David Dobrodt

Diane Sare, a longtime associate of former U. S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, is a candidate for the United States Senate from the State of New York. Sare, a musician, who founded the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus, is running against Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader of the Senate, and a leading spokesman for the bankrupt institutions on Wall Street and the City of London. Currently serving on the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, Schumer has been a leading supporter of every one of the illegal “regime change” wars of the past two decades. He is also one of the major proponents of nationwide legalization of recreational marijuana, in spite of the fact that the United States surpassed 100,000 drug overdose deaths in the last year. He is now a leading backer of financial warfare against the Russian people in the form of draconian sanctions and other measures, as well as being the prime sponsor of the anti-China “Innovation and Competition Act,” which are driving the United States and NATO toward a potential nuclear confrontation with both of these nations, while doing massive damage to our own economy. Sare’s campaign against Schumer is already demonstrating the potential to unite patriots of the nation and citizens of the world to bring about a new paradigm for mankind based on peace through development, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon LaRouche, ending the British geopolitical divisions of the world once and for all.

Mike Billington: Greetings! This is Mike Billington. I’m a co-editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, and I’m here today, March 11, with Diane Sare, who is a candidate for the U.S. Senate versus Senator Chuck Schumer in the state of New York. Diane is also the founder of the Schiller Institute New York City Chorus and a longtime associate of Lyndon LaRouche. Welcome, Diane.

Diane Sare: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Billington: Your opponent, Chuck Schumer, has been called the Senator from Wall Street—and he’s been called a lot of other things! Running against him clearly has both local and national and, in fact, international implications. How do you see the role of your campaign in the extreme strategic and economic crisis of the world today?

Sare: I think we definitely need a voice nationally for the policies of Lyndon LaRouche, particularly since everything that he warned about throughout his many years of economic forecasting, political forecasting, is now occurring. Most recently, one of our associates, Paul Gallagher, brought up Mr. LaRouche’s comments after the murder of Qaddafi in Libya, saying that the intent of this was to go for war with Russia, not because of anything Russia had done, but to create a major conflagration so that the City of London and Wall Street, the great financial interests which Schumer represents, could in effect blow out the system under the cover of war, and then write off all of their debt. So LaRouche was warning of this already in 2011. Schumer, as the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, is the hatchet man, the front man for these policies. He actually bragged at an event—I attended a cocktail reception at City and State magazine where he bragged that a hip-hop band on Staten Island had given him the nickname “Killer Chuck.” I think it is a very appropriate moniker for his activity.

Billington: You’re running as a LaRouche Independent candidate in New York. What does that mean exactly, and why are you not running in one of the major parties?

Sare: I’m glad you asked. This is really very important. As LaRouche said on his 90th birthday, the party system—or the “potty” system—is dead. It’s finished. You see the unity of both major parties in the mobilization and build up for World War III, for example, and on sanctions on Russia, for which Schumer has been one of the leading proponents, as he is on sanctions against China. Ninety-eight out of 100 senators always seem to vote the same way—that is a broken system. There is no such thing as a two-party system. Roger Stone has called it the “duopoly,” and I think the American people, frankly, have had it. I think they’re smart enough in the state of New York to realize that it’s over.

One of the peculiar aspects of the very corrupt election system here is that there is no such thing as “running as an independent candidate.” You actually have to create a body, which they call an “independent body,” and you then have your own party line on the ballot. You’re allowed to have a name of 15 letters. I’ll have to have an abbreviation for independent since my independent body is going to be called “LaRouche Independent.” Then you have an emblem for your party, your independent body. My body’s emblem will be a treble clef, because I want the musical aspect of the campaign to be there on the ballot for everybody to see. That’s the situation. The state has made it extremely difficult for a non-major-party-affiliated candidate to get on the ballot. Just recently, in the 2020-2021 budget, they arbitrarily increased the number of signatures that an independent statewide candidate needs to get on the ballot from 15,000 to 45,000, in the same six-week period of time as in the past!

Billington: That’s rather ironic, given all the talk about voting rights these days, that they’re making it virtually impossible for independents to even get on the ballot, to give voters options. Do you have more to say on that?

