Executive Intelligence Review, the Daily Alert Service, and other LaRouche publications, including our video, must be vectored, especially in the next days, to asserting the reality of the present danger of total war, including thermonuclear war, and what to do to avert it—even as mistaken distortions in the calm strategic evaluation required in this situation abound in the printed and electronic media, whether through incompetence or design. This begins with accurately reporting, particularly to the largely clueless American people, what the Russian government is actually saying. On Monday, Russian Presidential spokesman Dmitri Peskov said during his briefing: “The head of our state, as the commander-in-chief and the man who defines the foreign policy of our country,.. takes necessary measures to ensure our common security and to protect our interests… It were us who initiated the negotiations, the consultation [on guarantees of security for Russia], and we expect to receive written responses to our proposals, which aim to help us avoid such tense situations in the future.”Peskov refused to speculate on any potential military action that might be initiated, either by Ukraine, or by Russia. He indicated that there was no plan at this point for Biden and Putin to speak again. Those written responses by the United States and by NATO are the clear precondition for anything else. We also insist, emphatically, and as only these publications will, that despite the obvious culpability of the knuckle-dragger factions of American intelligence agencies, including their criminal manipulation of, and deployment into, the United States Congress, the war design that is presently unfolding is British in origin, as it was in Iraq I (Margaret Thatcher,) and Iraq II (Tony Blair.) Today, the hapless Boris Johnson represents the tattered imperial “Remains of the Day” that is the silly “Global Britain” scheme. A vigorous, polemical attack on “the sexual impotence of British liberal imperialism,” on lurid display yesterday in a “senior U.S. administration officials’ special background briefing” on the “incredibly potent” sanctions about to be imposed on Russia, or in Britain’s depraved indifference to defending the General Welfare of British subjects as expressed in the “herd” approach to the coronavirus pandemic, is certainly in order, and would uncomfortably echo through the halls of Buckingham Palace right now. (The now-demoted Andrew was, in fact, the ideal representative of the latter-day British “Great Game.”) The imposition of new sanctions against Russia, now being discussed in the U.S. Congress by Senators Menendez (D-New Jersey) and Risch (R-Idaho,) is also being simultaneously contemplated against China, ostensibly because of the “imperial threat” China may pose to Taiwan. Notably, manic Republican legislators have proposed that these new Russian sanctions should happen now, before any incident even occurs involving military forces at the Ukrainian/Russian border. Sophistries aside, are not sanctions, in fact, an implicit act of war? The present drive towards war was not, in fact, provoked by any recent Russian actions whatsoever. Ukraine’s Natalia Vitrenko documents in her " Open Letter to World Leaders: Stop supplying weapons and using political blackmail to incite Ukraine to war with Russia!" that, “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….” The reality is that the same Anglo-American intelligence establishment that manufactured the “Russia-gate” hoax, and instigated the overthrow of the duly elected government of Ukraine in February 2014, has partnered with a pro-Nazi grouping to provoke a war on the border of Russia. We should note in this context, recent reference by Chinese spokesmen to a “zero tolerance” policy toward attempts at “color revolutions” in nations such as Kazakhstan, which borders both Russia and China. Various American commentators now warning about the war threat opine that “there is nothing that the United States actually can do to stop a Russian action,” and that “there is no basis to believe that NATO can expect to win a war in this area.” They, however, miss the point. British imperial interests, which dominate the thinking of the United States State Department, realize that their system is doomed unless China and Russia are subjugated—which, however, will bring about planetary doom, not merely monetary doom for an already-dead system. Trans-Atlantic policy no longer follows logic, let alone reason. In an article entitled, “NATO As Religion,” author Alfred de Zayas, professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy and a U.N. official, states: “I dare postulate the hypothesis that the best way to understand the NATO phenomenon is to see it as a secular religion. Then we are allowed to believe its implausible narratives, because we can take them on faith…. As [with] every religion, the NATO religion has its own dogma and lexicon. In NATO’s Lexicon a”color revolution" is [the same as] a coup d’état, democracy is co-terminous with capitalism, humanitarian intervention entails “regime change,” “rule of law” means OUR rules, “Satan Nr. 1” is Putin, and Satan Nr. 2 is Xi Jinping. Can we believe in the NATO religion? Sure. As the Roman/Carthaginian philosopher Tertullian wrote in the Third Century AD—credo quia absurdum. I believe it because it is absurd “….I dare consider myself a US patriot—and an apostate from the NATO religion—because I reject the idea ‘my country right or wrong.’ I want my country to be right and to do justice—and when the country is on the wrong track, I want it to return to the ideals of the Constitution, of our Declaration of Independence, of the Gettysburg address—something I can still believe in. “NATO has emerged as the perfect religion for bullies and war-mongers.” It is not enough, however, to aspire to “return to” the American Republic. Policies must be formulated now, to deal with the shock of what British monetarist-economist Jeremy Grantholm characterized on January 20 as “the end of the Fed U.S. bubble extravaganza: housing, equities, bonds, and commodities,” the “three-and-a-half super-bubbles collapse.” For the Anglo-Dutch imperial impulse for total war, including thermonuclear war, to be defanged, the American Presidency must publicly reject war with Russia and China. It should consider, and respond positively, to the perspective presented to an apoplectic Davos audience last week by Xi Jinping: " Countries need to strengthen international cooperation against COVID-19, carry out active cooperation on research and development of medicines, jointly build multiple lines of defense against the coronavirus, and speed up efforts to build a global community of health for all….In the context of ongoing COVID-19 response, we need to explore new drivers of economic growth, new modes of social life and new pathways for people-to-people exchange, in a bid to facilitate cross-border trade, keep industrial and supply chains secure and smooth, and promote steady and solid progress in global economic recovery…." Operation Ibn Sina, the World Health Platform policy of the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, and the “Four Economic Laws” of Lyndon LaRouche, the most concise statement, and advancement of Hamilton and the American Revolution’s rejection and replacement of British liberal imperialism, are the readily available solution for a rapid move forward by the United States Presidency into the Twenty-first Century, free of the “eighteenth-century methods” of the British Empire that Franklin Delano Roosevelt rejected.
From the moment last Friday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken announced that they had met and agreed that the U.S. would provide a written response to Russia’s urgent security concerns, the British have been working overtime to make sure that nothing of the sort ever happens—or at least that whatever written response Blinken provides will be a further anti-Russian provocation.First, there are the stepped-up direct military deployments: another American planeload of sophisticated weapons for the pro-Nazi Kiev government; the transfer of Ukrainian rocket launchers and other heavy weapons to the conflict zone with Donbas; and the Pentagon confirming that President Biden had instructed them to put 8,500 U.S.-based troops on heightened alert for potential deployment to Europe, based on a briefing on “military options” presented to him by Defense Secretary Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Milley. Those options included sending up to 50,000 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe—steps which the Russians will read as a direct military threat. Then there are the British psy-ops: British intelligence reached a fact-less finding that Russia intended to topple the Kiev government and put in their own puppet (denied by the Russian government); an anonymous diplomat in Beijing reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping had asked Putin to hold off on invading Ukraine until after the Winter Olympics (denied by the Chinese and Russian governments); and yet another round of anti-Russian bravado by Blinken (there will be “massive consequences” for Russia if a “single additional Russian force” enters Ukraine) and by Karen Pierce, the British ambassador to the United States (“you’ll always find the U.K. at the forward end of the spectrum” in going after Russia). “What is clear,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche reported today, “is that we are in an extremely dangerous situation and, given the number of lunatics in leading positions and also the absolute certainty of miscalculation based on wrong epistemological approaches, I think the only conclusion we can have out of this present situation is that we have to go into an all-out anti-war mobilization, waking up especially the American public, because that is the main force which is uninformed about what the danger of the situation is.” Russia expects an answer this week, she continued, and that answer cannot fail to address their existential security concerns by putting in writing guarantees that NATO will cease its eastward expansion up to Russia’s borders. But at this point, everything indicates that the U.S. will do nothing of the kind. If that is the case, Zepp-LaRouche warned, then we are in a showdown for a countdown to Russia’s activation of “military technical measures” of their own—which could include the deployment of hypersonic Zircon missiles on submarines within five-minutes flight time of both American coasts. For an anti-war mobilization to be successful, however, it must not simply issue pronouncements against war, but it must address two key policy points: 1) identify who is behind the war drive, and why (the collapsing trans-Atlantic financial empire); and 2) present a program to build a durable peace—based on the policies of global economic reconstruction encapsulated in LaRouche’s Four Laws. As then-presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche summarized the matter nearly 40 years ago, in the opening sentence of a March 30, 1984 “Draft Memorandum of Agreement between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.”: “Article 1: General conditions for peace. The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.”
Harley Schlanger, a spokesman for the Schiller Institute and The LaRouche Organization, gave the following presentation at the Schiller Institute Conference on January 22, “A Difference in Leadership – Can a War with Russia Still Be Averted?”, following presentations by Russian Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy and Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. HARLEY SCHLANGER: What I will show is that the U.S. official position -- that Russia is the cause of the problem, and Russia has to back down, Russia has to move back its troops and so on -- is either based on ignorance of history, or an arrogant view of the U.S. as the unilateral enforcer of a “rules-based order.” What I intend to show is that it’s the latter.Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said the other day, that ignoring Russia’s legal concerns over the eastward expansion of NATO to include Ukraine and a deployment of forces, including weapons, near the Russian border, will have the most serious consequences. In stating this, he was repeating the formulation that I think is the most clear from President Putin, from his annual press conference on December 23rd. I want to read the quote from President Putin: “Our actions will not depend on the negotiation process, but rather on unconditional guarantees for Russia’s security concerns. In this connection, we have made it clear that any further movement of NATO to the East is unacceptable. Is there anything unclear about this? Are we deploying missiles near the U.S. border? No, we are not. It is the U.S. that has come to our home with its missiles, and is already standing on our doorstep. Is it going too far to demand that no strike systems be placed near our home? What is so unusual about this?” In listening to that, it’s very striking the similarity to the argument made to the American people on October 22, 1962 by President Kennedy, as to why he had to adopt a quarantine—which was actually a blockade—of Cuba, to stop the import of further Soviet missiles, during the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here’s what Kennedy said in that speech to the American people: “In the world today, due to the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the swiftness of ballistic missiles, any substantially increased possibility of their use, or any sudden change in their deployment may well be regarded as a definite threat to peace.” He talked about the build-up of the Soviet Union’s missiles in Cuba, and added:“In an area well known to have special and historical relationship to the United States,” and I might add parenthetically, exactly as Ukraine does with Russia today, “the sudden clandestine decision to station strategic weapons outside of Soviet soil, is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.” I think you’ll see in his language, something very similar to what President Putin is saying today, which is why many people, including Helga, have called this a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis. I want to give you a quick view of what the idea of a “unipolar world” is, and what it means. The people who argue for the U.S. to be the main power, start from the standpoint that we’re “democratic,” we’re “good.” Therefore, when we deploy missiles, it’s for the good. As Dr. Andrey Kortunov (of the Russian International Affaires Council) told us: when the Russians deploy the missiles, since they are “bad,” these are “bad missiles” and have to be opposed. From that standpoint, we have to look at where this idea comes from. The underlying issue today, which is called into question by President Putin’s insistence on legally binding security guarantees, is that the construct of a unipolar world is dead. The whole idea that there’s only one nation on the planet which, because of its immense military power and economic power, can dictate the rules to the rest of the human race, and use satraps such as the European Union and NATO to help enforce it, no longer applies. The Western financial system is collapsing. There’s a further point, though. In reality, this idea never really existed, except in the minds of those who enforced it and tried to convince the rest of the world that it had no choice but to accept it. They believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union left them with no military obstacle to impose their unilateral decisions on strategic and financial matters. We’ve talked about this before. Helga brought it up again this afternoon. What is the “rules-based order”? Well, for the unilateralists, it’s the rules that sustain their control over the global economy. This goes back to a merger during the George Herbert Walker Bush administration, and actually before that. It occurred during the Reagan administration with the emergence of the Democratic Leadership Council taking over the Democratic party with its so-called “Third Way,” which became the approach of the Clinton administration. The idea of the neoconservatives and neo-liberals essentially joining as an American force to impose this unipolar world. In particular, it was the neo-cons who were the most arrogant, with their Project for a New American Century, in which they insisted that the United States had emerged as the only power on the planet. Therefore, they created a narrative to explain why everyone else has to march to the tune of the United States. The narrative starts with, “We won the Cold War.” Second, the victory in the Cold War was one of “democracy” and the “free market.” The third point: This means that every nation must submit to those who won the Cold War, because we’re the good guys; we did what was right. The fourth point, which is usually not expressed, is that this means there’s no more sovereignty, no morePeace of Westphalia, as Tony Blair blatantly stated repeatedly in trips to the United States. The idea that there’s a common good is no longer acceptable. The idea that there should be no interference in other nations’ internal affairs, which was part of the Peace of Westphalia, is no longer valid. That the “common good” is whatever the unipolar power insists on. I want to give you a sense of what the so-called “democratic order” that this “rules-based order” has done in the world in the last 30 years.
As war preparations hit a feverish pace, driven by the usual false narratives from the Military-Industrial Complex war hawks, there are other warnings being stated quietly, hoping you are not paying attention. These have to do with the Fed's decision to "fight inflation" by raising interest rates, a strategy that risks triggering a wave of defaults of 54 mostly poor, heavily-indebted countries -- including Ukraine -- but also of debt-ridden zombie corporations, banks, insurance companies, etc. If you suspect there might be a connection between the war drive and the systemic financial collapse of the economy, you are right.
Once again, a fraudulent report has been produced by British intelligence to push the U.S. into war, this time with Russia over Ukraine. Using the usual tactics -- anonymous sources, promoting fake intelligence, asserting devious schemes by Russia -- they may be reacting to a sense of reluctance in Washington, by Biden, and some NATO countries, to plunge into World War III. That the U.S. has now announced that it will respond to Putin's demands for "legally-binding security guarantees" may have spooked the Brits into "ramping up preparations" for war. A thorough background report was produced in a Schiller Institute video seminar on Jan. 22, "Can War with Russia Still Be Averted", available HERE.
The Schiller Institute today sponsored a critical forum under the title: “A Difference In Leadership: Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?” Speaking from the Russian Mission to the United Nations, Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN, presented the stark reality of the current rush to war by Western leaders. “It seems,” he said, “that our Western colleagues are blinded by the so-called ‘victory’ in the Cold War, and continue to live these memories and try to talk from the position of superiority, and impose double standards. They blame us for the presence and movement of our troops on our own sovereign territory, while claiming that everything they do on NATO territory is nobody’s business. This will no longer work.”Helga Zepp-LaRouche posed the higher order approach to the crisis: “I suggest very strongly that we need a new security architecture, which has to reflect on the basic lessons of history. You have to look at treaties which did lead to peace, and those which didn’t. A good example for the first is the Peace of Westphalia, where after 150 years of religious war, especially the Thirty Years’ War, people realized that nobody would be the winner of the continuation of the war. So, they agreed on the famous principles of the Peace of Westphalia, the most important being that you have to take into account the interest of the other if you want to have peace. Every time that was done—and this Peace of Westphalia, by the way, was the beginning of international law and what constitutes the UN Charter today—that leads to peace. The other example is the Versailles Treaty, which proclaimed that Germany was the only guilty party in World War I, which was not true. For sure, it was not just. It put burdens on Germany to pay not only the cost of war, but reparations, which was completely overburdening the German economy. So, the Reichsbank started to print money; that led to the hyperinflation; that contributed to the Depression. Naturally, the deep sense of injustice which the people coming out of this had, led to the rise of the Nazis and the actual takeover by the National Socialists which led to World War II.” Harley Schlanger, a spokesman for The LaRouche Organization, reviewed the arrogance of the neoconservatives and the neoliberals who believed that the West had “won” the Cold War, and that this gave them license to impose their imagined superior system of “democracy and free market economies” on all nations, by military means if necessary. He posted a chart of the illegal and genocidal wars waged against nations—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, and then the coup against Ukraine in 2014—against nations which were no threat to anyone, wars based on fraudulent charges which are acknowledged now to have been manufactured to justify the wars. This included the “shock therapy” imposed on Russia itself, in an attempt to reduce a great scientific and industrial nation into a “raw material exporter” with impoverished and declining populations. When Vladimir Putin reversed that destruction, he was labeled an “autocrat,” while both parties in the U.S. united behind the war policy. The era of unilateralism and a unipolar world is now finished, Schlanger asserted, as the China-Russia cooperation in nation building, for themselves and the 140 nations which have joined the Belt and Road Initiative, are no longer taking orders, and will no longer allow color revolutions or neo-colonial wars and oppression. Paul Gallagher, EIR Economics Editor, then dissected the destruction of the “American System,” which had been restored by Franklin Roosevelt through Glass-Steagall bank regulation and the post-war Bretton Woods system. The destruction began with the 1971 decoupling of the dollar from gold by the Nixon Administration, turning the banking system into one based on speculation rather than production. With the collapse of the speculative bubble in 2008, Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal to restore American System policies was rejected in favor of mass money printing to save the banks, creating the greatest “everything bubble” in history. The effort to sustain the $275 trillion bubble through the Green New Deal, run by the same bankers responsible for the bubble itself, by shutting down fossil fuels, many industries and farms, would result in mass depopulation of the world, already evident globally, and even within the United States. Here again, the emergence of Russia, China and the Belt and Road Initiative demonstrates that the unipolar world run by the City of London and Wall Street no longer can dictate this destruction on the rest of the world, with the danger that they may choose to launch a nuclear war rather than joining as an equal partner in a new world order. Richard Black, the Schiller Institute representative to the UN, followed up Ambassador Polyanskiy’s call for ending the forced division of the world into warring blocs, to seek those things which unite us rather than divide us. He reviewed LaRouche’s work with the scientific community in Russia, in the tradition of that nation’s great scientific geniuses, calling on the citizens of the Western nations to organize their political leaders and candidates to force their governments to give up their phobias, and cooperate in the great tasks facing mankind as a whole. A rich discussion and Q&A followed. You are encouraged to watch this crucial and productive forum, and to act on the ideas there presented.
