David Dobrodt

Daily COVID deaths reached a record high of 3,100 yesterday in the United States, with a total number of 106,600 patients hospitalized nationwide–the highest number ever according to the COVID Tracking Project. The total number of deaths has reached 289,529, and the average of daily new cases is over 200,000. Over the past week, there have been 1.2 million new cases. According to the Minnesota-based Center for Infectious Disease and Research Policy (CIDRAP), the World Health Organization’s weekly epidemiological report showed just under 4 million reported cases worldwide in the last seven days, half of which are in the Americas. 

According to the New York Times a third of Americans now live in areas which don’t have enough ICU capacity. Hospitals serving more than 100 million Americans have fewer than 15% ICU beds available. Total COVID cases in the U.S. now amount to 15,285,261 according to the Johns Hopkins COVID dashboard.

A team of 45 medical personnel has been deployed to Wisconsin by the Defense Department to augment medical staff in hospitals overwhelmed by a flood of COVID19 patients. The facilities are in an area of Wisconsin with some of the highest and most sustained rates of COVID-19 infections. The Marshfield Clinic system, which oversees the facilities receiving help, has been utilizing volunteers from a state emergency assistance program “but the need for more staff to meet patient demand remains a challenge,” Marshfield Clinic Health System CEO Susan Turney said, reported the {Milwaukee Journal Sentinel}. “Because of the prolonged and intense nature of this crisis, many hospitals are near full capacity and medical staff is exhausted,” she said in a Dec. 9 statement. Wisconsin  Gov. Tony Evers called the military support “crucial” and thanked the DOD for providing it.

The Americas showed a 12% increase in cases over the previous week After the U.S., Brazil showed the next highest number of new cases with 295,000 –a 35% increase over the previous week.  Dr. Carissa Etienne, Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional adjunct of the WHO,  warned in a Dec. 9 press conference that Brazil’s health and hospital system is at the breaking point, and that Colombia and Paraguay are also struggling to deal with increasing cases. Dr. Etienne reported that the Americas are  experiencing “the highest levels of COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic.” It is crucial now, she said, to boost hospital capacity, and  “redouble preventive measures,” especially as the region heads into the  holiday season.

The SpaceX Starship prototype Sn8 made a test flight on Wednesday which demonstrated the maneuvers which will be used in descent and landing back on Earth from deep space destinations.  At roughly 12 kilometers altitude the stainless steel vehicle flipped over 90 degrees to become roughly parallel to the ground, and used its flaps and fins to slow and control descent before reigniting its engines and flipping back 90 degrees to be perpendicular to the ground for a propulsive landing at its intended landing pad. On the test flight the propulsion was not enough to sufficiently slow the vehicle to the intended speed of touchdown, so the vehicle hit hard and exploded. 

However, all involved were ecstatic as everything else went according to intention.  SpaceX, which aims at producing a vehicle every two weeks in its Boca Chica, Texas plant, has been rapidly testing systems to failure and is lining up the next vehicle for further testing.  Better than reading this account, would be to watch one of the YouTube videos which YouTube has not yet figured out how to ban.  Here is a good ten minute one.

In a preview of what will be the focus of this weekend’s Schiller Institute conference, Helga Zepp-LaRouche emphasized today during her weekly dialogue that an underlying theme will be to address the “wrong method of thinking” which characterizes most political discussion in the western world.

One cannot solve problems by applying the same mistaken method which produced those problems. That’s why it is so essential to look to the best thinkers of the past, who launched cultural Renaissances and scientific revolutions — such as Cusa, Leibniz and Lyndon LaRouche — to find solutions to the dangerous crises which threaten to destroy civilization today.

International Press Release

The International Investigative Commission for Truth in Elections met on November 28 in a hearing sponsored by the Schiller Institute to hear testimony regarding irregularities and charges of voting fraud in the U.S. Presidential election. The following is the statement issued today by the distinguished panel of jurists. A number of the members of the Commission also issued an additional individual statement of their findings.