Sare: Yes. They also got rid of two very significant parties. You can call them minor parties, but the Green Party and the Libertarian Party have had many candidates over the years. The Libertarian Party just celebrated its 50-year anniversary. They have organization in every county in the state. The previous law said you needed 50,000 votes every four years—for example, the presidential election years—to keep your ballot line. They changed that to two percent of the vote, or 130,000 votes! The Libertarian candidate, I think, had 104,000 votes last time when he ran for governor. The Greens had something similar, about 98,000. They both were thrown off the ballot with this this new law! They are therefore now required to get 45,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot like independent candidates. Another party, Serve America, was also thrown off. Alternative views to the mainstream duopoly are essentially denied to the voters.

Billington: The Schiller Institute, which was founded by Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has issued a petition in 11 different languages calling for the convocation of an international conference to establish a new security and development architecture for all nations. How is your campaign acting on that concept and that petition?

Sare: Interestingly, this war drive and the insanity of it all, and the fact that we installed a pro-Nazi regime in Ukraine in 2013-14 under the Obama-Biden administration, has caused many people to start listening to us and all of the spokesmen for LaRouche. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, myself, Schiller Institute spokesman Harley Schlanger, LaRouche’s French associate Jacques Cheminade in Europe, are all reporting that we’re each getting massively increasing numbers of viewers of our posts on YouTube, Facebook, social media, etc. In my case, my Friday symposium, I’ve had a tenfold increase in the number of people watching, and some of my videos have gone to 70,000 views. People are developing, and are hungry, clearly, for a more profound conception, which Helga brings into this: the idea of the Treaty of Westphalia. First of all, it is a beautiful, timely idea, because people who would argue, “Oh, we’re too far gone, you’ll never stop war. They’ve always been killing each other,” etc. Well, have we been killing each other longer than the one hundred and fifty years of religious fighting in Europe that led to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia? What would cause people to adopt such an agreement as the Treaty of Westphalia could only be that they are considering the future rather than saying, “Well, I have to get revenge for this, that, and the other thing which was done to me or my nation.” Instead, they say, “Where is this behavior leading us?” When you put it in that perspective, as we can see right now, the behavior of the British, the Biden administration, NATO, is surely leading us into World War III.

Perhaps people can say, “Well, we would like a different goal. We need to change the trajectory of this,” and therefore people may be able to put aside their pragmatic or vengeance-driven motivations. Emphatically in this approach is LaRouche’s Four Laws, because there is no such thing as a static, no-war situation. You only have motion, either forwards or backwards, so you must have economic development. And you must have an economic platform that goes with that, starting with the bankruptcy of the rotten financial system, which the reimposition of the Glass-Steagall Act would allow to occur.

What I’ve seen happening with my social media posts as I’ve been promoting this petition, many people are writing in the comments: “I signed, I signed.” So we’re gathering signatures that way. We will also be releasing this week a listing of over 130 VIP signers representing institutions around the world. I think this is an urgently needed initiative, because you have to have a sense of where you want to end up. You never should enter a war if you don’t have a conception of victory. We didn’t choose the war that we’re in, but if we want to have an idea of how to solve it, we must have in mind an arrival point which we must achieve. And I think this petition is really brilliant in that regard, because it gives people a sense of how to get out of this crisis.

Billington: The state you’re running in includes one of the great cities of the world, New York City. I would suspect that people who have lived in New York or know New York are very much aware that there’s been a degeneration of that city, which would cause people to perhaps agree more with you, that we need an international agreement to stop not only the strategic crisis, but also the economic crisis. New York was a symbol of the melting pot idea of the United States. What is your approach to the question of New York City and its condition today?

Sare: There was a reason why Lyndon LaRouche in 2014 called for the creation of the Manhattan Project. The idea was not only that New York City was a melting pot, but that it was also the point for unifying the nation. The first president, George Washington, was sworn in there. Alexander Hamilton was based there when he made the proposal at the end of the American Revolution that the war debt of the thirteen states should be taken on by the government as a whole, and not by each state separately. He had a huge brawl with Thomas Jefferson on that point. That was critical. While we did celebrate Evacuation Day, and many of the British left, all of them didn’t. There were certain British sympathizers then, and had the debt not been taken on by the federal government as a whole, it would have been easy to pull the states apart and destroy our new Republic.

So New York was really a center of that, and also of the fight against slavery. Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, and Hamilton were very active proponents of ending slavery as an economic practice. New York developed to be the most important city in the world. The United Nations is located there, and the New York Stock Exchange, which used to have a relationship to productive enterprise—not anymore.