With the sounding of a “Russian coup coming in Ukraine” siren by British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Jan. 22—to push the British demand to hit Russia now with the financial super-sanctions that were supposed to be threatened to deter war—it has become clear that there is no “unity of the NATO allies and partners” on dealing with Russia in the Ukraine missiles crisis.Rather, there is a British drive to force Russia to invade Ukraine or capitulate; a beleaguered but definite German opposition to the British war drive; a French President who wants to negotiate but is trying to look good and get re-elected; and a weak American President who would like to avoid war. If war, even world war, comes, it will be war imposed on the weakened American Presidency by the City of London and Britain. Not a second Crimean War, but a war for revenge against Russia and China for resisting and ruining the grand Glasgow global climate summit in November, leaving the British ministers who ran that summit in angry tears as it ended in failure. That included Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “BoJo” the nasty clown, who is discredited and inches from a no-confidence vote by his own Conservative Party MPs. “His resolve has hardened” against Russia, his spokesman announced on Jan. 22. The New York Times coverage of the new fake was headlined, “Britain Pursues More Muscular Role in Standoff with Russia on Ukraine,” although it’s always U.S. muscle Britain uses. Even the nervously hyper-aggressive U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not respond to the newest British war fable, beyond “We’re taking that seriously,” when it was thrown at him today by “Face the Nation’s” anchor Margaret Brennan, who raved as if she had taken some British meth with her coffee before the program. Against the London-Kiev demand that the supposed financial super-sanctions be imposed on Russia tomorrow, Blinken noted the obvious, “We’re using them as a deterrent. You would lose their deterrent effect.” He did not include the equally obvious, “and push Russia toward war”—the British intent. Blinken repeatedly stressed two points: “We have rallied allies and partners across Europe in a very intense way in recent days”; and “We are also responding to some of Russia’s concerns in further talks, and we expect them to respond to our concerns.” The Russian Embassy in London stressed today that the British were outside the process of negotiation with Russia: “The U.K. Foreign Office continues with a series of provocative statements on the situation around Ukraine…. These rallying cries come against the background of an obvious deterioration of British expertise on Russia and Ukraine. …The words by Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss about Ukraine having suffered from various invaders, ‘from the Mongols to the Tatars,’ is one example. Then came the ‘news’ of Russia intending to establish a puppet regime in Kiev led by a former Ukrainian MP—one that happens to be under Russian sanctions for being a threat to national security,” referring to Yevheniy Murayev. Germany does not want to allow the British war drive to succeed. Its Navy Chief Vice Adm. Kay-Achim Schönbach was forced to resign by media attacks, when he stated that what Putin “wants is respect. And my God, giving someone respect is low cost…. It is easy to give him the respect he really demands—and probably also deserves.” It is now widely reported that Chancellor Olaf Scholz was asked to Washington for consultations with President Biden and declined to go until some later time. Germany will not permit Baltic nations to which it has sold German weapons to pass them on to Ukraine, and the breakneck British shipments of lethal weaponry are having to be flown over Danish airspace because the U.K. does not dare ask Germany for flyover permission. The Biden Administration is about to respond in writing to Russian President Putin’s proposed agreements to keep NATO missiles and warfighting arrangements out of Ukraine and off Russia’s border—“and stating our concerns” about Russia, Blinken said today. The United States has decided it wants Russia to agree not to publish these responses, most likely because such publication will either infuriate the warmongers around BoJo’s government and inside the City of London, or cause more doubts in Germany, France, and perhaps other “allies and partners.” The most important question now is, what will American citizens do to direct their flailing government toward solving the most important problems facing humanity? That requires cooperation with at least Russia and China as a means to reverse the American industrial economy’s decline toward “green” suicide, and involve the United States in building new public health systems and infrastructure development programs around the world. London’s Malthusian policy of deindustrialization by war can’t be tolerated.
This is translated for publication in EIR from Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s lead article in the January 27, 2022 issue of Neue Solidarität Jan. 23 (EIRNS)—After the hectic diplomacy of this week—Annalena Baerbock in Kiev and Moscow, Antony Blinken in Kiev, then in Berlin to meet with the foreign ministers of the United States, France, Great Britain and Germany, Blinken’s meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and finally the meeting of foreign ministers Sergey Lavrov and Blinken in Geneva—the danger of a world war which could annihilate mankind has not been averted. After the last meeting, Lavrov stated that he expected to receive a written answer from the U.S. and NATO next week concerning the legally binding treaties demanded by Russia, which provide that NATO will not expand further east to Russia’s borders, that Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO, and that no offensive weapons systems will be placed on the Russian border. Blinken referred to further talks with “allies and partners in the coming days,” after which Western concerns and ideas could then be shared with Russia.However, if the U.S. position remains what Blinken, according to RT, told journalists after his meeting with Lavrov—namely that there is no room for compromise on Moscow’s main demand, and that a non-negotiable principle of America and its allies is that the Ukrainian people have the right “to write their own future”—then the very short fuse threatens to burn very quickly. Indeed, the formulation used by Blinken is just a sophistical way of referring to Ukraine’s entry into NATO, which is part of the Anglo-American narrative on “Russia’s aggressions.” But for any honest historian, as well as for everyone who looks at a map, the facts are clear: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was not Russia that moved its borders some 1,000 km westward from the border of the then-Warsaw Pact to reach somewhere in France around Lille, but it was NATO that advanced to the east by 1000 km. Thus, it clearly broke the verbal commitments given to Gorbachev by the George H.W. Bush administration, and especially by then-Secretary of State James Baker III, that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.” A closer look shows that the methods used by NATO to add 14 new member states in Eastern and Central Europe and in the Balkans were not always the most subtle. According to the Western narrative, it was the desire for freedom that pushed these countries into NATO. But the reality is different. After the shock therapy of Jeffrey Sachs and the brutal policy of privatization, with no concern for the social consequences, had drastically impoverished the populations of the former Comecon, a massive network of NGOs was set up with thick checkbooks, with the aim of effecting a paradigm change in favor of the West. In 1990, at the time prior to German reunification and during the upheavals in Eastern Europe, this author personally experienced how the first democratic attempts of self-organization by the people in the East were cold-bloodedly smothered and replaced by compliant opportunists, often enough in positions of government. “Corruption is good” became the motto in many places—then at least we know whom we can trust. So much for the principle of “letting peoples choose their own future.” The latest example just came from the—failed—attempt to carry off a color revolution in Kazakhstan, with the use of “Maidan techniques” as Vladimir Putin correctly pointed out. If Putin is now demanding—in the context of what German Gen. Harald Kujat (ret.) told DLF radio/TV was not in preparation for a military attack, but rather as a threatening backdrop (i.e., the redeployment of about 100,000 Russian troops closer to the Ukrainian border although some of them are still hundreds of kilometers away)—legally binding written assurances that NATO will neither be extended further eastward to the borders of Russia, nor will ever accept Ukraine as a member, then this is simply a way of expressing that for Russia a red line has been reached. Given the fact that there are already 10,000 NATO troops in Ukraine, including some 4,000 U.S. troops, that private mercenary outfits are training Ukrainian military units in eastern Ukraine for false-flag operations, that the U.K. is supplying offensive lethal weapons to Ukraine, that U.S. and British warships and fighter jets are provoking incidents in the Black Sea aimed at providing the reconnaissance aircraft with information about Russian military capabilities—what conclusions is Russia supposed to draw from all these and many other policies? In reality, NATO is already operating practically in Ukraine, but formal NATO membership would definitively confirm that it was no longer possible to defend Russia’s fundamental security interests. Even as the abovementioned diplomatic talks were ongoing, the British broadcaster Sky News reported that the U.K. had deployed 30 members of its “Special Operations Brigade” to Ukraine to train Ukrainian troops on anti-tank weapons that were also supplied by the British. According to the military spokesman for the Donetsk People’s Republic, more than 460 tons of various lethal weapons, including 2,000 NLAWs (anti-tank missiles), have recently been delivered by nine C17 aircraft to Ukrainian forces stationed on the line of contact with the Donbas, which include a considerable number of radical nationalists. Whether these weapons are defensive or offensive in nature depends, as always, on the specific combat situation. Shortly after Moscow presented the two treaties to the United States and NATO on Dec. 15, Putin announced that Russia would respond to their rejection with “appropriate military-technical retaliatory measures.” In a Jan. 15 article in National Interest magazine, David T. Pyne, currently working for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security (a Congressional Advisory Board), cited Brussels-based U.S. analyst Gilbert Doctorow’s interpretation of what these “military-technical retaliatory measures” might entail. Doctorow assumes that it means the additional deployment of Russian nuclear-capable SS-26 Iskander-M short-range missiles to Belarus and Kaliningrad, which would threaten NATO front-line states and eastern Germany. Moreover, the new nuclear-armed Tsirkon sea-launched hypersonic cruise missiles could be stationed off the American coast near Washington. Earlier statements from Russian officials noted that such missiles could destroy the American capital faster than the President could escape on Air Force One. Therefore, if the U.S. and NATO reject Russia’s demands for security guarantees, there is a real probability that we may have to deal very soon with a double Cuba crisis, but without a John F. Kennedy as U.S. President. Rather, we have a President Biden whom the war hawks in his entourage openly refuse to respect and who “correct” him if he says he does not seek war with Russia. It should be clear to all thinking persons that in the event of a war waged with nuclear weapons—be it “limited” or not—no one in Germany would survive. For our new Foreign Minister Baerbock, it is obviously not clear, otherwise she would not fall into NATO jargon in such a synchronized manner with “dear Tony” as she just did at the Berlin press conference. The Greens have completely morphed into a war party. And if someone begins pondering, like former Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, what nuclear options there might be against Russia, then they should seek therapy against suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Under such circumstances, Germany’s membership in NATO can no longer be defended. We immediately need a new international security architecture that takes into account the interests of all countries, explicitly including those of Russia and China. If we have learned anything from history, it is that only those treaties that include the interests of all the states involved, such as the Treaty of Westphalia, can be the basis for lasting peace. Peace treaties that do not do so, such as the Treaty of Versailles, contain the opening salvo for the next war, as we in Germany should have painfully learned. NATO, which unnecessarily excluded Russia from the European house after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and has since increasingly become an offensive alliance, not only no longer corresponds to Germany’s security interests, but has become the primary threat to Germany’s existence. We need a new security architecture that overcomes the geopolitics responsible for two world wars in the 20th century, one that defines the common goals of mankind as its fundamental principle. And this includes, first and foremost, the elimination of the primary cause of war—which is the imminent collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system—and the creation of a new credit system, a New Bretton Woods system, that vanquishes poverty and underdevelopment everywhere in the world. All peace-loving people in the world are called upon to enter into an open dialogue on this issue.
This question, “Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?” is the title of the Schiller Institute’s International Dialogue Saturday, January 22 at 2 pm (ET) for the purpose of strengthening the forces to stop the dangerous brinkmanship of the U.S., the British Empire and NATO against Russia and China, and make way for a complete shift toward a world security system based on the principle of the mutual benefit of all, most assuredly, the economic benefit of all.The results of today’s important meeting in Geneva between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, do not change this focus, only heighten it. The meeting ran for 90 minutes, with remarks before and after by the officials. There is expected follow-on to the talks—with a rough time frame of the next week to 10 days; but at any time, expect sabotage from enemies of this process of engagement. In brief, Blinken, who said that President Biden had asked him to meet with Lavrov, said that after today’s talks, he will go back and consult with NATO, and allies, plus Congress, and “we will be able to share with Russia our concerns and ideas in more detail and in writing next week, and we agreed to further discussions after that.” TASS reported that Blinken said that the U.S. and Russia will meet again, after Moscow scrutinizes Washington’s security proposals next week. However the Foreign Ministry threw cold water on that report, saying there are no plans for a meeting, until Russia receives an “article-by-article” reply to its demand for security guarantees. Otherwise, Blinken stuck to the assertions in his litany of accusations and demands, admonishing Russia to de-escalate its force placement, not invade Ukraine, etc. Lavrov said of Blinken’s remark that the U.S. will respond in writing to Russia’s “concerns,” that, “I believe it would be right to make this reply public and I will ask Antony Blinken, so that they do not object.” He said there was no arrangement for another meeting between himself and Blinken. Among many other points, Lavrov said that the U.S. repeats its charges against Russia “like a mantra” and pointed to Western “hysterics” when it came to Ukraine. Especially noteworthy was the inclusion of China in what is at stake. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement at the time of the talks which said, “It is high time that our American colleagues understand that Washington’s dual containment policy towards Moscow and Beijing is completely outdated and offers no good prospects for the U.S. The Americans would do more good for themselves and the entire world if they abandoned their arrogant claim for global dominance and engaged in an equal and honest dialogue with Russia, China and other major players in order to search for balanced solutions to pressing global security and development issues.” Ominously, hostile initiatives have been conducted against Russia all during the period of today’s Geneva talks. Yesterday, Blinken’s State Department and the U.S. Treasury issued sanctions against four individuals in Ukraine, on charges that they are instruments of the Russian FSB. Two of them are members of Parliament, and of the opposition party to the Zelenskyy government, and one of them a media company operator. Thus, once again, the U.S. warhawks—while singing of democracy, are interfering blatantly in another nation’s internal politics. More military personnel and armament are flowing into Ukraine from individual NATO countries. In the U.S., the hype over Russian “aggression” is at fever pitch, and even more shrill because it is bipartisan. A call for “pre-emptive sanctions” on Russia by the U.S.—before Russia has a chance to aggress!—was made this week by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst (IA), appearing as a CNN guest of rabidly Democrat Anderson Cooper. On the eve of today’s Geneva meeting, the State Department posted three fact-sheet type write-ups to defame Russia, that qualify the agency as akin to the Ministry of Truth, in George Orwell’s 1984, which was noted by Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. Just consider the names of one of the documents, “Russia’s Top Five Persistent Disinformation Narratives.” One of the narratives that the U.S. finds Russia guilty of, is to say Western culture is decaying. The State Department reports that Foreign Minister Lavrov has even accused U.S. schools of teaching that Jesus Christ was bisexual. This is madness gone wild, and very dangerous. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said in her weekly strategic webcast on Jan. 20 that, “I think the danger of war is what people should be concerned with.” But she further stated that the concern should be “from the standpoint of the dynamic [whose] directionality goes very clearly in the direction of the Belt and Road cooperation, because many nations see it much more to their advantage to economically cooperate, rather than have geopolitical games.” In this way, the BRI alliances and projects are anti-war policies. Look at the urgency of action to support Afghanistan in that way, as part of a greater development zone from Central and South Asia, westward across the war-torn Southwest Asia, into the Horn of Africa. Just this week, on Jan. 19, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was in Moscow for discussions. China and Iran are implementing their 25-year cooperation agreement. In Pakistan, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is proceeding. In the war-devastated Horn of Africa, China has recently committed to the “Initiative of Peaceful Development,” involving rail, port, power and other infrastructure programs. Add to this the thrust of “Operation Ibn Sina” in this region, and elsewhere internationally—the drive for a health care platform with full economic support, called for by Zepp-LaRouche—and the end of war is a given. However, in complete opposition to all of this, came the mass-murder bombing today in Yemen—the heart of this extended region, by Saudi Arabian-led forces. The wave of bombings has killed at least 200 people, and injured many more, including a strike on a prison in Sadaa, north of Sana’a, where the death toll is 150 so far. This amounts to a “shock and awe” crime, timed exactly with today’s Geneva U.S.-Russia meeting. The Yemen mission director for Doctors Without Borders Ahmed Mahat called the prison strike a “horrific act of violence.” Moreover, the main communications tower in Sana’a was deliberately bombed, knocking out all internet service, whose import could mean that, without communications, the Saudis will perpetrate more heinous crimes. Fouad Al Ghaffari, the leader of the ALBRICS Youth Parliament in Sana’a, sent a message by text to the Schiller Institute this morning, “We condemn the terrific aggressive murder attack on Sada’a Prison, and destroying the internet connection in Yemen that violates the right to information and may hide a massive attack at any moment!” Attend the Jan. 22 International Dialogue conference, “Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?” and activate with the Schiller Institute.
Join us LIVE on Saturday, January 22 at 2pm EST. “The war danger is greater than ever, and we are on the verge of World War III,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned today. “We are now down to the wire and things will have to break one way or the other in the days ahead.” Although there is a growing chorus of voices calling for sanity in the U.S. and Europe, the control of U.S. policy by the insane British and their American war party confederates has not been broken. Furthermore, Zepp-LaRouche stated, the descent into war is being driven by the systemic breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is now going out of control, as Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained.There is a second dynamic underway in the world, which is the emerging realignment of nations of all continents around China and Russia, and the Belt and Road Initiative as an alternative to the policy of Malthusian depopulation being promoted by the dying trans-Atlantic system. If the United States remains hostile to this policy alternative, and continues to defend the City of London and Wall Street’s bankrupt system, then the world will in all likelihood careen toward thermonuclear war in the short term. If the U.S. joins with the Belt and Road, as Lyndon LaRouche advocated from the outset, then the prospects for peace and development are excellent.