Statement of the International Investigative Commission for Truth in Elections 

Dec. 5, 2020

Commissioners

1) Marino Elsevyf (Dominican Republic): Attorney-at-law; member of the 1995 Martin Luther King International Tribunal. 

2) Simón Levy (Mexico): Doctor of Law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); former under-secretary of Tourism of Mexico. 

3) David Meiswinkle (United States): Attorney-at-law in the state of New Jersey.

4) Juan Francisco Soto (Argentina): Constitutional attorney; legal counsel to Yacyretá Binational Entity (Paraguayan-Argentinian Yacyretá Dam).

Witnesses:

1.William Binney

2. Harley Schlanger

3. Col. Richard Black

4. Sen. Mario Scavello

5. Bennie Smith

6. Leah Hoopes

On Saturday, November 28, 2020, a virtual meeting was held on Zoom with a group of attorneys and legal experts who served as Commissioners in order to hear testimonies of six witnesses to alleged election ballot fraud concerning the recent U.S. elections, held on November 3, 2020, which included a record number of mail-in-ballots sent before the election began.

Witnesses presented testimony regarding the different problems and incidents that they were aware of that occurred in the recent general election, as well as their insights into those problems.

In summary: The witnesses recounted a host of what they understood to be violations of election law and of equal protection under the law concerning the fundamental right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.

From their observations, they believe the election law was violated and that the massive violations could have been the result of an organized and orchestrated plan to violate election law, especially in swing states, and to unfairly and illegally alter the outcome of the election, including but not limited to the following examples: 

1) The Smartmatic and Dominion companies were reported to be owners of voting machines and software that were used to alter the vote and direct that vote in favor of the Democratic presidential candidate, according to testimony presented to the Commission. Testimony was given concerning fraudulent voting results involved with the use of these particular machines in Venezuela and the Philippines, and that the Commissioners were informed that these vote tallying machines were banned from use in elections by such countries as Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and Great Britain. Electronic fraud was alleged particularly in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

2) William Binney, the former technical director of the National Security Agency, testified about the security problems involving the vote tallying machines, and spoke about the evident inconsistency, in one case, of having 100,000 votes in Philadelphia which were stated to have been counted at 3:00 a.m., all for Joe Biden. Binney asserted that he believes that this anomaly cannot possibly be explained without recognizing the strong possibility of the existence of fraud.

3) Bennie Smith, a voting machine expert, testified that algorithm programs were used in voting machines which cause the fractioning of the vote in favor of Democratic party candidates, thereby violating the principle of “one person, one vote”.

4) Former Virginia State Senator Colonel Richard Black, USA (ret.) stated that the circumstances surrounding the U.S. elections and the planned protests that accompanied the elections were similar to the Arab Spring protests and government changes in the Far East and Eastern Europe.

He also highlighted the arson of St. John’s Church a few feet from the White House, the undermining of Presidential authority, and the media’s praise for the turbulence and insurrection.

He also noted articles published in {Defense One} magazine, where retired officers practically called for a coup against President Trump and his removal from the Presidency if he did not accept the current election result.

Col. Black emphasized that, in his experience as a former state senator, the vast majority of voters who indicate their preference in the category of President, go on to fill out their choices for the various other categories on the ballot. Therefore, the unusually large number of ballots that were filled out only for the office of President but which left the other lines empty seemed implausible. This indicated to him the existence of massive fraud, which made a Democrat the winner for President, but which made Republicans victorious throughout the rest of the ticket, including the election of congressmen, senators and state and local officials.

5) Harley Schlanger, a spokesman for the Schiller Institute, testified about the reported electrical blackouts in the early morning hours of the elections, which affected the voting machines. He also referred to reports of improperly linking of voting machines to the internet, as well as ballots cast with missing signatures and without verification of the same. He highlighted the developments in Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona, where narrow margins of victory for Biden were reported. 