Manhattan has also been a target for people who want to destroy the Republic. I have to say, what we’ve seen since the pandemic in particular—and there was a great ratcheting down in the 1970s with the Municipal Assistance Corporation, Big Mac, and the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people; shutting down the mental institutions, even shutting down the hospitals, that’s been going on for some time—but in the last couple of years, the city has become like something out of a movie. It’s really horrible.

There was a team of LaRouche organizers who set up on the Upper West Side with a table, and during their organizing, two large rats at different points came scurrying across the sidewalk right in the middle of their conversations with passers-by. The city is getting overrun with rats. In Brooklyn, people’s cars are getting destroyed by rats because they’re coming in and chewing up all the wiring. You can imagine, you have an epidemic of mental illness. They tossed many people out of the homeless shelters to alleviate crowding during the pandemic and then put them into hotels, with none of the programs that they would normally have. They paid the hotels the full rate—such a Wall Street rip off. They didn’t pay a discounted rate because of an emergency. They paid the full rate for those rooms, two hundred and fifty dollars a night or whatever, to house homeless people, at great expense, to make sure that the “hotel industry” was funded. Everything is a scam. Nothing is done in the interest of the general welfare of the population, but it is done to bail out the system and to promote this Great Reset, the Green New Deal. The other thing, which started with Mayor Mike Bloomberg, was putting in all these bike lanes, shutting down major streets to traffic altogether. As of two years ago, the average speed that you could drive in Manhattan was 4.9 miles per hour.

And now you have people getting pushed in front of subway cars. We’ve had hundreds of incidents like that, committed by people who are mentally ill, who may have drug addiction problems, who are homeless, who are living in the subways. People are now moving back into the city, so you have a slightly higher ratio of stable people to insane people. But there was a period of time at the height of the pandemic when I really felt like I’d walked into a bad movie. I went into a convenience store where there were three people inside, who I think were addicted to drugs. One of them had turned on the ice cone machine, with the stuff coming out of the nozzle with no cup under it—he didn’t notice. The owner was trying to get them to turn it off, but he was clearly terrified for his life. Just surreal scenes, people in affluent neighborhoods waking up to discover that someone had defecated on their doorstep in the morning. That’s the kind of thing that you have going on in New York City. It’s actually quite shocking. I know people who come in from outside of the United States are actually quite horrified by how filthy and run down the city is. We have a new mayor now. I think Mayor Adams would like to do something about it, but can he break out of the Wall Street run axioms to be able to act to defend the general welfare? That’s another question.

Billington: What is needed to restore New York to its previous position in the world?

Sare: That’s a good question. First of all, LaRouche’s Four Laws, urgently. I think you need a CCC type program, like Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. I think it might even be the case that you would have to be like the Chinese, and build a new city somewhere 30 or 40 miles away and move half the population there, so you can rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up.

One of the things we discovered in the flooding which I was not fully aware of, the whole sewer system is about a century old. In Woodside, Queens, where about a dozen people drowned in their basements during Tropical Storm Ida, it turns out that in the 1970s it had been assessed that they did not have adequate sewer lines for the 50,000 people who lived there. The population there is now triple that, yet they never built the improvements that were recommended in the seventies.

So it’s a massive need. We need more care for people who are mentally ill. We need to stop shutting down hospitals. But you can’t do this outside of the context of a reorganization of the whole system. I think people should ask themselves why they think it’s legitimate that AIG can get an $80 billion bailout in a pop. No one ever says, “Where are you going to get the money?” They just come up with it. But when you say, “We have to rebuild the infrastructure of the city from underground up, as part of a modernization of the entire United States,” people say, “Well, how are you going to pay for it?” They should consider, they don’t give a second thought about bailing out some bankrupt Wall Street speculative garbage, but when it comes to investing in things that actually are going to generate growth and a return, they have questions.

I would like to say, you can’t do it in isolation. People in New York do talk about the infrastructure crisis, but you can’t just rebuild New York City alone. It’s a hub of transportation. You’re going to have to consider the railroad lines of New Jersey, New York into Pennsylvania, up to Massachusetts. You’re going to have to think of it as a region, and rebuild several cities simultaneously—New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, all of them are going to have to undergo a transformation simultaneously.

