madeleine

CLINTEL/Schiller Institute—A Wake-Up Call: The Danger for Mankind Is Not the Climate, but Toleration of a Devious Policy that Uses Climate To Destroy Us!

October 11, 2021by madeleine in Helga statement, article, transcript, Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The following statement was jointly issued by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute, and Guus Berkhout, emeritus professor of geophysics; initiator and co-founder of CLINTEL (Climate Intelligence).

PDF of this statement

We have bitter debates about just about everything: green energy, pandemic measures, political ideologies, tax policies, the refugee crisis, rising rents, erosion of fundamental rights, pension plans, government bureaucracies, the generation gap, women’s rights, etc. But what we fail to see is the big picture: namely, that we in the West are ruled by an increasingly powerful political establishment that is in the process of destroying everything we have built since World War II!

All the symptoms of a collapsing system are right before our eyes, if we care to see them: an economic system in which the balance between cost and benefit is totally out of balance, an accelerating hyperinflation that devours our earnings, a good healthcare system that only the rich can afford, an education system that teaches neither excellence nor moral values, an out-of-control woke culture that turns people against each other, a disastrous geopolitical confrontation policy against alleged rivals—and the list could go on and on!

All these manifestations of crisis have a common cause: We in the West are living under the dictatorship of a financial oligarchy, for which the common good is nonexistent, and whose sole interest is to maximize its own privileges. An oligarchy that needs “endless wars” to generate income for its military-industrial complex, and promotes the production and distribution of mind-destroying drugs, both illegal and legalized, the latter because the financial system would have collapsed long ago without the input of laundered drug money. And given that this system is now hopelessly bankrupt, the entire economic and financial system is now supposed to be converted to so-called green technologies in a final great coup—the Great Reset. Under the pretext of climate protection, the motto for this conversion is “Shifting the Trillions.” And it’s happening now!

The policies of the Green Deal (EU) and the Green New Deal (USA) mean that banks restrict their loans to investments in green technologies, and have long since subjected companies to an increasingly strangulating system of requirements such as taxonomy, the Supply Chain law, etc. At the same time, there is a method to the high energy prices: pushing prices above the pain threshold in monetary terms is supposed to manipulate the population into learning how to get along without meat consumption, heating, decent housing, travel, etc. This goes hand in hand with an image of man that sees every human being as a parasite polluting nature. While we know that CO₂ is essential to all life on Earth, the green policy trumpets: “The less CO₂ footprints left behind, the better.”

The truth is, this is old wine in new bottles. It is exactly the same austerity policy of Hjalmar Schacht, Germany’s Reichsbank president and economics minister just before World War II. This is cannibalization of the labor force. Whoever thinks this comparison is exaggerated, should watch the film Hunger Ward about Yemen, featuring the World Food Program’s David Beasley, or consider the death rate of children in Haiti.

What does Klaus Schwab say about this in his book Stakeholder Capitalism? He complains that African countries like Ethiopia successfully fought extreme poverty (p.154):

“It reveals the central conundrum of the combat against climate change. The same force that helps people escape from poverty and lead a decent life is the one that is destroying the livability of our planet for future generations. The emissions that lead to climate change are not just the result of a selfish generation of industrialists or Western baby boomers. They are the consequence of the human desire to create a better future for himself.”

Here it is in black and white. According to this logic, increasing the death rate by increasing poverty is the best thing that can happen to the climate! Life does not matter to the elites of Schwab.

If we want to escape the looming catastrophe, we must rebuild society completely on very different principles. This is our positive message, being a message of a hopeful future with prosperity for all:

1. Human life is inviolable. Man is the only species endowed with creative reason, which distinguishes him from all other living beings. This creative capability enables him to continually discover new principles of the physical universe, which is called scientific progress. The fact that the human mind, through an immaterial idea, is able to discover these principles, which then have an effect in the material universe in the form of technological progress, proves that there is a correspondence between the lawfulness of the human mind and the laws of the physical universe.