Today could prove to be a fateful day for history as U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meet to discuss the security proposals Russia formally introduced in writing, just over one month ago. Speaking to an audience in Germany on Thursday, Blinken said, “I don’t expect a breakthrough.” But a breakthrough is what is needed to pull humanity back from the brink of nuclear war.In the United States, former member of Congress and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard denounced the White House and Congress — on both sides of the aisle — for hiding from Americans the immense danger of ongoing provocations against Russia. Tucker Carlson interviewed a guest who warned that the “U.S. is sleepwalking towards conflict” with the other biggest nuclear power on the planet. Meanwhile, the U.S. legacy media are in overdrive mode to demonize Russia (while still keeping the pressure on China). They claim that nothing less than democracy and goodness itself are at stake, and that only an enormous display of anti-Russian might can save all that is good in the world from the Russian menace. Time is running short to avert catastrophe. The U.S. has participated in tyrannical overreach around the world — twenty years in Afghanistan, the murderous Iraq War, the murder of Qaddafi and consequent chaos in Libya, the destruction of Syria, and the 2014 coup in Ukraine that has since been used to demonize Russia. This tyranny in the name of democracy knows no shame. And that same tyrannical overreach is increasingly occurring domestically. The failed vote on ending the filibuster for a partisan voting bill was intended not so secure that bill’s passage. Its purpose is more aligned with the declaration that domestic terrorists — that is, people with unorthodox opinions — must be denied rights. It is of a piece with the spreading censorship of non-Atlanticist views on social media. Do you oppose war with Russia? You must be in Putin’s pocket. In fact, you should be prosecuted for treason. Do you oppose war with China? A CCP spy must have gotten to you. Do you support affordable energy capable of powering a growing human population at higher standards of living? You are supporting ecocide, and should be tried for your crimes. Have you revealed inconvenient truths? Ask Julian Assange how the UK and US treat practitioners of press freedom — a virtue they hypocritically claim to promote around the world. A new security architecture is needed, one that both ends attempts at unipolar hegemony, and that recognizes that peace is not merely the absence of conflict. What are to be the economic, social, and scientific-technological contours of that peace? Whatever may be presented as the outcome of today’s Blinken-Lavrov discussions, the world needs the analysis and direction of the LaRouche Organization and the Schiller Institute — to be presented at an event tomorrow, “Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?” Learn more on Saturday at 11am PT, 2pm ET, 8pm CET, on schillerinstitute.com
The comments made in Berlin yesterday by Tony Blinken on the continuing war tensions between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine show a dangerous detachment from reality. In stating before his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov today, "I don't expect a breakthrough," he is demonstrating the delusional attitude of much of the Trans-Atlantic leadership, which is willing to risk a nuclear war, rather than take President Putin's demand for national security guarantees seriously. Lavrov will likely call his bluff -- then how will Mr. Blinken respond?
These days, when someone offers you a “narrative,” expect a lie. The new (annual) book out this month from Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, whose Davos sessions are this week (virtual,) is titled: The Great Narrative (The Great Reset Book 2). Health care itself has been one of the deadliest examples of lying narratives for over half a century. Take the case of how the principle of public health embodied in the 1940s Hill Burton Act, was subverted by “managed” care and privatization. There’s more to this story, even involving Tony Blair’s health care hitman, who came to the U.S. to help design Obamacare. Marcia Merry Baker, of the EIR Editorial Board, joined the discussion this week.
In the last days, and in the next days ahead, decisions are being made which will determine whether mankind has the moral capacity to survive. In her weekly dialogue, Helga Zepp-LaRouche presented a dramatic tour d'horizon, weaving together an analysis of summit meetings, troop deployments, and positive economic developments around the Belt-and-Road Initiative, communicating both the tremendous danger of the present, and, importantly, a pathway out of that danger.She emphasized that the bluster of Blinken in Ukraine is not completely in step with the pronouncements of Biden. She also emphasized that Putin has been clear on why Russia requires strategic guarantees, and that some in the West, such as David Pyne, Gilbert Doctorow and Gen. Kujat, are openly discussing that. You have the delegation of seven knucklehead Senators blustering after a trip to Kiev, demanding that Biden toughen up, with one — whom she referred to as Sen. Wicked — saying that Putin must be given a bloody nose. At the same time, the Iranian President was in Moscow, signing a 20-year deal, and the Chinese and Syrians finalized a Memo of Understanding for collaboration on the BRI. Finally, she spoke movingly of the Schiller Institute conference on January 15 on Afghanistan, which contrasted the present threat of millions starving, with the axiom-busting decision by India to ship wheat to Afghanistan, traveling through Pakistan.
Read the full transcript below. Mike Billington: This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute and The LaRouche Organization. I'm here speaking with Jim Jatras. Jim served in the State Department in Mexico and in Russian affairs. He also served for many years as an adviser to the Republicans in the Senate. He worked in the private sector, and he's established himself as a leading analyst on political issues internationally. Would you like to say anything else about your career, Jim? Jim Jatras: No, I don't think so, except to say that the extent to which somebody can be in the belly of the Beast for 30 years and come out relatively sane, I hope so. I guess we'll let the viewers decide that. Mike Billington: You presented a speech to a student seminar at the Ron Paul Institute last September titled "It's Later Than You Think." What did you mean by that? Jim Jatras: Well, we tend to think of political and economic. Developments in a kind of an isolation -- what are good policies, what are bad policies, what are constructive, what is destructive -- rather than looking at the underlying health of society itself and macro historical trends that make such policy choices viable or not. My concern was, and is, that we are approaching some kind of a crunch, some kind of a major crisis, not only in America but globally, that not only could totally remake what it means to be an American, but maybe means the end of the American nation and the republic itself. I would even go as far as to say, I don't think the American Republic, as we've known it, really exists anymore. I'd like to ask the question of people: how many republics have there been in France? Well, this is the Fifth Republic. Yet the French nation still exists. So many Americans are so wedded to the notion of our constitution, our political structures, that they lose sight of the fact that that's all they are -- they're just structures. Those structures are going through the biggest crisis, certainly since the Great Depression and possibly since the Civil War. And we don't really know what's going to come out on the other side of it. I think the problems America faces today are not going to get solved by an election or a political party or a political movement -- we're going to have to go through a great destructive ordeal of some sort. And we cannot really envision what comes out on the other side. Mike Billington: The talks this week between Russia and the United States, while not an absolute failure, were described by Russia as having failed to budge an inch for the West, having failed to budge an inch on the fundamental issues of guarantees for Russian security. Nonetheless, several leading Russian experts, including Gilbert Doctorow and Dmitri Trenin, have described the talks as a victory for Russia by forcing the U.S. to admit that they could not conduct a war with a nuclear armed Russia over Ukraine. You have headed an organization called the American Institute in Ukraine and have insight into this. What's your view of this week's diplomatic efforts? Jim Jatras: I'm basically in agreement with the analysts you cited, I think sometimes there's too much of a focus on, you might say, the CNN headline -- which is: “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” -- when that is not really what this is about. In fact, it's not even primarily about Ukraine, in the sense that it's really about NATO expansion and the United States and our satellites. Let's not even call them allies, they are satellites, basically on Russia's doorstep, its front porch, its back porch and everywhere else, threatening its vital security interests. And the Russians have basically signaled that they've had enough. As President Putin said, "We have no place left to retreat to." So I think they're coming back to say, "All right, we're giving you one last chance to address our security concerns seriously, to provide us with guarantees." I don't know what those guarantees would look like, by the way, since the West can never be trusted to keep its word. But, but nonetheless, I think they're making one last chance to say, "Will you take our serious concerns seriously? Here are two draft treaties. Do we have a deal or not?" And I think the West is coming back and saying, "No, we don't have a deal." Jim Jatras: We can delay Ukraine's accession to NATO for about 10 years. Maybe we can have some more confidence building measures in Europe, things of that sort. I don't think that's going to wash with the Russians. As you mentioned, Gil Doctorow, as he's pointed out, he thinks that the Russians are ready to act in some decisive and dramatic way, stationing advanced hypersonic weapons close to the United States that would give them the same flight time to our major cities as we are posing a threat to Russian cities. Jim Jatras: Maybe some kind of surgical strikes within Ukraine against hostile forces that would force NATO to wake up and smell the coffee and say, "We have to accommodate these concerns or else the pain level is going to keep getting ratcheted up." NATO is no longer the master of all it sees in Europe, as we were, say, in the 1990s, and the Russians are in a position to act. They're acting unilaterally, and there's really not much we can do about it unless we want to start a major war. Unfortunately, what I'm seeing from most of the establishment -- there was an absurd discussion at the Atlantic Council, (which, just saying Atlantic Council almost tells you how absurd it was going to be), where the most reasonable person on the call, if you can believe it, was Evelyn Farkas --who had this horrible piece in Defense One basically talking about how we need to fight a war with the Russians in Ukraine. But she was the only one that took that seriously. The rest of them were all saying, "No, no, the Russians are just bluffing. We just need to crank up the weaponry going into Ukraine and crank up the sanctions threats and the Russians will back down." That's what I think is the dominant view within the establishment. Mike Billington: This brings up the issue of some of the mad men who openly propose a nuclear war. The head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Admiral Richard, said earlier last year that because of the rise of Russia and China, nuclear war, which we used to consider unlikely, is now likely, which is literally madness. And of course, you had Senator Roger Wicker directly calling for a first strike nuclear attack on Russia. Do you think these people have the power to influence decision making on the questions of war? Jim Jatras: I think they can influence it. Even I don't believe that there are people who are crazy enough to actually deliberately push the button and say, let's have a nuclear war. Maybe there are. They've got to be out there somewhere. But the bigger concern I have is that we are in a very dangerous period, especially since I think the Russians will do something fairly dramatic before the end of the month, my guess is. Then you always have the risk of unintended escalation, that if you have -- as we've been having increasingly for the last few years -- if you have American and Russian planes playing chicken over the Black Sea or the Baltic Sea or with boats, something unintended could happen, leads to an escalation, and then we don't really know what happens after that. So the risk is there. The question is, can we find some way to come to an understanding of security in Eastern Europe, which basically means getting out of Russia's face, or can we not? I find it very hard to believe this establishment can accommodate them. So that risk will be there. Mike Billington: The Obama administration and the Trump administration and the Biden administration have all referred to the violent overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine in 2014 as a "democratic revolution." You know the situation well. What can you say about that coup and its aftermath today? Jim Jatras: Let's remember what triggered it. You hear, again, misreported in the Western media that it's because Yanukovych was Moscow's stooge and he refused to to proceed with a deal with the European Union. All Yanukovych did --first off, he wanted his country to be non-aligned, not either part of a Western bloc or part of a Russian led bloc. He very much wanted to be a neutral country, which many people, by the way, are even proposing now as a solution to the problem. Well, that solution has never been acceptable to the West. We want Ukraine in our camp, by hook or by crook, despite the fact that Ukraine is a very, very divided country. If you look at the electoral map, you look at the linguistic maps, the only way to hold Ukraine together is by having it straddle both sides of the East-West divide. Anybody with any sense knows that, but that's not good enough with Victoria Nuland and people like that. You have this almost Bolshevik mentality which says, "The people of Ukraine have chosen their historical path." No, they haven't. The people of Ukraine are certainly as divided as the people in the United States are. They haven't made a choice of any historical direction at all. It was, as you say, a coup, and it was clearly planned for many years in advance. Jim Jatras: A lot of money being poured in there by the National Endowment for Democracy and other Soros organizations and other outside groups, to prepare for a color revolution, the overthrow the Yanukovych government, similar to what we saw recently in Belarus and very recently in Kazakhstan, an attempt to do that as well. These things don't just come out of thin air, whatever the local roots of those might happen to be. Yanukovych (unlike President Tokayev in Kazakhstan recently) President Yanukovych dithered. He couldn't make up his mind whether to accommodate the demands or to try to defend himself and to crush what was an insurrection -- a real one, not a fake one like we talk about a year ago here in this country. He ended up paying for it by being driven out of office. At that point, we had this triumphalism coming from the West. “Ukraine is ours! Ukraine is coming to the West! Ukraine is coming to Europe! NATO,” blah blah blah. Well, the Russians felt they had some cards they could play in the Donbass and supporting the local people there who, remember, were the people who voted Yanukovych in in the first place. They saw their vote taken away by a violent mob in the streets of Kiev, and they were not willing to accept it. And they were certainly the people in Crimea were not willing to accept it, and the Russians took steps to secure their interests and the interests of those people in Ukraine. Jim Jatras: We saw, as you know, the Minsk agreement by which Kiev was given an opportunity to repair some of this damage by saying, "OK, fine, let's have a federalization of Ukraine. Let's give self-rule to these areas and eastern Ukraine. Let's not repress the Russian language. Let's try to put Humpty Dumpty back together by accommodating the diversity of Ukraine." And of course, they and their Western sponsors had no intention of ever doing that, despite Kiev's legal commitment to the Minsk agreement. So that's where we are now. In the meantime, the West has proceeded with NATO expansion. Right after Trump was elected they swept Montenegro into NATO, even though the polls showed that, at best, there was an even split within the population about whether they should join NATO. I actually think the majority was opposed to that. They just swept in North Macedonia -- a ridiculous name for a ridiculous excuse for a country. Why are we doing all of this stuff? It has nothing to do with American security, certainly, but it does have to do with tightening a stranglehold around Russia, which has been the purpose of NATO ever since, supposedly, the Cold War ended in 1991. Mike Billington: What do you think of the relations between forces within the U.S. and Europe with the overtly neo-Nazi groupings within Ukraine. Even Israel has complained bitterly that Ukraine is allowing these neo-Nazi organizations to parade with swastikas and with pictures of Stepan Bandera and so forth. What's behind these institutions and how much influence do they have over actual policy? Jim Jatras: It's hard to say, Mike, because we know that especially in the Republican Party -- not exclusively -- some of this kind of World War Two Losers Association stuff, went all the way back to the 1950s, really, even in the late 1940s, where the CIA and MI6 and other -- you may be familiar with something called the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. This is something that was around largely led by West Ukrainian pro-Nazi elements that went all the way back to the late 1940s and was originally created by British intelligence and then was adopted by the Americans as well. But there were many groups like that. Now, some of them may have been simply people who were nationalists of various sorts and thought that their countries had gotten a raw deal on the territorial arrangements in Europe in both World Wars, and others, I think, were very ideologically committed to something along the lines of fascism or Nazism. And we do see some elements like that in Ukraine. Jim Jatras: I would draw a parallel to the way the United States, especially the intelligence agencies, have used jihadists of various sorts as proxies in various wars, going all the way back to Afghanistan in the nineteen eighties. We used them in Bosnia, we used them in Kosovo, we use them in Libya. We are still using them today in Syria. There is, I think, a very cynical attitude of the intelligence agencies toward extremist groups, whether they're neo-Nazis or whether they're jihadists. They say, "Yeah, these people are operational, we can use them with a degree of plausible deniability. If they get into trouble, too bad for them. ‘The secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.’ But they can get the job done because they're ruthless." So I think the degree of cynicism about groups like this is really hard for most Americans to believe, that their government would engage in. Mike Billington: The coup in Ukraine also included an effort to separate the Ukraine Orthodox Church from the Russian Orthodox Church as part of this anti-Russian hysteria. You are a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and you're active in issues regarding Orthodox Christianity. What can you tell us about what was going on in Ukraine and where that stands today? Jim Jatras: Well, a lot of this is "inside baseball" in the Orthodox Church. I'm of Greek origin personally. The parish I attend most of the time is a Russian parish although it's mostly full of just regular Americans. They are some Greeks, some Russians, some Serbs, Romanians and so forth, but it's mostly just Americans. We're still one Church at this point. We like to say the devil can never subvert our Church because he can't figure out the organization chart. We have this feud going on between Constantinople and Moscow over Ukraine and what really was the status of Ukraine in the 17th century and all this sort of thing. But I think we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, again, just as I was mentioning with regard to jihadist and neo-Nazi groups, for outside meddlers, religion is simply another lever that they can use to try to manipulate society and to try to even break down society. For example, we're talking about specifically the Orthodox Church: back in 1948, there was essentially a coup in Constantinople (Istanbul) that removed the patriarch then, Maximos, who was considered to be too friendly toward the Russian Church -- which, let's be honest, at the time was under the control of the Soviet authorities -- and replace him with the archbishop here in America Athenagoras, who was actually flown over there on Truman's plane and installed by the U.S. government, the Greek government and the Turkish government acting in concert and has been an asset of the United States, the State Department and the CIA, ever since 1948. Of course, this is also consistent with Constantinople's kind of "neo-papal" aspirations within the Orthodox Church, which is itself a-historical. At the same time, you've got Russia, which -- again in a very peculiar structure among the local Orthodox churches -- is itself a majority of the entire Orthodox Church, a good chunk of that being in Ukraine. Now in Ukraine, the Orthodox Church is called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It is an autonomous part of the Russian Orthodox Church, it is self ruling in virtually all aspects. That church is the canonical Church in Ukraine. Its status has not changed. What has happened is, with U.S. support, Constantinople has tried to create a rival Orthodox church in Ukraine from a group of, actually several groups of, schismatics that they tried to cobble together into a new church. That's where we stand right now. We have two competing Orthodox churches in Ukraine. The canonical one aligned with Moscow, which is very much the majority, and a much smaller one supported by the United States and Constantinople, which is not acceptable to most of the rest of the world, in Romania and Jerusalem and Serbia and Bulgaria and the other places of the Orthodox Church. Again, I know this is very complex inside baseball, but what it shows is frankly a degree of sophistication, and again, cynicism of the Western powers that they're willing to manipulate this in order to make some kind of a political game. Because I think the way they see it is, just as the Maidan in 2014 was a political coup to try to separate Russia from Ukraine, this is, if you will, a spiritual coup to try to accomplish the same thing, to take two very closely kindred people in language, culture and especially religion, and set them at odds against each other. It's not working, it's not successful, but it is creating a lot of discord, a lot of unhappiness and hurt, and even to some extent, violence. Mike Billington: Georgia is yet another country where the NED, Soros apparatus ran a color revolution in 2003, the so-called Rose Revolution, which saw the mobs connected to Mikhail Saakashvili, overthrow the government of Eduard Shevardnadze, who himself had been the Soviet Union's foreign minister before becoming president of Georgia, a position that he kept after the falling apart of the Soviet Union and Georgia became independent. Then in 2019, you've pointed out that there was a second color revolution -- you could call it a "rainbow revolution" -- which was unleashed by the Soros organization, and some people in the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi, demanding support for an LGBTQ parade, a Pride parade, against the strong opposition of the 80% of Georgia's population who are Orthodox Christians. Where did this lead and what is the status of that at this point? Jim Jatras: I think to a large part is simply the application on the local level of what is a huge, huge part of Western policy, which is the promoting of -- I'm trying to think of a … -- socially and morally destructive forces the equal of LGBT. As I like to say, there's no trans-Atlanticism without transgenderism. This is a huge part of American and Western democracy promotion and human rights promotion. There's a great meme out there of an American soldier with an automatic weapon and a flag and a skull mask saying, "Until I'm out of ammo or out of blood, I will fight for homosexuality in Botswana." This is one of the great causes for which Americans are willing to shed blood and treasure? Evidently so. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that if you look at maps of social attitudes like, for example, towards same sex marriage or toward the role of religion and public life and things like that, you will notice a rather odd thing -- that is, that Eastern Europe, the areas that were under communism, are much more conservative than the countries of Western Europe. Maybe it was because as a progressive Promethean force, communism was such a failure that the underlying social attitudes are actually much more pre-modern conservative when it comes to social and family values and religious values than Western Europe, and presumably the United States, that have been corrupted by decades of consumerism and all these other materialist forces. Jim Jatras: So I think that the Western policymakers instinctively understand that if we want to conquer these societies, we need to break down their social attitudes. And one way to do that is to tell them, "Hey, if you want to be part of the West, you want to be part of the EU and NATO, you want to be part of the democratic club? It's a full package. You have to take this as well.” I think that's what they were doing there in Georgia, but they also do that in Ukraine. I even remember there was one of the priests from the church in Odessa, after they had a big Pride parade there, he went out afterwards with holy water to re-sanctify the streets after the parade had passed through. People there don't like this sort of thing, but nonetheless, the Americans and the U.S. embassies with their rainbow flags and all that, they're all over it. They're being forced to do this because, well, "this is democracy. This is the West. You have to get used to it." Mike Billington: I'm reminded that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov once said regarding the so-called "Western values" that you hear spoken of so often, that the West insists on defending, are not the values of their grandfathers. Jim Jatras: No, they're not. And by the way, I can remember back in the 1990s, when I was at the Senate, there was a big issue about giving observer status to some big coalition of LGBT organizations, which included groups like NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, which is a pro pedophile group. This was a very controversial thing at the U.N. This was under the Clinton administration. North America, the U.S., Canada and all of Western Europe were really promoting this, and the countries in Eastern Europe -- this was the 1990s -- newly liberated from communism were saying, "What is going on here? We have to accept {this?}." I mean, the communists there, they never would have accepted anything like that. So you really had this kind of weird thing, where these Western countries, the paragons of democracy, are promoting this kind of depravity. Latin America was opposed to it. The Islamic world was opposed to it. The Far East, I think, was mostly puzzled by it, by "what kind of people are these?" And then you had Eastern Europe who was sort of on the fence, because they knew they should be integrating in with the democratic West, but at the same time they couldn't figure out why in the world we would be pushing something like this. Mike Billington: You've noted often that the leaders in both parties -- you've named in particular, John McCain, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton -- have never seen a war they didn't like. Biden's push for the war started by George W. Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq, is well known, that he promoted that strongly. But less well known is that Biden led the effort to launch a war on Serbia in 1999, which led to 78 days of bombing without U.N. authorization, laying waste to much of that country. Biden also backed the al-Qaida-linked Kosovo Liberation Army in that conflict and the independence of Kosovo. So you were involved in some of this, if you could explain that? Jim Jatras: At the time I was the analyst at the Republican Policy Committee in the Senate, and the Clinton administration had decided on -- "intervention" is a nice word -- I would say in "aggression" in the Balkans, not only in Bosnia, but also in Kosovo. I tried, to whatever extent I could, to inform Republican Senators and their staff, which it was my job to do, as to what was the reality behind some of the claims of the Clinton administration, That was a little difficult to do when the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate at that time was Bob Dole, who was on the same program as Biden and the Clinton administration were. But I did my best to try to say, "Look, here are the open sources. Here's what they're saying. Here's the various Al Qaida and other groups that are involved here in terms of the human rights and other claims. Here's what's really going on. Yeah, we've unleashed a brutal inter-communal war between Serbs and Muslims and Croats and Albanians. Rather than trying to find some way for a peaceful resolution, we're trying to aggravate it, in a conflict that was kind of a rock-paper-scissors thing. Well, "the Serbs are always the bad guys. Let's just start with that and work from there." And by the way, some of this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, as I mentioned, the World War Two Losers Association. If you look at a map of occupied Europe in the Balkans in 1943, and compare it to the way we carved up Yugoslavia, the two maps look awfully similar. We essentially adopted all of the Axis clients from during the war and said, "Oh, these are now democratic NATO clients." So, you know, again, the roots of these things tend to go back a long way. In any case, obviously I was unsuccessful in trying to enlighten people about what was going on, although I will say that when the vote on the Kosovo war occurred in Congress, the Republicans voted primarily against it. Maybe a lot of it was just partisan because it was the Clinton administration, a Democratic administration. But even with Bob Dole in the Senate and Henry Hyde, at the time the Republican leader in the House, whipping votes in favor of the war, the Republicans in the Senate voted, I think very heavily in the majority against the war, and in the House, not only a very heavy majority of Republicans vote no, they even voted down the war resolution. It failed on a tie vote in the House of Representatives. Jim Jatras: Nonetheless, Clinton proceeded with the war, which tells you something about the integrity of our constitutional process, when a war can take place not only against international law, in violation of the U.N. Charter, aggression against another country, but even against American domestic law. When the Congress says "no, you do not have the authority to go to war," and they said, "Yeah, well, I'm going to do it anyway." And so there are many things that are all wrapped up in these things. The long and the short of it is that it is amazing to me how many people, even who are essentially anti-war and against these wars -- You remember there was a great series by Oliver Stone about the history of American wars and aggression around the world. I notice he skipped over the Balkans. He sort of forgot that war. These are the wars everybody wants to not really pay attention to because they sort of went down in the history as the place where NATO, the West, you know, came as the cavalry with the rescue. We were there for mom and apple pie and human rights and democracy. Well, it really wasn't that way. But nonetheless, that then set the stage and the precedent for places like Iraq and Libya. Mike Billington: On Kosovo. Secretary Tony Blinken and other U.S. officials have insisted that under the so-called rule of law -- which means their own made up rules, nations cannot change the borders of other nations by force. Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, responded to that statement by saying, "Do we get it right? That Washington no longer supports Kosovo's sovereignty?" You were directly involved in much of this. What is Zakharova referring to? Jim Jatras: Let's remember, under U.N. resolution 1244, which ended the war in Kosovo, Kosovo was supposed to remain part of Serbia, and there were supposed to be negotiations about its status with the fullest possible autonomy, which is what Belgrade was offering. They were willing to jump through any hoop requested of them in terms of whatever autonomy could ever exist anywhere on Earth, for any part of any country, they were willing to offer that to Kosovo. But the Western powers, especially Washington, had decided {ab initio}: "No, no. The only possible solution is independence." Well, the U.N. resolution doesn't say that. At that time -- I was in the private sector -- I was involved in lobbying on behalf of the Bishop of Kosovo, Bishop Artemije, against the American policy of pushing for independence for Kosovo. I would say we met with some success. That was supposed to be resolved by the end of 2006. It wasn't. It was dragged out until the beginning of 2008, when I think the Western powers thought they were losing support, so they needed to push the button they needed to move quickly on unilaterally recognizing Kosovo as an independent state, even though there was no legal mandate for that at all. And certainly there was no negotiated solution to that effect. I think that's one reason why we have a stalemate now where you have about one hundred and ten countries at last count that recognized Kosovo, but a lot of those are micro states, that if you look at the vast majority of the world's population, India, China and so forth, not to mention Russia, even still today, five members of the European Union -- Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Spain and Slovakia -- have not recognized Kosovo's independence. So it's not an acceptable solution for anybody, but that's where we are right now. Jim Jatras: I think the point that Zakharova is referring to is, you say you can't change borders by force. Well, what do you think the West did in 1999 in the war and then 2008 in recognizing Kosovo's independence? We did precisely that without any legal authority at all. We detached part of a state, or at least claimed to, and say this is now a new country. Well, OK, you know, some things, once you break them, stay broken. Once you have a principle like the inviolability of borders, and say, "Oh, well, we can break them when we want, but you can't." Well, the other side says, "Oh no? Watch." And then, if you want, might makes right. If you want the law of the jungle, if you want to say that the U.N. guarantees of the inviolability of borders and state sovereignty no longer matter, OK, they don't matter anymore, I guess. Well, who asked for that? Mike Billington: On China's role in all of this, the Belt and Road Initiative, which is taking the the economic miracle within China over these past decades through massive infrastructure, lifting the productive platform of the nation as a whole, they are taking that to the rest of the world. they are also very active in Eastern Europe in huge amounts of trade through the thousands of trains that now traverse the new Silk Road routes from China to Europe, and also through investments in infrastructure across the region, especially in Eastern Europe. How do you see the difference between China's approach to international relations to that of the United States? Jim Jatras: This is something we've discussed before, especially with regard to some of the ideas that Mr. LaRouche was championing for many decades. It really comes down to construction versus destruction. Are you going to build? Are you're going to integrate -- a rising tide raises all boats? Or are you going to try to look at the other people trying to do that and say, "Let's beggar thy neighbor, let's try to throw roadblocks into that. Let's try to break it down." We've talked about in the past. For example, why don't we have a land bridge across the Bering Strait, with trade between Eurasia and North America? Why are we not building our own Belt and Road Initiative here in the Western Hemisphere? Why are we not trying to come up with a way that countries can act in a cooperative way to build up their economies and to maximize their mutual advantages in the way that I think the Chinese and the Russians and the other countries behind Eurasian integration are doing that. Our response is what? To try to give the Chinese the hotfoot in Xinjiang, to try to give the Russians a hot foot in Kazakhstan with a coup there, rather than trying to find a way to build up the world economy, build up standards of living. We're trying to find a way to play "dog in the manger" by trying to retard those efforts if it's being done by somebody else, while we neglect to do it ourselves. We're not doing any of these things. I think we have -- unfortunately, put it in a nutshell -- that is the distinction between construction and destruction, and it's a really sad thing. But that gets back to what we're saying about the nature of our ruling class and the duopoly in this country. They seem to see eye to eye on these things, about preserving American hegemony, primarily based on military power {ad infinitum} and using whatever dirty tricks in the book they can, to try to preserve that and to keep the other guys down. Mike Billington: President Trump insisted -- one of the reasons he got elected -- that he was going to rebuild the American industrial economy, and Wall Street basically said, "Forget it. We have to bail out the bankrupt financial institutions," and as a result, really nothing, nothing has changed. We continue to see no infrastructure and no development within the U.S. Do you have thoughts on that whole financial situation? Jim Jatras: I'm not an economist. I'm not an expert on financial matters. As I say, I do understand the difference between construction and destruction. I think Trump did want to do that. I think he did have a concept of a national economy. When it comes to China, yeah, I do think our China trade relationship with China is terribly lopsided. It seems to me that is because, frankly, it's beneficial to a lot of corporate America to hollow out our industries, our production, and ship those operations to foreign countries. China, certainly, but many other countries as well. And then, of course, bring their goods back in the United States, duty free, basically undermining our national economy. At the same time --I was saying this back at the time of the Trump administration --there's a natural deal here between the United States and China, to where we rebalance our trade relationship to favor American production and the American industrial base, but at the same time, we get out of China's face in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and so forth, the same way that we should be getting out of Russia's place in Eastern Europe, that it seems to me there's the making of a deal there. I don't know that Trump really saw that. It seemed to me a lot of people in his administration had a strong animus against China across the board, that not only did they want to address the trade issues, which I think is legitimate, but also wanted to threaten them on some of the security issues, which I thought made no sense whatsoever. Jim Jatras: But that's where we are. But I do think Trump, on some level, at least in his gut, had a sense that we need to build up our own national economy, get control of our borders, get control of our trade. Unfortunately, like many other things, I don't think he really had any idea how to do that. He certainly populated his administration with all the wrong people when it came to getting any of his agenda from 2016 done. When you turn to the Heritage Foundation and the Republican National Committee to hire a bunch of Bush retreads for your administration, hey, you're going to get your tax cut, which any Republican president would want to push through the Congress, but you're not going to get an infrastructure bill, you're not going to get any of the other things you want. I think looking back on it, Trump was a great missed opportunity and perhaps in some sense, the last missed opportunity for an America that, maybe, could have been revived. Mike Billington: As to the two party system, you were an adviser to the Republican Party in the Senate, as you mentioned, for many years. You have insight into the two party system that we have today -- what Lyndon LaRouche referred to as the two potty system. What is your view on democracy in America today, which the war party claims to be defending in their wars around the world? Jim Jatras: To be precise, I was an adviser to the Senate Republican leadership, which is a Senate office, not a party office. The structure of the Senate, as in the House, is partisan, but it's the Senate, part of the U.S. government. It's not the Republican Party {per se.} I don't know, Mike, we might not be fully in agreement on these things. I'm a pretty retrograde guy when it comes to political theory. I do notice that the founding fathers did not intend to create a democracy. They knew their history, they knew their Aristotle, they knew how democracies tend to end. For the first 80 or 90 years of our republic until the Civil War, we had a confederal republic. And then after the Civil War, until at least in the post-World War Two period, we had a federal democracy. But then increasingly in recent decades, we've had a consolidated administrative state, managerial state. I don't think you would even call it democracy anymore. This is the way democracies tend to end. Once you have, everybody has the vote, everybody can say, "Well, I want, I want, I want." You tend to vote yourself benefits out of the other guy's pocket. And that goes for the plutocracy, too. They say, "Well, we can manipulate the levers of this thing too, and we have our propaganda machine in the media" and so forth. So none of this should be particularly surprising where you get to a moribund state where a constitution on paper is simply honored in the breach. Jim Jatras: It's honored with fingers crossed behind your back, and it really doesn't exist anymore. The fact that we have this entrenched duopoly, which is as entrenched in America today as the CPSU was entrenched as a one party system in the Soviet Union, is something that is -- I don't know that there's any coming back from that, except in the same sense that, well, when the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and something new arose from the ashes. Unfortunately I think that's sort of where we are now in America today, what that looks like, how bad it's going to be, with things like supply chain breakdown, collapse of the dollar. Who knows what else is going to come, whether it results in the breakup of the country or what level of violence. I don't think we really know. I explored some of this in the piece you mentioned earlier, the "It's Later Than You Think." I think unfortunately -- and again, we might disagree on this, Mike -- a lot of this is baked into the cake. I don't know that there's much any of us can do by shouting from the rooftops that "bad things is a'comin." The bad things will come, and then we'll see how we get through it, who survives, who doesn't, and what comes from the ashes. Mike Billington: At the end of of that talk you gave to the students at the Ron Paul Institute, you said that, I have a quote: "I think your ability to impact the big picture regarding any of this is slim to none." That's somewhat like you are saying right now. That's clearly rather pessimistic. As you know, LaRouche always told the youth, and others, that in a systemic crisis like we're in today -- and you acknowledge it's a systemic crisis -- the ability to make big changes is even greater than normal, rather than less, precisely because the old system is falling apart and people are forced to give up their delusions and look for new solutions, including outside of the United States, internationally. So how do you respond to that? Jim Jatras: Well, I would say that it largely depends on the human factor and the mechanisms. I remember during the 2020 election, so many people were saying, people who believe that the vote was stolen -- and I'm I'm one of those people -- "Well look, the Supreme Court's going to do this, or the state legislators are going to do that, or Congress is going to do this." And I kept saying, "No, no, no. None of those things are going to happen, because those people who are in charge of the system, in charge of being the guardians of the system, will not do their duty even when the facts are plain." I think a lot of us have a kind of a naive -- and I'm not calling Mr. LaRouche naive -- but a lot of us have a naive faith, in facts. If you throw the facts on the table -- whether it's about COVID or whether it's about CRT and Black Lives Matter and Antifa, or whether it's about foreign policy -- that people will wake up and say, "Oh my God, you're right, let's do the right thing." The trouble is, you have people holding all the levers of power who will not do the right thing. That means what you have is stasis. You have stasis until the collapse comes. Now what that happens after that? Jim Jatras: Yeah, I think there are things that people can do. I'm not advising complacency by any means. I just don't see the levers. I don't see the pathways to changing national policy even in the middle of a crisis until the collapse comes. That doesn't mean that the local, and to some extent at the state level, things can't be done like, you know, I live in a rural county in Virginia. We did pretty good in this last election here. We're very optimistic here at the county level, maybe even a little optimistic at the state level. That may be a little naive. But you look at states like Florida and Texas to some extent, maybe we have a kind of a soft secession going on in some of the states and localities in America where, yeah, a healthy America could still be sustained and provide the groundwork for a kind of a revival of the American spirit and something like an American republic in the future. But I think those pathways are not yet clear to us. I think being active at the local level, being active with your community, acting with likeminded people and why conversations like this, I think are valuable, are something we should focus on. But not to expect that, "oh great. The Republicans are going to take the House this year," and that goodness and niceness will break out, because it won't. Mike Billington: Lyndon LaRouche always, always represented himself as an American, supporting the American system of Hamilton and Lincoln and Roosevelt, but he always insisted he represented the human race as a whole, and fought for the human race as a whole, rather than for one nation. You have followed LaRouche for many, many years, and you've been involved in many of our discussions and forums and conferences. How do you see LaRouche, his role in history and his impact on the international situation today? Jim Jatras: I think he will be remembered as a visionary and maybe a reminder of what could have been, that if there had been people who are willing to listen to common sense at the right time, when opportunities had not been frittered away one after another, the outcome could have been different, that we would not have to go through this crisis or crunch or whatever you want to call it, which I think we will have to go through now. I think one of the things that occurred to me, looking back on my comments at the time when we were asking about his exoneration to try to get a pardon and a exoneration for him from the unjust prosecution -- persecution that he suffered, and that you and many others suffered, by the way, at the hands of Robert Mueller and the establishment. You think about that. What if, if those policies had been heeded at the time when they could have made a big difference, rather than saying, "let's squash this guy," which was what the response of the power was at the time. I think it could have made a big difference in the life of this country, but unfortunately that didn't happen. Remember, he was out talking about these things, how many decades ago? There were how many missed opportunities through all of those decades? And now here we are. So I'm not saying those ideas are not applicable now. As you point out, we do have to look at the rest of the world, that to a great extent some of the things he proposed about a new Silk Road and so forth are being followed by the Eurasian powers. I don't want to sound naive in that regard. I'm sure the Chinese and the Russians and other countries are looking out for number one, the way, frankly, a national government should do. I think we discussed a little earlier, we have so many people on the Right in this country today who are calling for the "China, China, China" alarm, the same way the Left fell for "Russia, Russia, Russia" during the Trump years. "Oh, the Chinese Communists, you know, they're behind everything.' Well, first off, despite the formality of the CCP being the ruling party in China, I think it's pretty clear that it's not -- I like to call it Han National Bolshevism. The bottle may be red and has a picture of Mao on it, but the wine inside the bottle is Han Nationalist and Confucian, and there's simply nothing really communist about it other than the name of the party. Now, it's authoritarian. In some ways, it behaves in ways that we would consider quite inhumane. But I think it reflects the long history of China as a civilization, and it is focused on China's national interest, but not in a kind of a "let's destroy everybody else" kind of mentality, but rather that China will have its greatest flowering and opportunity when other people do as well. Why can we not see that in our leadership? I think it gets back to the level of corruption that has become almost ubiquitous at the upper ends of our system, or as, hopefully, at the lower end, the local level, maybe to a lesser extent on the state level, they're still healthy things there that can be preserved. Mike Billington: Thank you. Any further thoughts or last words for our readers and supporters? Jim Jatras: No, not really, I would just ask people if they want to see what I have written --I have lost my muse for writing, I do try to do interviews from time to time. But I am an incessant tweeter, until they kick me off. So go to @JimJatras if you want to see what my latest thoughts or dumb ideas I have. And I do want to say that, black pilled as I do tend to sound -- I am a Boomer after all -- I am fundamentally an optimist in many respects. As I pointed out with respect to France, the fact that one republic is ending doesn't mean the nation goes away. And I do believe there is an American nation. I realize that concept is not well understood or accepted in America today because we tend to think in "civic terms" rather than national terms. But I do think that there is a future for the American people as we come through this crisis, which still, I think has another five to seven years to go. And we'll see how bad it gets. But something, some phoenix, will arise from the ashes. At the same time, even in a greater sense, on a moral, spiritual level, the hairs on our head are all numbered. God is in His heaven. Nothing happens without His allowance or his will. If we pray without ceasing and have confidence in the final triumph of good, it will sustain us through even very difficult times. Mike Billington: Ok, thank you very much, Jim. I think this will have a very good and long term impact on those who have a chance to watch or listen or read this. Thank you. Thank you, Mike, for the opportunity.