Billington: You’ve also campaigned across the state, holding meetings and events in many parts of the state, and you host a virtual event every Friday night during the pandemic for people from around the state and around the country. You’ve drawn in many people from different layers of society and different professions to address various aspects of the crisis in society. You also use social media a great deal to get out your message and to organize people to this effort. How would you describe the response? You mentioned that you’ve had a huge increase in people watching. How do you find the response to your campaign generally now?

Sare: I think people are relieved. It’s not really a matter of agreement. They want to actually be able to discuss through major problems. The topics on the Friday symposium have included the prison situation, the psychological trauma of prisoners—and there’s a lot more to be discussed on that—the housing situation, the floods. We’ve also had people discussing nuclear power. They just shut down the Indian Point nuclear power station, and I understand in these recent weeks they’re beginning the full dismantling, so it cannot be reopened, which is completely insane given that we’re going to have blackouts and brownouts. Not only are they shutting down Indian Point, but Governor Kathy Hochul has yanked the permits for gas-powered plants that were supposed to replace Indian Point, so we can look forward to not having enough energy. So, top engineers, scientists, people who were victims of the floods, the fire in the Bronx, people who have been working on low-dose radiation, farmers, historians—we’ve had all kinds of guests on the Friday Symposium. I have been told by many people that they find it absolutely delightful, that they follow them every week to see what’s next. What happens is that the people involved in prison advocacy end up getting really interested in what’s happening with Indian Point; the people from Indian Point get interested in knowing what happened in the Battle of Cherry Valley with the massacre by the British and their Native American mercenaries. People who are involved in keeping Evacuation Day alive find out that they’re interested in what happened with the floods in Queens.

What I’m finding with the symposium is, contrary to the media narrative, the American people are not really divided. The algorithms of social media are designed to make us divided, by getting an imaginary or a real profile and just feeding you into a certain track. But, you know, do people need food? Do they need electricity? Do they really want their child to be contemplating what gender they are at the age of five? These are things that people are pretty unified on. People don’t want war. The reason Trump got elected, I believe, had a great deal to do with his pledge to end the never ending “forever wars.” There are many areas of major importance around which Americans are united, and the worse the crisis gets, the more united Americans can become, if you have leadership that is putting a solution on the table.

Billington: Let me note that you are an accomplished trombone player. And as we mentioned, you’re the founder of the Schiller Institute’s New York City Community Chorus and co-conductor. Do you think being a musician has a bearing on your activity as a candidate? And is there a relationship between politics and music, or should there be?

Sare: Yes, definitely. There is an incredible paper by Lyndon LaRouche called, “Politics as Art,” which I would really recommend people read. I think musicians are playing an important role in the world today. You have the orchestra in—I’m not sure where it’s based, perhaps in Jerusalem—of Palestinian and Israeli young people, musicians, performing together. You’ve just had concerts in Western Europe of Ukrainian and Russian music together. The point about music in particular, because it’s not visual, because it’s fully in the mind, it allows you to place yourself where human identity really should be. As LaRouche reminded us, so many times, each of us is ultimately going to die. There is no person who has been here on this planet for two hundred years or something like that. So the question is, “what is your identity? What is it that makes mankind immortal? What are those things that actually remain after our life has disappeared?” When you think from that standpoint, you realize that many of the things that we’re all squabbling over are frankly not that important. The question is mankind as a whole. I think you have a similar effect, although all of us can’t participate in it as easily, when astronauts who’ve been in space and look back on the Earth for the first time, they have an overwhelming sense of the smallness of our planet in the scope of the galaxy and how really insignificant all the borders and divisions are among mankind. That is not to say, just to be very clear for our listeners, that I’m advocating a one world government or something like that. But as in a chorus, as in a symphony orchestra, there is a richness in the diversity. The fact that nations have a national culture and national language, a history of contributions that they’ve made—if you’re taking this from the appropriate standpoint of a classical composition, then what you discover is that the whole of mankind is capable of things greater than the sum of its parts. I think this is very, very important and should not be lost. That’s not to diminish in any way the contributions of the individual person or the individual nation, but actually is an augmentation of those diverse creative breakthroughs.

Billington: Well, I think your campaign is a demonstration of that idea, of acting on behalf of mankind. As Schiller said, one must be both a patriot of one’s nation and a citizen of the world, as I think you’re demonstrating. Is there any final thought that you’d like to leave us with?