2. Just as the spatial expanse and anti-entropic evolution of the universe are infinite, so is the intellectual and moral perfectibility of the human mind. Therefore, every additional human being is a new source for further development of the universe and for the solution of problems on Earth, such as overcoming poverty, disease, underdevelopment, and violence. Taking care of each other is key in this ongoing development. It is the combination of creativity and empathy that transcends mere day-to-day exigencies.

3. Scientific and technological progress has a positive effect in that, when applied to the production process, it increases the productivity of the labor force and of industrial and agricultural capacities, which in turn leads to rising living standards and a longer life expectancy for more and more people. A prosperous physical economy is the precondition for the positive development of the common good, providing not only the elites, but all people with quality food, clean water, affordable and modern health care, quality education, modern communications and, above all, cheap and sufficient energy with high energy flux densities. Inherently safe third-generation nuclear energy and the future use of thermonuclear fusion are indispensable for securing mankind’s energy supply for an unlimited time. Unreliable energy systems and increasing energy prices are the mother of inflation. Poverty starts with energy poverty.

4. The purpose of the economy has nothing to do with profit, but with the happiness of people, in the sense meant by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, i.e., that people are able to develop all the inherent potentials they have into a harmonious whole, and thus contribute to the best possible further development of mankind. Or as the wise Solon of Athens said: The purpose of mankind is progress. It is the duty of good government, through its policies, to provide for the happiness of its citizens in this sense, beginning with universal education for all, the goal of which must be to foster beautiful character through education and the development of an ever-increasing number of geniuses. This perspective is in accordance with Vladimir Vernadsky’s conviction that the physical universe must inherently evolve in such a way that the share of the noösphere increasingly grows in relation to the biosphere. To be more specific, growth should be two-fold, creativity for the material necessities and empathy for the immaterial needs. Taking care of each other and our natural environment is presented in our slogan: “Prosperity for all,” in which all refers not only to us in the here and now, but also to future generations.

5. Man’s true destiny is not to remain an earthling. His identity, as the only known species endowed with creative reason, is to explore space, as we did with planet Earth. What space pioneer Krafft Ehricke called the “extraterrestrial imperative,” or in a certain sense, the new educational effect of space travel on man, requires mankind to truly “grow up,” that is, to cast off his irrational impulses, and make creativity his identity, which has so far only been the case for outstanding scientists and artists of classical culture. In this phase of evolution, of love for humanity and love for creation, generated by recognition of the magnificence of the physical universe, it will have become natural that mankind takes care of all aspects of humanity, the planet, nature, and the universe at large with great care, because the fabricated contradiction between man and nature will have been overcome (new stewardship). Man does not exist in opposition to nature; he is the most advanced part of it. This is what Schiller called freedom in necessity, and is the concept that Beethoven placed above his Grosse Fugue: “Just as rigorous as it is free.”

This lofty idea of man and everything he has built, is what is threatened by the Hjalmar Schachts, Klaus Schwabs, the power-hungry political leaders, and the profit-hungry business leaders of the world. This is a wake-up call, addressed to all people, to resist the danger of a new evil. Let us prevent a return to the past, when an evil elite impoverished mankind and told us to be happy with such conditions.

Webcast: We Are Facing “Fascism with a Green Face”, and We Should Call It That!

October 6, 2021by madeleine in Afghanistan, Environmentalism updates, Finance, General, Global Diplomacy, Green New Deal, Haiti, Helga Video, Helga Webcast, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Lyndon LaRouche legacy

As energy hyperinflation is taking off, as a result of both objective and subjective factors, Helga Zepp-LaRouche said that this is what her husband uniquely warned about when the Club of Rome first began pushing its anti-human slogan of “limits to growth” in the late 1960s. This is Schachtian policy, she said, a strategy of the leading oligarchs running the world economy, to drastically reduce the world’s population, using the same methods Schacht applied in Germany under Hitler. This has now been openly identified in an article in the October 4 “Economist” magazine, “The Age of Fossil-Fuel Dependence Is Dead”, and in Klaus Schwab’s new book, “Stakeholder Capitalism”, as the dark future they intend to impose. Zepp-LaRouche stated that this is “fascism with a Green face”, and should be identified as such, to mobilize people to defeat it.