He further spoke about the close business and political connections between Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, the Chairman of Smartmatic’s parent company SGO, and the billionaire financier of the Arab Spring, George Soros. He also stressed further the fingerprints of Wall Street, the City of London and the “Deep State” as players in this election.

The significance of so-called “glitches” was also discussed, and that “glitches” were actually indications of vote fraud opportunities in the software, as were the existence of backdoor access to the machines. 

6) Leah Hoopes, a Republican Committeewoman and poll worker in Pennsylvania, testified that starting at 7:00 a.m. on election day, many polling centers had no Republican observers present. She observed that many voting machines did not provide receipts to voters, after they cast their ballots, exercising their right to vote. She said that she had seen between 50,000 and 70,000 unopened ballots without a chain of custody. She also stated that she felt intimidated and very angry about the inability to exercise the right to vote. She stated that, as an observer, she was kept 20 feet or more away, and could not even see, and therefore was unable to challenge the ballots from where she was located. She stated that scanners were not working and that votes were being counted for two-and-a-half days in a back room without observers present to see how the ballots were being handled.

7) Pennsylvania state Senator Mario Scavello testified that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had no problems with their previous voting machines, but that the state’s governor nevertheless decertified the voting machines this year and forced the adoption of new, problematic voting machines on Pennsylvanian voters. He said that those machines are a suspected source of fraudulent voting. This 2020 general election is the first time the new voting machines were used.

8) Mexican citizen Daniel Marmolejo, a journalist, in the course of asking a question of the witnesses, spoke about the importance of scanners  in creating a voting record and the vulnerability of electronic voting. He made a reference  to the electoral crisis in Mexico in the 2006 elections, which involved fraud against Andrés Manuel López Obrador, currently the President of Mexico.

The Commission of attorneys and legal experts had the opportunity to question each witness concerning their testimony. The legal battle that is currently being waged in the courts of swing states was taken into consideration by the witnesses, and they expressed serious concerns over violations of election rights law, and questioned whether the Federal Electoral Commission would investigate fraud.

Finally, all the participants and the members of the Commission stated their appreciation of the Schiller Institute’s efforts in organizing this hearing on the 2020 electoral crisis in the United States.

The Commission heard testimony from six credible witnesses and concludes from that testimony the following:

1) The U.S. Presidential elections held on November 3, 2020, appear to have had serious irregularities, especially in key swing states, which raise legitimate legal and civil questions regarding the violation of both Federal and state election laws. 

2) The Commission recommends that evidence of voter fraud must be specified in each state whose validity must be determined in part through forensic tests, audits of voting machines, expert testimony, eyewitness accounts, and examination and cross examination of witnesses in the courts.

3) There must be a determination by the courts as to whether the alleged fraudulent votes which apparently occurred were so significant and appreciable, that they could have altered and impacted the results of the election sufficiently to make that election null and void in those states where the manipulation or alteration of the vote occurred.

4) The competent committees should be called into session in each of the state legislatures where there were reports of serious irregularities. Votes cannot be validated where there is a “reasonable doubt” that they may have been fraudulent. Furthermore, it is a Constitutional responsibility (cf. Constitution of the United States, 1787) that falls to each of the states, to arbitrate with all means at their disposal in order to protect votes cast according to the will of the voter. 

5) There must be a federal criminal investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy to undermine the Presidential election of 2020, not only by domestic and internal interests who may have been involved, but also by the possible connection to foreign agents and or countries that would trespass on the sovereignty and freedoms of the United States and its citizens.

Some of the questionable voting-day practices which were mentioned during the witness testimony, and which should be investigated, include:

1) Third parties voting on an untold number of unlawfully acquired absentee mail-in ballots with no signature verification.

2) Republican challengers denied the right to observe and monitor voting.

3) Republican challengers denied access to monitoring of absentee votes.

4) Ineligible ballots counted.

5) Lack of signature verification.

6) Receiving absentee ballots not requested.

7) Remote access to voting machines.

8) Remote troubleshooting of voting machines.

