Activity of the Schiller Institute

EIR Publishes “The Schiller Institute Plan To Develop Haiti”

October 1, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Activity of the Schiller Institute, Agriculture, Economic development updates, General updates, Global Diplomacy, Haiti, Healthcare, Our conferences, Our economic development events, Power & Energy

Sept. 30, 2021—Today, EIR News Service posted, “The Schiller Institute Plan to Develop Haiti,” a 16-page report, which presents a comprehensive program addressing “eight fundamental areas of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture, which are at the core of the Haitian economy … present[ing] what capabilities and what problems exist, along with recommended development plan solutions.” Those areas are 1. Power and Electricity, 2. A Universal Health Care System, 3. Hunger and Agriculture, 4. Railroads and Roads, 5. Airports and Seaports, 6. Sanitation and Water Purification, 7. Industry and Labor Force, and 8. Education. The full report is available here.

The Schiller Institute Plan is clear in the mandate, and the urgent necessity of acting now, saying:

“The task of rebuilding Haiti is a daunting one because of the level of destruction deliberately imposed on it by two centuries of Malthusian policies. Every sector of its physical economy must be rebuilt from the bottom up, to uplift its impoverished population. But it’s not an impossible task if China and the U.S. collaborate along with other nations of the Caribbean Basin and Central America, as part of an expanded Belt and Road Initiative and Maritime Silk Road throughout the region.

“Haiti will have to establish diplomatic relations with China: it is still one of the few countries in the world that maintains diplomatic relations instead with Taiwan. China rightly insists that it will only work with nations that recognize the principle of One China, and Haiti would be wise to follow the path taken by its neighbor, the Dominican Republic—which recently broke with Taiwan and established ties with China—if it is to have any hope of attaining Chinese participation in its reconstruction.

“Haiti has been repeatedly subjected to an intentional depopulation policy every time a ‘natural disaster’ strikes the country. For 125 years, the looting of Haiti by the City of London, Wall Street, and other Trans-Atlantic banks (France is key among them), joined in the 20th Century by the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral lending agencies, has denied it the right to develop into a modern nation, leaving it defenseless in the face of repeated disasters, the August 14, 2021, earthquake being only the most recent one.

“The Schiller Institute program for the rebuilding and reconstruction of Haiti, the initial outlines of which are presented below, includes a unified infrastructure plan, financed by a Hamiltonian system of ample directed credit, created as a central feature of a bankruptcy reorganization of the disintegrating international financial system. The Schiller Institute has estimated preliminarily that a viable Haiti reconstruction program will cost between $175 and $200 billion, or $17.5 to $20 billion per year over ten years.”

The report also reviews the scuttled 2017 Haitian-Chinese $4.7 billion project to rebuild Haiti’s capital, in which “two Chinese companies—the Southwest Municipal Engineering and Design Research Institute of China (SMEDRIC), and the Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC)—outlined a series of detailed projects valued at $4.7 billion to carry out the rebuilding of the capital and its environs. SMEDRIC indicated that the projects for Haiti’s capital were part of a broader, $30 billion proposal for the whole country, discussed at the May 14-15, 2017, Belt and Road Initiative summit in Beijing. A short time after that, a Chinese delegation carried out an 8-day investigative visit to Haiti and met with local officials.”

Video Preview—‘Need Creative Genius of the World To Bear on Haiti and Afghanistan’

The report was previewed on Sept. 25, on an international webinar by the Schiller Institute, with the intent of bringing together the forces to make it happen. The 2.5-hour event was titled, “Reconstructing Haiti—America’s Way Out of the ‘Global Britain’ Trap,” featuring the Schiller Institute Plan and the immediate emergency action required. The plan was summarized, and discussed by experts with ties to Haiti, in engineering, medicine, and development policy. This deliberation stands in stark contrast to the events of the past weeks, which included the U.S. forced deportation of thousands of displaced Haitians from the Texas-Mexico border, back to Haiti, to disaster conditions from the August earthquake and before. The full video of the webinar is available here.

The six panelists were Richard Freeman, co-author of “The Schiller Institute Plan To Develop Haiti”; Eric Walcott, Director of Strategic Partnerships, Institute of Caribbean Studies; Firmin Backer, head of the Haiti Renewal Alliance; Joel DeJean, engineer and Texas based LaRouche political organizer; and Walter Faggett, MD, based in Washington, D.C., where he is former Chief Medical Officer of the District of Columbia, and is currently Co-Chairman of the Health Council of D.C.’s Ward 8, and an international leader with the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites; and moderator, Dennis Speed.