In addition to destroying the world’s physical economy, they are engaging in an assault against the idea of human creativity, which is the one source of innovation which has demonstrated that, as LaRouche wrote, “There Are No Limits to Growth.” And at the same time, they are conducting provocations against China which could lead to war. She reiterated her view that collaborative efforts among nations, including the U.S., Russia and China, to reconstruct Afghanistan and Haiti, can provide a basis for overcoming this otherwise deadly threat to humanity.

Hamilton, China, and LaRouche: Economic Development Is an Inalienable Right

October 6, 2021by madeleine in General, Global Diplomacy, Green New Deal, Haiti, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Lyndon LaRouche legacy, The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

Those familiar with the fifty-plus-year forecasting practice and record of economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche will perhaps recognize the deeper significance of the following statement, a significance probably unknown to the writer himself. In a London Guardian October 1 op-ed entitled “America faces supply-chain disruption and shortages. Here’s why,” author Matt Stoller says: “… what we’re experiencing is also the net result of decades of policy choices starting in the 1970s that emphasized consumer sovereignty over citizenship. The consolidation of power into the hands of private equity financiers and monopolists over the last four decades has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.”

It is not enough to point out that what seems to be a sudden seizing up of the trans-Atlantic goods-distribution system is not the product of the Covid pandemic of the past 20 months, but something more “long-range.” History is never “objective” in that way. What was the agency that was at work here? Thirty-five years ago today, an “event” occurred that, if omitted from current history, renders it impossible to fully understand what is happening now.

THE PRICE FOR CHANGING HISTORY

Lyndon LaRouche, in 2004, in a report titled “The Night They Came to Kill Me” explained the true, “subjective” nature of that “objective” trans-Atlantic-wide economic devolution. “On October 6, 1986, a virtual army of more than four hundred armed personnel descended upon the town of Leesburg, Virginia, for a raid on the offices of EIR and its associates, and also deployed for another, darker mission. The premises at which I was residing at that time were surrounded by an armed force, while aircraft, armored vehicles, and other personnel waited for the order to move in shooting. Fortunately, the killing did not happen, because someone with higher authority than the Justice Department Criminal Division head William Weld, ordered the attack on me called off. The forces readied to move in on me, my wife, and a number of my associates, were pulled back in the morning……

“The 1973 campaign for my ‘elimination,’ the near-slaughter of Oct. 6-7, 1986, and the stubborn effort to exclude me from the debates now (in 2004), are each and all products of the same issue of my fight against the effort of certain liberal economists, and others, to put the world as a whole under the thumb of the policies of former Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht.

“The ultimate origin of these and related actions is not the U.S. Department of Justice, but a much higher authority than the U.S. government, the same assortment of Venetian-style international financier-oligarchical interests, and their associated law firms, which unleashed the wave of fascist dictatorships in continental Europe over the interval 1922-1945. The common feature of those international financier interests, then, back during 1922-1945, and today, is their present commitment to imposing Schachtian economics upon both the U.S.A. itself, and also on the world at large…

“The shift of the U.S. and British economies away from the U.S. ‘s leading role as the world’s greatest producer nation, toward a pro-Schachtian, ’post- industrial’ utopianism, was the hall- mark of the 1966-1968 Nixon campaign for the Presidency. The follies of this ‘post-industrial’ shift into wild-eyed monetarism, led the U.S. government to the point, that it must abandon its foolish post-Kennedy economic and cultural policies, or make exactly the choice I had warned that I feared they would make. Nixon’s decision of August 15, 1971 made the march in the direction of ruin and fascist-like dictatorship inevitable.”

Today, as in 1986 and 2004, there are two systems of choice before the world. There is the system of “Reesian choices,” named after the Tavistock Institute’s John Rawlings Rees, typified by the “development policies”—policies of financial looting—of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) toward the continent of Africa ever since the period after JFK’s assassination. Then there is the “American System” of “Hamiltonian” choices, of what has recently been called “win-win cooperation” by the nation of China. For example, when China’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Geng Shuang, recently told that body that the international community should “spare no effort in humanitarian assistance and post-disaster reconstruction” toward Haiti, he opened a “strategic flank in the mind,” that is a far more powerful idea than that of the self-doomed “Operation Orcus/Global Britain” military adventure hurtling to its strategic doom in the trans-Pacific theater.