David T. Pyne published an article in the Jan. 17 issue of the conservative National Interest under the headline “Biden’s Opportunity for Peace in Eurasia.” In it, Pyne warns that “bilateral U.S.-Russia negotiations broke down this week after the U.S. delegation reportedly refused to offer Russia any concessions or recognize any of its legitimate security concerns, most importantly in Ukraine,” and that as a result, the crisis between the two countries is in danger of spiraling out of control, towards a thermonuclear war. (On Jan. 18, U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke by phone, and agreed to a hastily-arranged meeting between them in Geneva on Jan. 21.)Pyne is a former U.S. Army combat arms and HQ staff officer with an MA in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, whose website describes Pyne as “an authority with regards to the U.S., Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals, U.S. and Russian missile defense systems and the increasing threat posed by Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons.” We quote the opening section of Pyne’s article, which speaks for itself: “In late December 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin threatened that the rejection of Russia’s proposed security agreements with the West would be met with ‘appropriate retaliatory military-technical measures.’ Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based political analyst, has translated this to mean the deployment of additional Russian military equipment including nuclear-armed SS-26 Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles to Belarus and Kaliningrad to threaten NATO’s frontline states and eastern Germany. He also speculated that it might refer to a possible deployment of nuclear-armed Zircon sea-launched hypersonic cruise missiles off the coast of Washington, DC, which Russia has previously stated could be utilized to destroy the U.S. capital before the president could escape on Air Force One. “When Russia’s other weapons of mass destruction are added to the mix, the stakes for bilateral negotiations between the United States and Russia could hardly be any higher. Russia has also threatened these retaliatory military-technical measures in response to the United States enacting much stricter economic sanctions against it. Of course, if the United States and NATO were to move their troops to the Ukrainian border in response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, it would almost certainly provoke a Russian attack upon NATO’s frontline member states where these troops are stationed, potentially starting a third world war. Thus, that is one Russian “redline” that must not be crossed. Furthermore, any Russian invasion of Ukraine and/or outbreak of war between the United States and Russia in Europe could be shortly followed by a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and a North Korean invasion of South Korea—all but ensuring that the United States would be unable to effectively counter any of these aggressions. “Unfortunately, bilateral U.S.-Russia negotiations broke down this week after the U.S. delegation reportedly refused to offer Russia any concessions or recognize any of its legitimate security concerns, most importantly in Ukraine. In response, Russia has stated it has no plans to resume bilateral discussions with the United States to end the crisis and is continuing to escalate its preparations for war. At this point, the only way to give Russia a face-saving solution to the Ukraine crisis would be for the Biden administration to offer a significant concession such as the suspension of U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.” Pyne ends his article by calling for the U.S. to change policy and instead forge “comprehensive peace agreements with Russia and China,” adding that they “would not be without challenges.” They would however, Pyne states, “provide an unprecedented opportunity for Biden to secure his presidential legacy as a transformational peace president while also serving to safeguard vital U.S. national security interests.”
The systemic collapse of the world financial system, driven by speculative gambling by City of London/Wall Street banks and financial institutions, and underwritten by the world's private central banks, is why the U.S./NATO powers are risking a war with Russia over Ukraine. In the 4th Quarter of 2019 alone nearly $20 trillion were required to roll-over short-term loans, to prevent a wave of defaults. That's what triggered the present inflation, and is the impetus for the war drive against Russia and China, both of which refuse to surrender their sovereignty to allow for the bailout of speculative swindlers.
The Jan. 17 Schiller Institute international seminar, “Injustice Anywhere Is A Threat To Justice Everywhere: Stop The Murder of Afghanistan,” advanced Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Operation Ibn Sina” beyond its initially targeted and already-partly-successful role in “pricking the conscience” of the trans-Atlantic world. In that world of “narratives” and “spin,” governments are presently willfully engaged in the potential “revenge starvation” of millions. But now, with the attempt by that “Adolph Eichmann of medicine,” Ezekiel Emmanuel, to decree that mass death by Covid infection, including through variants yet to be detected, is already “endemic” to the United States, there is already outraged reaction from medical personnel and their unions.“Operation Ibn Sina” is not, and never was only applicable to Afghanistan. It is itself a form of medicine, intended to cure the epidemic of trans-Atlantic “depraved indifference” that, fortunately, has not yet spread to the whole world. “Operation Ibn Sina,” however, may be the only efficient way to prevent mass death from being prescribed for America’s and Europe’s poor, elderly, and immunocompromised, as a “regrettably necessary cost-cutting measure.” If we don’t move to save Afghanistan, and don’t join forces with Russia, China, India, and other nations to establish a World Health Platform over the course of this year, set up any accountant’s lie you like, but “send not to know for whom the bell tolls—it tolls for Thee.” The same day as the Schiller Institute seminar, President Xi Jinping of China addressed the Davos World Economic Forum on the topic, “Forge Ahead with Confidence and Fortitude to Jointly Create a Better Post-COVID World.” Here is an excerpt from his remarks: “We must do everything necessary to clear the shadow of the pandemic and boost economic and social recovery and development, so that the sunshine of hope may light up the future of humanity. “The world today is undergoing major changes unseen in a century. These changes, not limited to a particular moment, event, country or region, represent the profound and sweeping changes of our times. As changes of the times combine with the once-in-a-century pandemic, the world finds itself in a new period of turbulence and transformation. How to beat the pandemic and how to build the post-COVID world? These are major issues of common concern to people around the world. They are also major, urgent questions we must give answers to. As a Chinese saying goes, ‘The momentum of the world either flourishes or declines; the state of the world either progresses or regresses.’ The world is always developing through the movement of contradictions; without contradiction, nothing would exist. The history of humanity is a history of achieving growth by meeting various tests and of developing by overcoming various crises…. …Strong confidence and cooperation represent the only right way to defeat the pandemic. Holding each other back or shifting blame would only cause needless delay in response and distract us from the overall objective. Countries need to strengthen international cooperation against COVID-19, carry out active cooperation on research and development of medicines, jointly build multiple lines of defense against the coronavirus, and speed up efforts to build a global community of health for all. Of particular importance is to fully leverage vaccines as a powerful weapon, ensure their equitable distribution, quicken vaccination and close the global immunization gap, so as to truly safeguard people’s lives, health and livelihoods…." Recall, also, the remarks of Anna Popova, Russian head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare—effectively Russia’s equivalent to the U.S. Surgeon General—to the December Conference of the nine Commonwealth of Independent States nations, regarding the war against the pandemic. “Considering the proximity of our states, the commonality of epidemic threats and the level of integration, one of our key tasks is to build a unified system for epidemic response and relief,” she said. At that same conference, President Vladimir Putin himself spoke about “joint scientific activities, the development of medications and preventive drugs, as well as exchanges of test kits and means of overcoming this disease.” Dr. Joycelyn Elders proposed the issuance of a “Medical Manifesto” by the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites at the conclusion of the Martin Luther King Day seminar, to which Helga enthusiastically agreed. The door is now open to the United States population to reclaim the General Welfare clause of the Constitution’s Preamble, and join with other nations to reverse the injustice now unfolding in Afghanistan. Lyndon LaRouche’s 2004 Martin Luther King Day remarks should be read by some, reviewed by others, and heeded by all, to discover the “open secret” as to how our lawful present descent into Hell can be reversed by a lawful re-commitment to the future of humanity, and its prosperity.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken began three days of critical meetings in Europe on Wednesday, Jan. 19 to discuss the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s adamant insistence that, if security talks with the U.S. are to continue, Russia must receive written responses to each of the points raised in the two draft treaty proposals they presented to the world on Dec. 17. Those proposed treaties, one with the United States and the other with NATO, state that Russia’s national security is gravely endangered by the threatened deployment of NATO advanced weapon systems on their very border, and by the proposed admission of Ukraine to the NATO alliance; and that therefore Russia must be given written guarantees that neither will occur—or else they will have to take “retaliatory military-technical measures” of their own.On Wednesday, Blinken travelled to Kiev, Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. On Thursday, Jan. 20, he will go to Berlin to caucus with the foreign ministers of Germany, France and war-drive ring-leader United Kingdom. And on Friday, Jan. 21 he will go to Geneva to sit down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Blinken’s trip is not just another round of diplomacy: war or peace between the U.S. and Russia hangs in the balance. Putin has warned repeatedly that Russia is being driven to adopt “appropriate retaliatory military-technical measures” of its own, which Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based political analyst, believes would include deploying nuclear-armed SS-26 Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles to Belarus and Kaliningrad to threaten NATO’s frontline states and eastern Germany, as well as possibly placing nuclear-armed Zircon sea-launched hypersonic cruise missiles off the coast of Washington, D.C., which, Doctorow further points out, “Russia has previously stated could be utilized to destroy the U.S. capital before the President could escape on Air Force One.” In his talks with Zelenskyy, Blinken set the tone for his Jan. 21 talk with Lavrov by yet again aggressively blaming Russia alone for the crisis, and demanding that they “de-escalate” by stopping the deployment of troops on their own territory, near the Ukraine border, or be prepared to be hit with scorched-earth economic warfare by the West. Lavrov, for his part, restated the Russian position after talks on Jan. 18 with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock: “We are now awaiting answers to these proposals (the two draft treaties), as promised, in order to continue the talks.” “The war danger is greater than ever, and we are on the verge of World War III,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned today. “We are now down to the wire and things will have to break one way or the other in the days ahead.” Although there is a growing chorus of voices calling for sanity in the U.S. and Europe, the control of U.S. policy by the British and their American war party confederates has not been broken. Furthermore, Zepp-LaRouche stated, the descent into war is being driven by the systemic breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, which is now going out of control, as Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained. But there is a second dynamic underway in the world, which is the emerging realignment of nations of all continents around China and Russia, and the Belt and Road Initiative as an alternative to the policy of Malthusian depopulation being promoted by the dying trans-Atlantic system. One indication of this is the visit of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi to Moscow, where a 20-year package of development deals is under discussion. Another is the upcoming visit to Moscow and then Beijing by Argentine President Alberto Fernàndez, where he plans to sign a memorandum of understanding on the Belt and Road Initiative. If the United States remains hostile to this policy alternative, and continues to defend the City of London and Wall Street’s bankrupt system, then the world will in all likelihood careen toward thermonuclear war. If the U.S. joins with the Belt and Road, as Lyndon LaRouche advocated from the outset, then the prospects for peace and development are excellent. We join with Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s call to make 2022 the Year of Lyndon LaRouche, and of the adoption of his policies.
On Tuesday, Fox personality Tucker Carlson hosted Clint Ehrlich to denounce the media-backed drive for war with Russia. After explaining that the U.S. has nothing to gain in backing Ukraine's accession to NATO, Carlson introduced Russia scholar Ehrlich, who said that even if Russia doesn't invade Ukraine, there are many in the U.S. saying that the U.S. should effectively invade, by sending in troops for conflict with Russia. "It's not just nuts, it's dangerous. We're sleepwalking towards conflict with a country that has 4,000 nuclear weapons. The Russians are talking about potentially deploying strategic forces to Cuba and Venezuela in a repeat of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's just shocking that people are not more upset about this, because the lives of Americans are being threatened over a situation where we have no vital strategic interest." America is moving towards war with Russia, and the media is encouraging it. pic.twitter.com/hE9Hv8Xu63— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 19, 2022 In a tweet thread, Ehrlich listed insane responses to his appearances: "Tucker all-in for Putin" pronounced neocon lunatic Bill Kristol. "Your nightly reminder that @TuckerCarlson and @FoxNews are not loyal to the United States of America" said the totally sane Keith Olbermann. "We are potentially on the verge of a land war in Europe aimed at extinguishing democracy and sovereignty and the American right wing is on the side of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism. That's where we're at," wrote Ben Rhodes, Obama's favorite speech writer. Exceedingly deep thinker and CNN chief White House correspondent John Harwood weighed in: "that the leading Fox host unabashedly makes Putin's case shows how the disinformation successes of Russian intelligence extend way beyond Trump." "This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States," demanded DNC operative Alexandra Chalupa of Russiagate fame. My segment last night on @TuckerCarlson is having a bigger impact than I ever imagined. It's causing pro-war pundits and politicians to lose their minds!Let's catalog their meltdowns. A thread... 🧵— Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) January 19, 2022 This followed Tulsi Gabbard's appearance with Steve Hilton on Fox. Gabbard denounced the White House, particularly Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, for being architect of regime change policies in the past and making policy at present. "They are stoking tensions. They are escalating the situation that can only lead us down a more dangerous path that directly undermines the interests of the American people and our country. Let's be real about what we're dealing with here, Steve. We're talking about the United States and Russia, two great nuclear-armed powers in the world. There is only one place that that conflict ends. That ends in destruction of this world and life as we know it. Don't be naive, don't be shy about pointing out exactly what is at state. That is what the American people need to know, and that is what people in the White House and leaders in Congress on both sides of the aisle refuse to tell them the truth about."
In response to the devastating situation in Afghanistan and the clear focus the LaRouche movement has placed on turning Afghanistan into a crossroads of development, Bernie Sanders — who plays the role of a principled fighter for justice on TV — has been forced to take a stand.One day after the Schiller Institute's Jan 17 conference "Stop the Murder of Afghanistan," the Vermont senator tweeted: "Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian catastrophe. I urge the Biden administration to immediately release billions in frozen Afghan government funds to help avert this crisis, and prevent the death of millions of people." Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian catastrophe. I urge the Biden administration to immediately release billions in frozen Afghan government funds to help avert this crisis, and prevent the death of millions of people.— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 18, 2022 Afghanistan's central bank funds — which belong to the people of that nation — be released immediately. The leading powers of the world — particularly those NATO nations that helped to create its present disastrous state — must join forces to support Afghanistan in building a proud future. Learn more in Helga Zepp-LaRouche's recent presentation on Operation Ibn Sina and its namesake.