Firmin Backer pointed out that the USAID has spent $5.1 billion in Haiti over the 11 years since the 2010 earthquake, but asked, what is there to show for it? Now, with the latest earthquake on Aug. 14, we can’t even get aid into the stricken zones, because there is no airport nor port in southern Haiti to serve the stricken people. We should reassess how wrongly the U.S. funding was spent. Firmin reported how Haiti was given some debt cancellation by the IMF years back, but then disallowed from seeking foreign credit!

Eric Walcott was adamant. “We need the creative genius of the world to bear on Haiti and Afghanistan.” He said, “leverage the diaspora” to develop Haiti. There are more Haitian medics in New York and Miami than all of Haiti. He stressed that Haiti is not poor; the conditions are what is poor. But the population has pride, talent, and resourcefulness. Walcott made a special point about elections in Haiti. He said, “Elections are a process,” not an event. He has experience. From 1998 to 2000, Walcott served as the lead observer for the OAS, for elections in Haiti.

Joel DeJean, an American of Haitian lineage, was forceful about the need to aim for the highest level in that nation, for example, to leapfrog from charcoal to nuclear power. He advised, “give China the opportunity” to deploy the very latest nuclear technology in Haiti—the pebble-bed gas-cooled modular reactor. We “don’t need more nuclear submarines, we need nuclear technology!” He called for the establishment of a development bank in Haiti, and other specifics.

Dr. Faggett summed up at many points, with the widest viewpoint and encouragement of action. He served in the U.S. military’s “Caribbean Peace-Keeping Force,” and was emphatic about taking action not only in Haiti, but worldwide. He referenced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saying that “you can tell a lot about people, by how they take care of the health of their people.” He reported that, at present, aid workers in Haiti are having to shelter in place, because of the terrible conditions.

But, he said, we should mobilize. Have “vaccine diplomacy,” and work to build a health platform in Haiti, and a health care delivery system the world over. He is “excited about realizing Helga’s mission,” referring to Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, who issued a call in June 2020, for a world health security platform. At that time, she, and Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. Surgeon General, formed the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites.

For more information contact the Schiller Institute at contact@schillerinstitute.org

Dante Part II: The Power of Language

September 30, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Activity of the Schiller Institute, Cultural renaissance updates, General updates, Our cultural events

On the 700th Anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s Death, the Poet To Be Remembered —

Percy Shelley said in discussing Dante: “Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.” Do today’s leaders live up to this? Do our American citizens know the difference?

Dante has much to teach us today. He not only was a poet—the grandfather of the Italian Renaissance—but he unified the Italian language so that its unification as a sovereign nation would ultimately be successful. At a moment of crisis such as we face today, let’s take a page from Dante’s book. Here is the recent video presentation celebration.

Xinhua Interviews Schiller Institute’s Richard Black on the BRI and The UN Charter

August 22, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Activity of the Schiller Institute, General updates, Media coverage of our activity

On October 25, 1971, the People’s Republic of China was recognized by the UN General Assembly as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations,” and the UN vote removed the representatives of Taiwan from the United Nations. In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the PRC’s role at the UN, Xinhua conducted a video interview with Schiller Institute representative at the UN, Richard A. Black. He discusses the economic development policies of the Charter, and the power of China’s BRI both as a fulfillment of the UN Charter, and as a global driver for peace and stability. The 4-minute interview is out on Xinhua‘s Twitter feed and can be viewed here. The written article is available here.

Schiller Institute Aug. 21 Afghanistan Conference: Rush the Economic Projects; Talk with The Government-in-Formation

August 22, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Activity of the Schiller Institute, Economic development updates, General updates, Our conferences

Aug. 21 (EIRNS)–The Schiller Institute hosted an international webinar today, “Now, More Urgent Than Ever: Afghanistan—Opportunity for a New Epoch for Mankind,’ bringing together speakers with wide experience, from six nations—United States, Germany, Pakistan, Canada, and Italy. Three main themes were struck repeatedly in the dialogue: Toss out the “endless wars” paradigm completely, talk to the new Afghan government-in-the-making, and get economic projects going.

“Push for quick economic development,” was the advice by Helga Zepp-LaRouche in her opening remarks. Saying that what’s happened in Afghanistan marks “the end of a system,” maybe not as big as the fall of the Wall and the end of the Soviet Union, but as portentous. There has been a deep-seated problem of conducting never-ending wars, and geopolitical games. This must stop, and it goes beyond Afghanistan as such. She stressed also that, “It is high time to change the axiomatic assumptions about Russia and China.”