COMPLETING HAMILTON’S UNFINISHED “HAITI MISSION”

The United States used to think that way. In 1861, the United States, under Abraham Lincoln, dispatched Ambassador Anson Burlingame as diplomatic emissary to a China then subjugated by the British Empire through the Second Opium War. Today, in 2021, China attempts to reach a United States whose leadership and institutional structure, as well as cultural institutions, have now also been subjugated, and largely devastated by the same “Opium War” method—though this time, not external force, but seduction through Winston Churchill’s “Empire of the Mind” was used. The United States was induced, through the Tavistock Institute and its Frankfurt School subsidiary, to destroy itself, to de-industrialize itself, to reject scientific progress itself, and, now, to depopulate itself. The just-announced proposal, however, for a joint, international mission to defend the sovereignty of the nation of Haiti from the international drug mafias that now subjugate it, by demonstrating, through construction of ports, rail, and power, including nuclear and thermonuclear power, that “economic development is a human right,” if accepted, can bring the United States itself back to its senses.

The LaRouche proposal for the emergency reconstruction of Haiti, introducing the higher-order concept of development corridors and an ” economic platform” into one of the poorest areas of the world, provides, as with Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Afghanistan proposal, and especially if successfully advocated by a group of Americans representing the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, including those that hail from Haiti, a way for America to return to its previous Hamilton/Lincoln/Roosevelt outlook, that Frederick Douglass, America’s ambassador to Haiti, represented in his living person.

The uncorrected flaw in the American Revolution was, as all know, the inability to resolve the Africa chattel slavery matter at the beginning of the creaton of the nation, largely because of the influence of John Locke and his Royal Africa Company on the constitution of South Carolina, and other Southern states. But slavery was not the desired system, originally, even in the Southern colonies. Auguste Levasseur, Secretary to Lafayette, recounted in 1824:

“In about the year 1680, the General Assembly of the State of Virginia requested of the parent state that it finally put an end to this commerce in human flesh, infamous and unnecessary in the future, since now the population was numerous enough and active enough to cultivate a land that required only the lightest work to reward the tiller richly. Other Colonies repeated this cry of justice and philanthropy, but the parent country was callous and responded only by this atrocious resolution of Parliament: The importation of Slaves in America is too lucrative for the Colonies to be able to insist that England renounce it forever. This response was accompanied by threats to which it was necessary to succumb since they were in no condition to resist them. Nonetheless, the General Assembly renewed several times its demand….”

Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s support for the Haitian Revolution, and his co-authorship of Haiti’s Constitution, flowed from his notion of “Artificial labor” as expressed in his 1790 Report on the Subject of Manufactures. Is Thomas Jefferson’s then-opposition to Haiti’s self-government consistent with the now-present United States policy, itself opposite to that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of allowing, tolerating, and in effect aiding in the never-ending torture of that population, through refusing to take down the “Dope Inc.” financial oligarchy that dominates it as surely as did the slave-masters of 1791? China, which has, since the Bandung conference of 1955, and now even despite the fact that it is not diplomatically recognized by the government of Haiti, insisted that economic development is a human right for that nation. It has now posed to the entire international community that the same problem China has successfully tackled and solved internally—the eradication of poverty—be solved worldwide. The Global Development Initiative premiered by Xi Jinping at this United Nations session has now placed “economic development as a human right” on the world table. Executive Intelligence Review has answered the United Nations, and the world, by providing a policy orientation for the now-distracted United States. The plan for Haiti invokes, implicitly, FDR’s Four Freedoms, and, explicitly, LaRouche’s Four Economic Laws, to chart a way forward, not only for Haiti, not only for the Caribbean, but by means of eradicating poverty through economic cooperation, for “everywhere in the world.”