9) Back door possibilities on those machines.

10) Lax control of memory cards.

11) Early processing of absentee ballots.

12) Absentee ballots never requested.

13) People moved out of state voting.

14) The integrity of the voting machines and the manner in which the votes are counted.

15) Scanners not working.

16) The influence of the news media.

17) The influence of social networking platforms.

18) The influence of George Soros, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, and others.

19) The influence of Wall Street, the City of London and the “Deep State.”

While China’s Chang’e 5 mission’s orbiter and ascendor are on their way back to Earth with extensive lunar soil samples from various depths, a Japanese space capsule returning the world’s first asteroid subsurface samples has landed in the remote Australian Outback. The spacecraft Hayabusa2 (“Peregrine Falcon2”) released the small capsule on Saturday and sent it towards Earth to deliver samples from a distant asteroid. At about 6 miles above ground, a parachute was opened to slow its fall and beacon signals were transmitted to indicate its location in the sparsely populated area of Woomera in southern Australia. It is reported recovered “in perfect shape”.

Chang’e 5, after lifting off the lunar surface on Thursday, completed the ascendor’s docking with its orbiter on Sunday, on its mission to bring back lunar samples for the first time in more than 40 years. A robot arm lifted the container holding the samples into the orbiter. The orbiter will separate from the probe and leave lunar orbit on its return journey to Earth.

Nine former governors of American states met in the Fall to address what they described as “the toll a deteriorating U.S.-China relationship has had on their states.” The National Committee on United States-China Relations  and the U.S. Heartland China Association are hosting a forum on Monday, Dec. 7, with four of these former governors, who note in the promo for the event: “As localities have faced job cuts, lost markets, multiple crises in higher education, and reduced trade revenues, among others, the governors all agreed that we must work to stabilize the bilateral relationship and develop a long-term strategy that recognizes that while the United States and China inevitably will compete in some areas, it will be essential for us to cooperate in others.”

The four are: Bob Holden (Missouri, D, 2001-2005), Jon Huntsman, Jr. (Utah, R, 2005-2011), Gary Locke (Washington, D, 1997-2005), and Rick Snyder (Michigan, R, 2011-2019). Both Locke and Huntsman are past ambassadors to China. Gov. Holden, together with Sen. Adlai Stevenson from Illinois, founded the U.S. Heartland China Association in 2003, which now represents 20 states from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

Join Jacques Cheminade and Harley Schlanger with your host Dennis Speed for our weekly Saturday Manhattan Project meeting.

Related to the ongoing Chinese mission to collect lunar soil samples on the Moon, CGTN is pointing to the vast reserves of helium-3 there, writing:

“Modern science has revealed that most of the energy we use today originated from sunlight – coal and oil are basically storage of ancient sunlight. Scientists and engineers have been trying to build a smaller sun on Earth for decades. And helium-3 is a great fuel to do that.

“100 tons of helium-3 can generate the energy needed by all humans for a year. And there may be a million tons of helium-3 on the Moon – which can help humans survive another 10,000 years. Building the artificial sun requires many strict conditions, some of which can be easily met on the Moon since the sphere has much less gravity than the Earth.

“Imagine if we don’t need oil anymore. Lots of wars will become pointless and we may enjoy one of the most peaceful ages ever. Isn’t that great? And that’s why we should continue the effort of lunar exploration. China’s international Moon lab could be a good start.”

This is not the first time that CGTN has highlighted the helium-3 issue, but has been a steady companion to most of its coverage of the Chang’e-5 mission since it began. It has also been underlined by many of the researchers involved in the Chang’e-5 project in their briefings on the project.

In the midst of an increasing danger of war and an accelerating collapse of the global economic/financial system, it would be a catastrophe were Joe Biden to be inaugurated in January, and bring in with him the team of neoliberals and War Hawks being presented as his cabinet.