Besides Zepp LaRouche on the panel, there were Lt. Col. (ret.) Ulrich Scholz (Germany), a military and philosophy expert; Pino Arlacchi (Italy), former head of the UN Office for Drug Control (1997-2002), now professor at Sassari University; Hassan Daud Butt (Pakistan), CEO, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province Board of Investment; Ray McGovern (U.S.) former CIA Analyst and co-founder of the VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), and Nipa Banerjee (Canada), Professor at the University of Ottawa. A question was taken up from Khalid Lattif, Director of an institute in Pakistan.

The co-moderators of today’s event, Dennis Speed and Diane Sare, pointed out that today’s discussion is a continuation of the dialogue of the July 31 Schiller Institute event, “Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History After the Failed Regime-Change Era,” and several of the same individuals are involved. Sare noted the importance of the Schiller Institute in restoring the dialogue process, saying that, “people are losing the ability to have a dialogue” these days. Instead, we have ideological hysteria, as seen right now, with the fixation on accusations and blame over the logistics of the Kabul evacuation process, with no vision for the people and the future.

Within two weeks of the Schiller Institute’s July 31 event, presenting a development perspective for Afghanistan and the region, the 20 year U.N./NATO military action came to an end. The Taliban took over Kabul. Today there were meetings in Kabul among Taliban political director Abdul Ghani Baradar, former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, Afghan High Council for National Reconciliation head Abdullah Abdullah, and others toward an eventual formation of a government, to be announced some time shortly after August 31, when the evacuation period concludes.

What we don’t need now, said Arlacchi, is “Talibanology”—speculating on their intentions and hypotheticals. Many others agreed, making the point that the intentions to be focused upon, are those of the major powers: What do the U.S. and the European Union intend to do? Will they, for example, work together with other major powers of Russia, China, and India as well as immediate neighbors of Afghanistan—Iran and Pakistan, and the Central Asian nations to the north, on humanitarian aid and economic initiatives? One in three of the 39 million people in Afghanistan are food insecure. There are dozens of thousands of dislocated people, and thousands fleeing the nation. All this, with the COVID-19 pandemic continuing.

Arlacchi reported his own past experience on a wool factory project in Kandahar Province, involving successful negotiations with the Taliban governor. In the July 31 dialogue, Arlacchi reported on the success in nearly eradicating all opium poppy cultivation over the period 1998 to 2000, through his UN program, in conjunction with the Taliban. Opium production then roared back after the U.S./NATO 2001 invasion. Arlacchi said emphatically today, “We should start to make plans on narcotics elimination” right now.

On the question of accountability of the Taliban new government and projects, Ray McGovern raised the point that you can and should have a truthful monitoring process, which could come, for example from the United Nations. He raised the specific example of how the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), set up by the U.S. Congress some years back, actually kept truthful accounts on what the U.S. and NATO were doing in Afghanistan, which documented that U.S. officials were lying about progress there all along. Prof. Banerjee strongly agreed on this point. These Inspector General documents were published in 2019 by the Washington Post, described by McGovern as “the one useful thing done by the Washington Post in the last 20 years.” Principal author Craig Whitlock, has just released his new book, titled, “The Afghanistan Papers; a Secret History of the War.”

The features of economic development for the region were summarized today by Daud, whose province in Pakistan borders Afghanistan, which has “national endowments, minerals, water, hard working people.” He stressed that, “when the Afghanistan government is strong and stable, it can reach out to China,” and work with the Belt and Road Initiative, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, in which it already has observer status. It can become “a crossroads of the region.”

In the past, this very region was referred to as a “land of 1000 cities,” Zepp-LaRouche stated in concluding the discussion. The idea of the New Silk Road is again to create conditions for hundreds and thousands of new cities—science centers of all kinds. The old paradigm is crashing down, not just in Afghanistan. War can no longer be a means of solving problems.

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.

Now More Urgent Than Ever: Afghanistan Is an Opportunity for a New Epoch for Mankind

August 18, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Activity of the Schiller Institute, Afghanistan, Economic development updates, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Global Diplomacy, Our conferences

~ Schiller Institute Webcast: Saturday, August 21, 12pm EDT ~

PDF of this invitation

Aug. 18 – With nearly all policy-makers and strategic analysts in the trans-Atlantic sector of the world in a clueless state of utter chaos and hysteria over the developments in Afghanistan, Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche today convoked an urgent international seminar for this coming Saturday, August 21 to pursue the only available solution to the crisis: peace through development. The seminar will continue the prescient discussion held by the Schiller Institute on July 31, with many of the same panelists, as well as new ones.

