rather than a news network. This comes at a moment when the U.S. is talking about withdrawing the family members of diplomatic personnel in Kiev, which a Ukrainian former Defense Minister mocked by saying, “They’re safer in Kiev than they would be in Los Angeles or any of the other cities in the United States under siege.” Zelenskyy himself said this kind of talk is causing panic. It creates the perception that there’s a war underway. He said, “That’s not the case.” Also, Zelenskyy in his response said this is harming Ukraine’s ability to get foreign aid, which they need. They need $4-5 billion in aid to stabilize the economy. Well, maybe instead of asking for billions of dollars of weapons, they should see if they can get new loans. But why are they in trouble? Why do they have such a large debt? When the coup took place in February 2014, one of the first things the new government of oligarchs did was to bring in the International Monetary Fund, which imposed a form of shock therapy on Ukraine. The idea of a transition to a free market economy, which drove the living standards down, shut down a lot of industry in Ukraine, and created a problem that the loans that they had taken previously could not be covered. They had to borrow more, and now they’re one of the 54 nations that is heavily indebted that the World Bank and others say could be headed toward a debt default which could trigger a global financial crisis. So, if you put this together, what you see is Ukraine, which was always a difficult country because of the ethnic divisions, because of the post-Soviet period, and so on, was worsened by the coup by bringing in the IMF, and by making the demand that it be brought into NATO to increase the tension that exists already between the Russian population in eastern Ukraine and the majority so-called Ukrainian population in Kiev, which includes in very important positions in its defense and security forces open neo-Nazis who are out to kill Russians. That’s the situation on the ground at present. Let me just do a little bit of brief background on why it’s important that this is a British-initiated story. Because it comes at the same time that the British intelligence agencies put out a report saying that they have evidence that the Russians are trying to pull a kind of reverse Maidan; a coup in Kiev to put in a pro-Russian president to replace Zelenskyy. This was heavily covered in Europe, heavily covered in the United States. When the Ukrainians said they don’t believe it, and the person British intelligence named as the target, or the one who would be brought in by the Russians, when he denounced it and denied it, those stories were never covered. But the fact that the Russians supposedly were organizing a coup was given heavy coverage. Now, what’s the British interest here? Many people say, well, you LaRouche people always talk about the Brits, but Britain is a collapsed country. The United Kingdom is no longer very significant. Well, it is still a nuclear power, but more importantly, the British Commonwealth is a political force in the world. The City of London is the dominant financial force in terms of setting the policies. People who are focussed on Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum in Davos, their policies for the Great Reset come from the City of London. Klaus Schwab is not an original thinker; he works closely with Mark Carney, the former director of the Bank of England who is the person overseeing for the United Nations the Green New Deal and the Great Reset. So, this is a British operation. But, what’s the British interest here? This goes back to the 19th century, what was known as the Great Game, which is the background to the Afghan war. But more importantly, the overall strategy of empire is called geopolitics. And I’m not going to go through the history of that, Mackinder; I’ve done that before, you can find that on YouTube. But the important conception behind British policy from the 1890s to the present, is the greatest threat to the ability of the British and now the United States to dictate the terms of the post-Cold War order, would be the same threat that they had in 1900: That of Eurasian integration. And by that, they mean Western Europe, France, Germany, Italy, the countries of Eastern Europe uniting economically with Russia, with China, with the Asian countries. Because that would undermine the power of the City of London. Why? Because of what you just heard from Lyndon LaRouche before. The City of London bases its supremacy on monetarism, on neo-liberalism, on the ability to speculate, and in opposition to investing funds into physical economy. That’s always been the fighting issue between the American colonies and the new American republic against the British Empire. The Brits are for free market policies, free trade policies. The United States was founded on policies of protectionism, investment in physical economy, and in favor of industry based on science and technology as opposed to looting and predatory policies based on speculation, which is the core of monetarism and has been from the time of the British East India Company in the 18th century. Let’s look at the recent history of this to get a sense of the British role in controlling U.S. policy. I’m going to look very quickly at two prominent British figures, who themselves were just spokesmen for the City of London and the oligarchy, but are known for their policies. Let’s look at that. First, you have Margaret Thatcher, who in 1983 in an ongoing fight that the City of London was having with people who were saying the City has too much power, she came down along with high court on the side of the City of London. The result was what was called the Big Bang, which was a deregulation policy which did away with much of the control that the government had over the banks and the financial institutions. This opened the door for a bigger speculation that goes back to the 1971 decision by Nixon to end the Bretton Woods system. The next step in this was 1983 in Britain. Ronald Reagan took leadership from Margaret Thatcher on this, and the Reagan economic policy, even though there was somewhat of an economic impact from the big spending on defense, nevertheless in October 1987 we had giant stock market crash, which had been forecast by LaRouche earlier that year. Why did that happen? Because of the shift to a speculative economy under Thatcher. Nigel Lawson, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Thatcher when the Big Bang took place, and after the 2008 crash, in a moment of candor, said that the crash of 2007-8 was an unintended consequence of the Big Bang. Thatcher’s policy, as I said, was adopted by Reagan, Bush. In 1999, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the United States is right there with the United Kingdom, that is Wall Street and Silicon Valley with the City of London, as a deregulated money center for monetarism and neo-liberalism. Also with Thatcher was the neo-con policy of war, the fight to protect the Empire. There’s a really interesting story: In 1991, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the question was, would the United States do anything or not? Margaret Thatcher was staying with the U.S. Ambassador to Britain in Aspen, Colorado for a vacation. She was visiting the U.S. Ambassador to Britain in Colorado, and George H.W. Bush, the President of the United States, flew to Aspen to meet with her to discuss what should be done about Saddam. She made this famous comment to him, “Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly.” She encouraged him to invade. Later, she said it more colloquially, she said she “stiffened his spine” at that meeting. Just of interest, the Ambassador to Britain that she went to visit was Raymond Seitz, who had spent three years before being the Ambassador to Britain as the Executive Assistant to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a British monetarist to his core. So, that’s the Thatcher policy—neo-liberalism, neo-con, U.S.-British Empire must set the rules of the rules-based order. The next step in that was Tony Blair. Blair was also a neo-liberal and a neo-con. His neo-liberalism was called the Third Way, democratic socialism, but also free-market policy. Blair always represented the City of London. He was just given the Noble Order of the Garter, the highest honor that you can get from Queen Elizabeth. Blair’s policies were deregulation and neo-liberal economics: Tear down the role of the government, make everything a stakeholder society, shareholder values. That’s what Klaus Schwab is talking about now. LaRouche was attacking this back in the 1980s, when it started with Thatcher, but under Blair, the impact was especially profound with the Clinton-Gore administration, where Bill Clinton signed on, and this goes back again to the ’80s when Gore set up the Democratic Leadership Council which said Democrats have to move to the center, shouldn’t be left wing, and so on. They fully embraced the deregulated economic system. In fact, Clinton, under the influence of Robert Rubin, signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, which took away any prohibition against speculation for the commercial banks. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which opened the door to the crash of 2007-2008, as Nigel Lawson said. William Black, who is a very prominent columnist, analyst, former bank regulator, said that the Third Way pretends to be a center-left policy, but is actually completely a creation of Wall Street. He called it a “false flag operation” of Wall Street. That’s what Clinton embraced; that’s what Obama was full-fledged. That’s why Obama bailed out the banks in 2008 instead of listening to LaRouche and putting them through bankruptcy reorganization. On the war question, Blair is the same as Thatcher. Blair is the outspoken proponent of getting rid of the idea of the principle of Westphalia, which is that you must recognize the security interests of other nations. You must act toward other nations as you wish they would act toward you: no interference in the internal affairs of other nations. That was signed in 1648 as the Peace of Westphalia. Blair in 1999 said, “no, no, no, no, no, we can’t have that anymore.” There’s too much evil that has to be taken on, that’s why we have to get rid of the Westphalian principle. What he put forward instead was the idea of Responsibility to Protect, which is essentially a justification for regime-change coups. This was brought into the United States by people like Samantha Power (who by the way is a Brit) and others who insisted that the Clinton administration get involved in the Balkan war, in which the U.S. and NATO bombed Yugoslavia. And especially regime change in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, and in Ukraine. In April 2002, there was a meeting at Blair’s country home, Chequers, which included Lord Boyce, the Chief of the Defense Staff; it included Richard Dearlove, the Chief of MI6; and Sir John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. They met to discuss Iraq. This was in April 2002, just after the U.S. and NATO invaded Afghanistan. Then on April 6th and 7th, four days after this meeting, Blair flew to Crawford, Texas to the Bush ranch, and had two days of meetings with Bush, Jr. in which they discussed Iraq. Less than a year later, the U.S. invaded Iraq. But before the invasion, in September of 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove provided the original dodgy dossier =, which claimed Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, getting yellow cake uranium from Niger in Africa, and that this was to show that Saddam Hussein had a capability, according to that report, to hit the United Kingdom with nuclear bombs, nuclear weapons within 45 minutes whenever they decided to do it. This was cited by the United States when they went to the United Nations to get support for the invasion of Iraq, in the February 2003 discredited presentation by Sir Colin Powell. There’s more you could go into on this British question. The Syrian chemical weapons charges which came from the White Helmets, which were essentially a British operation working for the overthrow of Assad. You had the Skripal affair, the claims from Porton Down, the British chemical weapons lab, that Putin was deploying agents to kill off Russian defectors with a highly poisonous chemical. Same thing against Navalny. And then the most recent example again being this British report, at the height of the tension over whether Russia is going to invade or not, claiming that Russia had a plan to overthrow the Zelenskyy government and put in a pro-Russian government. I want you to think about this question, because this British question is real. The British Empire’s power is the power of shifting the narrative, of creating new narratives, and of invading your mind to convince you that the greatest threat to peace and security in the world is the demon, Vladimir Putin, and the authoritarian dictator Xi Jinping in China. And not the fact that, under British direction, the United States has taken the lead in shifting the world to a neo-liberal economic system, which is responsible for poverty, for absolutely unsustainable debt, putting us on a pathway toward an economic crash, and at that same time, one war after another, and now targetting Russia and China. So, what’s the lesson from all this? Join with the Schiller Institute. Find out how the world really works. This was Lyndon LaRouche’s great contribution to humanity. Not just being able to find out who the bad guys are, but to provide an understanding of how the human mind is the battlefield, and that the British are highly sophisticated in their ability to shift the way you think; including the development from Silicon Valley of social media networks and so on, the spy operations and so on. The running of Russia-gate; on and on and on. This has to end. The United States has to stop being a dangerous ferocious beast on a British leash. That’s why the hope is that we can pull back from this situation with Ukraine. But more importantly, move toward a new security arrangement for the world, which does not start from the City of London and Washington and NATO. That’s what I wanted to present today.