Dennis Speed and Mike Billington (Executive Intelligence Review) in dialogue with Ray McGovern (Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA-ret.), Co-Founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity). The full transcript is available below. SPEED: Now, what we’re going to do is hear from a couple of people who are going to discuss this. That’s Ray McGovern and also Mike Billington. I just want to say about Ray, I wrote about you about 11 days ago at the top of something I was writing. “Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has insisted that only a metanoia, a 180-degree spiritual bootlegger’s turn away from a self-defeating, self-destructive indifference to promoting the General Welfare of people all over the world can preserve any nation, including a declining United States.” Now, I’m not asking you to take responsibility for my remarks, but I would like to point out that our art of analysis, of actual strategic evaluation seems to be severely endangered right now, particularly in the United States. You’re one of the few people who is still practicing it. So, I’d like you to start us off, both in terms of responding to what Helga said, but you’ve been looking at what’s been said over the last week, week and a half, and Mike’s going to have plenty to say, because he’s been speaking to a few interesting people on his own about these matters. So, make it a little informal, you go ahead and tell us what your own thinking is about these matters, and then we’ll hear from Mike, and then continue to discussion. RAY MCGOVERN: Well, Dennis, thank you for the introduction. I hope you didn’t get too many bricks thrown at you from describing me that way. I wish I could tell you that we were further toward metanoia at present than we were back when I used that term. We are inches further, or inches more toward metanoia now. Let me tell you what I think, and why I think it. I should sort of as a clearness or honesty in advertising, say that I’m an outlier on this, just as I was an outlier for four years on Russiagate and so forth. But I’m used to that, just so you know what you’re getting. Watching the pronouncements by official Kremlin spokespeople and the play from these Biden-Putin conversations, and most important, what happened this last week starting on Monday in Geneva, persuades me that we’re on the road to a relaxation of tension. That Putin got a major concession from Mr. Biden, who very cleverly has told his people to play that down, and that talks will continue. I’ll say that again, the Russians didn’t stomp out of the talks, they didn’t invade Ukraine. They didn’t do anything other than to insist on their maximum position, and then sotto voce saying, well we got a big commitment here. We’re going to reinvent the intermediate forces treaty, the INF Treaty. Most Americans don’t understand this because it happened in 1987, but what was happening in those days was that the Russians had these intermediate and shorter-range ballistic missiles called SS-20s. We had Pershing 2s, the equivalent. This made the strategic situation incredibly tentative, because instead of 30-35 minutes warning from an ICBM shoot-out, you had maybe 14-15 minutes. These were bases in Europe, the European part of Russia, and Germany and elsewhere. Wise statesmen got together and said, this is crazy. We got to limit this. We don’t need this; we’ve already got a balance of strategic power here, thanks to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. So, we don’t need these things. Let’s get rid of them. People like me kind of said, “Right. We’re going to get rid of a whole class of very sophisticated ballistic missiles.” But, they did. One key element there was that it was verifiable. My friend Scott Ritter, for example, was one of hundreds of U.S. inspectors who were there when they blew up these sites in Russia. So, that’s possible, and what happened more recently is not only lamentable, but stupid and reversible. Now, be the first to know that U.S.-Russian talks are in the process of getting underway to reverse that, and to reinstate something like the INF Treaty. Will it be exact? No, it won’t, but it will place limits on offensive strike missiles in that part of Europe. How come you’re the first to know this? You’re the first to be crazy enough to listen to McGovern; that’s the first answer. But the second one is, McGovern has this arcane methodology, it’s called media analysis. I mean it’s sort of a sub-discipline of political analysis, I suppose. And what he does is, he reads stuff one day, and the next day he reads stuff, and then he figures out what’s different. When Vladimir Putin called Joe Biden and says, “Look, our negotiators are going to get together in just 12 days, but I need to talk to you now.” Biden said, “OK.” And they talked on the telephone on Dec. 30th this past year. How do we know what eventuated? Well, the Kremlin put out an immediate report, and they said—and I’ll quote it here, because I don’t want to misstate it. “Joseph Biden emphasized that Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in Ukraine.” I’ll say it again. Biden emphasized that the U.S. has no intention of deploying offensive strike missiles in Ukraine. What about the American side? Well, they didn’t really include that in their read-out. How about Jake Sullivan? I guess he was the senior administration official that briefed all those reporters on background. Well, he said, nothing much happened. One of the reporters said, “Was there anything at all that we could report?” And Sullivan says, “Nothing I can think of.” Well, that’s a bit disingenuous, but it’s also clever. Because he didn’t want to give these reporters, who have their own axes to grind, time to criticize what Biden had done. It’s a mixed blessing that Americans don’t know what Biden had done, but eventually the mainstream media is going to have to deal with it, because those negotiations are in train. We know from Wendy Sherman and Ryabkov that they said these arms control issues are going to be pursued now. And you know, you can’t conclude these talks in a week or a month; it’s going to take some time. Both sides agree that it’s going to take some time to do this. Another straw in the wind, but not really for somebody who follows the media closely. Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, who’s way out there as a hardliner, who says, “Our arms are ready for Russia.” What did he say? Again, you won’t see this reported, but here it is in TASS in English. Reporters can read this. He says, “‘Concrete possibilities for limits on the missiles Russia and NATO should be discussed, but not discussed publicly.’ He stressed that the Alliance was ready to discuss not only limitations, but a ban on intermediate-range missiles. ‘We have clearly expressed our willingness to sit down and discuss these kinds of limitations on different levels, banning all intermediate-range weapons which are a concern in Europe,’ the Secretary-General said.” That’s Stoltenberg! It was missed by the western press. What am I saying here? I’m saying that if you get through all the propaganda, all the stuff that’s sort of boiler-plate—“The Russians are demanding that Ukraine and Georgia will never become members of NATO.” Is that a realistic prospect? No. How long does it take a country like that to qualify for membership in NATO? Several years, maybe decades, maybe never. If you’re Vladimir Putin, what’s more important to you? To get NATO and the U.S. to sign onto an agreement that says we’ll never let Ukraine and Georgia into NATO? When, as Putin points out, Ukraine is already being populated by all kinds of arms emplacements. In other words, Putin said, membership in NATO for Ukraine may sort of be a distinction without a difference, because what they’re doing right now is moving all kinds of troops and offensive capabilities into Ukraine. What I’m saying here is this: You have to distinguish between the rhetoric, which is “No, no Ukraine, no Georgia in NATO.” And we, NATO, and Wendy Sherman, and Blinken and Nod and Sullivan, we all stood up to those Russians. We adamantly said, “Under no circumstances! Win!” Putin was hardly surprised by that. I think he was a little surprised—let’s be realistic—that he frightened Joe Biden with a deployment of—how many? 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. And persuaded him that, hey, you had a Cuban Missile Crisis which not only bears a resemblance to how we feel now, but is an exact replica. And guess what, Joe? We’re going to react the same way the U.S. when Khrushchev tried to put those medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. As an aside, and as an indication of how dangerous this really is, Khrushchev did put those medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. We found them finally. CIA U-2s found them. But guess what? We never thought they were armed with nuclear warheads. And guess what? They were. We found that out decades later. So, just think, if John Kennedy had been more susceptible to the blandishments of our military, they wanted to give Russia a bloody nose? Long story short, we might not be here; there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be here today to discuss these things. Another sort of aside on this, is simply that here’s Putin before all his generals and admirals above a certain grade, it’s the 21st of December. He’s giving them the word. He says, this time we’re going to have mutually agreed upon signed, legally binding documents to limit arms. And he looks out, and he sees—I’m guessing here, I wasn’t there, right? He sees a couple of generals say, “Yeah, right. That was really helpful on the ABM Treaty, wasn’t it? Or, the INF Treaty? We had mutually binding international agreements, and the Americans just walked out, without explanation, for God’s sake. Tell us more about those mutually binding agreements there, Vlad.” In the next paragraph, Putin says, “OK, the U.S. has not given much respect to mutually binding international agreements.” And he mentions the INF Treaty and the ABM Treaty. So, you know, it will be nice to get these kinds of agreements, but what Putin is most interested in is what happens on the ground. And they’re negotiating on that. If you don’t believe me, or you don’t believe Wendy Sherman, believe Jens Stoltenberg, who is on the far right of the hawks in NATO. The last thing I’ll say has to do with analysis of what the New York Times puts out. I’m just becoming aware how war-mongering the New York Times has always been. I go back a ways. More recently, I go back to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And of course, the New York Times was a main culprit in selling that story. Not only Judy Miller, who did finally get relieved of duty, but a fellow named David Sanger. He was equally responsible. I have the book on David Sanger, and I’ve written about him, but suffice it so say here that in July 2002, so 7-8 months before the war, before the U.S.-British attack on Iraq, Sanger had this article in the New York Times which said, no fewer than seven times, that there were, as flat fact, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Now, this was what he was instructed to say by his intelligence sources. It was a very interesting juncture, because that’s when W Bush and the administration were trying to sell the idea to Congress so that Congress would, in its own stupid way, authorize war. Today, we have a lead article, right on the front page above the fold, David Sanger. What’s he saying? He’s saying that my intelligence say that the Russians, those dastardly clever Russians, do you know what they’re planning now? They’re planning to infiltrate agents to shoot up other Russians so they can have a pretext, a casus belli, a reason to attack Ukraine. They are so lusting after some kind of justification to attack Ukraine, that they’ll kill their own Russians there. How about that? What’s his source? The same guys he talked to back in 2002; the WMD guys. How do I know that? They’re the same unknown sources who are reluctant to give their names because of the sensitivity of the subject. Just in contrast, the Russians have also warned about a false flag justification. And how did they do that? It was this fellow named Sergei Shoigu, who happens to be their Minister of Defense. At the same gathering at which Putin talked to all the top admirals and generals, what he said was that we know there are 150 or so Americans, contractors of course, who are preparing this kind of false flag attack in the area of Ukraine, and that they have sarin gas, which is one of their preferred methods of false-flag attacks. So, you have Shoigu identifying himself, he’s not an unnamed source in intelligence who’s reluctant to give his name because of the sensitivity of the subject. No, he’s gone right ahead of time. Is this significant? It is in a sort of intelligence playing around thing. I’m sure that both sides are equally prepared to do just this kind of thing. The operative bottom line for me is simply that Putin is much too clever, much too restrained, and much too much a statesman—and I’ll say that again, statesman—to get himself involved in attacking Ukraine, much less occupying this basket case. It used to be the bread basket of Europe; now, it’s a basket case, thanks to the coup that we, the United States and other Western intelligence services, arranged on the 22nd of February, 2014, aptly called the most blatant coup in history. Why? Because it was advertised; it was advertised on the 4th of February on YouTube. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland talking to U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in Kiev, saying, “We’ve got it all arranged now. Yats is the guy. Incoming Prime Minister. Tell these other guys to wait in the wings here. Did you talk to Jake Sullivan?” “Yeah.” “OK, what did he say? Oh, good. Biden is free to come in and solidify this thing, and we can glue it together.” Pyatt says, “What about the EU?” And Victoria Nuland says—and I don’t want to destroy the nice tone of this conversation, but she uses the F-word. She says, “F— the EU!” Was this a real conversation? Yeah! You had the voices. Did they know it was going to monitored? No. Did Nuland apologize? She apologized, but only for saying the F-word, not for arranging the coup. She said, I’m really sorry I said that; I didn’t really mean it. Of course, that’s exactly what she meant. And that’s what they’re doing even now. The question is, how long the EU will put up with this kind of thing. I could go on for a while, and I’ve probably outlasted my welcome, but perhaps more can be said in what ensues. The operative thing I’d like to leave you with is that right now, many of the leading newspapers—that is, the Wall Street Journal and so forth—are very reluctant to mention that discussions will now take place on intermediate-range ballistic missiles between the U.S. and Russia. Did you know? I ask you, did you know that Biden promised that we have no plans to deploy offensive strike missiles in Ukraine? Did you know that? No, you didn’t know that. OK. Did you know that the so-called anti-ballistic missile emplacements already completed in Romania and going into Poland now, have the same kind of holes that accommodate what Putin calls “Toe-ma-hawk”? Tomahawk missiles. Now, what’s the point there? Tomahawk missiles can easily strike the ICBM force of Russia and destroy the strategic balance. Is this a real concern of Putin? Of course it is! It’s been a primary concern for years, and he said so. Right now, he’s being heard, that’s different. Right now, he’s being heard, and there’s a concession on the table from Biden about not doing this in Ukraine. The discussions will go forward. I’ve been accused of being Pollyanna, and I don’t like that, but I don’t mind seeing some progress here. And of course, the main kibosh can be done by what I call the MICIMATT. There are very strong forces there in the military-industrial, Congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex. You notice there are parts of the government in there, right? Military, Congressional, intelligence? But in this case, oddly, it’s not the White House. So, the question for the next couple of weeks is, how soon will it become the White House, or conversely, how soon will the White House’s hopeful position descend under pressure of the MICIMATT? I’ll stop there, and thanks very much for letting me go on this long. SPEED: Well, thank you very much, Ray. And I think you had a lot to say there that I’m sure Mike is going to have both responses to and maybe some questions about, too. Mike, of course, for anybody who doesn’t know, is the Asia Desk editor for EIR, but he’s also been spending some time interviewing some interesting people recently, and he’s pursuing that, as we’re doing our best to try to resurrect the lost art of evaluations. So, Mike, why don’t you go ahead. MICHAEL BILLINGTON: Well, thank you, Ray. That was a most comprehensive and very powerful presentation. I think you captured the overall idea in a way which is going to maybe shock a lot of people, but I think also wake them up to the fact that you have to look at the world as a whole. There’s a lot of people, very depressed, or somewhat pessimistic within the United States right now, about the idea that everything’s lost, our country’s going to hell, our cities are destroyed, the pandemic’s out of control, we’re threatened with thermonuclear war, and so on. But if you’re willing to look at the world from the perspective of the world as a whole, as Ray just did, then you have the ability to revive optimism in a population which has been purposely degraded by the media part of the MICIMATT, and by our government in many respects, to give them some optimism, that there is a way out; that in fact, there’s a way to stop this descent into a dark age, which clearly we are in—the threat of war, the pandemic, the cultural breakdown, the social disintegration within the United States and most of Western Europe. But, again, if you look at the world as a whole, if you look at who should be our closest allies, Russia and China, then you begin to get the sense, you can begin to get the sense that what we as individuals do at a moment of crisis like this, can have a huge, huge impact on the world. I want to say a few things about what Helga and Lyn said in the beginning, but let me fill in a few pieces of what Ray McGovern just went through, from a few other, very prominent and knowledgeable intelligence people. There aren’t that many, so the few of them that there are, have stepped forward over the last few days, in a way which really does confirm the perspective that Ray just laid out. One of them is a guy named Gilbert Doctorow: He’s a long, long-time analyst, somebody who’s worked in Russia and around Russia for many years, as well as on other sides of this. He attended the Russian press conference, after the Russia-NATO meeting on Wednesday [Jan. 12], and when he came out, there was an RT journalist who talked with him, and he said that the reason that the Russians deployed these forces on the border with Ukraine was provoked, first, by the fact that the U.S. and the British and others were sending modern missiles, modern weapons—not ballistic missiles, not intermediate-range nuclear missiles, but war-fighting missiles, Javelin missiles against tanks and drones to deliver bombs over the Donbas, that this was happening. And the way Doctorow put it, he said, they were concerned that some of the “hotheads” in Kiev would use this equipment with the mistaken belief that the Western powers would come and defend them militarily if they got into a war with Russia. In order to disprove that to these hotheads in Kiev, they deployed their forces to the border, with no intent to invade—they’ve made that very clear—but they want to do, as Doctorow put it, “flush out the reality” of what nations would come to Ukraine’s defense if they were stupid enough to get into a war with Russia. And it worked! One after another, the U.S., the French, the Germans, others, said, “No! If there’s a war between Ukraine and Russia, we’re not going to send troops, not one troop, not one soldier, not one boot will be on the ground” (although there are people there, training already, and there’s certain activities). But what they mean is that they’re not going to put their full weight into a war with Russia. They’re not stupid enough to fight a potentially nuclear war with Russia, over Ukraine. And in fact, they said so! They said, “If Russia invades Ukraine, we’re going to give them the toughest, most never seen before sanctions against them, it’s going to destroy their economy. It’s the economic nuclear option,” and so on and so forth, but not said was, “we’re going to send any troops, we’re not going to go to war.” And that, in fact, is what happened. Now, another extremely competent analyst on this is a guy called Dmitri Trenin: He is Russian, who spent 20 some years in the Soviet army, at that time. And he’s now heading the Carnegie Institute in Moscow. So he went to work in something called the Moscow Institute in Europe, and then the NATO Defense College in Rome; but then he began working with the think tanks here in Washington, Carnegie in particular, and he’s now heading the Carnegie Moscow center, so it’s the fellow Carnegie Institute in Moscow. He’s in Moscow, he’s in the center of these ideas; he has a long history in the military. And he gave an interview to Christiane Amanpour—I won’t characterize her; she’s with CNN. I think that’s probably enough to indicate her character. And she was trying to bait him and he generally made mincemeat out of her. She began by quoting the hardline positions that were being stated by Russia and by the U.S.; Russia saying, we absolutely insist on written guarantees, you must move NATO back to where it was before you expanded. The U.S. was saying, we didn’t give an inch, we’re telling Russia we’re going to really destroy them if they dare to invade Ukraine; and we will never say that we cannot expand NATO, and so forth. But Trenin said: Look, they’re talking. This is the beginning, this is not the end. And when you talk about Russia going to war, he said—and I’ll read this—he said: “Putin is very careful in using military force. In Crimea, not a shot was fired. In Syria, professionals did the fighting, with few casualties. Kazakhstan is a victory. And they’re beginning to withdraw, today,” he said, which is true. They stopped a Ukraine, a Maidan from happening in Kazakhstan, because they quickly called in the collaborators to make sure that this thing was stopped in its tracks, this color revolution and outside terrorist operation, which burned down several government buildings, but tried to literally create a Maidan, and a coup was crushed. He goes on: “This talk of war is on the Western side, not on the Russian side. There’s no feeling of impending war within Russia over Ukraine. Putin is using the troops as leverage, to get the U.S. to listen and to negotiate.” And as Ray said, Putin is being heard. This is a change in the dynamic of European security development. Now, as Ray also mentioned, Blinken, just yesterday, Blinken and Stoltenberg talked, and they both incurred, indeed, as reported by Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, he said that both the U.S. and NATO are ready to meet again, to pursue diplomacy and reciprocal dialogue. So this is moving forward. And Wendy Sherman, who’s the official negotiator in these talks, talked with the head of the OSCE, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes Russia—it’s all the nations of Europe; she agreed with the current Secretary General Helga Schmid of the OSCE that this is a format to continue revitalizing European security dialogue, which includes Russia and all the other nations. So this is moving forward, no question. Amanpour then quoted the U.S. bluster and Trenin replied, just straight out, “Get beyond the rhetoric. We know Ukraine will not be a NATO member soon, maybe never,” as Ray also said. “The simple reason, the U.S. will not fight a nuclear-armed Russia over Ukraine. It is not in the U.S. interest to deploy intermediate-range missiles in Europe, since Russia could retaliate by deploying nuclear-armed submarines to patrol the Eastern seaboard of the United States.” In other