“YOUR DEATH WILL SAVE THE PLANET”

There is only one problem. The financial neo-Malthusians intend to use the illiterate argument that “natural law” is above human rights, to introduce what Fred Wills used to call “the doctrine of regrettable necessity” as the means to argue that billions will have to go away to save the planet. The bill is beginning to come in for this sophistry, in astronomical gas and electricity prices, hyperinflation, supply chain breakdowns, cuts in living standards, and drops in life expectancy that, while blamed on the coronavirus pandemic, preceded it. As stated by Klaus Schwab in the book Stakeholder Capitalism:” The same force that helps people escape from poverty and lead a decent life is the one that is destroying the livability of our planet for future generations. The emissions that lead to climate change are not just the result of a selfish generation of industrialists or western baby boomers. They are the consequence of the desire to create a better future for oneself.”

Except that Schwab isn’t actually referring in this passage to “western baby boomers,” but to both the Chinese policies for the development of African nations, and the desire of African nations to create a better future. As the Club of Rome’s Alexander King wrote: “The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” Especially the “high birth rate” in Africa—too many African “carbon footprints.” So, regrettably, Africans must be reduced in their numbers, by any means necessary, in defense of natural law.

China’s calling the attention of the world to the crisis in Haiti at the United Nations, seen from the standpoint of the proposal in Executive Intelligence Review written by Richard Freeman and Cynthia Rush, places the United States in the position to choose, not the Tavistock choice method, but the “win-win” method which was always the essential characteristic of the American System which, as Henry Carey put it, “is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating vehicle equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

China, Russia UN Envoys Call for International Community To Assist Haiti

October 6, 2021by madeleine in Agriculture, China, Economic development updates, Global Diplomacy, Healthcare, Russia

It is notable, that at yesterday’s U.N. Security Council debate on Haiti, it was left to the representatives of China and Russia to at least raise Haiti’s desperate need for development and reconstruction, beyond merely relief aid.

All representatives who spoke, pointed to the need for Haitians to come together to resolve the nation’s government and institutional crisis, and spoke of elections, and of the terrible security problem of gangs and drugs that must be addressed. But without moving beyond meager humanitarian relief efforts, to international assistance to allow Haiti to undertake the kind of full-scale reconstruction program which the Schiller Institute is proposing, no political solution is possible.

Geng Shuang, Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN of China, called on the international community to step up and help Haiti recover, and “spare no effort in humanitarian assistance and post-disaster reconstruction…. China calls on the international community to respond actively to the UN humanitarian emergency appeals totaling about $187 million, and urges the Haitian government to work closely with the UN system to ensure that supplies reach people most in need and to avoid waste and embezzlement,” he said.

Geng suggested that a change in strategy is needed, pointing to the failure of the humanitarian strategy towards the country, in which the 14.7 billion U.S. dollars spent since 2010 “have yet to deliver the expected results…. The international community’s long-standing assistance model that can be compared to blood transfusion and oxygen supply to Haiti has proven to be neither markedly effective nor sustainable…. We are ready to join the rest of the Council members to address the systemic and operational impediments to peace and development in Haiti, and to consider adopting a novel approach to help Haiti come out of its plight,” he said.

Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative Dmitry Polyanskiy spoke of the “urgent need to address issues that are inevitable to all States, among them combating unemployment and improving overall standards of living…. We cannot but be appalled by the information contained in the report from the World Bank that in 2021, 60% of Haitians will fall under the poverty threshold…. Clearly, such a dire situation in this insular country requires consolidated international support, first and foremost, from regional neighbors.”

Many representatives could not fail to reference the shocking decision to forcibly return to Haiti thousands of “people who cobbled together their last money to leave the country in search of better lives for their children,” as Polyanskiy—but not only he—put it. On that subject, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield was silent.

UN Agencies Warn Again: Afghan Children Face “Acute Malnutrition” and Death

October 6, 2021by madeleine in Afghanistan, Agriculture, General, Healthcare, Healthcare

After a visit to Herat, Afghanistan, the UNICEF and World Food Program Representatives to Afghanistan, Hervé Ludovic De Lys and Mary-Ellen McGroarty, respectively, warned that one half of Afghanistan’s children under five years old —an estimated 3.2 million children— are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition by the end of the year, and at least a million of them are at risk of dying, should they not get immediate treatment.