What if the U.S. and the U.K. declared war, but nobody came? Day after day the U.S. and U.K. media post screaming headlines about the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today’s edition includes the Daily Mail reporting that the U.K. government will announce moves to “target Russia’s strategic and financial interests tomorrow,” while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss ranted to Sky News: “Currently, the economic sanctions are fairly narrowly drawn, so we could only target companies with a direct involvement in destabilizing Ukraine. What we are looking to do is widen that so any company of interest to the Kremlin and the regime in Russia would be able to be targeted, so there will be nowhere to hide for Putin’s oligarchs, for Russian companies involved in propping up the Russian state. That’s what we are looking at doing this week.”This follows the open admission by the White House in a published rant on Jan. 25 by a “senior administration official” that U.S sanctions are intended to “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy.” There it is—bring down the Russian state, and stop Russia’s industrialization. Hitler had a similar ambition, and it is hard not to recognize the comparison to today. That insanity resulted in the death of 73 million souls. There are major differences, of course—for one, the U.S., U.K., and Russia have nuclear weapons, and 73 million or more would likely be killed on the first day. Nor is the U.S. hiding its intention to use nuclear weapons. Recall that U.S. Strategic Command chief Adm. Charles Richard said in February 2021 that nuclear war is no longer considered “unlikely,” but is now “a very real possibility” due to the rise of China and Russia. On Jan. 25, 2022 U.S. Strategic Command announced the kickoff this week of “Global Lightning 22,” “an annual command post exercise designed to train Department of Defense forces and assess joint operational readiness across USSTRATCOM mission areas,” that this year is being conducted “in coordination with U.S. Indo Pacific Command.” Newsweek yesterday quoted Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, that the exercise “includes practicing operations during a trans-/post-attack nuclear environment, including reconstitution, redirection and targeting of STRATCOM forces.” In other words, it not only contemplates nuclear first use by one side or the other, but also continued nuclear warfighting after the initial exchange. Then there is the “cheering on” of today’s Nazis. A Fox News report (with help from AP) today runs the headline with kicker: Ukrainian Volunteer Forces Prepare To Fight Off Russian Invasion as U.S. Troops Deploy to Eastern Europe—More than 130,000 Ukrainian volunteers are on reserve to defend against a potential Russian invasion." Such heroic coverage leaves out the fact that the “volunteers” they interview are members of the neo-Nazi militia, condemned even by the Israeli government as fascists. So what about the Ukraine government itself, and the Ukraine military? Today’s “egg on your face” story comes from Reuters on Jan. 28, claiming that three “unnamed U.S. officials” had informed them that the Russian military buildup along the Ukraine border had “expanded” to include “blood products” and other medical supplies, which certainly shows (they say) that Putin is prepared for an “imminent” invasion, as CNN says White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki has insisted. Not so, said the Ukraine Defense Ministry in a Jan. 29 statement: “The Center for Operational Information commented on information spread in some media about the alleged accumulation of blood supplies by the Russian Federation in the troops near the Ukrainian borders. First of all, it should be noted that this information, with reference to anonymous officials, was not confirmed by any official source from the relevant agencies of the partner countries. Monitoring and analysis of the current situation around the Ukrainian borders does not record such activities. This is evidenced by the exchange of information between intelligence services and foreign partners. Such information ‘interventions’ are an element of information and psychological warfare, the purpose of which is to provoke fear and panic in our society. The Operational Information Center urges not to disseminate unverified information from anonymous sources and to use official data.” Is this the nation we are to “defend” by going to war with Russia, and possibly also China? We must assure the maximum possible viewership for the Jan. 22 Schiller Institute forum: “A Difference In Leadership: Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?” featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche and First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy, along with host Dennis Speed, LaRouche Organization expert Harley Schlanger, EIR Economics Editor Paul Gallagher, and Schiller Institute Representative at the United Nations Richard A. Black.

Richard Black in discussion with Daniel Burke and Cade Levinson via Twitter Spaces. Subscribe to the Schiller Institute's Leonore magazine to read Richard's article.

Today’s “news” is that the three full months of escalating British and U.S. accusations that Russia is “imminently” about to invade Ukraine, along with a crescendo of threats to “crush” Russia when it does, are getting so wild that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to reject them publicly and tell American officials to “calm down” and give him some economic aid. But British media still escalate, now putting the most provocative possible words in President Joe Biden’s mouth. Their purpose is to provoke the war they accuse Russia of, then attempt to destroy Russia’s economy.But because Russia has moved more and more into an economic and strategic partnership with China, this is the most dangerous form of bluffing. The United States and European economies are being corroded by “Green New Deal” technological primitivism; their banking systems are facing a hyperinflationary explosion. The partnership of Russia and China is more than strong enough for a new Cold War; but the best would be to cooperate with the United States in international development, and in a new credit system that can replace a bankrupt “everything bubble” of debt. China’s 2021 GDP growth was reported 8.1% over the year. U.S. GDP growth in the fourth quarter was 6.9% relative to the third quarter, but for the full year 2021 it was just 5.7%. Moreover, more than 70% of the fourth-quarter U.S. growth was attributable to businesses building up their inventories; the remainder, to increased consumer spending. China’s national planning and reform body attributed its faster growth to greater and growing investment in research and technological innovation. The other key factor is technology in infrastructure; China is investing $300-$400 billion a year in new infrastructure, led by high-speed transportation and new power supplies in many countries. Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” visit to a Pennsylvania bridge that collapsed just before he arrived was poignant; but putting another bridge there is not going to raise America’s economic productivity. Because U.S. growth for the fourth quarter only was supposedly higher in that quarter than that of China, Biden on Jan. 27 lied to the American people, saying that afternoon, “For the first time in 20 years, American GDP grew faster than China.” But the opposite is true. And just under $16 trillion equivalent, China’s GDP, even in nominal dollar terms, is now more than two-thirds that of the United States at just over $22 trillion, and will overtake it in coming years. China’s industrial production grew by 9.6%, fixed asset investment by 4.9%, job creation was at 12.69 million, according to the National Bureau of Statistics release Jan. 17. China’s real disposable personal income, after inflation, rose by 8.1% in 2021. On the other hand, Americans’ average real weekly wages fell by −2.4% over the year. U.S. Industrial production was 3% lower than its peak level of mid-2018; manufacturing output was 5% lower. And regarding labor productivity, with labor forces growing fairly rapidly in both countries in 2021, a long-term trend nonetheless continued: China’s productivity growth was 1.6%; that of the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 0.6% for the first three quarters of 2021, the latest figures available. The Chinese banking system’s loans outstanding, offered both to the domestic economy and to many countries in the Belt and Road Initiative framework, rose by 11.7% in 2021; loans outstanding of the U.S. banking system grew by less than 0.5% over the year. Americans and people of the NATO countries should think: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s idea of saving Afghanistan from the Soviet Russia, produced al-Qaeda, and a country destroyed by 40 years of war; Tony Blair’s neo-cons’ idea—saving Iraq, Syria and Libya from Russia—produced ISIS. The crazy idea of saving Ukraine from Russia, would give us a country run by neo-Nazis; but before we even get there, it’s producing a new Cold War against the effective partnership of Russia and China, and may produce a world war. Rather than this insane pursuit of a global superpower military confrontation, Americans in particular should look at what Russia and China are actually doing. They are developing their economies, making loans for high-technology infrastructure projects in third countries, developing advanced nuclear power technologies, jointly working toward a base for scientific work on the Moon in the 2030s, and looking for the United States to join in the projects of the Belt and Road Initiative China started in 2013. And the trans-Atlantic nations’ economies need a New Bretton Woods credit and monetary system or their banking systems are going to explode again, soon. This is the way to do it.

The Russian Federation continues to insist that the United States and NATO commit to satisfying Russia’s need for assurances that its national security requirements will be respected. But the responses this week — delivered officially by the U.S. and NATO — fall far short of the mark. While offering room for negotiation on secondary matters, the U.S. and NATO have given no positive response on Russia’s core security demands.Russia, which is moving forward with military exercises in Belarus and the Arctic, and organizing training drills using its nuclear forces, has repeatedly made clear that failure to respond will force the use of “military or military-technical measures.” Will those measures include the forward deployment of hypersonic nuclear missiles? Placing short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad? The U.S. maintains some 200 nuclear gravity bombs in Europe, through joint nuclear missions. If Russia moves to bring similar pressure to bear on the United States, how small will become the window of decision for responding to a real (or perceived) nuclear attack? You and I can’t count on U.S. politicians, British imperialists, or NATO commanders to get this right — to avoid a situation which, whether through calculation or accident, could rapidly escalate to an unsurvivable nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of human beings within an hour and devastate civilization globally, perhaps permanently. Neither can the NATO/Anglo-American maniacs attempting to force Russia and China into submission count on the acquiescence of their supposed partners and instruments. Secretary Blinken claims that NATO is unified, that there “is no light between” the views of the U.S. and other NATO countries. But he is wrong. Those intent on crushing Russia fret that a single NATO country could destroy the consensus on which its decisions must be made. Will Croatia stand firm? Will Bulgaria? Will Hungary dutifully play its suicidal role? Will Germany, after its 1941-1945 attack on the Soviet Union, truly set up another war against Russia? Will diplomats, politicians, generals, and thinkers break ranks? This is the unanswered question of the moment. As Russian diplomats are kicked out of Washington, D.C., as American diplomats reportedly plan to leave Beijing, as the media drumbeat for war intensifies and as supporters of peace are cast as traitors — as weapons fly into Ukraine, as new sanctions are mulled — as calls for censorship grow — will you stand up for the dignity of the human species, and for your own life as well? Will you overthrow the hideous Malthusian dogma that says we are too numerous, and the false culture that says we are animals? Will we be here to marvel at the shocking observations the James Webb Space Telescope will soon be transmitting back to Earth? A crisis of this magnitude — an absolute branching point in history — demands great things of us. The LaRouche movement, headed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has warned of the magnitude of the crisis, to which increasing numbers are awakening, and has committed itself to catalyzing the needed new paradigm on this planet. In his poem The Artists, Friedrich Schiller — the namesake of the Schiller Institute — expressed the awesome responsibility that forces itself upon each of us today. “The dignity of man into your hands is given, “Protector be! “It sinks with you! With you it is arisen!” Can the future count on you?