Zepp-LaRouche drew a crystal clear picture in a webcast interview yesterday, Afghanistan: Opportunity for a New Epoch.

“First of all, I do not agree with the hysteria of the Western media that this is the end of the world. The first thing that must be stated, is that it ends 40 years of war for the Afghani people, and if people have any sense of what it means to live in such a long war, all the suffering of the civilians, all the terrible things people had to endure, in terms of drone attacks, in terms of anxiety, I think, first of all, it’s very good that the war has ended.

“I think it is, on the contrary, the real chance to integrate Afghanistan into a regional economic development perspective, which is basically defined by the Belt and Road Initiative of China. There is a very clear agreement of Russia and China to cooperate in dealing with this situation. The interest of the Central Asian republics is to make sure there is stability and economic development; and there is the possibility to extend the CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, into Afghanistan, into Central Asia. So, I think it’s a real opportunity, but it does require a complete change in approach.”

Zepp-LaRouche continued: “This is an epochal change… I think that if the European nations and the United States would understand that this is a unique chance, if they cooperate, rather than fight Russia and China and their influence in the region, and if they join hands in the economic development there… then this can become a very positive turning point, not only for Afghanistan, but also for the whole world.”

Zepp-LaRouche made a special appeal to the United States in remarks earlier in the day on Aug. 17: “The United States must go back to the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers and the initial period—such as John Quincy Adams–that the aim of the United States is not to chase foreign monsters, but to build alliances. John Quincy Adams said that the United States should have alliances of perfectly sovereign republics, and this is now the moment to really do that. The idea is to not oppose China linking Afghanistan into the Belt and Road Initiative, but rather see it as an opportunity to cooperate, and stop this geopolitical confrontation which can only lead to catastrophe.

She concluded: “That’s the kind of discussion which we have to catalyze.”

Here is the video archive link of the July 31, 2021 Schiller Institute conference on “Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History after the Failed Regime-Change Era”

Those speakers included:

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), Founder and President of The Schiller Institute; Pino Arlacchi (Italy), Sociology Professor at the Sassari University, Former Executive Director of the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, and former European Parliament Rapporteur on Afghanistan; H.E. Ambassador Hassan Shoroosh (Afghanistan), Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to Canada; H.E. Ambassador Anna Evstigneeva (Russian Federation), Deputy Permanent Representative at the Mission of The Russian Federation to the UN; Dr. Wang Jin (China), Fellow with The Charhar Institute; Ray McGovern (U.S.), Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA-ret.), Co-Founder, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS); Hassan Daud (Pakistan), CEO, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province Board of Investment; and Hussein Askary (Sweden/Iraq), Southwest Asia Coordinator for the Schiller Institute.

Implement LaRouche’s 2010 Rebuilding Program in Haiti Now: The 2021 Earthquake Can Not Be Allowed To Be A Further Descent into Hell!

August 18, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Global Diplomacy, Haiti, New Silk Road / BRI updates, Our initiatives (petitions, etc), The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, United States, World Land-Bridge updates

Had American statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s program to rebuild Haiti been implemented, in response to the devastating Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, which killed between 250,000 and 300,000 people, this impoverished nation would not be suffering the level of death and destruction so far wrought by the August 14 earthquake that measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. And the carnage will become much greater as a series of tropical storms hit, which are expected to be rolling in, perhaps one after another.

As of August 17, reports are that 1,900 people are dead, 10,000 injured, and 37,000 homes have been destroyed. Homes, schools, supermarkets, and roads were leveled in the southern and western parts of the country. People are terrified. They have once again been abandoned by the United States and its international partners, left to perish in extreme poverty, disease, and misery.

Lyndon LaRouche immediately responded to the 2010 earthquake by calling for an emergency reconstruction program for Haiti, to which, he said, the U.S. had a special responsibility. He called on the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to first deploy to rescue and relocate up to 1 million homeless Haitians from Port-au-Prince to higher ground before the rainy season arrived and unleashed a dangerous health and sanitation crisis for these destitute citizens; he then proposed a comprehensive program to focus on building infrastructure—for sanitation, water management, irrigation, earthquake-proof housing, transportation, agriculture, etc.

LaRouche also recommended that the U.S. sign a 25-year treaty with Haiti, “a treaty agreement to reestablish the efficient sovereignty of the nation of Haiti, after the destructive effect of this and preceding difficulties. We make a contract with the government, as a treaty agreement, between the United States and Haiti, to assure the rebuilding of their country, in a form in which it will actually be a functioning country which can survive.” Those proposals are available here.