The WFP estimates that 95% of households in Afghanistan are not eating enough food, and the two UN agencies are now adding 100 more mobile health and nutrition teams, to the 168 already operating in hard-to-reach areas. UNICEF rep De Lys warned that “the nutritional health of mothers and their children is getting worse by the day…. Children are getting sicker and their families are less and less able to get them the treatment they need. Rapidly spreading outbreaks of measles and acute watery diarrhoea will only exacerbate the situation.”

WFP’s McGroarty reiterated: “Unless we intervene now, malnutrition will only become more severe. The international community must release the funds they pledged weeks ago, or the impact could be irreversible.”

The World Is Watching The Schiller Institute

August 21, 2021by madeleine in General

China’s international news agency, China Global Television Network (CGTN), produced a six minute video of excerpts from the keynote speech by Helga Zepp-LaRouche at the July 31 Schiller Institute Conference, “Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History After the Failed Regime-Change Era.” The CGTN video is titled: “Afghanistan: The Bright Future for the Coming Cooperation of the Great Powers.”

It is certain that leading circles within the U.S., including within the Biden Administration, are watching closely as prominent figures from Russia and China speak at Schiller Institute conferences, and present LaRouche’s ideas in their media and institutional websites.They are watching, and some are listening and learning. Others are chewing the rug, and working with the U.K. to prevent what they see as the greatest danger to their Empire—the United States coming together with Russia and China to address the world’s existential crisis in all its facets—the danger of nuclear war; the pandemic; famine in multiple locations; the cultural decay across the Western world; and the financial bubble threatening to either explode or break out in an even more destructive hyperinflation.

The ending of the 20-year war in Afghanistan, then, is not a disaster, as portrayed in the Western press. It is an opportunity for a great change in the course of human history. Mrs. LaRouche says in the video: “It should be obvious, even to the most incurable warmongers on the planet, that in Afghanistan, no military solution can succeed. In that sense, there must be a recognition that all such endless wars, like in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and so forth, belong to a paradigm of geopolitical thinking that has utterly failed. That means that the geopolitics of the British Empire, of the ‘Great Game,’ of the Arc of Crisis of Bernard Lewis and Zbigniew Brzezinski—must be outlawed forever. And there should be an agreement among all neighbors of Afghanistan that geopolitical manipulation must be ended and replaced by the application of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.”

Zepp-LaRouche also points to the fact that even Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who generally sounds as mad as Mike Pompeo on all things Chinese, “during his recent trip to India stated that the U.S. government sees a positive role for China in the economic development of Afghanistan.” She pointed to the statement by the Afghan Ambassador to China, “who recently said that Afghanistan is the one place where the United States and China can actually cooperate, since they have common interests such as the suppression of terrorism and the elimination of opium production.”

Zepp-LaRouche concludes: “In this sense, Afghanistan is at a crossroad. Not only for Eurasian integration, but also at a crossroad for universal history where we all can leave the age of immature adolescence behind us, and enter an era of adulthood, in which we concentrate on the common aims of mankind.”

Recall that Biden held a high profile summit with President Putin, and spoke for hours on the phone with President Xi Jinping. Recall also the Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman held extensive discussion with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the Deputy Minister responsible for U.S.-China Relations, then chaired a major summit with top military and diplomatic leaders from Russia and the U.S. Afghanistan was a leading item on the agenda at both meetings.These leaders are abundantly aware that the ideas expressed by Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche, and the wealth of ideas in the voluminous writings of Lyndon LaRouche which have been translated into Chinese and Russian, are ideas taken extremely seriously in Moscow and Beijing, as they are increasingly around the world.