Sergei Lavrov expressed the Russian disappointment with the written response from the U.S. to President Putin's demand for new treaties which guarantee Russia's security interests. While agreeing to further discussion of secondary issues, the Biden administration appears to have refused to meet Putin's demands. At the same time, the U.S. is escalating its plans for sanctions against Russia, and the media -- led by CNN -- is running false reports about Biden's discussion with Zelensky, to stoke tensions.Despite Blinken's claim of complete unity among NATO allies, fault lines continue to become visible. In Italy and Germany, businessmen and manufacturers want to speak with Putin, as they recognize that a war, or escalation of sanctions, would have disastrous consequences for western economies, which are already weak. The desperation in the west is also visible, in reports of a likely wave of debt defaults of highly-indebted poor nations, if interest rates are raised in the U.S. Helga took note of the positive potential which emerged from the meetings in Oslo with a Taliban delegation, and motion in support of her Operation Ibn Sina. She appealed to viewers to join with us to break out from under the war drive of the geopoliticians, and bring about her husband's perspective of a New Bretton Woods, which would uniquely address the common interests of all nations. Transcript War Danger Still Exists — A New Paradigm Is in the Common Interest of All Mankind Weekly Strategic Webcast with Helga Zepp-LaRouche Friday January 28, 2022 HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger. Welcome to our weekly dialogue with Schiller Institute founder and Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is Friday, January 29, 2022. While the world was kept waiting for a couple of days for the United States’ response to President Putin’s demand that there be new security guarantees extended to Russia, the response was delivered on Jan. 26. Sergey Lavrov said that while there’s ongoing discussion there was no response to the core issues. Helga, what’s your thinking on where this leaves us? HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think the war danger clearly still exists, because it’s very clear that there are elements who are not satisfied with the relationship between United States, and Russia, and China, for that matter, to go into a civilized direction. But because of the systemic collapse going on in the Western financial system, the desperation is big. And there are, despite what is officially being said, where always psywar ops, covert operations being threatened, it’s a very complex picture. To start off with what the Russian response has been, Lavrov, and the Russians in general, have said that they are very disappointed that the United States and NATO did not respond to the core issue of their demand that NATO should not further expand to the East, that no offensive weapons system should be placed along the Russian borders, and that Ukraine should definitely not be ever in NATO. These were the absolutely important issues, and they were rejected by both the United States and by NATO. And what was offered instead was all kinds of, what from the Russian standpoint are also useful discussions, but not the essential ones. So it’s like, make offers for arms control, for continuation of the dialogue—all of that is useful, naturally, but I think it is to be noted that the basic position of the West to not respond to the very legitimate security interests of Russia. And it’s very difficult to say where this will all end up, but the bullying coming from people like Blinken, in particular, is so blatant, and the obvious neglect of the United States, not only for the security interests of Russia, but also the security interests of European countries like Germany, or economic interests, is also so absolutely blatant, that this whole thing may end up in a complete backlash, in a blowback. Because if the United States insists on being the hegemon, and keep a unipolar world, and in then in the process of trying to ram that through, tramples over the interests of its so-called Allies, and creates an open hostility with the so-called adversary—, namely Russia and China—this may end up in not what the architects of the confrontation have intended, but it may reveal the absolutely uncivilized behavior of those who are pushing this confrontation. Now, Lavrov said that compared to NATO, the response of the United States was almost diplomatic decency, while the response from NATO was so ideologically blatant that it leaves almost no room for any civilized discussion. So we have to see. Now there are different voices. There is a lot of psywar and it’s sometimes very difficult to know what is true and what is not. The latest flareup is this CNN report by Matthew Chance who claims that in yesterday’s phone discussion between President Biden and President Zelenskyy, Biden supposedly would have said that once the ground is frozen, the Russia attack will come, and he would have told Zelenskyy that Kiev will be sacked, that he should prepare for a big impact—all language that is draconian and barbarian. The White House denied that this was said in this form. In any case, I think it’s very unlikely—there is not even an interest by Russia to occupy Ukraine! They have an interest to protect the Russians in east Ukraine, but for sure, not to overrun Ukraine, where the entire west is filled with Nazis and neo-Nazis and would be a complete mess to even think of occupying a terrible place like that. So, I think there is an incredible psywar going on. Zelenskyy himself said he does not think anything has changed, only the hype has increased. Papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung say that they think there is a very low probability for a Russian attack. One has to differentiate between the confetti which is being thrown around, and the core question. And the core question is that a solution must come out of all of this which takes into account the basic security interest of Russia, and that is the bottom line. SCHLANGER: I think, Helga, for the sake of our American listeners, who don’t get any of this reporting, it’s worth noting that what CNN said was not only denied by the Zelenskyy spokesman who said that no one in the President’s office said such a thing in the discussion with Biden, and described it as completely false, but National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said that CNN’s sources are leaking falsehoods. So that’s what you’re getting in the United States, with the psywar. And speaking of psychological warfare, there is the British intelligence report that came out this week which said that they have evidence that the Russians are about to try to install someone to run the President’s office in Ukraine, presumably as a coup, who’s favorable to Russia. The Russians denied this, the person whom they named said this is completely preposterous; but we’re seeing this kind of psychological warfare. Now, countering the psychological warfare, there’s been a continuing diplomatic offensive from Russia. Putin had an interesting discussion with the Russian-Italian Chamber of Commerce, and it appears that the German business and manufacturing grouping wants to have a similar discussion. And the EU has denounced this. This is part of what appears to be a growing split occurring within Europe, isn’t it? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s deepening, and if Blinken goes around and talks about the “unity of the allies” and NATO and so forth, I think this is absolutely not true. As you say, the EU tried to pressure Italian businessmen and corporations not to go into this dialogue with Putin, and only two or three did back down, but the vast majority did have this dialogue. And in Germany, the German Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations (Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft), which is basically the core of German industry, they also came out and want to have a videoconference with Putin. And they also reminded people of the statements by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, that the most important good is the maintenance of peace. And they also made emphatically the point that the security interests of Russia must be respected. That is important. Then you have in the Social Democracy (SPD) an appeal circulated that Germany has to remember and return to the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr, the détente. And there are similar other appeals circulating. So I think there is a reawakening of the peace movement in several countries, and this is a reflection of the fact that people are becoming very, very upset about the possibility of war. There is one demand coming from Vladimir Yermakov, who is the Director of Arms Control and Nonproliferation in the Russian Foreign Ministry, and he demands that the modernized nuclear weapons which are in Europe, the B61 and other types, that they all be withdrawn back to the territory of the United States, and that the five non-nuclear members of NATO who are training for the case of a nuclear attack on Russia, that that must be absolutely halted. I think this will be a demand that will be picked up by peace-oriented people in Europe, because the fact that these weapons do exist on European soil makes the countries that have these weapons prime targets if it comes to any kind of a confrontation, because it is generally very clear that conventionally there is no way how the United States and NATO could win a war against Russia. The United States may have all kinds of modern equipment, and right now both the British and the United States are having continuous transport of so-called “lethal weapons” into Ukraine; and also from the Baltic states, whom the U.S. has given permission that they can transfer weapons which they got from the U.S. to Ukraine. But if you look at the map, Russia has the advantage of territorial depth—Russia is a country with 11 time zones—and any time somebody tried to conquer Russia, starting with Napoleon, and continued with Hitler, they got such bloody noses: The great Napoleonic army was decimated to a few hundred, poor lost souls who returned from that campaign. Hitler could not defeat Russia, at a tremendous loss for the Russian people, but there was no way how Hitler could have won that war; and that would be the fate of anybody who was trying to have a war that would involve Russia. So the danger, naturally, is that it would come to the question of the use of nuclear weapons. Now, we are still sitting on a powder keg, because Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has warned that there is evidence of American or British mercenaries operating already inside the territory of Ukraine. There are reports about private military companies, in part these are the “gray zone” people, former soldiers who now have private firms training people who have a crazy affection for military questions. So there is a big danger, because a provocation could be launched at any moment, and false-flag operations, as well, so this is something to be watched very carefully. Then there is the discussion that supposedly Xi Jinping would have asked Putin to wait until after the Winter Olympics are over before attacking Ukraine—which is ludicrous, but increases the danger, and I can only say that people must really step back from this whole question and get back to their senses. One has the feeling that the people who are pushing this confrontation have gone completely mad: They’re playing with the existence of civilization. And I can only tell people, this is something where we have to walk back from the brink of the potential annihilation of the human species. SCHLANGER: There is one other aspect I want to bring up, which you mentioned before, which is the bullying by Blinken. We’re seeing more signs of insanity from Congress in terms of sanctions that they’re talking about, new economic sanctions against Russia. “Preemptive sanctions,” which is being discussed by a number of different people—including some in Ukraine—saying the best thing to make sure that Russia doesn’t invade is to have “preemptive sanctions.” And then you have the threats against the diplomats, the fact that more diplomatic offices are being shut down—this is all part of what seems like a pre-war mobilization. ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I must say that this is not civilized behavior any more. First of all, the U.S. recalling its non-essential diplomats from Ukraine is an unfriendly act. There is no reason to do that. Then there is this talk about the Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov, that may be forced to leave in April. Now, that would be a very, very dramatic escalation, to basically force the ouster of the most important diplomat between the United States and Russia. And then, there was a readout from the White House, from unnamed “senior administration officials” discussing what the nature of potential economic sanctions against Russia would be, in the case of a Russian attack. Now, obviously, the Russians have stated again and again, they do not intend to attack, and Lavrov has said it many times, that if it is up to Russia, there will be no war. And other officials have said the only people who are pushing a war between Russia and Ukraine is the West. Russia has no interest to attack. They just put up these troops along the border to make the point that they have a security interest, and they want to have a solution to it, but they never said they intended to attack. Now, what this White House readout says, it is quite incredible. This was a meeting which took place on Jan. 25. They discussed a whole range of “severe economic measures” starting “at the top of the escalation ladder”—in other words, not moving up slowly, getting stronger and stronger, but going full blast from the beginning. And they say want to “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard,” by denying him access to all modern advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, anything having to do with defense aerospace. And they basically say the aim is to prevent Putin’s intention to “diversify” from exporting oil and gas, causing an atrophy of the Russian economy. And on and on with this language. The language of this is so brutal, it’s basically saying: Look, we managed with the shock therapy in 1990s, with Jeffrey Sachs in the Yeltsin period, to turn a former superpower into a raw materials producing, third world country, and now we will deny Russia the right to industrialize, by applying such measures. Now, that is a form of a declaration of war already! How can you deny a country to develop industrially? This is really big, and I would like people to read this, because if you read the language, how this is written, it portrays a mindset which is the mindset of a party declaring war already. And naturally, I remember, there was a report by the CIA in 1991, which had similar language, which basically said Russia has more raw materials than the United States and they have better educated scientists, and therefore, any economic development of Russia must be discouraged. And that was the beginning of the shock therapy, which reduced the industrial capacity of Russia between 1991 and 1994, to only 30% of what it had been before. And the 1990s were a decade which the Russians regard as “genocide,” because the demographic curve was absolutely reduced by 1 million people per year. Naturally, this is also not very realistic, because in the meantime, the Chinese economy is in the process of overtaking the United States, and while there may still be certain areas where such sanctions would be felt in a painful way by Russia or anybody else who is affected by it, but the idea that you can deny Russian industrial development by applying such sanctions, it’s a reflection of the same kind of arrogant mindset; because China has put a rover on the far side of the Moon, where nobody in the West has, so they could not have stolen that technology from anybody—they’re the leader. They’re also the leader in terms of fusion energy research and fast train systems and many other areas. But it shows you an intention, and that mindset is the same one as Mr. Blinken thinks he can force the Europeans to go along with these sanctions, even if it would destroy their own economies, which if you go in this direction, then Russia would cut off all oil and gas supplies which would hit Europe, not the United States. So this is really wrong, and I can only say that hopefully there will be some people inside the United States who will say this is not the true character of the United States, because you cannot build peace on the basis of doing the utmost damage to whoever you want to have a relationship with. SCHLANGER: It’s also a confirmation of what your husband, Lyndon LaRouche talked about in his 1998 “Storm Over Asia” video, in which he said the attempt to deny economic development to Russia and China is part of the traditional British geopolitical doctrine, which is dictated from the City of London. And the idea, obviously, that they’re trying to stop any Eurasian integration with Europe is really one of the key, underlying features. Now, on that, there are some developments around Afghanistan: There is a Taliban delegation in Norway this week. There’s continued discussion of your proposal for Operation Ibn Sina. Why don’t you let us know what you have on developments around Afghanistan? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s good there was this conference in Norway, where a delegation of the Taliban met with representatives from the U.S., Germany, I think France, Italy—and I don’t know the full extent of what measures came out of that. But the fact that this took place, and there are now more organizations working with the Taliban and that there is a recognition that the only way to save the 25 million people who are in acute life danger is to work with the Taliban—this is definitely a breakthrough. I think the German head of UNICEF gave a report from Kabul, where he said 1 million children are in acute danger and are actually dying; 7 million children are in acute danger. And he said this is as many children altogether as there are in Germany. I haven’t checked this figure, but it makes sense, and it shows you the incredible dimension of the need to change the thinking. And as we have mentioned on this show several times, I launched the Operation Ibn Sina, which refers to the great physician from 1,000 years ago from this region. And I’m very happy that there are now more people picking up on it and really think this is a very good idea, to use Afghanistan as a model to create a modern healthcare system for every country in the world. And the speech I gave about it, which is the cover story in the January 28 issue of EIR, which you can download and circulate it. We can also put the link underneath this show afterwards. The video of the speech I made is also available. And these are being tweeted by several influential people, and they are sending it through their social media. So I hope this will lead to a really broad discussion and becomes the basis for actually implementing a modern health system for Afghanistan and every other country on the planet! Because the pandemic is still here, and despite what people hope, new variants are still a possibility. And in any case, the conditions of many, many countries in the developing sector, they must have a development perspective, because it cannot go on that billions of people are on the verge of famine, and losing their livelihoods, and in danger of dying. So Operation Ibn Sina must be the beginning of a new paradigm. And this becomes all the more urgent, because we’re sitting on a powder keg: The reason for all the war danger is the fact that the financial system is about to blow up. There are many reports that the so-called “emerging markets” which is a synonym for the developing countries, that they may have a huge debt crisis if there is the slightest “tapering” of interest rates by the Federal Reserve. So the urgency to go with LaRouche’s Four Laws, and really go in a completely different direction, rebuilding the world economy by having actual development, starting with a world health system is of the greatest urgency. SCHLANGER: Among those issuing a warning was Guardian columnist, Larry Elliott, who pointed out that almost 50% of the debt which could be lost in a wave of defaults from poorer countries that are heavily indebted, is owed to financial institutions and investments. That means, people’s personal retirement funds are invested in this debt. David Malpass, the president of the World Bank, also warned that we could be seeing a trigger of debt defaults from the developing sector: So, in that sense, the interconnection between the war danger, the spread of disease and collapse of healthcare, and the overall economic system, really comes back to the importance of Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal for a New Bretton Woods. And I think that would be a good place to wrap this up. ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. I think there are many countries in the world that clearly are preparing for the eventuality of a sudden collapse. You see it in many details: Gold buying is up again, which always happens when the population starts to get hysterical, then you have large buyers of gold. You have more and more a tendency to go out of the dollar. So, even if Russia would be cut off from the SWIFT system, I don’t think it will have that devastating an affect on Russia, but it could be a “nuclear bomb” for the Western capital markets—at least, that’s what Friedrich Merz, the new head of the German Christian Democracy has been saying, and I tend to agree with him on that point. So, I think we have to have a discussion about a new paradigm: We must completely change the orientation of colonialism, the idea to keep the developing countries suppressed. We have to replace that with a new just world economic order, along the lines with what China is doing with the Belt and Road Initiative, and we must get the Europeans and the United States, hopefully, to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, in the development of Southwest Asia, of Africa, of Latin America. And you know, if we join hands, no problem could not be solved! So I think, in the same way as the relationship between Russia and China has been named by former Russian Prime Minister Medvedev, he said that that relationship has become a model of what relationships among nations should be: In other words, that each furthers the best interests of the other, respects its sovereignty, doesn’t meddle in its internal affairs. And China has offered that many years ago, already, as the model for a great power relationship between the United States and China. So, we have to have a new thinking, and the common interest of mankind must be put first. If we cannot mobilize the thinking of the population to that level, we may not make it as a species, so there is right now the urgent need to have such a debate. And if you want to help this effort then join the Schiller Institute, and we will soon have a big new conference on all of these issues, probably in the week of February 7-11, so stay tuned: Become a member, help our mobilization, and hopefully we’ll see you next week. SCHLANGER: And I would urge people, as you mentioned before, but your presentation from last Saturday’s Manhattan Project meeting of the Schiller Institute—“Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?”—was very effective at identifying what this new paradigm would be and how we would get there. So, I would urge people, go to the Schiller Institute YouTube channel and it’s the presentation from January 22, 2022. So Helga, thanks for joining us. It’s always good to get a note of optimism, but it’s also important that people face the fact, as you say, that we’re still sitting on a powder keg, and it’s a little hard to be totally optimistic when you have a powder keg underneath your rear end: So, join us now, and let’s see what we can do about it. So, Helga, we’ll see you next week! ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I hope so—next week.

Once again -- Surprise, Surprise! -- CNN is caught lying to promote a war. CNN "reporter" Matthew Chance said that Pres. Biden told Ukraine's Pres. Zelensky that Kiev could be "sacked" by invading Russian forces, while CNN "reporter" Marquardt said Biden told Zelensky that a Russian invasion "is virtually certain." A spokesman for Zelensky said the first report, which cited a Ukrainian official, is "completely false", while a spokeswoman for the U.S. National Security Council, Emily Horne, told CNN that "anonymous sources are ‘leaking falsehoods'”. Help us get out the truth -- share these Daily Updates, and subscribe to our Daily Alert!

Learn how to outflank geopolitical war-mongering from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who turns 266 on Thursday! In 1781, when the American colonies turned the world upside-down on the British Empire, there was a chance for a breakout for Western civilization amongst the courts of Europe. Mozart’s bold intervention in Vienna, upon the court of Emperor Joseph II in 1781/2, blew up the attempt to inveigle the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a geopolitical war. It allowed Joseph the political and cultural room to attempt his ‘American System’ reforms. EIR's David Shavin joined the discussion tonight.

The following is an edited transcription of an interview with Prof. Li Xing, PhD, conducted on Jan. 26 by Michelle Rasmussen, Vice President of the Schiller Institute in Denmark. Dr. Li is a professor of Development and International Relations at the Department of Politics and Society, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Aalborg University. Li Xing was born in Jiaxing, China, near Shanghai. He earned his BA at the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages. He came to Denmark from Beijing in 1988 for his MA and later completed his PhD studies at Aalborg University. Read the full transcript below. Michelle Rasmussen: Welcome, Professor Li Xing, thank you so much for allowing me to interview you. Prof. Li Xing: Thank you too. Michelle Rasmussen: Li Xing, as we speak, there is an overhanging threat of war between the United States and NATO against Russia and China, countries which the war faction in the West sees as a threat to the disintegrating, unipolar Anglo-American world dominance. On the other hand, the Schiller Institute has led an international campaign to try to get the U.S. and Europe to cooperate with Russia and China to solve the great crises in the world, especially the pandemic, the financial and economic crises, the underdevelopment of the poor countries, and the cultural crisis in the West. Our international president, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has stated that the U.S.-China relationship will be the most important relationship in the future. You recently gave a lecture at the Danish Institute for International Studies about the U.S.-China rivalry. And you are a contributor to the book The Telegram: A China Agenda for President Biden by Sarwar Kashmiri, which was published in 2021 by the Foreign Policy Association in New York City. The book is composed of statements by the contributors of what each would say if they were granted a personal meeting with President Biden. What would your advice be to President Biden regarding China? Advice to President BidenProf. Li Xing: Thank you for giving me this chance for this interview. If I had the chance to meet the President, I would say to him: Hello, President Biden. I think that it is a pity that you didn’t change Trump’s China policy, especially regarding the trade war and the tariff. We can see from the current situation that in the U.S., the shortages issue, the inflation issue, these are all connected with tariff issue. Many congressmen and senators are calling for the removal of the tariffs. So, I really think that the president should give second thoughts to continuing the trade war. Contrary to this, though, the data from 2020 and 2021 shows that the China-U.S. trade actually surged almost 30%, compared with early years. So, the trade war didn’t work. The second issue is the competition in the area of high technology areas, especially regarding the chip industry. I’d say to him: Mr. President, the U.S. has the upper hand in that technology, and China has the largest market. I think that if the U.S. continues to use a technology sanction on Chinese chips, then the whole country and the whole nation will increase the investment on the chips. Once China has the technology, then the U.S. would both lose the market, and also lose technology. So, this is the second issue, I think the president should give a thought to. The third issue, which I think is a very touchy issue, is the Taiwan issue. I would really advise the President: Mr. President, to play the Taiwan card needs caution, because Taiwan is the center of Chinese politics, in its historical memory, and the most important national project in the unification process. So, to play the Taiwan card really needs caution. But still, I would also say to the President: Mr. President, China and the U.S. have a lot of areas for cooperation. For example, climate change; for example, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan; and last but not least, because China has great technology and skill in terms of infrastructure, so you, Mr. President, should invite China to come to the U.S. and play a role in the U.S. infrastructure construction projects. That would be an ideal situation to promote bilateral relations. Attitude of the U.S. Toward ChinaMichelle Rasmussen: In your statement in the book, The Telegram, you address whether the United States should consider China as an enemy or as rival. What would you say to the American people about the attitude that the United States should have towards China? Prof. Li Xing: I don’t think that the U.S. should regard China as an enemy, but as a rival. I think there is a truth in that because China is obviously a rival to the United States on many, many grounds, both in materials and also in ideation. Nevertheless, it is not an enemy. China and the U.S. have so many areas of cooperation as you point out, that this bilateral relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Were this relationship turned into an enemy relationship, it would be a disaster for the world. Michelle Rasmussen: On January 17, Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos. What do you think is most important for people in the West to understand about his speech? Prof. Li Xing: Xi Jinping was invited to the World Economic Forum, and he sent some messages. In his address he admitted that economic globalization has created problems, but that this should not constitute a justification to write off everything regarding globalization, regarding international cooperation. So, he suggested that the world should adapt and guide globalization. He also rejected the protectionist forces on the rise in the West, saying that history has proved time and time again that confrontation does not solve problems; it only invites catastrophic consequences. President Xi also particularly mentioned protectionism, unilateralism, indirectly referring to the U.S., emphasizing that this phenomenon will only hurt the interest of others as well as itself, meaning that the U.S. trade war, or sanctions against China, will hurt both. It’s not a win-win, it’s a lose-lose. President Xi delivered a message that rejects a “zero sum” approach. I think it was a very constructive message from President Xi Jinping. He totally rejects, if I interpret his address correctly, the Cold War mentality. He doesn’t want to see a Cold War mentality emerge in either the U.S., or in China. The Belt and Road ConceptMichelle Rasmussen: Let’s move on now to the question of the Belt and Road Initiative. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Schiller Institute has worked to establish a new Silk Road, the World Land-Bridge, and many of these economic principles have been coming to life through China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Li Xing, in 2019 you wrote a book, Mapping China’s One Belt One Road Initiative, and have lectured on this. How has the Belt and Road Initiative created economic development in the underdeveloped countries? Prof. Li Xing: First of all, I think that we need to understand the Belt and Road concept—the historicity behind the Belt and Road; that the Belt and Road is not an international aid program. We have to keep that in mind. It is an infrastructure project attempting to link Eurasia. It has two routes. One is a land route, consisting of six corridors. Then, it has another route called the Maritime Silk Road. Globally, about 138 countries, ranging from Italy to Saudi Arabia to Cambodia, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with China. Just recently another country in in Latin America signed up with the Belt and Road. The idea of the Belt and Road is founded on two basic Chinese economic strengths. One is surplus capital. China has a huge amount of surplus capital in its banks, which it can use for investments. The second is that after 40 years of infrastructure development in China, China has huge technology and skill, particularly in the infrastructure development area. So, the Belt and Road is basically an infrastructure development project. The driving force of China’s Belt and Road is that after 40 years of economic development, China is experiencing a similar situation experienced by the advanced countries in world economic history—for example, rising wages, overproduction, overcapacity, and a lot of surplus capital. So, China is looking for what the Marxist analytical lens calls a ”spatial fix,” as in its domestic market, the mass production manufacturing is getting extremely large. In looking beyond Chinese territory at Chinese neighbors, China has discovered that all the countries around China are actually very, very far behind in infrastructure development. So, it’s kind of a win-win situation. The idea behind the Belt and Road is a kind of a win-win situation. Historically, the Post World War II Marshall Plan in Europe, and the military aid to East Asia, were, you could say, like Belt and Road projects, helping those countries to enhance economic development. I recently came across a World Bank study pointing out that if the Belt and Road projects were successfully implemented, the real income level throughout the entire region would rise between two or four times. At the global level, the real income can rise between 0.7 -2.9%. So, you can say, the international financial institutions, and economic institutions like World Bank, are also very positive toward the Belt and Road. However, the Belt and Road also has four areas which we need to be concerned about. Number one: the debt trap, which has been discussed quite a lot at the global level. Number two: transparency, whether the Belt and Road projects in different countries are transparent. This, too, is an issue for debate. Number three: corruption, whether Chinese investments in countries creates corruption by local officials. The number four area for concern is the environmental and social cost. So, these definitely need to be taken care of, both by China and those countries. As a whole, I think the Belt and Road project is huge. It’s very constructive. But we also need to consider its potential to create bad effects. We need to tackle all these effects collectively. ‘Debt Trap’ DiplomacyMichelle Rasmussen: When you spoke just now about a debt trap, our correspondent Hussein Askary, who covers the Muslim world, and also developments in Africa, has argued against the idea that China is creating a debt trap, pointing out that many of the countries owe much more money to Western powers, than they do to China, and that China has done things like forgiving debt, or transferring physical assets to those governments, because the debt trap accusation has been used as the primary argument against the Belt and Road. Do you do you think that this is legitimate argument or that this is overplayed to try to just create suspicion about the Belt and Road? Prof. Li Xing: No, I fully agree, actually, with the comment you just quoted from another study. It is true that the “debt trap” has been used by Western media, or those politicians who are against the Belt and Road, as an excuse, as a kind of a dark picture. But, according to my research, China actually understands this problem, and very often, the Chinese government uses different measures, or different policies, to tackle this problem. One is to write off the debt entirely, when the borrowing country would really suffer, if it had to repay. For example, the Chinese government announced that during the pandemic, debt service payments from some poor countries is suspended until their economic situation improves. China is a central-government-based country. State policy plays a bigger role than in the political system of the West, where different interest groups drive their countries’ policies into different directions. Therefore, the Chinese central government is able to play a bigger role than Western governments in tackling debt problems. Michelle Rasmussen: What has this meant for the underdeveloped countries, for example, in Africa, and other poor countries in Asia, in Ibero-America? What has the Belt and Road Initiative meant for their economic development? Prof. Li Xing: The increasing number of countries that have signed up with the Belt and Road, shows that the Belt Road project is comparatively quite welcomed. I have also followed many debates in Africa, where many African leaders were asked the question and they completely agree. They say that the situation regarding the debt of the old time, their experiences with the colonial countries, is quite different from the debt incurred with China’s investment projects or development projects. So, they still have confidence in China’s foreign development policies, especially in the Belt and Road project. From the many studies and reports I have read so far; they have strong confidence in that. Infrastructure Means DevelopmentMichelle Rasmussen: What would you say about the role of infrastructure development in China in creating this unprecedented economic growth and lifting people out of poverty? What role has infrastructure played in the incredible poverty elimination policy that China actually succeeded in achieving this year? Prof. Li Xing: The entire 40-year history of China’s economic growth and economic development, and China’s prosperity, is based on the lesson that infrastructure is one of the most important factors leading to China’s economic success. China has a slogan: “If you want to get rich, build a road.” Infrastructure is connected with every aspect of national economy. The raw materials industry, the metal industry, you name it. Cement industry, etc. Infrastructure is really the center of a nation’s economy, which can really get different areas of the country running. So, I think this experience of China is really a good lesson, not only for China itself, but also for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries. That’s why China’s Belt and Road project, identified as infrastructure projects, is really welcomed by many people, and especially President Biden. Even though his budget was not passed, because of the resistance, or even if it’s shrunken, the idea about improving U.S. infrastructure, became a kind of hot spot. I think that the U.S. needs to increase its infrastructure investment as well. Definitely. Europe-China RelationsMichelle Rasmussen: Let’s move on to Europe and China relations. You have edited the book China-U.S. Relations at a Crossroads: “Systemic Rivalry” or “Strategic Partnership.” What is your evaluation and recommendation about European-Chinese relations? When we spoke earlier, you had a comment about how the impact of African development, if there would be development or not in Africa, would impact Europe. Could you also include your idea about that? Prof. Li Xing: EU-China relations are increasingly complex, and affected by a number of interrelated factors, such as China’s rise, the growing China-U.S. rivalry, U.S. global withdrawal, especially under the Trump administration, the trans-Atlantic split, the Brexit, and at the same time, the China-Russia comprehensive alliance. Under these broad transformations of the global order, EU-China relations are also getting very complex. Right now, I feel that the EU and China are struggling to find a dynamic and durable mode of engagement, to achieve a balance between opportunities on the one side, and challenges on the other, and also between partnership and rivalry. For instance, China and the EU successfully reached what is called the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment treaty in December 2020. It was a joyful moment. However, in 2021, due to the Hong Kong events, the Xinjiang issue, and mutual sanctions in 2021, this investment treaty was suspended. Not abandoned but suspended. You can see that the relationship can be hurt by events. It’s really difficult to find a balance between strategic partnership and systemic rivalry. “Systemic rivalry” was the official term used in a European Commission document, “EU-China—A Strategic Outlook,” issued March 12, 2019. That document states that China is “simultaneously … an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership. and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.” So, you can see that a systemic rival means alternative normative values. That’s why it’s a new term, when used in that way. It shows that China’s development has both a material impact, and, also, an ideational impact—that many countries are becoming attracted by the Chinese success. For that reason, the Chinese, and the rise of China is increasingly regarded as a systemic rival. On the other hand, the message from my book is also that the EU must, one way or another, become autonomous, and design an independent China policy. Sometimes I feel that the EU-China policy is somehow pushed around or carried by U.S. global interests, or affected by the U.S.-China competition. I really think Europe needs an independent China policy. You know, the EU is thinking of developing “defence independence.” That is, it is pursuing autonomy in defense. But that’s something else. According to data from Kishore Mahbubani, a very well-known Singaporean public intellectual and professor, the Belt and Road has special meaning for Europe in relation to Africa. This is of importance to your question about Africa. According to his data on the demographic explosion in Africa, Africa’s population in the 1950s was half of that of Europe. Today, Africa’s population is 2.5 times that of Europe. By 2100, Africa’s population will be 10 times of that of Europe. So, if Africa still suffers from underdevelopment, if any crisis appears, where will African refugees migrate? Europe! From Kishore’s point of view, the Belt and Road is doing Europe a “favor,” so Europe should be very supportive of China’s Belt and Road project. I totally agree with that. What he says is also a part of the message of my book. A ‘Differentiated’ EuropeMichelle Rasmussen: You were speaking about Europe becoming more autonomous in its relations with China. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stated openly that Germany should not be forced to choose between the United States and China, that Germany needs to have relations with both. Can you say more about that? Is China Europe’s biggest trading partner? Prof. Li Xing: Yes, since November last year. Michelle Rasmussen: There’s differentiation inside Europe. For example, the Eastern European countries have a forum called “16+1,” where 16 Eastern European countries, plus China, have a more developed Belt and Road cooperation with China, than the Western countries. And there’s differentiation in the western European countries. You mentioned that some are making Hong Kong and Xinjiang into obstacles to improving European relations to China. What would you say to these concerns? Prof. Li Xing: China-EU relations are being affected by many, many factors. One is, as you mentioned, about 16+1, but now it’s 17+1, because, I think two years ago, Greece became a part of 16+1, so now it’s 17+1. And the western part of the EU, was quite worried about the 17+1 because some think that the Belt and Road plays a role in dividing Europe. Because Europe has this common policy, common strategy, and common action toward the Belt and Road, they also see the 17+1 grouping as somehow playing a divisive role. So, the EU is not very happy about that. Because you’re right, the Belt and Road is more developed in the eastern part of the EU. This is one issue. The second issue is that the EU has to make a balance between China on the one side, and the U.S. on the other. Right now, my assessment is that the EU is somehow being pushed to choose the U.S. side. It’s fine with me, from my analytical point of view, that the EU, most of the countries in the West, the traditional U.S. allies—like including Denmark—if they choose the U.S., that’s fine. But my position is that their choosing sides should be based on their own analysis, their own national interests, not purely on the so-called values and norms, that the U.S. and EU share norms, and therefore should have a natural alliance. I think that is not correct. I always advise Western politicians, thinktanks, and policy makers that they should study China-U.S. relations or EU-China-U.S. relations and try to find their own foreign policies. What is the correct direction? And based on their own judgment, based on their own research results, not based on what the U.S. wants them to do. Michelle Rasmussen: One of Denmark’s top former diplomats, Friis Arne Petersen, has been Denmark’s ambassador to the United States, to China, and to Germany. At the Danish Institute for International Studies, he recently called for Europe to join the Belt and Road Initiative. Why do you think it would be in the interest of Europe and the United States to join or cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, instead of treating it as a geopolitical threat? Prof. Li Xing: Well, on the Belt and Road, as we have already discussed, we must first understand what it is. I fully agree with Friis Arne Petersen. When he was Ambassador to Beijing, I met him at one of the international conferences. He was always very positive towards Denmark-China cooperation. I fully agree with his point on the Belt and Road. But we have to understand, first of all, why the West is nervous about the Belt and Road. This is very important, because the European’s or the American’s worry is based on two perspectives. One is geopolitics. The second is norm diffusion. Geopolitics means that through the Belt and Road, China’s economic political influence will gradually expand to cover all of Eurasia, which is not in the interest of the West. This is a geopolitical rationale. Then the second perspective is norm diffusion, which means that through the Belt and Road, the Chinese development model spreads. As I mentioned before, because of the global attraction to China, the Chinese development model will be consolidated and extended through the Belt and Road, and that is also not in the interest of the West. That’s why China is a “systemic rival,” because it has a norm diffusion effect. We have to understand these two aspects. But why should Europe support the Belt and Road? I have already discussed this issue in my answer to your previous question regarding the importance of infrastructure development, and regarding why Europe should support the Belt and Road, especially in the context of Africa. Michelle Rasmussen: And you also spoke about the need for infrastructure development in the United States. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States a grade point average of C- for the state of its infrastructure. Looking at high speed rail in China and in the United States, there’s nothing to compare. Prof. Li Xing: No, no. Michelle Rasmussen: In its 14th Five-Year Plan, China has committed itself to increase its high-speed rail lines by one third, from the present 38,000 kilometers to 50,000 kilometers by 2025. The U.S. has maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers. Prof. Li Xing: I was told by American friends that the U.S. has not invested heavily in infrastructure for many, many decades, about half century, something like that. I was shocked to hear that. So, I think Biden’s idea of infrastructure investment is great, but somehow the bill could not be agreed on by the Congress, and also the Senate, due to partisan conflict. Michelle Rasmussen: And it was not very ambitious in any case. Prof. Li Xing: Yes, totally. Reordering the World OrderMichelle Rasmussen: It was a step in the right direction, but was not very ambitious. Let’s move on to Latin America, which we in the Schiller Institute call Ibero-America. That’s because our members say that the Spanish language did not proceed from Latin. The Iberian Peninsula is Portugal and Spain, so Ibero-America is a better term. In any case, Li Xing, you are working on a study, China-U.S. Rivalry and Regional Reordering in Latin America. Can you please share the main idea with us? Prof. Li Xing: Yes. I’m working on this book, together with a group of Latin American scholars from different countries in the region. The objective of the book is to provide a good conceptualization, first, of the changing world order, and the reordering process. When we talk about that the world order is changing because of the US-China rivalry, at the same time, we also suggest that the world is experiencing a reordering process, that we do not know the future order, or the new order, but the world is in the process of reordering, driven by the China-U.S. rivalry. The book will also try to convey that the U.S.