Sare: My final thought is that people should consider very seriously the moment we’re in, in history. We may get another chance, but I wouldn’t count on it. I think our chance is now, in this moment. So if you’re alive right now, and you probably are if you’re reading or watching this interview, then the time to act is now. Don’t presume it’s going to exist for some future generation. Your life and what you do with it can be exceedingly important.

Billington: Thank you very much, Diane. People can go to your website, SareforSenate.com, and I encourage you to do so, and to tune in especially for the Friday night events, which are at 7:30 EDT.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche addresses a meeting of youth representing 28 countries on the urgent need to create a youth movement committed to ending the tragedy of geopolitics and replacing it with a New Paradigm. This meeting is a continuation of the process initiated on April 9 by the Schiller Institute with a conference committed to the development of a new international security and development architecture.

View the conference in its entirety. Read and sign our petition calling for a new International Security Architecture.

Join us Live on Saturday, May 7 at 2pm Eastern. It is said that “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” But who, what, makes people sane, healthy, and productive? By what means might we reverse the clear and present dangers of the moment posed by the “Four Horsemen” —Famine, War, Disease, and the Pestilence of usury and financial speculation? 

It has just been reported that “Researchers at Nanjing University investigating the soil samples brought back from the Moon by Chang’e-5, have found active compounds that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and fuel. In particular, they have found samples containing iron-rich and titanium-rich substances which could work as a catalyst to make oxygen using sunlight and carbon dioxide, two of the most abundant resources on the Moon.” 

Carbon dioxide is not only a “resource” on the Moon, but also on Earth—ask any friendly plant. It is “madness,” largely provoked by the “gods” of pseudoscience, to concentrate on “reducing carbon dioxide” when mankind, using nuclear power, can  wield carbon dioxide as a resource. We can increase the energy throughput and energy flux-density of the planet as a whole, for all the billions of people on Earth now, and in the solar system in the future. 

A new security architecture must start with a new development architecture. That development architecture declares that “the world needs more people.” Youth, who have an investment in the future, and not the failed ways of the past, must supersede today’s morally obsolete war madness through reason and scientific progress. Today’s panel will discuss this perspective. 

Panel participants include:

Princy Mthombeni
Florencia Renteria del Toro
Kelvin Kemm
Jose Vega
Kynan Thistlethwaite

Your daily update for May 5, 2022 from Harley Schlanger.

Your daily update from Harley Schlanger for May 4, 2022.

An International Youth Dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Saturday May 7 at 11:00am EDT

Register below

The NATO alliance is now at war with Russia, a war of NATO’s creation. U.S. officials have made explicit that they have no intention of pursuing a negotiated peace. Mankind is on the path to nuclear self-annihilation.

It must not be so. The world desperately needs the political and moral leadership of a new generation to chart a new course for humanity.

How did we get here?

The danger of extinction war is a manifestation of the final stage of a half-century of accelerating decline of the trans-Atlantic sector, a decline brought about by hyperinflationary money-printing, bail-outs of speculative assets, imperial “regime change” wars, and intentional “Green” deindustrialization. In 2019, already over 810 million people lacked sufficient food. By the end of 2021, the World Food Programme estimated that over 230 million were nearing outright famine. In March, 2022, Liu Zhiqun, a Chinese economist with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, warned that 1 billion people could soon face starvation as a result of the unilateral sanctions imposed on Russia and their effect on the global economy.

The Malthusian policy of world depopulation adopted by the financial oligarchy in the City of London and Wall Street has succeeded in creating an era without a future. Their financial bubble, nearing $2 quadrillion of worthless gambling debts, is primed to collapse in a crash many times worse than the 2007-08 crisis. In early 2020, an Executive Intelligence Review report revealed that the global real unemployment rate already stood at 46%. A global pandemic has taken over six million lives, and nations remain unprepared for the next deadly variant, or new virus. The global food supply is under attack by the Great Reset’s murderous “conservation” policies, which order farmers to let their land lie fallow. Hyperinflation is destroying the ability of human beings to live.