Instead, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said, President Trump has some options to break through the efforts of those, including the media, who have been running a coup against him for four years: declassify the documents which show the corrupt and illegal acts of his opponents, and order them to be made public; appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the election fraud; and pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, and bring them to the U.S. to expose what they know about the surveillance state, the cyber technologies involved in it, and the endless wars which are the product of the team behind Biden. Such clarity is necessary, as populations in the west are being bombarded by psy-ops designed to confuse and demoralize them.

As we fight against this coup, she said, we must inspire people with solutions which are possible, to address the war danger, disease and hunger, and loss of dignity and hope. The Schiller Institute is sponsoring a two-day, online conference on Dec. 12-13, which will challenge participants to adopt a complete change in thinking needed to break free from the axioms which keep them enslaved in the collapsing system, so nations can engage in both emergency programs to address the crises, while moving into a future based on advances in science and culture. The Chinese Chang’e 5 mission which landed on the Moon on Tuesday is an example of the potential mankind has, once freed from the deadening sophistry of the slogans of “human rights” and “democracy” spouted by today’s failed establishment figures.

The following is translated from Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s lead article for the Dec. 3 issue of the German weekly Neue Solidarität on Nov. 28, 2020.

Although the mainstream media are outdoing one another in presenting Joe Biden and his projected cabinet of super-hawks as the next U.S. administration, and President Donald Trump as a populist monster babbling on about vote fraud, those same media may be in for an unpleasant surprise. The sworn statements of eyewitnesses, documenting various aspects of vote fraud in the “swing” states, represent legal evidence. State representatives and senators of Pennsylvania have just announced their intention to make use of their constitutional right to appoint the electors to the Electoral College themselves.

There are manifold possibilities that the proof of electronic vote fraud via Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines can be produced on time, and that this evidence will suffice to reverse the results of the election. Should that happen, the world will be on the verge of a dam failure, such that literally not one stone will be left standing on the other, and most of the current assumptions about the political realities in the trans-Atlantic world will be swept away. Presumably, the next two weeks leading to the decision of the Electoral College on the confirmation of the next President of the United States will see many aspects of the vote fraud brought to light, in spite of the attempted censorship.

Related to this issue, but touching on the deeper causes of the current civilizational crisis, President Putin noted in his address to the recent annual meeting of the Valdai Club, that we are living in an era of obvious international shocks and crises. As the reason for this crisis, he cited the paradox that mankind, on the one hand, has reached a high level of technological and socio-economic development, but is facing, on the other, an erosion of moral values and reference points, and the feeling that their existence no longer makes sense, or that the purpose of mankind on this planet Earth has been lost. This crisis, Putin went on, cannot be settled through diplomatic negotiations or even a large international conference, but requires a complete revision of our priorities and goals. And this must begin with every single individual, he explained, every community, and every state, and only then can a global configuration emerge. The starting point for such a transformation, he stated, could be the Covid pandemic.

Indeed, the response to the pandemic takes us to the heart of the problem. The relative success of Asia and the failure of the West to bring Covid-19 under control are so obvious that even mainstream newspapers like the Neue Zürcher Zeitung or Die Zeit are now talking about Europe’s arrogance and stubbornness, that prevent it from learning the lessons of the method used in several Asian countries to eradicate the pandemic, rather than simply trying half-heartedly to contain it. As a result of these two different approaches, there has been an extremely low level of new infections and deaths in China, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea, while the pandemic in Europe and the United States threatens to reach exponential growth rates in several countries and completely overwhelm medical capacities. What’s the difference?

From the very beginning, President Xi Jinping made clear that the Chinese government’s absolute priority was to save every single life, and that it was especially important to protect the elderly and therefore those most at risk. After rigorous measures taken at the outset, such as mass testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantines in Wuhan and Hubei province, it was possible to bring the pandemic under control and then, at every new eruption, such as in Beijing and Qingdao, to find and isolate the contaminated individuals thanks to testing and efficient digital contact tracing, and thus stop the spread of the virus.