-China rivalry, according to our conceptualization, is “intra-core. According to the world system theory, you have a core which is the advanced economy countries, then you have a semi-periphery, and then you have a periphery. The semi-periphery is between periphery and the core, and the periphery is the vast number of developing countries. So the China-U.S. rivalry, competition, especially in high technologies in the security areas, is between these two core countries, or is intra-core. The China-U.S. rivalry also represents a struggle between two types of capitalism. On the one side is Chinese state capitalism, very centralized, state led, with central planning. On the other side is the U.S. free market, individual capitalist economy. Somehow the China model is gradually appearing to be more competitive. Of course, the U.S. doesn’t agree with that assessment, at least from the current perspectives. So, this rivalry must have a great impact on the whole world, especially on the developing world we call the Global South. Here we’ve tried to focus on the U.S.-China rivalry, and its impact on the Latin American and Caribbean region. The message of the book is, first, that global redistribution of power is inevitable. It’s still in process, and the emerging world order is likely to be dominated by more than one superpower, so the world order will likely look like a polycentric world, with a number of centripetals competing for high positions or strong positions. This is the first message. The second message is that the situation shows that the world is in a reordering process driven by the competition between the two superpowers, and it poses opportunities, and also constraints, to different regions, especially for the Global South, such as Latin America, because Latin America is the U.S. backyard; it is the subject of American doctrines—that North America and South America, are a sphere of U.S. influence. The Monroe DoctrineMichelle Rasmussen: You’re talking about the Monroe Doctrine? Prof. Li Xing: The Monroe Doctrine. Thank you very much. North America and South America have to be within the U.S. hegemonic influence. No external power is allowed to have a hand in, or interference in these two regions. You can say that China’s relations with Latin America has really been increasing tremendously during the past two decades. At the same time, the U.S. was busy with its anti-terrorism wars, and its creation of color revolutions in other parts of the world. If you look at the investment in infrastructure, and also imports of agriculture, China-Latin American trade and Chinese investment in Latin America are increasing tremendously, dramatically, which becomes a worry, a really deep worry, to the U.S. The different scholars, the book’s chapter authors, will use different countries and country cases as examples to provide empirical evidence to our “theoretical conceptualization.” This book will be published around summertime by Brill, a very good publisher in Holland. Michelle Rasmussen: Well, actually, the Monroe Doctrine was adopted in 1823, in the very early history of United States. This is after the United States had become a republic and had freed itself from the British Empire. It was actually John Quincy Adams— Prof. Li Xing: Exactly. Michelle Rasmussen:—who was actually involved in the idea, which was that the United States would not allow imperialism, imperial powers to bring their great power games into Latin and South America, but that the United States would help those countries become independent republics. So the question becomes, will Chinese policy strengthen the ability of the Ibero-American countries to be republics and enjoy economic development, or is China’s intention also a kind of imperialism? Prof. Li Xing: Based on your definitions, on your conceptualization of the Monroe Doctrine, you can say that there are two implications. One is that the U.S. should defend these two regions from imperialist intervention. The U.S. itself was not an imperial power at that time. The U.S. didn’t have intentions to become a global interventionist then, but today it is a different situation. Second, that the U.S. definitely interprets Chinese investment and infrastructure cooperation, and economic investment in Latin America as “helping,” to consolidate the country’s independence? No, I don’t think that is the case. That would be a kind of positive-sum game. Today, unluckily, these two countries are trapped into a zero-sum game. Whatever China is doing in the South American region, is interpreted as not being good for United States. That’s a very unfortunate situation. Michelle Rasmussen: Actually, we in the Schiller Institute have said that if the United States were to join with China to have even better economic development in Ibero-America; that would be a win-win policy. You spoke about the immigration challenge from Africa to Europe. It’s the same thing from Ibero-America to the United States. People would much rather stay in their own countries if there were jobs, if there were economic development, Prof. Li Xing: Yes. Michelle Rasmussen: And if the United States would join with China, then instead of— Prof. Li Xing: —building the wall! Instead of building the wall! Michelle Rasmussen: Exactly, exactly. Prof. Li Xing: Yeah, I agree with you. Operation Ibn SinaMichelle Rasmussen: Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the President of the Schiller Institute, has stated that one very important way to lessen the war danger between the United States, Russia and China would be for these countries to join forces to save the people of Afghanistan, where there is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world now, after the war, the drought, and the freezing of Afghanistan’s central bank assets by the western countries. She has proposed what she calls Operation Ibn Sina, named after the great physician and philosopher from that region, to build a modern health system in Afghanistan to save the people from disease, and as a lever to stimulate economic development. I know that when we spoke about Afghanistan before, you also referred to very important discussions now going on in Oslo, for the first time, between the Taliban and Western governments, including in the United States. But what do you think about this idea of China and the United States, and also Russia and other countries, joining hands to act to alleviate the terrible crisis for the people of Afghanistan? Prof. Li Xing: It’s a superb idea. This is one of the initiatives by the Schiller Institute. When I read your website, you have many development projects, and this one is a great idea. This is one of the areas I mentioned where the U.S. and China have a common interest. Unfortunately, what is happening today is the Ukraine crisis and the China-U.S. rivalry—so many battle fronts—puts Afghanistan more into the background. Right now, the Taliban delegation is talking with the West in Oslo, and I really hope there will be a constructive result, because after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s Taliban government immediately went to China. And it was a Chinese interest. It was in China’s fundamental interest to help Afghanistan, because if Afghanistan is safe and prosperous, then there will be no terror and terrorism coming from Afghanistan across the border. Many of the terrorists in Xinjiang actually based themselves in Afghanistan. So it is in China’s national interest to help Afghanistan. Right now, I don’t know whether it is still in the U.S. interest to help Afghanistan. The U.S. might be tired of that region, because the U.S. lost two trillion dollars in the Afghanistan war, without any positive results. So, I do not know. I cannot tell the what the U.S. politicians’ feelings are, but the U.S. holds $9.5 billion of Afghanistan assets. And I think that money has to be released to help in the country’s rebuilding. And particularly, the Shiller Institute’s suggestion of a health care system is the priority. When people are in a good health, then people can work, and earn money. When people have a job or have a family, normally, people do not move. According to refugee studies, people normally do not move just because of a shortage. People move because of a situation devastated by war, by climate change, by various crises. Otherwise, people are relatively stable and want to stay in their homeland. XinjiangMichelle Rasmussen: You mentioned Xinjiang again now. Do you have something to say about Xinjiang for people in the West? Prof. Li Xing: I think that there are a lot of misunderstandings between the West and China, especially the misunderstanding from the Western side concerning Xinjiang. The other day, I saw a debate at Oxford University between an American former politician and a British former politician, about whether China is a friend or a foe. The American representative put forward the claim that in Xinjiang, we are experiencing what is called genocide. But later, at the end of his discussion, he admitted that there is no genocide, but he deliberately used genocide as a kind of provocation in order to receive attention from the world. The British representative asked if this view caused such a bad misunderstanding, misperception, then why not just give it up? Do not use genocide. You can criticize China for human rights abuses. You can criticize China for its minority policies, etc. But to deliberately defame China is not a good way. I don’t think it’s a good way. We also have to be fair. On the one side, you can criticize China’s policy treating problems in the minorities and others. But you have to also condemn terrorist actions because there were a lot of terrorist bomb killings in that region, especially from 2012-2015, around that time. In the beginning of the 2010s. I was in Xinjiang as a tourist in 2011, and I was advised to not pass by some streets, because there could be some risks. You can see that it was a very tense situation because of a lot of bombings. People pointed out to me, here were some bombings, there was some bombings. You don’t understand. So, the West should be fair and condemn these things, while at same time, also advising the Chinese government to develop a more constructive policy to resolve the problem, rather than using harsh policies. It has to be fair. This is the first point. Second, is that genocide not only defames China, it’s also contrary, it’s opposite to the facts. Twenty years ago, 30 years ago, Xinjiang’s Uighur population was about five million or eight million. But after 30 years, I think it’s about 11-13 million. I do not know exactly, but there has been a growth of population. How can you claim genocide, when the local population is increasing? Do you understand my point? So, this is not a good attitude. It is not a very good way to discuss with China and it makes China much more resistant in talking with you, when China is fears that it is being defamed. When some Western sources, in particular one German scholar, use a lot of data from a Turkish scholar, who is connected to the “minority resistance” from Xinjiang, then the credibility, reliability of the source is in question. You understand my point. So, the Xinjiang issue is a rather complicated, but the West and China should have a dialogue, rather than use in this specific discourse rhetoric to frame China in a way that China is the bad guy. It should be condemned. I think this is not constructive. The SWIFT SystemMichelle Rasmussen: Going back to the war danger, what do you think the impact on China and on the world economy would be, were the U.S. to force Russia out of the SWIFT international payment system, or similar draconian measures? Prof. Li Xing: Let me tell you that Olaf Scholz, the current German Chancellor, already expressed it very well, saying that if Russia were sanctioned and pushed out of the SWIFT payment system, then Europe could not pay Russia for its gas and oil. “If we can’t pay Russia, then Russia will not supply us. Then what should we do?” I read in the news today that the U.S. said, “We could supply most of Russia’s oil and gas.” Then Europe began to ponder: “Well then, this war has become your war, you know—a very egoistical interest, because you actually want to replace Russia’s gas and oil supply. That’s why you want to instigate the war.” So, I think it’s the U.S. that has to be very cautious in its sanctions, because the only sanctions possibilities for the United States today against major powers is financial, is payment—it’s the U.S. dollar. That’s the intermediate currency, the SWIFT system. And when China sees this, that only strengthened China’s conclusion to develop what we call electronic currency. China is using a lot of energy today investing in electronic currency. This electronic currency is a real currency. It’s just electronic. It’s being implemented in some big cities in test trials. Then, back to the SWIFT system, [if a country were thrown out] it would be rather impossible or would rather create a lot of problems in the international payment system, then the whole system will more or less collapse, because most countries watch this, and they will try to think about how they should react in the future if the U.S. uses the same system of sanctions against them. I just mentioned China, but also many other countries as well. They have to find an alternate. One other alternative is to use currencies other than the U.S. dollar as much as possible. I just read in the news today that the Chinese yuan has surpassed the Japanese yen as the fourth international [reserve] currency. And the situation will accelerate in that direction. So, I think that the U.S. should think twice. On China-Russia relations, I definitely think that China will help Russia in case the U.S. really implements a sanction of pushing Russia out of the SWIFT payment system. China definitely will help Russia, because both face the same pressure, the same struggle, the same robbery from the U.S. So, it is very bad. It is extremely bad strategy from the U.S. side to fight, simultaneously, on two fronts with two superpowers. This is what Henry Kissinger had said many times during the entire Cold War period. The U.S. was able to keep relatively stable relations between U.S. and China and between U.S. and the Soviet Union, keeping the Russia and China fighting against each other. But now it’s the opposite situation. The U.S. is fighting with two big powers simultaneously. I don’t know what is in the mind of the U.S. politicians. I really think that the U.S. needs to redesign its strategic foreign policy. The Schiller InstituteMichelle Rasmussen: Yeah. We’ve been speaking mostly about the U.S., but the British really are an instigator in this: the British Old Empire policy of trying to drive a wedge between the United States, Russia and China. That also has a lot to do with the current situation. We spoke before about that the Schiller Institute is trying to get the United States’ population to understand that the whole basis for the existence of the United States was the fight against the British Empire, and against this divide and conquer strategy, and, rather, to cooperate with Russia and China. In conclusion, this conversation has been very wonderful. Do you have any parting words for our audience? We have many people in Europe and in the United States. Do you have any parting words of advice as to how we should look at China and what needs to be different about our policy? Prof. Li Xing: No, I think that I want my last words, actually, to be invested in talking about the Schiller Institute. I think that some of your programs, some of your projects, and some of your applications are really interesting. The Schiller Institute has a lot of ideas. For example, you just mentioned your campaign for an Afghanistan health care system, but not only in Afghanistan. You promote these ideas for Africa, in developing countries. I really think that the Schiller Institute should continue to promote some of the ideas—a health care system in a country, especially now, considering the pandemic. The rich countries, including China, are able to produce vaccines, but not the developing countries. The U.S. has more vaccine doses stored up than necessary [for itself]. But Africa still has only very low percentage of people [who have been vaccinated]. Michelle Rasmussen: I think 8%. Prof. Li Xing: And we claim the Omicron variant of the coronavirus came from Africa. That’s an irony. That’s an irony, because it’s definite that one day, another variation will come from Latin America, or from some other part of the world. So, it’s rather important for the West, and for China, to think about some of the positive suggestions by your Institute. I’m glad that you invited me for this interview, and I expect to have more cooperation with you. Thank you very much. Michelle Rasmussen: Thank you so much, Li Xing.

