General

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

July 17—Not only will 2020 go down in history as the year in which the world was hit by the worst pandemic in 600 years, it may also be the year in which the Chinese economy overtakes that of the United States—and if things go wrong, it could also be the year in which humanity wipes itself out in a nuclear war. There is still time to take a different path, but it will require a dramatic change of course in international politics to avoid the trap of geopolitics, which led to two world wars in the 20th century.

The changing numbers are more than just economic data: after China’s gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 6.8% in the first quarter as a result of the pandemic—the first time this has happened since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976—the Chinese economy grew in the second quarter by 3.2%. Mei Xinyu, a researcher at the Ministry of Commerce, commented “China’s GDP for 2020 could be slightly lower than that of the United States.… But if the domestic chaos in the United States escalates, China’s whole-year GDP could exceed that of U.S. this year.” 

This probable development forms the background against which U.S. Attorney General William Barr just gave a fire-breathing talk about geopolitical confrontation at the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum. That presentation definitely brought him into the ultra-Sinophobic company of Secretary of State Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Esper and FBI Director Wray.

For Barr, the phenomenal rise of China, which Deng Xiaoping initiated with his reform policy, that allowed China to lift 850 million of its citizens out of poverty, is not proof that the government is serving the common good, but rather it is only due to the Communist Party’s wish to prove that socialism is superior to capitalism. Barr could have asked these 850 million Chinese or U.S. citizens of color in Alabama and Mississippi for their opinions.

Barr calls China’s “Made in China 2025” program to become the world market leader in ten technological areas, such as artificial intelligence, robots, and telecommunications, the ultimate threat. This program of the People’s Republic of China was announced years ago. China has now achieved this status in some areas, such as 5G technology, high-speed rail and maglev systems, nuclear fusion technology, and aspects of space technology. These technological breakthroughs alone demonstrate the absurdity of Barr’s argument that China has only been able to accomplish all of its economic achievements by stealing them through industrial espionage or by influencing American companies.

China’s rise could have something to do with the fact that while this 5,000-year-old civilization has consciously revived its best cultural traditions, it is, at the same time, fostering innovation in production and excellence in education. It should come as no surprise that this successful combination, after 40 years of reform policy, has led to this nation of 1.4 billion people now claiming an equal rank among the world’s leading nations.

Definitely Not ‘The End of History’

The neoliberals’ calculation that China would also adopt the western model of democracy and free market economy when it joined the World Trade Organization has obviously not worked. Behind it was the idea of the “end of history” that Francis Fukuyama had expressed after the demise of the Soviet Union.

But instead of all states submitting to the dictates of the financial markets and the associated maximization of profits for the caste of speculators, there has been a tremendous counter-movement worldwide. Especially since China in 2013, with its offer of cooperation in its Belt & Road initiative—the New Silk Road—for the first time gave developing countries the chance to overcome their underdevelopment, and the poverty left behind by colonialism, through the development of infrastructure and industrialization. The secret services controlled by the City of London and Wall Street have increasingly characterized China as a threat.

China has repeatedly emphasized that it has no intention of replacing the United States as the sole superpower. China is, however, committed to international relations based on cooperation among sovereign states, which neither interfere in the internal affairs of other nations, nor attempt to change the others’ social systems.

When it became clear in March and April that China was not only much more able to curb the coronavirus pandemic, but also to get its economy going again faster than most western countries, the geopolitical attacks against China increased, but also against Russia. In his speech, Barr claimed that hackers associated with the People’s Republic of China were attacking American universities and companies with the intention of taking research results on vaccines and drugs against COVID-19. 

The British National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), for its part, claims that the Russian group APT29, also known as “Cozy Bear,” is trying to gain access to academic and pharmaceutical research facilities of all states that are researching vaccines.

The Roger Stone Case

An explosive turning point in this secret service war has now emerged from President Trump’s decision to commute the sentence of his former campaign advisor, Roger Stone. Stone submitted a Declaration from William Binney, the former Technical Director of the NSA, in his court case. Binney and the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former U.S. intelligence agents, have provided forensic evidence that there were no Russian hacking attacks on the computers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the leadership body of the Democratic Party, to account for the publication of extremely damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign by WikiLeaks. Rather, these files appear to have been leaked by an insider using a thumb drive. This evidence challenges the entire basis for Russiagate and the three-and-a-half-year coup attempt against President Trump, as well as the charges against Roger Stone. 

Immediately after his imprisonment was prevented by the President’s action, Roger Stone highlighted, in an interview on Fox, that he had tried to prove in court that Russiagate was a hoax by seeking a hearing on Binney’s evidence, but was prevented from presenting the full story by a corrupt judge. 

The explosiveness of this story lies not least in the fact that the identity of the supposed hackers of the DNC servers had been the basis for the Russiagate affair. This Russian hacker group called “Cozy Bear” was originally named by the CrowdStrike company as responsible for the hack attack, and has now been blamed for a new alleged hack attacks in search of vaccine research. 

The very public surfacing of the statement by Shawn Henry, CrowdStrike’s main cyber-attack expert, who admitted on December 5, 2017, to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, that CrowdStrike had no concrete evidence that any files ever left the DNC as the result of a hack, is another big factor. That testimony was only made public in May 2020. 