What direction will the U.S. take at this turning point in human history? The American people are finally beginning to throw off their delusions, their smug confidence that life as usual will go on no matter what they do. As their economy unravels under the Malthusian “Green New Deal”; as the reckless printing of trillions of dollars to bail out the bankrupt financial system without any real economic growth begins to drive inflation to the point of explosion; as their children are being offered legalized drugs and encouraged to change their sex; and as they contemplate the very real threat of nuclear war from the anti-Russian and anti-Chinese hysterics in both political parties—a real resistance is mounting, and is increasingly turning to LaRouche.

Afghanistan is at peace—for now. The Taliban today, unlike the Taliban of the 1990s, is working in close cooperation with Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and others in the region. Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen, in addition to pledging no retaliation and for women to continue working and studying in schools, also told CGTN that “the people of Afghanistan need help of other countries. They should come forward and help in the health sector and also infrastructure and education. They can come to explore our natural resources. This is a general invitation to all countries, and we appreciate any country that they help us at this crucial time of our history.”

Will the U.S. and Europe accept this offer, to work with China’s Belt and Road to build the country they have destroyed, the country President Ashraf Ghani admitted suffered from a 90% poverty rate? Will this approach serve as a model for rebuilding Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen?

Join the Schiller institute on Saturday, Aug. 21 at noon EDT for a follow-up conference to the July 31 event, under the title: “Now More Urgent than Ever: Afghanistan Is an Opportunity for a New Epoch for Mankind“

Italians Join Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Defense of China

April 2, 2021by madeleine in China, General, General updates, Global Diplomacy, Our initiatives (petitions, etc)

On Friday morning, at least six Sinologists and China experts added their names on the website of the LaRouche movement in Italy, Movisol, to the Schiller Institute statement on China. They had been were mobilized by Fabio Massimo Parenti, associate professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, Beijing. Professor Parenti was contacted by journalists of the “Report” political magazine (connected to the Rai Tre national television channel) who had asked him about the statement. Parenti, who had had dealings with Movisol in the past, contacted Liliana Gorini, the chair of Movisol; to sign the statement; and then to post it on his Facebook page. His group is now considering to write a similar statement, to be sent to Italy’s President, Sergio Mattarella.

Biden’s Infrastructure Plan: Paving the Road to Hell

April 2, 2021by madeleine in Environmentalism updates, General, Green New Deal

Huge amounts of ink, digital and otherwise, are being wasted in discussion of President Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan announced yesterday. But one of the more revealing comments came from the ever-green Washington Post, which insisted that the whole purpose of the plan isn’t infrastructure, but bringing about a paradigm shift.

“President Biden’s infrastructure plan would turbocharge the country’s transition from fossil fuels, using the muscle and vast resources of the federal government to intervene in electricity markets, speed the growth of solar and wind energy, and foster technological breakthroughs in clean power,” the Post wrote. “The linchpin of Biden’s plan… is the creation of a national standard requiring utilities to use a specific amount of solar, wind and other renewable energy to power American homes, businesses and factories. The amount would increase over time, cutting the nation’s use of coal, gas and oil over the next 15 years.”

The Post concluded with excitement: “Biden’s strategy would amount to the most sweeping federal intervention in the electricity sector in generations.”

As that reality sinks in, there will be foot-dragging and more from all sorts of political and business layers in the country. The following response by Brian Wolff, executive vice president for public policy of the Edison Electric Institute, the power sector’s biggest trade association, is indicative:

“Certainly, we will review any proposed clean energy standard closely,” he said, “and we support policies that enable our member electric companies to continue to get the energy they provide as clean as they can as fast as they can, without compromising the affordability and reliability our customers value.”

Not precisely a ringing endorsement.

Kerry to Demand India Must Declare a Net-Zero Emissions Target Date

April 2, 2021by madeleine in Environmentalism updates, General, Green New Deal

U.S. Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry will visit India in early April, The Hindu reported. The visit is a run-up to the April 22-23 virtual “Leaders Summit on Climate” hosted by President Joe Biden from the White House. Kerry’s April 1-9 itinerary will also include Abu Dhabi and Dhaka.