Secretary of State Blinken used the occasion of the release of the U.S. response to Putin's proposed treaties to repeat the accusations of Russian aggression, and reiterate that Russia will face a harsh response if Russia invades Ukraine. Putin insists upon written security guarantees because the U.S. has broken numerous promises, financed and organized Color Revolutions and regime change coups, and launched aggressive wars, all supposedly to defend "human rights" and "democracy." In reality, the hypocritical and bloody foreign policy of the U.S. since the end of the Cold War has not been to secure peace or benefit the American people, but to defend the geopolitical interests of the City of London and its allies on Wall Street. What is needed is not further militarization in Europe, but diplomacy aimed at achieving mutually beneficial economic cooperation.

Jan. 27, 2022 (EIRNS)—Over 400 Iowa farmers have filed objections to threats of eminent domain and are opposing and protesting the 1,200-mile carbon-capture pipeline system across five Midwest states to a permanent sequestration site in North Dakota. Three companies, Valero Energy Corporation, BlackRock Global Energy & Power Infrastructure Fund II, and Navigator Energy Services, together, have teamed up with an Ames, Iowa, company, Summit Carbon Solutions, whose senior advisor is Terry Branstad, former Iowa Governor and Ambassador to China. Carbon dioxide has many useful roles in the modern economy, not to mention as plant food, and the infrastructure for CO₂ includes, in some locations, pipelines and storage capacity. However, the three green CO₂ pipeline proposals now rightly contested in the Midwest states, centered in Iowa, are not only not useful; they are crazy and unproductive in the extreme. They should be cancelled immediately. The four companies have CO₂ capture agreements with 31 biofuels plants and 20 fertilizer and ethanol plants, to transport their CO₂ to a destination where it will be sequestered underground. In the course of this, CO₂ burial certificates will be available as carbon credits for sale to other entities needing them, such as in California. This will supposedly benefit farmers by making the ethanol plants “green,” ensuring that their corn will still have a market. Those pushing the scheme say that without it, the ethanol plants may be shut down. Farmers in the dozens of counties that the pipelines would cross are in revolt against the scheme and the whole damn pack of lies. There are three schemes: An Iowa project, Midwest Carbon Express, envisions building 710 miles of pipeline across about one third of Iowa’s 99 counties. A second section would go into Minnesota and Nebraska. A third pipeline would connect the first two pipelines to pipelines passing through South Dakota and finally to North Dakota, where the CO₂ would be stored in underground caverns. All told, the pipes would extend 2,000 miles and cost $6.5 billion. The pipelines would supposedly capture the carbon equivalent of over 25 million cars per year. How would it get paid for? These companies would look to loans, hopefully government-backed, and “green investors”! John Deere & Co. is a “strategic investor,” and many ethanol plants have agreed to help finance this, as they will get added dollars from selling their low-carbon footprints. California currently pays $200 per metric ton for carbon credits and federal tax credits pay $50 per metric ton of carbon sequestered. Ethanol is already wildly inefficient in physical-economic terms. These added incentives would continue to drive the economy towards wasteful processes of low energy-density. Instead of burning corn and sending CO₂ thousands of miles away, use crops for food! The future of power lies in nuclear fusion, not shoveling your dinner into the gas tank. [rlb]

Today Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a State Department press conference, and closed-door sessions with members of Congress, announcing that the U.S. has provided written responses to Russia’s December texts of proposed security agreements. He also stated, “Additionally, NATO developed and will deliver to Moscow its own paper with ideas and concerns about collective security in Europe—and that paper fully reinforces ours, and vice versa. There is no daylight among the United States and our allies and partners on these matters.”In reality, while Blinken’s remarks repeated his usual dark litany of accusations and threats against Russia, daylight is showing through from many directions, on how dangerous and how “British” this whole confrontationism is. Blinken may blow clouds of smoke about “unity,” input from “allies,” and the like, but reality is otherwise. Even a reporter asked Blinken, you talk about “a unified approach with Europe. What do you make of Germany’s stance?” She said, “Would you say that you’re happy or satisfied with Germany sending helmets to Ukraine instead of arms shipments?” Blinken could only huff and puff about how each country has “different capabilities.” In brief, what Blinken did say in his press briefing, was that Russia is the aggressor against Ukraine, and warned, “We’ve lined up steep consequences, should Russia choose further aggression.” Blinken reiterated his “two path” sophistic approach to Russia: that Western militarization in Eastern Europe is the path of deterrence, but otherwise, the U.S. and the West are open to diplomacy, “should Russia choose it.” On the so-called deterrence path, Blinken gave a full report. He said, “Three deliveries of U.S. defensive military assistance arrived in Kiev this week, carrying additional javelin missiles and other anti-armor systems, 283 tons of ammunition and non-lethal equipment…. More deliveries are expected in the days to come. We have provided more defensive security assistance to Ukraine in the past year than in any previous year…. Last week, I authorized U.S. allies—including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—to provide U.S.-origin military equipment…. Also last week, we notified Congress of our intent to deliver to Ukraine the Mi-17 helicopters….” And 8,500 U.S. servicemen are on “heightened readiness to deploy” in case needed to “to harden the Allies’ eastern flank.” Among the expanding opposition to this dangerous showdown are several political leaders and formations in Europe. In Croatia, President Zoran Milanovic said this week that his country will in no way get involved in the Ukraine crisis, nor send soldiers. He states that Ukraine does not belong in NATO, and that it was the European Union (N.B., including the U.K.) that triggered a coup in Kiev in 2014. Moreover, Milanovic said, as reported by Euractiv, that the crisis has nothing to do with Ukraine or Russia, but is connected with the dynamics of the United States internal situation, and that international security problems reflect “inconsistencies and dangerous behavior” by the U.S.A. In Spain, the Unidos Podemos party and eight smaller parties, all nine leftwing members of the Socialist Party’s governing coalition, have publicly opposed Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s decision to send military forces to participate in NATO’s buildup of forces against Russia, and are calling for an anti-war mobilization like that of 2003 which drove out the Aznar government that had deployed Spain’s military forces for George Bush’s war on Iraq. The existence of NATO itself is being questioned. On Friday, Jan. 28, French President Emmanuel Macron will be speaking by phone to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Today in Paris, officials of the Normandy group of four nations—France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, met for eight hours, and issued a statement. They plan to meet again in Berlin next month. Today, Sputnik news ran an article reviewing the opposition in France and elsewhere in Europe to the U.S./U.K. showdown with Russia. Headlined, “French Politician: Puzzled by U.S. Warmongering, France & Germany Trying to Avoid EU Militarisation,” the article is based on an interview with Karel Vereycken, Vice-President of Solidarité & Progrès in France, who said that “France and Germany aren’t interested in dancing to the U.S., the U.K. and NATO’s tune—for good reason….” The Schiller Institute is providing the critical platform internationally to wake up the world to the war danger and to what has to be done in foreign relations and economically, including emergency humanitarian action, to stop the conditions and perpetrators who created this terrible emergency. The website offers ammunition, and another international conference to rally action is in the works for early February.

To protect a bankrupt financial system, the City of London and its allies in the Military-Industrial-Complex in the U.S. and NATO are demanding an end to sovereign governments, insisting that nations submit to their Great Reset -- which is a global central banker's dictatorship. Russia and China will not submit, putting us on a pathway to war in Ukraine and Taiwan. But such wars cannot be won, and could trigger nuclear war. The alternative was developed by Lyndon LaRouche: put the predatory financial institutions into bankruptcy, establish a New Bretton Woods financial system, and apply his Four Economic Laws to revive the American System of Physical Economy.