President Barack Obama rejected LaRouche’s proposals, and instead removed crucial economic and military aid, encouraging what became known as the “Republic of NGOs” — a large unwieldy network of foreign NGOs that had a lot of money to throw around but did nothing of any real substance.

Years later, in 2017, when China’s Southwest Engineering Municipal Design Research Institute joined with the Haitian firm Bayti Ayiti to propose a $30 billion program to completely rebuild Haiti, with $4.7 billion to rebuild the capital, Port-au-Prince, with sanitation infrastructure, housing, and transportation, the IMF reportedly stepped in—EIR was told at the time—to make sure the proposal went nowhere.

On March 10, 2010, EIR published a 20-page package which detailed the programmatic solutions Haiti required and identified those monetarist political forces committed to keeping in place the Malthusian economic policies that had made Haiti so vulnerable to disaster, and which remain in effect today. That package is available here.

Video of Doctor Susan Moore While Dying from Mistreatment

March 31, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in General updates, Healthcare, Our conferences, The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

March 30, 2021 –During the Q & A session of Panel 4: “The Challenge of Famine and Pandemics — The Coincidence of Opposites or Mass Extinction?” at the the recent Schiller Institute conference, there was an extensive discussion of triage and the treatment of poor and non-white patients, which have been exacerbated under conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Shirley Evers-Manly, who had described the mounting cases of mistreatment and triage taking place in hospitals and elsewhere in the US against poor and minority patients during this pandemic, subsequently referenced the following video made by a black medical doctor, Dr. Susan Moore, in an Indiana hospital. Suffering from Covid-19, Dr. Moore describes how she was denied medicine, and told to go home despite being severely ill — even that she was to be sent home at night. Dr. Moore makes a passionate appeal, not simply for herself but for all those who “don’t know how to fight for themselves.” Dr. Moore died a few days after making this video. Twitter coverage and video.

Syria Coverage of Sen. Black in English

March 31, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Activity of the Schiller Institute, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Media coverage of our activity, Our conferences, World war danger updates

March 29 (EIRNS)–The Syrian official English-language daily Syria Times published a short review of what it considers the main points of former Virginia state Senator Richard Black’s speech at the Schiller Institute international conference on March 21. The daily then links to the video of the speech. I have asked them to link to the Schiller Institute conference page. The coverage can be found here.

Afghanistan: the Role of the Neighboring Countries in Development

August 6, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Activity of the Schiller Institute, Afghanistan, Economic development updates, Finance, General updates, Pakistan, Uzbekistan

Afghanistan: the Role of the Neighboring Countries in Development—

Aug. 5, 2021 (EIRNS) – During a Schiller Institute conference July 31, Prof. Pino Arlacchi, the former head of the United Nations Office of Drug Control who negotiated near-elimination of Afghan opium production with the Taliban 20 years ago, noted that immediately neighboring countries should play a primary role in planning South Asian regional development to include Afghanistan, and in stopping drug traffic from that country. One country clearly taking the point for this kind of development is Uzbekistan, under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

A July 31 article in EastAsiaForum.org by Nasriddinov Salokhiddin, a researcher at the Institute for International Security of Tokyo International University, calls the February 2021 conference with Pakistan and Afghanistan organized by Mirziyoyev, “the event of the century for Central Asia”, because it will connect landlocked Central Asian countries to the Indian Ocean through Afghanistan and Pakistan. The conference attendees decided on a 600-kilometer Tashkent-Mazar e-Sharif-Kabul-Peshawar railroad and requested $4.8 billion in World Bank funding for it, Apparently the railroad corridor project was planned from the first to include new electricity transmission lines through it.

Noting the criticism that surmounting the Hindu Kush Mountains will make the project very expensive, Salokhiddin wrote: “Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan filed an appeal for investment to international financial institutions, which [appeal] received support from the United States, China and Russia. Representatives of the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Asian Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank also expressed their willingness to assist the project through technical consulting and financing. Such wide support for the project means that the source of investment is no longer a concern.” He did not give dates or details regarding these other nations’ and international institutions’ support. He did add that the route transits Afghanistan through regions and cities which are under relatively secure government control now.

The author wrote that freight traffic in Afghanistan was about 4 million tons for 2020 and had risen by 25%. “Estimates suggest that if implemented, the trans-Afghan railroad will increase annual volume of rail freight by 20 million tons.” Some economists in Uzbekistan have advocated a railroad corridor to Chabahar in Iran instead, as allegedly more secure. But, “To achieve its economic objectives, access to the ports of Karachi and Gwadar is Uzbekistan’s highest priority.” Full article is here.

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