words, they could put nuclear weapons, including their hypersonic weapons, which they have and the U.S. doesn’t, they could put them at the same distance from the U.S. cities, as the U.S. would be, if they moved their missiles up to the Russian border, and therefore, it is absolutely not in the U.S. interest to do that kind of thing. Now, one other aspect of this I want to quote; this is back to Mr. Doctorow. The RT reporter asked him, “Why, now?” And Doctorow said, “That’s a question. Why has the media asked the ‘why now’?” Why didn’t Russia do this when they started moving their NATO forces east toward the Russian borders, starting, I think it was in 1999 was the first time. And Doctorow said, it’s very clear, you know, Putin gave a now very famous speech in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, where he laid out precisely these issues of what is not acceptable to the Russians. But, at that time, the Russian economy was still in very precarious condition, and their military was not up to snuff, to put it nicely. Since that time, Gilbert Doctorow said, they have poured huge amounts of money, of brain power, of scientific and technological capacity into building their military, and they now quite rightly believe they have a military that’s equal, perhaps even in some areas like hypersonic weapons, the superior to the Western military powers. Therefore, they can do it. You can’t even pretend any longer that the U.S. is the only superpower, as we did after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s simply not true. You have China, as the by far the biggest and best economy in the world; and you have the Russia-China cooperation on both developing the third world. Russia is building nuclear power plants, and of course the Belt and Road is building nations, getting them out of poverty, getting out of the grip of the IMF/World Bank, by giving them infrastructure. So they were able to do it, because they now have the power to do it. And the U.S. knows that. People, no matter how much they bluster, they know that they cannot fight a war against Russia, just like they cannot fight a war against China. The only danger, and it’s an extreme danger, is that you have some real madmen in the United States. You have Admiral Richard, the head of the Strategic Command, the guy who would actually push the button. Who said in February last year, that we used to think nuclear war was unlikely, but now with the rise of Russia and China, it’s likely. And this is madness, real madness. And you all saw, I’m sure, Senator Wicker, who literally, he’s one of the top guys on the Senate Armed Services Committee, openly saying we should prepare for a first nuclear strike against Russia: Madness. So, could madness happen? Could we sleepwalk into a thermonuclear World War III? We have to be on guard. But, as Ray said, we have to look for the optimism where it’s there, because it’s our responsibility to push to make that happen that way, by making sure the American people do know what the American media is trying so hard to make sure you don’t know. I want to say a few more words, in a sense go back to what you heard Lyn say, that when you have a crisis like we have today, you have to look at it in the context of an overall global crisis, an incident, which is not defined by what happened this week, or last week, but as a long-term process. And there’s no question but that this round of crisis started with the collapse of the Soviet Union, when we had a tremendous opportunity, when Lyn and Helga said: OK, we’ve broken the British Empire’s division of the world into East versus West, the free world versus the communists, and so forth. We’ve basically ended that. this is an opportunity to bring about a new paradigm for mankind, and they proposed that it be done by building high-speed rail connections between Europe and China, through Russia; that we create an environment in which we begin to work together as human beings and as sovereign nations committed to the idea that our sovereignty depends upon the sovereignty of the others, as we had in the Peace of Westphalia. So, at that time, with the fall of the Soviet Union, some people, the neocons and others in the West thought, “we just won. We won the war. We won the Cold War.” It’s like Francis Fukuyama said, the neocon who wrote The End of History: Liberal democracy has now proven to be the superior means of running a nation, and it’ll be so from now and henceforth for the rest of time. History is over. We won. And then, just last week, Fukuyama looked around, and he said, I guess I look like a bit of an idiot when people see that I wrote that End of History back in the 1990s. So he wrote an op-ed, I think in the New York Times, which said, “well, you know, I guess I missed up some things. It didn’t occur to me that advanced democracies like the U.S. could collapse—didn’t occur to me. I thought, well, this is permanent, this is the rest of time.” And of course, what he sees as the collapse is January 6, last year, that this “insurrection” showed that our democracy has collapsed. So he’s really no different from the most wacko of the Democrats, who look at it that way. But look at what Helga was discussing with the Peace of Westphalia. I won’t repeat what she said, but it was, in a sense, seen as the birth of the idea of sovereign nation-states, because it’s based on the idea that your sovereignty depends upon recognition and honoring the sovereignty of others, the “interest of the other,” that that was the basis on which this would take place. And the concept was somewhat built into the UN Charter. It was emphatically adopted under something that the Chinese and the Indians first established: In 1954, Zhou Enlai from China and Jawaharlal Nehru from India, established what they called Panchsheel, or Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. And then, in the next year, in 1995, the famous Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which was the meeting of Asian and African formerly colonialized nations, meeting for the first time without their colonialist lords, and it was sort of the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement. Part of the purpose of that conference was to prevent what was then an emerging threat of a war between the U.S. and China. And Zhou Enlai and Nehru and Sukarno, the head of Indonesia, were the key leaders—some from Africa and others from Asia—and in that they adopted officially these Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. And it’s worth thinking about what they are, because it’s really the nature of the Westphalia sovereignty idea and it’s the nature of the United Nations. The first, and you hear these terms, now, often, is: territorial integrity, that you have a sovereign nation. Nobody can move and take over your territory. Nonaggression, that you will not launch aggression against another nation. Non-interference in internal affairs, which of course is the daily fare of the U.S. intelligence community is interfering in other nations’ internal affairs. The equality of nations, the idea that you respect the sovereignty of the other, and cooperate with them. And then, fifth, the idea of peaceful coexistence. So these ideas are the basis upon which we can, and we must establish a new security architecture, to replace NATO. As Helga said, at one point, they were talking about Russia being part of NATO, and perhaps NATO could have sustained itself by being a truly inclusive agreement amongst all of the nations of Europe; but that was undermined, and it’s now threatened. We need a new architecture based on this idea of peaceful coexistence. And it has to be driven, as LaRouche has always insisted, by that idea of economic development: That peace will only come through economic development. We are now faced with both the complete breakdown of the Western financial system: Hyperinflation kicking in. To a great extent, the energy hyperinflation is driven directly by the adoption by the Western banking system of the Green New Deal, which is not something being run by AOC, or any of the silly children, running around screaming about the environment, or Al Gore and his fanaticism. It’s run by the banks. It’s run by Mark Carney, by the people who set up a banker’s cartel at the Glasgow climate summit, who explicitly said, we don’t believe governments are going to implement the policy of shutting down their fossil fuels in their economy, and therefore, we bankers will take upon ourselves, the moral responsibility to save the planet from carbon, by shutting down the world economy, and diverting every available penny into bailing out the bankrupt banking system, and funding the military buildup we need to enforce that. So this is a moment of truth, where we can, and must, inspire optimism in people of the world, and especially the people in Europe and the United States who are drowning in pessimism and degeneracy right now. I think what Ray had to say, what some of these others, and what Lyn and Helga have to say is the antidote to the pessimism and the destruction of the minds of our citizens, that’s been so drilled into them over this systematic descent into a moral and cultural dark age. And, again, I say, we have every reason to be optimistic, and let’s pledge ourselves to bringing that optimism, while holding up the grave danger we’re in, a moment of crisis of whether civilization itself will even survive if there were to be a nuclear war, and yet, it’s precisely because it’s so dangerous that people are looking around; they know something’s gone horribly, horribly wrong. They’re looking for answers. They’re looking for who’s been telling the truth when everybody else was lying. Like what Ray said about the brilliant New York Times journalist. I’m going to end by one short thing. This is the New York Times believe it or not [showing lead editorial, “Let Innocent Afghans Have Their Money,” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/opinion/afghanistan-bank-money.html]. But as you know, we’re having a conference on Monday, an emergency seminar on the extreme danger in Afghanistan, the fact that we have the threat of a genocide, as bad or maybe even worse, than Hitler carried out in his death camps and his wars—believe or not, the New York Times lead editorial this morning was “Let Innocent Afghans Have Their Money.” And the way it’s worded—I won’t go through the whole thing right here—but the way it’s worded, it’s clear that somebody at the New York Times realized that this genocide is so obvious, that if they don’t turn around from what they’ve been doing, which is peddling as they did with the war policy, the idea that we can and should punish the Taliban, they realize that this would be hanging over their heads. And somebody got through to them and said “You better turn that around.” So they did—not fully, not completely. It’s still somewhat self-serving. But they did note that if we don’t release the money that we’ve sequestered, if we don’t allow the central bank of Afghanistan to have their money, then we’re going to be faced with personal responsibility for mass murder, the mass murder of somewhere in the range of 20-24 million people, over this winter, where people have no money. And their editorial says “malnourished children with withered arms have been arriving at clinics in Afghanistan for months. Doctors, nurses, teachers and other essential government workers haven’t been paid in months and it’s not clear when they will. Targetted financial sanctions,” they say—of course, they defend their sanctions policies—“targetted financial sanctions are an appropriate and powerful tool to punish bad actors, and odious regimes. The mere threat of them can achieve results. But too often their cumulative effect over time is indistinguishable from collective punishment.” And of course, they’re guilty of collective punishment in case, after case, after case of these 20 years of mass warfare. But nonetheless, they’re saying this has got to stop. They have excuses about why the Fed can’t release the money, but they say, we can get the money released from Europe and they interview our friend Shah Mehrabi, the former board member of the central bank in Afghanistan. So things are moving: Our emergency conferences, our mobilization, our pulling people together on this Afghan crisis, our Committee on the Coincidence of Opposites, and the statement by Dr. Elders that humanity comes first in the case of Afghanistan, we have to release these funds and immediately launch a development program—this is having an effect. And again, there’s reason to be optimistic, if we’re willing to give our full heart and soul to this fight for the fate of mankind. SPEED: Thanks a lot, Mike. And I’ll just say, to both you and Ray, I’ve gotten three questions which I’m going to pose. They’ll give us an arc of time, and Ray’s got something. Go ahead, Ray. MCGOVERN: I just wanted to comment on one of the points that Mike made and that could be well elaborated on, because it’s the most important new factor in the equation: And that is, China. Now, Biden has had a bad experience. His advisers told him, before the June 16 summit that the Russians and the Chinese have this big, long border, and they have clashes on the border, and China’s so big that it must be threatening Russia. And so, what Biden said to Putin, and we know this, because Biden said this before he got on the plane coming home, “Russia is being squeezed by China. They have this long, long border, and Russia knows that China’s not only one of the biggest economic powers, but the biggest military power. So the Russians have a lot of cause to worry about China.” Now, that’s 180 degrees away from the current situation. It might have been true in the textbooks that Jake Sullivan and Blinken read 40 years ago, but it’s not true now. Never! Never, ever have China and Russia been so close! So, consider Putin coming away from this summit, saying to his associates, “My God! These guys don’t know what end is up! They don’t know how strong we Russians really are—why? Because China will back us up! In the vernacular, China’s got our back! How do we show them that?” Next summit, on Dec. 7, Putin reads Biden the Riot Act. He says: “You got our relationship with China completely screwed up. We’re very, very close. As a matter of fact, in one week I’m going to be talking with President Xi—tune in! Because you’ll see how close we are!” So, a week later, on Dec. 15, I think, there’s a virtual meeting between Putin and Xi, and they released the first minute of it, which was choreographed exactly the way the way they wanted it, and this is what happened. Putin: Thank you so much for the invitation to get together, and I just wish it were in person my good friend, because I look forward to meeting you in Beijing to begin the Olympics on Feb. 4. Then we will be in person and we can discuss things as we usually do. (Witness the fact, in parens here, that the U.S. had just declared that it would not go to the Olympics and it’s not going to have any official presence there and others followed suit.) What does Xi say? Xi says, “My friend, Vladimir Putin. This is the 36th time we’ve met, one-on-one, physically or bilaterally in the last couple of years. I look forward to these discussions. What I really appreciate is what you, Russia, have done to support our core interests. And also, you’ve been really good about preventing others from driving a wedge between Russia and China. Just be assured that we, China, will support your core interests, in the West, just the way you have supported our core interests here.” And then, Yury Ushakov, who’s the prime adviser to Putin, tells the press, “the way these two describe their relationship as something that exceeds, something that’s bigger than or higher than a treaty or a defense alliance, in terms of its closeness and in terms of its effectiveness.” It exceeds an alliance. I checked out the Russian and Chinese words, and that’s the word they used. So, if Biden and his advisers, you know, he brought in the clowns, but at least they’re getting educated! If they didn’t get the message from that, they never—well, they did get the message from that. That was on Dec. 15th. When Putin insisted that Putin and Biden talk on Dec. 30th, Biden had been educated. And what Putin is really saying is, look, even your military I think should be aware of, or shy away from the prospect of a two-front war on opposite sides of the world. China’s got our back, and that’s real. Bottom line, here: What helped Putin to be so assertive, and his people like Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu? Well, because it really is two against one, now, unlike the situation that existed under Nixon, where we successfully played one off against the other. Then their relationship was very thorny. Now it could not be closer. And that’s not pretense, that’s real! Now, one other thing I’ll just tuck in here, is that empowers what reaction our allies get when they make silly statements like German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who said: Look, you Russians are willing to use military force? That’s where we’re moving our troops up into Ukraine and elsewhere. And so, what did Shoigu say? He says, “You know, you’re probably too young to remember, but the last time German troops moved up to our border, it really didn’t end well, so, please go study your history.” There is a new assertiveness. It’s well founded, and I just hope that those sophomores—or, they’re rising juniors now—that Biden has advising him will read more current textbooks, or maybe even some articles from you guys and from me. Thanks. SPEED: I’m very glad you raised that, Ray. Actually, one of the first questions pretty much prompts that. I think before we go to this question, if we could show the map, and maybe either Mike or Ray will have a comment. This is a map of Kazakhstan, and the general area. I’m putting this up here, because of what you referenced concerning the issue of borders. It doesn’t show the whole Chinese border, but it does show something about an area people have just heard about in the world, and one of the things that should be noted is, Kazakhstan, and then you see Afghanistan on the map. The question we have is about Afghanistan, and I’ll ask that, but I suspect either of you may have a more expansive answer. Let’s leave the map up, while I’m asking the question. The question comes from one of our people, Anastasia, who reports: “Helga Zepp-LaRouche just had an awesome class and discussion”—this was during our meeting, as we began here—“with some 80-plus youth from around the world, who are ready to fight for Operation Ibn Sina. How can we combine the NATO/Russia crisis with the Ibn Sina initiative?” Operation Ibn Sina refers to Afghanistan, and it’s an initiative that Helga has discussed concerning the possibility of addressing the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan from the standpoint of a new participation among the United States, China, Russia, and of course, the actors surrounding Afghanistan. You see there on the map: Iran on the west, Pakistan on the east; and then Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan. But we’ve just heard on the news about Kazakhstan and what’s happened there. I’ll say that the concept of what was being discussed about Operation Ibn Sina—Ibn Sina was a physician and philosopher, generally from Southwest Asia; the Afghanis claim him, the Iranians claim him, a lot of people claim him. But importantly, as a physician and as a great philosophical thinker, the idea was to invoke someone from the culture of the area, so that when talking about humanitarian relief, you’re invoking a person from the area itself. You’re not just talking about outside intervention, and more importantly, a new form of collaboration: This as a process of a new strategic alliance. So, I just wanted that map up and whatever comment either of you could have, on what can be done on the Afghanistan situation. Mike why don’t you start, since we just heard from Ray? BILLINGTON: Actually, I wanted to respond to Ray by addressing the Kazakhstan issue, because as Ray was making fun of the geopoliticians, including Biden’s gaffe about Russia and China, the Kazakhstan thing is being portrayed by many Western geopolitical writers as “Oh, China’s very worried about this, because Russia used this crisis to step in there, and now Russia’s going to be taking over an area where China’s got its interests….” and nothing could be further from the truth. This was another example of the extremely close cooperative operation between Russia and China—based on principle! This is what’s important, it’s not just alliance of nations ganging up against people they see as their enemies. The old British imperial idea, that when there’s three powers, in order to defeat one, you ally with your enemy, who happens to be opposed to another enemy; and then you crush them, and then create another alliance to crush the other. This is geopolitics: Constant conflict, zero sum game—which deny that there’s a common aim for mankind! The relationship between Russia and China right now is based on the principle of peace through development. What happened in Kazakhstan? Remember that the Russians’ concern with the collapse of the occupation forces in Afghanistan, they’re working with the Taliban, but they’re not agreeing to recognize them because they have a very real concern about the existing al-Qaeda, ISIS type formations that still exist in Afghanistan, that they will come across the borders into the Central Asian countries. What happened in Kazakhstan? They tried to run another Maidan, another 2014 Maidan coup, with different predicates, somewhat, but it was done based on an economic crisis. The National Endowment for Democracy spent $1 million last year; the George Soros Open Society Fund spent $3.5 million last year, organizing the NGO/color revolution forces, to go out in the street and create chaos over some economic or other slight. And that was done. But within about 48 hours, when they doubled the price of gas, and therefore, some of these Soros types came out in the street, you then had very highly trained, armed terrorists, some of whom came from Afghanistan, some from Syria, who intervened into the mobs, with high-powered rifles, with their private communication capacities; attacked buildings, attacked the media—they took over the TV stations; they took over the airport: This is what a coup does. They burned down government buildings. And President Tokayev responded, by immediately calling in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) forces, which includes strong forces from Russia. And the Russians immediately deployed significant numbers of forces, shut the thing down over just a few days. Now, what’s going on in Kazakhstan: Kazakhstan is the key transport route for the New Silk Road. The Chinese already built a major pipeline from the Caspian Sea, right straight through Kazakhstan into China, which is delivering huge amounts of oil to China, so they have that to protect. Then when they decided to build their New Silk Road Economic Belt, the main route goes right through Kazakhstan on its way to Europe and Turkey. And they have a dry port on the border of China and Kazakhstan, which is an incredible place that takes 4,000 trains per year, now going back and forth between China and Europe, they go through the dry port, where they have to switch gauges; they have incredible mechanisms to move the containers from one gauge train to another in record time. So this is a strategically crucial part of the New Silk Road transformation of the economies. And yes, there were difficulties in Kazakhstan, with a lot of corruption in the ruling circles around Nazarbayev, and other problems. But the point is, the potential for its development as a very lightly populated, but huge country, which also has Russia’s spaceport and it also has Russia’s missile training sites are in Kazakhstan. They have uranium that is processed in Russia, and then sent back to be turned into nuclear power fuel. These are totally Russia-China cooperative operations to transform the world, and especially in their neighboring areas. Now, on Afghanistan: Of course, you also have the fact that the Uighur in Xinjiang in China—what people hear all the time is that the Chinese are