Natalia Vitrenko, the Chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, has announced that the party's Central Committee had issued an open letter to the leaders of the world, ripping apart the fraud of those pushing for confrontation with Russia on the pretext of allowing the people of Ukraine to “write their own future.” She opens bluntly: “The Central Committee of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, expressing deep concern over the socioeconomic catastrophe in Ukraine, considers it unacceptable and dangerous, for both the citizens of Ukraine and the entire world community, to use political blackmail in inciting Ukraine to war with Russia. Countries of the West, led by the USA and NATO, are inciting our country in that direction.”The letter follows: On January 19th, the Central Committee of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSPU) issued the following Open Letter, signed by the Chairwoman of the PSPU, renowned Ukrainian economist Natalia Vitrenko, and addressed to the Heads of State of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Poland, and NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg, with copies for others noted below. To:President Joe Biden, USA;PM Boris Johnson, UK;PM Justin Trudeau, Canada;President A. Duda, Poland;General Secretary of NATO Jens Stoltenberg CC:UN General Secretary A. Guterres;General Secretary of the Council of Europe Marija Pejčinović Burić;General Secretary of the OSCE H.M. Schmid;President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky;President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin Dear heads of state and government, dear leaders of respected international organizations, The Central Committee of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, expressing deep concern over the socioeconomic catastrophe in Ukraine, considers it unacceptable and dangerous, for both the citizens of Ukraine and the entire world community, to use political blackmail in inciting Ukraine to war with Russia. Countries of the West, led by the USA and NATO, are inciting our country in that direction. Since 2014, to our deep regret, fratricidal warfare has been under way in Ukraine, in which more than 15,000 innocent civilians have already been killed. In violation of international law and Article 17 of the Constitution of Ukraine, the Armed Forces of our state have been dragged into this conflict. In our view, the reason for this situation in Ukraine is not only the rewriting of history, making heroes out of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN-UPA) collaborationists who abetted Hitler, but also the implementation, unacceptable for a civilized nation, of a state policy based on the ideology of Ukrainian “integral” nationalism (fascism). This is what has given rise to ethnic and religious hatred and discrimination against “non-indigenous” ethnic groups, which lawfully enough led to a split within our country. That policy has been enshrined in the laws on “lustration,” “de-communization,” indigenous peoples, and languages. The split in society and deceiving of our population have been intensified by the policy forced upon our country of seeking to join the EU and NATO. In 1991 Ukraine’s sovereignty was recognized by the world community on the basis of the norms and principles set forth in the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine, which was twice affirmed by our people in nationwide referendums (17 March and 1 December 1991). The legal force of this Declaration still has precedence. That means that the world community not only recognized, but is obliged to defend the sovereignty of Ukraine as a neutral, non-bloc state, committed to a foreign policy of creating a union state with the former republics of the USSR. We understand that you, the leaders of countries in the West, do not like that kind of sovereignty for Ukraine and it does not benefit you in geopolitical terms. But that was the choice of our people, as against the false choice of the Ukrainian puppet regime that has been dragging the country towards joining the EU and NATO. It is quite clear that as long as our country maintained its non-bloc status, we had peace and tranquility. The policy of joining the EU and NATO, however, and the policy of Ukrainian “integral” nationalism (fascism), have led not only to a socioeconomic catastrophe and the loss of state sovereignty, but also to our people’s transformation into cannon fodder in the West’s geopolitical struggle against Russia and China. The Central Committee of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine categorically opposes that policy, which is forcing the Ukrainian regime to provoke a full-scale armed conflict with the Russian Federation. We have drawn these conclusions not only from the aggressive rhetoric of your countries’ officials and the NATO leadership, and not only from the bellicose propaganda of the Ukrainian regime and all its mass media, but also from the continuous supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine, construction of (essentially foreign) military bases on our territory, and the dispatch here of one after another unit of special forces, instructors and advisers from your countries. We understand that capitalism, by its objective nature, is sinking into an ever deeper crisis and that ominous social and economic problems are increasing in your countries. We understand that in the People’s Republic of China a magnificent event will soon take place, the Winter Olympic Games, which will show to the entire world an unprecedented, never before achieved level of development of a socialist state. That is why your countries have organized a “diplomatic boycott of the Olympics,” and to discredit this great international sports festival, just like in 2008 you need a military provocation. If it’s not Georgia against Russia, then this time it’s Ukraine against Russia. It’s clear that you want a military conflict, but you want it to be done by somebody other than yourselves. You won’t be the ones with zinc coffins coming home, and it won’t be your cities and villages that lie in ruins. You’ve grown accustomed to getting somebody else to do it for you. And for this purpose you buy off and intimidate the puppet regimes in your colonies. We are categorically opposed to this being done in general. And, included, to its being done through Ukraine and at the expense of the people of Ukraine. We draw your attention to the fact that delivering weapons to Ukraine today, in the current blistering-hot conflict situation, is a violation of the UN Charter, the Minsk accord on the peaceful settlement of the conflict in the Donbass (an agreement affirmed by the UN Security Council!), and international humanitarian law — in particular, the international Arms Trade Treaty (April 2013). Beyond any question, your countries’ supplying weapons to Ukraine is harming peace and security and provoking an intensification of the armed conflict and a growth in tension. This is expressly forbidden by that Treaty. We also draw your attention to the International Code of Conduct on Arms Transfers, drafted in 2000 by laureates of the Nobel Peace Prize. In particular, Article 4 of that Code, “Compliance with international human rights standards,” and Article 8, “Commitment to promote regional peace, security and stability.” The Code calls for not supplying weapons in instances of a Nazi regime or if it may lead to “a significant number of displaced persons or refugees.” Peace and accord will be established in Ukraine not by weapons deliveries, but by implementing the Minsk agreements, recognizing that Ukrainian “integral” nationalism is a criminal ideology, and the denazification and democratization of our country. The governments of your countries and of Ukraine are obliged to realize that war and incitement to war are not the main values of world civilization. Those values are peace, life, and the mental and physical health of people. Dr. Natalia Vitrenko is a noted Ukrainian economist, who formerly served as a member of parliament and ran for president. In 2019, she delivered an address on the topic “LaRouche’s Science of Physical Economy as the Key to Solving the Problems of the World, Eurasia, and Ukraine” at a Schiller Institute conference.

Saturday, January 22, 2022 Helga Zepp-LaRouche made a video address to the National Congress of Peru’s Christian Democracy, which was translated into Spanish and played at their conference on Saturday, Jan. 22, 2022. Here are her remarks: Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Dear Friends of the Christian Democracy in Peru: It is a great honor and pleasure to send these greetings to your national conference. I think you are all aware that we are at an extremely important moment in history, where world peace is not safe. We are still in an acute danger zone of a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis, over the situation in Ukraine, and the continued expansion of NATO eastward, toward the Russian border. This has been going on despite promises made to Russia during the time of the German unification in 1990-1991, where the promise was given to Gorbachev that NATO would “not move one inch eastward.” But NATO has moved 1,000 km to the east; 14 countries have joined NATO. And right now, you have a very fragile situation where the media are talking about that Russia would attack Ukraine, which Russia has denied. In any case, the situation is extremely volatile. And a little sign of hope comes from the discussions which just took place in Geneva between the United States and Russia, between NATO and Russia in Brussels, and in Vienna in the OSCE discussions, that maybe diplomacy will replace confrontation and that new arms control discussions can actually start in earnest.But the real reason behind this geopolitical crisis is that the systemic crisis of the neoliberal system is coming to a head. My late husband Lyndon LaRouche has made a forecast 50 years ago, in 1971, when President Nixon decoupled the dollar from the gold-reserve standard, and replaced fixed exchange rates with floating ones. My husband at that point said, if the world continues on that course of monetarism, sooner or later, the world would be faced with the danger of a new depression, new fascism, and even the danger of a new world war, unless a new financial system, and a new credit system would be implemented with a new, just world economic order. I think the countries of the developing sector are more acutely aware of this problem than anybody else, that we have now the danger of a hyperinflationary collapse. You see it in the prices of energy, of food, of basic raw materials. And the worst humanitarian crisis, of the many, is naturally happening in Afghanistan now, where after the withdrawal of NATO in August and takeover of the Taliban, when the Western countries cut off the aid to Afghanistan, because they didn’t like the Taliban, but everybody knew at the time that 75% of the budget of Afghanistan came from international aid! And when that money was cut off, all of a sudden, the economy of Afghanistan was plunged into an absolute chaos. Now, the United Nations is warning dramatically, again and again, that there are 8 million people right now, who are in immediate danger of starvation. They’re dying of hunger and freezing right now as you hear my words. The United Nations World Food Program also warned that there is the danger that 23 million people may not outlive this winter if there is not a dramatic change in this situation, and that over 90% of the people in Afghanistan have not enough food, are food insecure, have not enough medicine or no medicine at all, in the middle of a pandemic, and that 98% of the people are in danger of becoming permanently extremely poor, which is a starvation level. Now, this is why I have called for, what I call Operation Ibn Sina, in reference to the great physician who lived 1,000 years ago, who is the father of modern medicine, who was the one who first discovered quarantine, as a symbol that we have to build a modern health system in every single country on the planet, starting with Afghanistan, but not limiting it: Every country must have access to modern medicine, modern hospitals, and this is obviously only possible if you have electricity, if you have clean water—2 billion people in the world have no access to clean water; that has to be immediately reversed. We need basic infrastructure. And this building of a world health system must become the beginning of overcoming underdevelopment and poverty in the world, for good, forever. 2022 is the year when my late husband would celebrate his 100th birthday, and that’s why I have called that the year 2022 must become the Year of LaRouche. It is the year when all the beautiful plans which he developed in his lifetime must be realized. He developed already in the 1970s a plan to develop Africa through a large infrastructure program as the precondition for industrial development. He worked together, as you all know, with López Portillo, the President of Mexico, on what he called Operation Juárez, which was the idea that all of Latin America must be integrated and must have a coherent infrastructure program as the precondition for agriculture and industry to develop. This program of Operation Juárez is actual today than ever before. He also worked with Indira Gandhi: We worked with her on a 40-year development program for India, which was the idea that you need, at that time, in 1979, about two generations to reach a modern development state for the nation of India. After 1991, he proposed the Eurasian Land-Bridge. This has become the basic idea which is now being carried out by China with the Belt and Road Initiative. We published the study, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge.” Now, this is the hope, because, the fact that China and about 150 nations have signed memorandums of understanding with China, to cooperate in the Belt and Road Initiative is where the development of the world is taking place right now. And we, the LaRouche movement, and the Schiller Institute have made it our commitment to try to convince the United States and Europe to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, and not oppose it for geopolitical reasons. This is the program to overcome poverty and underdevelopment, and create a decent living standard for every person on the planet. Now, this is the obvious task and challenge for us, because it should note be self-evident and accepted that several billion people are living in poverty! Poverty eradication is the absolute demand of this coming year, and the reason why we can be optimistic about the human species finally accomplishing that is because, as my husband said many times, the human species is the only species which has the ability of creative reason: We can do what no animal species can do, we can make fundamental discoveries about physical principles of the universe, and when we apply those principles as technologies in the production process, it leads to an increase of the productivity of the labor force and of the productive forces. And that is the way how to increase the living standard, the life expectancy, and to create the conditions for an improvement of the general welfare. It is the principle of physical economy, and not monetarism, which we have to bring back to the world economy. This coming year, we will see a worsening of the crisis, because there is no way how this casino economy will last forever. It will come to a point of crisis, where we need to put all forces of the world together, people of good will, to implement the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche: The first of which is a global Glass-Steagall banking separation, the speculation of the derivatives casino has to come to an end forever, and the economy must again be put to the service of the people. The second is, we need a National Bank in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton in every single country, and when these National Banks among the different countries work together, then that can create a New Bretton Woods credit system which will provide credit lines for long-term investment and the kind of infrastructure program which Latin America needs in the same way as parts of Asia and Africa, and even parts of Europe, which are not yet developed. Now, this can be done. And I think we should be optimistic that this coming year is going to be the year where that is going to be put on the table, because the crisis will demand it. Well, I had the fortune, together with my husband, to visit your country in 1987, and I have the most beautiful memories of that visit, and I think Peru is a great nation, which has an absolutely great population. And I wish you the best possible future, for your country and the great success for your conference. And I look forward to our collaboration, so that we together bring humanity from the abyss of a catastrophe and start to create a new paradigm in international relations, and start a new, more optimistic chapter in the history of humanity. All my greetings to you.