To rescue humanity from complete destruction requires nothing less than the creation of a new system—a new security and development architecture for the world, one coherent with the idea that man is in the living image of God, and that therefore each human life is sacred. Already an expression of such a system, devoted to the sovereign right for each nation to achieve economic development, is being built. The Belt and Road Initiative of China, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization all belong to this New Paradigm in principle—they can serve as the foundation for an international economic architecture designed to feed the world, build necessary megaprojects of infrastructure, and drive scientific breakthroughs in fusion energy and space science needed for the next fifty years.

What may convert this potential into actuality? Is it not the passion of individuals to become a necessary force for the common good? The world depends upon its youth to identify with the New Paradigm and manifest it, such that their beautiful vision of the future may overwhelm the pessimism and failed traditional modes of thought of the crumbling old order.

The March 28 Schiller Institute policy proposal, “The LaRouche Plan for a New International Economic Architecture,” outlines in detail how the New Paradigm can be created by the actions of leading nations. Our petition, “Convoke an International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations,” has been circulated across the world and signed by over 4,000 people, including hundreds of prominent public figures. The Schiller Institute’s April 9 conference devoted to this theme brought together panelists from the highest levels of government in Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

We invite youth from every nation to join us Saturday May 7 at 11:00am EDT for an international dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Founder and Chairwoman of the International Schiller Institute, about what youth can do to bring about the victory humanity needs. Proceedings will be simultaneously translated into Spanish.

WHEN
May 07, 2022 at 11:00am – 3pm EDT
WHERE
Zoom

In response to the Schiller Institute petition “Convoke an International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations,” Alessia Ruggeri, spokeswoman of Comitato per la Repubblica, Rome, Italy, issues a clarion call for a peace conference in the spirit of the Treaty of Westphalia that ended 30 years of religious war in the 17th Century. Ms. Ruggeri is one of over 120 prominent signers from around the world to the Schiller Institute’s petition.

Princy Mthombeni addresses nuclear power’s role in the continent of Africa.. View Princy Mthombeni’s entire speech here:

Read and sign our petition calling for a new International Security Architecture.

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

March 12—President Putin has now responded to the West’s tightening sanctions with a combination of measures unprecedented in modern times, to defend the Russian economy against an attempt to “destroy Russia, Putin and the Russian system.” In a meeting with Prime Minister Mishustin and a number of decision-makers that can be considered a war cabinet, Putin, Mishustin and Finance Minister Siluanov announced nationalization measures and capital controls.

We are now in uncharted waters and—depending on how the West reacts—at the beginning of a development that will end in either a complete collapse of the global economic and financial system, or even a new world war, or will establish a new paradigm in international relations. The publication of the Schiller Institute’s new petition calling for a new conference in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia could not have come more at a more propitious time. Because every thinking person should be aware that continuing the escalation spiral towards Russia, as is now being pursued by the U.S., Great Britain, and the EU, involves risks that can get completely out of control in a very short time.

NATO’s capital error was, and is, to assume that it can continue the Eastward expansion and encirclement of Russia indefinitely without this leading to countermeasures. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin had already sounded the alarm bells that everyone but the deaf should have heard, namely that a unipolar world order was not acceptable to Russia. Putin justified the December 17 demands on the U.S. and NATO for legally binding security guarantees—after a total of five Eastward expansions of NATO—with the fact that he no longer had any space to which he could retreat. Eight years of military attacks on the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk by Ukrainian forces, which killed 14,000 Russian-speakers, received almost no mention in Western media. Putin received no response to the core of his demands.

The economic equivalent of war, the sanctions, are a form of warfare with the stated aim of destroying not just Putin, but also Russia and the “Russian system.” French Finance Minister Le Maire declared his agreement with this aim with such undisguised hatred that he was reined in by President Macron and had to withdraw his statement. Similar statements had already been published on January 25 and then again at the end of February by two unnamed White House officials. The aim of American policy is to prevent Russia from any economic diversification away from oil and gas and to deny it access to advanced technologies. Ursula von der Leyen said the same thing.