The Kerry visit is likely to focus on pressuring India to declare a target year, preferably 2050, for achieving net-zero emissions of greenhouse gas. But there is strong opposition to this within India, including prominent advisers to Prime Minister Narendra Modi such as Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, a Member of PM’s Council on Climate Change and former ambassador to China and the EU. In a recent interview with the Indian news daily, The Hindustan Times, Dasgupta answered a question on what he believes would be the impact on the Indian economy of pursuing net-zero emissions target:

“First, it would require us to immediately scrap all existing coal-based power plants and factories, or alternatively, retrofit them with carbon capture and storage technology. This would entail astronomical costs at a time when the economy is already reeling from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.” He added that it would also quickly derail Modi’s Aatmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India) policy: “It would necessitate an immediate switch-over to imported, existing clean energy technologies at a huge cost, denying our own industry the time required for indigenization or development of affordable indigenous technologies. Let us not forget that the US lodged a complaint against us at the WTO when we took some modest measures to promote domestic manufacture of solar cells and modules.”

“Third, we need to examine the trade-related implications of surrendering our principled position on ‘common and differentiated responsibilities’. The European Union is set to impose levies on carbon-intensive imports, even from developing countries. It would be naive to think that the countries calling on India to adopt a 2050 net-zero target are motivated purely by altruistic concerns unrelated to commercial interests.”

The “common and differentiated responsibilities” clause refers to the argument made for decades by developing countries that any global targets have to be applied in a differentiated way to their countries, since they are also trying to overcome underdevelopment.

The pressure on India is intense. Last February, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) hosted an annual event, the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS), in New Delhi with a focus on the climate crisis, with the presence of high-level representatives from the U.S., the U.K., the EU, the United Nations and other countries. At this virtual Summit, John Kerry did not mince his words: “We all have to adopt the notion of zero emissions.” And his finger pointed towards India when he noted that “90% of the world’s emissions come from somewhere other than our country (US)” and “70% come from somewhere other than China”.

The pressure has been building, especially over the last six months as Biden took over the White House. Some analysts claim that China’s 2060 carbon neutrality pledge has also contributed to the pressure, as has the UK’s diplomatic push to ramp up climate matters ahead of Cop26. Cop26 is the next annual UN climate change conference scheduled to be held in Glasgow, UK, from Nov 1-12. Cop26 president Alok Sharma visited India in February and issued a statement before his departure stating, “I firmly believe that powerful action from India will be a catalyst for change, encouraging others to be more ambitious in their approaches to protecting both people and planet.”

With the heat on, discussions have begun in India on what it can do to withstand the pressure.

Webcast: Afghanistan – Opportunity for a New Epoch

August 17, 2021by madeleine in Afghanistan, General, Helga Video, Helga Webcast, Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The dramatic developments surrounding the Taliban takeover of Kabul expose the failure of this regime-change war, and the previous ones since WWII. The war was wrong from the beginning, as the continuing investigation by the 9/11 families into who was responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks are uncovering, and as Lyndon LaRouche warned that day, but more needs to be done. And there was never a viable war plan.

Some western political leaders are reacting thoughtfully. German CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet stated that this was the biggest failure of NATO, ever. Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod called for reflection and soul-searching. Helga Zepp-LaRouche pointed out the special responsibility that the U.S. has, in President John Quincy Adams’ words, to not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

Now, as presented in the July 31, 2021 Schiller Institute video conference, “Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History after the Failed Regime-Change Era,” there is a potential for a new era of real nation-building in Afghanistan, and the rest of the world, if the Western nations cooperate with the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative, along with Afghanistan’s neighbors, and drop their geopolitical goals of preventing China and Russia from playing leading roles in the world. Many Afghan development plans are already on the drawing boards, and there is great humanitarian need, starting with building a modern health system, other infrastructure and agricultural alternatives to opium production. There will be great pressure on the Taliban from the outside, with offers of economic development contingent upon how they act.

International Conference

Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History After the Failed Regime-Change Era

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Online Seminar sponsored by the LaRouche Legacy Faoundation

On the 50th Anniversary of LaRouche’s Stunning Forecast of August 15, 1971: So, Are You Finally Willing to Learn Economics?

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