committing genocide against the Uighurs. It’s such an abomination it’s almost not worth refuting: The Uighur population in Xinjiang has doubled; their standard of living has nearly doubled since China began focussing on developing the poorest parts of the country. And in lifting 700-800 million people out of poverty, a good number of those were the very, very poor Uighur people in Xinjiang, who have been lifted up, educated, given jobs, and this is called “genocide” by Mike Pompeo! They deal with their terrorist problem by educating and giving employment to the young people who otherwise are dragged off into terrorist operations, because the U.S. is dropping bombs on their mothers’ homes. I think that’s the proper way to see it. But these networks came out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there are still areas of terrorist training within Afghanistan. it’s not going to be cleaned up overnight, even though the Taliban is fighting them in most cases. So for both Russia and China, the issue of the Islamic movements within the Islamic culture are crucial. Now, what has Helga done, by launching the Operation Ibn Sina? This is not something that came out of the blue. Helga’s studied this for many, many years, and has written extensively about the golden age of Islam. She’s written about Ibn Sina in particular, and she knows that he is a beloved figure in the Islamic world. My interview with Graham Fuller, the former CIA station chief in Kabul, and stationed all over the Islamic world, very much an Islamic scholar himself, made the point that there’s absolutely no reason that you could not have another golden age of Islam! It’s most likely going to come as part of what Lyn and Helga always argued, which is that you’re not going to have a localist renaissance any more. We have to have a global renaissance, in which each culture pulls out the best moments of its history. The Christian Renaissance, the European Renaissance, the Islamic Renaissance during the Baghdad Caliphate, the Confucian Renaissance during the Sung Dynasty; and similar things in Africa and elsewhere, this is what can and must happen. So this Ibn Sina project, of course, it’s aimed at stopping genocide in Afghanistan, it’s aimed and bringing modern health facilities to Afghanistan and in fact every nation on Earth. But it also is crucial to getting people to think in terms of why we, non-Muslims, have to understand who Ibn Sina was and is, today, to the Islamic community internationally, but also that we have to internalize that in our hearts, with the sense of the Peace of Westphalia, that we have to understand the Confucian Renaissance and Chu Hsi in the Sung Dynasty in China. We have to understand what went on during the golden age of Islam, and embrace it as part of what we do, by embracing the Platonic period and Augustinian era, and especially the work of Nicholas of Cusa and Schiller and Leibniz and so forth. This is the basis on which we have to look at every one of these crisis moments as a moment that can change history as a whole. SPEED: Ray, if you have a response to that, and if you don’t, I have two questions for you. MCGOVERN: Let me just make a quick remark and about the strategic significance of Kazakhstan. I think you’re showing that map was a really good idea. Not many people known where Kazakhstan is. Now they do. It sits atop the other “stans,” and needless to say there still is a terrorist threat as Mike has elucidated. And so, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is, that the border between Kazakhstan and Russia is—most people say—the longest contiguous border in the world. Look at it! It’s pretty ragged, and it goes for a long way. Now, also look, in the middle on the left there, the Caspian Sea: What’s there? There are deposits of natural gas, that exceed by far all the oil deposits in Iraq in value. All of them. That’s where the TAPI pipeline was going to come from—Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India, and then out into the ocean. And who was going to take care of all of that? Enron! [laughs] That was a totally corrupt enterprise from the beginning, but that accounted in many ways for Bush Jr. and other interests in that TAPI pipeline—which never happened, of course. But the riches there are incredible. Uranium? Mike mentioned that, which is incredibly important, for anybody who’s working with nuclear materials. So the strategic significance of Kazakhstan is in many ways more important than Ukraine in terms of natural resources; not in terms of strategic importance. But when people try to overthrow governments like that, the prompt response of the President Tokayev in Nur-Sultan, in getting the Russians in there, and then the naïve response from my friend Blinken—“Oh, once the Russians come in, you’ll never get them out of there!” Well, as Mike also mentioned, they’re out of there, or they’re getting out of there. So again, Mike is quite right in saying that is a success, that Russia can crow about. And they’re going to watch it very closely, because this in its own way is a very critical, strategic area. SPEED: These will also be pertinent to you, Mike, and we also have a couple other maps to reference here. But the first question is from Cade, and it is: “Thank you for these wonderful analyses of the current situation. My question is to Mr. McGovern: It does seem we have moved a few inches away from a new Cuban Missile Crisis. The Schiller Institute’s interview with Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council Andrey Kortunov also pointed toward a trust from Russia put into Biden individually as a negotiator. But what about the potential, let’s say, of a ‘new Bay of Pigs’? The prospect of rogue elements outside of Biden’s control, such as those training Ukrainian paramilitaries to ‘kill Russians,’ as Yahoo News reported yesterday, inciting either of the false-flag scenarios mentioned or any other operation?” So that’s one question. I’m putting it together with the other question, for reasons of time, but also because they relate. The second question to both of you is from Kynan. He says: “It is quite a relief to hear that there were some positive developments from the talks that took place between Russia and the United States, and the fact that Biden has taken seriously Putin’s concerns about the deployment of nuclear weapons on Russia’s border, is important. “This also coincides with another very significant development in which the leaders of the UN Security Council affirm that a ‘nuclear war could never be won, and therefore must never be fought.’ Why is it that the media aren’t actually reporting on these developments? What do they gain from portraying Russia in this malicious way, and by saying that nothing significant happened in these talks?” MCGOVERN: The first question I discussed a little bit about these false-flag things, and these operations. You know, our intelligence services have lots of money, and if they don’t spend it, they won’t get as much next year. And sometimes there are cockamamie ideas, but they say, well maybe they’ll succeed and you get really fast promoted, so who’s going to be held accountable? It’s all secret, right? So, none of that can be dismissed. Is Biden fully in control? The answer is: No. If he told Bill Burns, head of the CIA, “you make sure that those CIA-nics don’t cause any trouble for us in the border area between Ukraine and Russia,” and Bill Burns said, “Yessir!” would they do it anyway? My guess is—of course, they would! Bill Burns is not in control either. The guys with the money are in control. And they have all these assets and they want to use ’em. That’s the problem. And Putin knows that better than McGovern knows it, because he’s been kind of mouse-trapped in this way before, namely, the ceasefire in Syria, which blew up in the face of Putin and Obama, each, when the U.S. Air Force decided to violate it, a brief week after it had been concluded—after negotiations of 11 months. The other thing here, is, OK, the UN Security Council: that was really nice. “No one can win a nuclear war.” Right. Well, that’s what Putin and Biden said at the end of their June 16 summit. They issued a statement, that’s the same as the one we remember with Reagan and Gorbachev: “No one can win a nuclear war…” That doesn’t really matter! What matters is what Mike mentioned before. Adm. Thomas Richard, who puts his finger on the button. He’s the Strategic Air Command, which used to be called “SAC.” Those guys are real patriots, and they’re not going to let the Russians do anything bad to us, and you know, Richard has never rescinded his notion that nuclear is probable. Has Biden told him to shut up? No, he hasn’t told him to shut up. And so, what is Putin looking at? He’s looking at a very, variegated command structure. In Russia, they have what they call “yedin nachaya” [ph]—leadership in one person. Everyone knows Putin is in control, and I think that’s a good thing. In our country, well, you have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling the Chinese late the year before last, “look, if Trump tells me to take you out, I probably won’t do it” you know? What the hell is that?! I mean, it may have been a good thing in the vast scheme of things, but what conclusions do Putin and his Defense Minister Shoigu draw from this kind of, let’s call it, insubordination? All I’m saying is, the situation is much more itsy-pitsy than anyone realizes. When you look from the Kremlin and you see, that despite all these statements, and they come fast and furious, the guys in charge—you know, if you read Daniel Ellsberg’s book on The Doomsday Machine, you’ll see that the executive authority to authorize nuclear weapons devolved into some of the smallest units you could ever imagine. I don’t know if it’s better now. But neither does Putin, and that’s the point: He’s got to be really careful. SPEED: We may be dealing with one of that kind of Sterling Hayden/ Brig. Gen. Jack Ripper and Slim Pickens/Major “King” Kong! Let’s hope not! [referring to characters in Dr. Strangelove] All right, lets again go the maps, but I want to have respond coming to the conclusion here. But let’s show three maps of NATO in 1990; this is 32 years ago, those were the NATO boundaries when the U.S. promised it would not expand one inch eastward from the German border. That was Secretary of State James Baker speaking to Gorbachev. All right, let’s go to the next one, NATO’s eastern boundary in 2019. Flip back to 1990 for a moment, and then 2019, so people can get the idea here. And then the third map is NATO in 2021, these are the proposed expanded NATO boundaries. Let’s go to the final image, the larger map: This shows what is sometimes referred to as the “Eurasian Heartland,” but more importantly can assist everybody, having seen the map of Kazakhstan, having seen the map of NATO expansion, to get a sense of the entirety of what we’re talking about. There, you’re seeing the border between Russia and China, there in the east. This is what Biden was referring to. Of course, you see the border of Kazakhstan and Russia, which Ray just discussed a moment ago. So, having shown these maps, here’s my question: How can people conquer the fragmented picture that is supplied by media and also supplied by bad education, to think about how these world leaders are required to think about strategic matters; what we are also talking about here as a higher security architecture, how would you approach that kind of thing? And how could we, as citizens think about this, or play a role in thinking about this in such a fashion as to call these people to account? It’s a large question, but I wanted to put it out there, and let each of you give me a sense of it. Mike why don’t we start with you. BILLINGTON: I agree, this is key. What Ray said a minute ago about the fact that the President doesn’t run things, is absolutely true. This was just as true with Trump as with Biden. Trump ordered the military to get out of Syria, and they told him to go to Hell. He said, we’re going to be friends with Russia, and they ran the Russiagate operation against him, and he basically capitulated. Same thing with China: He was friends with China, but then Pompeo and company made up the line about China gave us the coronavirus, and Trump needed somebody to blame or whatever reason. He clearly didn’t run things: he wanted to rebuild U.S. industry, but what did Wall Street do? They kept bailing out the banks. So he failed in everything he said he was going to do, which is why he was voted in by a population that was delighted to hear that we’re going to be friends with Russia, we’re going to rebuild the economy, we’re going to end these damned wars, we’re going to get out of the climate change hoax. This is absolutely true with Biden. Is that reason to be demoralized? I must say, a lot of people I talk to feel demoralized for the reasons I was saying before: they think there’s no leader who can do anything. Well, in a sense that’s true. But I’ve talked about this before: LaRouche always emphasized the institution of the Presidency as more important than the President per se; that sometimes a President plays a crucial role in the institution of the Presidency, but, really, it’s the institution of those who are part of governing, including people in Congress, in the intelligence community, in the private sector, and individuals like Lyndon LaRouche, or Ray McGovern, who’s no longer official in a government agency. But, in other words, citizens who take responsibility for their nation and for the world: That really is the institution of the Presidency. So what does that say to the American people? It says, it’s up to us! Like I said before, there’s a tremendous reason for optimism, in the midst of this descent into a dark age, that because it’s so damned serious, people are looking around for answers and for leadership. I’ve said, many times, when I first met Lyn in late 1971, he said people aren’t going to want to hear my warnings that Nixon’s pulling the dollar off gold and ending the Bretton Woods system is going to lead to depressions, and hyperinflation, and pandemics and wars. But when it happens, we’d better be there to lead, because people are going to look around for who was telling the truth, when everybody else was lying. So this is a wonderful moment for the individual: I think it answers the question about the individual rights and the common good. You know, you have a horrible problem in America, where people think individual rights are the rights to be anarchistic, and say, “I refuse to do what I’m being told to do, because I’m American,” you know. Well, the importance of the individual is in their capacity to effect the Good. This is Platonism. This is the American Founding Fathers. And a moment like this, people have an opportunity to do the Good, which is to change the descent into Hell that the world is going through right now—the Western world in particular, and to act in a way that we make sure that this very interesting potential that’s emerged, that Ray and I discussed, coming out of this last week, that this does go in the right direction, that it does not collapse into Admiral Richard pushing the button. But that it’s going to depend, really, on us. You don’t get demoralized about the fact that Biden doesn’t run things: You take a good that he has put forward with Putin—largely because of Putin’s direction in this—but you take that as the basis on which, this is what we fight for; that’s what we fought for with Trump, that if he had succeeded in doing what he said he was going to do, he would have won the election with or without vote fraud. But he did. And the same thing is true, here. We don’t just sit back and say, “Gee, I hope Biden can do it. We fight like hell to get the American people to understand that there is an opening here which is going to depend upon how the American people act, in conjunction especially with our friends in Russia and in China.” SPEED: OK, fine. Ray? MCGOVERN: Thanks, Mike. It’s been a pleasure to be one with you. I would my gloss on this, this way: things change. Maybe it’s an advantage being so old as I am, you see a lot of change. When I was working, as my first job at CIA as an analyst, it was to analyze the Sino-Soviet dispute, to convince people that the Chinese and the Soviets hated each other with a passion! And that we could take advantage of it. Now, I thought, and most of my colleagues thought that this would be forever the case, that they would hate each other from previous movies! They had irredenta, they had everything! And all of a sudden—not all of a sudden, actually; we watched it gradually dissipate, to the point where no two allies have been ever closer. And this is the reality. So what am I saying? I’m saying that things change. Now, I think we have to leave open the possibility, that people will change, too, and that there is a common enemy here. When the Chinese and the Soviets hated each other, the common enemy was the United States, but the United States took advantage of this. And now, the common enemy is twofold: climate change—I have ten grandchildren. I care about this!—climate change, and the pandemic. We have to do something about all that. Now one has to allow for the fact that more progressive people, less bound to the MICIMATT, will eventually come to the fore and recognize that, you know, it’s over for all of us, if we don’t do something about climate change, and reining in pandemics. And then, then comes individual initiative, where people will come together, individually at first, but without fear and do what is necessary. I would finish with my favorite theologian, Annie Dillard, who said, “Who shall ascend to the mountain? Who shall do the work for us? There’s only us, there never has been any other.” So let’s put our nose to the grindstone. Thanks. SPEED: And thank you, very much, Ray. I just want to say, also, at this point, this has been a particularly both stimulating and informative discussion. And it’s also important to say, and this explains why I’m saying this, that the opinions expressed here are not necessarily ones on which everybody agrees, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Let me repeat that: It’s going to be important, in particularly a United States that has become so sclerotic, that you rarely get a forum in which people can discuss ideas, that people get used to the notion of changing their view and of thinking about matters from a different standpoint. It’s fine—well, it’s not so fine, but it can be tolerable, when people find themselves in what they call “factional positions,” but really, actually, a lot of these are a product of advertising, the product of media. They’re not even opinions that people have formed. I’m saying that for anybody who is watching right now, and also in the future, this is exactly what we all are trying to pursue at this point in our nation. It’s important to get a platform, whereby we can not only talk about these things, but recognize that in the dispute comes wisdom.
While it appears in the visible realm that no accord was reached in the Russian talks with the U.S. and NATO last week, there are developments which suggest that at least some in the West realize that President Putin is serious that his demands regarding Ukraine must be addressed. Blinken is in Kiev today, Berlin tomorrow, then will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov Friday. Yesterday, German Foreign Minister Baerbock met with Lavrov, as the new Scholz government in Germany is putting itself forward as a mediator. The next days will go a long way toward determining whether there is a step back from a possible nuclear World War III.
A Twitter Space dialogue between Hussein Askary (@HusseinAskary, Southwest Asia Coordinator for the Schiller Institute), Cade Levinson (@GeldStandard), and Daniel Burke (@Burke4Senate) from January 13, 2022. Read about the economic potential of U.S. cooperation with China's Belt and Road Initiative: "The Coming US Economic Miracle on the New Silk Road."
At a bad time for the British and U.S. war party which is striving to put down Russia and China in confrontations over Ukraine and Taiwan, China’s annual economic data release has shown that its economy again grew faster than that of the United States in 2021. And more important, China’s credit channel is fully open both for domestic industry and Belt and Road loans, while U.S. banks’ lending cannot grow until the dominant Wall Street megabanks are broken up and reorganized.This time, financial analysts and business economists in New York and London had widely and confidently predicted, early in 2021, that the U.S. economy’s supposed “red-hot recovery” from what was alleged to be simply a pandemic-induced recession, would cause it to outgrow China’s economy both in 2021 and 2022. They were proven wrong. China’s GDP grew by 8.1% over the year, and *South China Morning Post) reported that former World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin now estimates China’s economy may become the world’s largest by GDP in 2028, rather than 2030 as he had previously forecast. Industrial production grew by 9.6%, fixed asset investment by 4.9%, job creation was at 12.69 million, and retail sales grew by 12.5%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics release Jan. 17. China’s real disposable personal income, after inflation, rose by 8.1% in 2021—and for urban areas, by 7.1%—while Americans’ average real weekly wages fell by 2.3% over the year. In a strategic crisis in which an effective partnership of Russia and China has stopped a “color revolution” attempt in Kazakhstan and is pushing to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, this development makes reality clearer for American policymakers. The feared U.S. Treasury sanctions, including anti-China tariffs, do not work against these two major economic and scientific powers, although they devastate developing-nation adversaries and are killing or exiling millions of Afghans. Sudden coal shortages, price spikes and even blackouts in late summer, triggered in China by London’s global Green New Deal, were handled quickly by regulatory action while Europe struggles. These economic facts of life will also affect the Federal Reserve and the dominant dollar. The People’s Bank of China was actually lowering interest rates and the reserve requirement ratio for banks as 2021 ended. The Fed supposedly plans several rate increases to “control inflation” which is out of control at 7% for consumer goods and almost 10% for producer goods. But its data presumably show the Fed’s governors that the U.S. real economy is again contracting, after failing to regain even early-2020 pre-COVID levels of activity. Seriously raising short-term interest rates, and the impact on long-term rates, could not only blow out the “everything bubble” of debt, but trigger another deep recession. U.S. industrial production dropped slightly, −0.1% in December, and is just about equal to late 2019 and −3% lower than its level of mid-2018. Manufacturing output fell by −0.3% in December and is about 5% below the mid-2018 level; again, equal to that of late 2019. Construction investment and employment are lower than in 2018, particularly in “public and government structures,” although contractors are expecting new highway and bridge contracts from the $1.2 infrastructure legislation just passed. Retail sales also fell in December, as a reaction to inflation of consumer goods. But the most dramatic contrast in the economies, is effective credit policy: Outstanding loans by China’s banks, including overseas lending, grew by 11.7% for the year; and although the big Wall Street and regional U.S. banks are crammed with trillions in excess deposits through Federal Reserve quantitative easing programs, American banks’ loans outstanding grew by less than 0.5% in 2021. An initiative for a new international credit and monetary system, a Rooseveltian New Bretton Woods, could now originate from the Eurasian “strategic triangle” nations of China, Russia and India and be proposed to the United States as a solution for strategic crises—jointly seek the benefit of third countries. This must begin with modern medical facilities and food aid for Afghanistan and other war-destroyed nations, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute propose.