In Asia overall, where the populations already had the experience of fighting outbreaks of the SARS and MERS viruses, there was neither the irrational refusal to wear face masks, nor the Western distrust of using the cell phone app, although the West deliberately ignored the total surveillance carried out by the NSA and GCHQ. In the meantime, the economic growth rate in China was back up to 4.9% in the fourth quarter and people returned to their normal social life.

In a similar way, Russia prioritized the preservation of lives as the key value of the country’s culture and spiritual tradition. Referencing the dramatic demographic losses suffered by Russia in the 20th century, President Putin stressed in Valdai that it was indispensable to fight for every single person and for the future of every Russian family. He also emphasized that a traditional, essential feature of Russian culture is to give the utmost priority to the protection of human life.

This brings us to the crux of the matter: The supposed contradiction between saving human lives and the “interests of the economy” has long since led to an erosion of the values that, at least in the past, used to be associated with Christianity, which was based on the sanctity of human life. Decades before the coronavirus, when healthcare systems were being privatized, the scale of values had already shifted to profit-making, which is the main reason why Europe and the U.S. were so catastrophically caught off-guard by the outbreak of the pandemic.

The lack of masks, protective gear, and intensive care beds at the outset of the pandemic, and the dramatic shortage still today of nursing staff are the result of this false set of priorities. New indications are continuously coming out about how the Swedish model, so loudly praised by some, was based on achieving herd immunity, which cost many elderly people in nursing homes their lives. Rather than receiving expensive treatments, they were simply given palliative care and left to die. As [SPD health expert] Karl Lauterbach put it: “Crudely speaking, many elderly people are sacrificed there, so the cafes don’t have to shut down.”

It is no less scandalous when in Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world, the predictable shortages in medical care have led to an open discussion of triage. In Italy, the horror images from Bergamo, where the coffins were piled up in the streets last spring and finally had to be carted away by the Army, were evidently not sufficient to ensure that appropriate preparations would be made for the perfectly foreseeable second wave. As a result, physicians in Milan now protest that the decisions they are forced to take are both clinically and ethically unacceptable.

On February 26, the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe handed down a landmark ruling stating that the 2015 ban on commercially assisted suicide was a violation of the Basic Law (Constitution). Since the right to a self-determined death is guaranteed, the Court argued, people must be allowed to make use of offers from third parties to do so. In this spirit, the ARD television channel broadcast the film “Gott” (“God”) on November 23 as an interactive TV event, which is based on the play by Ferdinand von Schirach, portraying a healthy, 78-year-old man who, after the death of his wife, no longer wants to live and seeks a medically assisted suicide. In light of the pandemic and the resulting grave risks for the elderly and the sick, this attempt in the form of a staged show to dispel the historical reservations due to the fact that the Nazis had systematically exterminated “worthless lives,” must be seen as unprecedented cynicism and as a propaganda stunt. And it was successful: After the event, 70.8% of the TV viewers said they were for the right to assisted suicide.

As a reminder: At the Nuremberg trials, Dr. Leo Alexander, a medical advisor to the prosecution, warned of the utilitarian thinking that was behind euthanasia, stating that it began with a quite subtle shift in the attitude of physicians concerning the costs of treating patients, who then quickly became categorized as “unworthy lives.” To follow this slippery slope once again, in the conditions of such a massively escalating economic and financial crisis, can only be described in Germany as historical amnesia.

We are right now in the midst of tectonic changes in the strategic situation, in a time when what is really at stake is war or peace, and when above all the dramatic developments in the United States cannot be understood, unless one regards them as an expression of an existential battle between the old, declining paradigm of the unipolar world and a new paradigm, aimed at creating a new world order that allows the long-term survival of the human species. The revision of the priorities and aims of society, evoked by Putin, that should become the foundation of this new paradigm must begin with the image of man that considers human life as sacrosanct. If one wishes to depict this as a competition between the values of China and Russia on the one side, and those of the West on the other, we would do well to revive our Christian, humanist tradition if we are to avoid losing the competition in disgrace.