The Western central banks reacted to the beginning of the war by confiscating more than $300 billion in Russian assets and announcing sanctions of the same sort as those used against Iran, i.e., also the extraterritorial application of American sanctions against third countries, as well as the exclusion of Russia from the status of a “most favored nation.” In the U.S. Imperial faction’s home organ, the Atlantic Council blog, “experts” Brian O’Toole and Daniel Fried, under the headline, “What’s Left To Sanction in Russia? Wallets, Stocks, and Foreign Investments” indulge in speculation as to how economic warfare against Russia could be escalated. The American and European sanctions have exceeded all expectations; in just two weeks they have plunged the Russian economy into a depression, the isolation means a disaster for the Russian people, but further escalations up to a full financial embargo and a total ban on all transactions, imports and exports are pending. This is the West’s final move to isolate Russia from the global economy. [See https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/whats-left-to-sanction-in-russia-wallets-stocks-and-foreign-investments/]

Do the authors of this policy really believe that all non-Western states, including China, will submit to this dictate in the same way that, for the most part, Iran did? The intention is evident to create enough economic chaos in Russia to prevent Putin from continuing his military actions in Ukraine and to embarrass the Russian people to such an extent that people from the security apparatus will depose Putin, or that the “Russian system” shattered, as Le Maire put it.

Putin has now reacted to this in an economic way, in line with his strategic thinking. At the said meeting he announced a package of measures to defend the Russian economy. From now on, foreign companies that withdraw from Russia without any comprehensible reason will be taken over by an “external (i.e., Russian) management,” and strict capital and currency controls will be introduced. Furthermore, liabilities to other countries are to be paid only in rubles (which have meanwhile been massively devalued), which can then only be exchanged for Russian assets confiscated by Western central banks. Foreign exchange generated through exports must be made available to the Russian central bank. Likewise, Putin enacted a series of measures to defend the domestic economy, such as a six-month moratorium on all payments in the agricultural sector to ensure its uninterrupted production.

The American government spokeswoman Jen Psaki acted surprised that these measures had brought us back to “1917,” i.e., the Russian Revolution. In fact, however, the West, through its economic warfare, has managed to checkmate the representatives of liberal economic theory, who had had a significant influence since the Yeltsin period. There is much to suggest that the West’s sanctions mania will prove to be an absolute boomerang for the transatlantic financial system, which is already on the verge of implosion, and will instead promote the emergence of an alternative financial system.

Sergey Glazyev, a former presidential adviser, economics professor and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was relatively calm about the impact of the sanctions. A new economic order will develop; after the collapse of the Soviet system, the collapse of the American system is now taking place; the West is destroying itself through the sanctions it has imposed. You have to get rid of the dollar because a currency that you can’t work with and that can be frozen tomorrow is worse than useless. The situation is not easy, but Russians should not panic, because Russia has no limits to economic growth and with the right macroeconomic policies today, economic growth of at least 10% per year can be achieved already this year. Glazyev has written a book on the reasons for the success of China’s economic model and has long suggested that Russia should adopt its own version of that model.

The idea of completely isolating Russia and thus “destroying the Russian system” is rather the product of arrogant Western fantasies. A growing number of states are refusing to participate in new bloc formation and are more willing to act as mediators, such as, for example, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Israel, South Africa, Argentina, just to name a few. However, in the short term, the consequences of the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia and Belarus, because of rising prices for energy, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. will have catastrophic effects on agriculture and thus on world hunger, which threatens about 400 million people this year .

There is also a risk that the confrontation between the U.S. and NATO—with the EU as an appendage—and Russia could escalate into a major war, including the possibility of a nuclear war. But even if there were “only” a worse financial collapse than that of 2008, the world could plunge into chaos that could be fatal for a large part of humanity.

Only a complete departure from geopolitical confrontation, and instead, the establishment of a new international security architecture that takes into account the interests of every state on this planet, can finally overcome this danger. The relevant petition from the Schiller Institute, which proposes a new conference in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, serves to bring together all the forces around the world who are committed to a new paradigm in politics. We urgently need a new model of relations between the nations of this world that makes it possible to tackle the existential problems of humanity together, such as overcoming world hunger, the pandemic, energy and raw material security through the development of new technologies such as nuclear fusion and Space Science.

The best thing you, dear citizens and readers of these lines, can do to regain world peace and overcome the global economic and financial crisis is to sign this petition and help spread it as widely as possible among your circle of acquaintances, on social media, and in all conceivable fora. Contrary to what the media and mainstream politics are trying to tell us, neither Russia nor China are our enemies, but we must take the standpoint of one humanity if we are to survive this crisis.

zepp-larouche@eir.de

Here are the links mentioned in the Update:

1. Please sign and circulate the Schiller Institute Petition: “Convoke an International Conference to Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.”
   
2. Use the press release with VIP signers to organize others.