An additional element of the fraud of this outrageous conspiracy underlying Russiagate has now emerged from a British court, in a lawsuit against Christopher Steele. As the investigative reporter John Solomon reports,  the trial documents prove that the FBI was guilty of criminally deceiving the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court, by keeping silent on the fact that the person who ultimately commissioned the Russiagate story was Hillary Clinton. And that Steele closely coordinated his activities with Victoria Nuland of the State Department, who was a key figure in the Maidan coup against the Ukrainian government in February 2014.

Who Colluded with Whom

Taken together, all of these secret service operations that have been made public show that the “collusion” did not take place between Trump and the Russian government in 2016, but between the Obama administration’s secret service apparatus and the British secret service, first against presidential candidate Trump, and then against President Trump. And some of his cabinet members, who are now leading the campaign against China and Russia, have suppressed this information. Pompeo, at the request of President Trump, was personally informed by William Binney in detail about the forensic impossibility of the Russian hack attack story on October 24, 2017.

It remains to be seen whether Attorney General Barr will finally take action against the conspirators of the Russiagate affair, about which he has all the necessary information, or whether he will only advance the confrontation against China.

One thing is certain: the representatives of the old paradigm—the geopoliticians of the British Empire—will do everything possible to sabotage the summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council proposed by President Putin, by continuing to make such accusations against Russia and China. This summit has the potential to lay the foundation for a new paradigm—one of cooperation among the world’s major nations, the United States, China, and Russia—and that would be the end of geopolitical manipulation. As you read and hear the hate speeches against Trump, Putin, and Xi in the media, keep that in the back of your mind.

A chorus of voices answers the call from Theo Mitchell, former State Senator of South Carolina, concerning what can be done to exonerate Lyndon LaRouche and correct the injustice rampant around the world. Leaders from the International LaRouche Youth Movement addressed the June 27 Schiller Institute conference concerning the urgent requirement to recruit a new generation of leaders to think at the level of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche.

Sign the petition to exonerate Lyndon LaRouche

Internet Press Conference with Bill Binney — Thursday, July 23, 11 a.m. EDT

Is there actually a way to know, and to then prove, that the “Russiagate” story of the 2016 elections—a story which resulted in massive federal prosecutions, escalating international tensions, national paralysis, and a presidential impeachment trial—was completely false?

William Binney, a thirty-year veteran of the National Security Agency and its former technical director, will expose the continuing suppression by British intelligence agencies and their American counterparts of his evidence disproving the entire “Russiagate” story. “We can prove, that all the data that Wikileaks published from the DNC, that was downloaded on the 23rd and 25th of May, and also the 26th of August of 2016; all of that carried the signatures of being downloaded to a thumb drive or a CD-ROM, and physically transported,” Binney says. “So, we can prove that in a court of law. In fact, I put that in sworn affidavits that I submitted in the Roger Stone case and also in the General Flynn case. And the judges would not let my testimony in. I’ve been hard pressed to find anything (Russia) did in the 2016 election, let alone anything they’re trying to do in the 2020 election,” Binney said.

Roger Stone, speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox TV July 13 in the aftermath of the commutation of his jail sentence by President Donald Trump, stated: “I could have proved at trial, using forensic evidence and expert testimony from fellows like Bill Binney, former NSA counter intelligence expert…that no one hacked the DNC, that there was no online hack of the DNC… But I wasn’t allowed to present that defense, because Judge Jackson would not allow it.”

Binney, whose work has been featured in documentaries such as PBS Frontline’s “United States of Secrets” and the movie “A Good American,” was the designer of the “ThinThread” security system, which could well have prevented the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center from occurring, had he and his associates not been deliberately prevented from deploying it. “But the problem also was that it was a system that would’ve uncovered all of the criminal activity of our government employees and our secret intelligence agencies, and also others in the world, too,” Binney said. Instead, “universal surveillance” capabilities that he personally designed to protect Americans from terrorist attack were deployed after 9/11 to illegally monitor virtually every citizen of the United States in possession of any electronic device.

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July 2 – Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH has recently been hammering away at what he has described as an anti-science, anti-authority problem in the American population, which has gotten in the way of taking the needed measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. In congressional testimony earlier this week he stated: “I think the attitude of pushing back from authority and pushing back on scientific data is very concerning. We’re in the middle of a catastrophic outbreak and we really do need to be guided by scientific principles.”

Examples abound. Take the case of a group of students in Tuscaloosa, Alabama who were just diagnosed with Covid-19 after attending “Covid parties” as part of a contest to see who can catch the virus first, a city council member told ABC News on July 1. Tuscaloosa City Councilor Sonya McKinstry said the organizers of the parties are purposely inviting guests who have Covid-19. “They put money in a pot and they try to get Covid. Whoever gets Covid first gets the pot. It makes no sense; they’re intentionally doing it.”

Nor can this be written off as “just kids.” In Rockland County, NY, so many residents have flat-out refused to cooperate with authorities on contact tracing, that the county has been forced to use subpoenas to enforce the process. NBC New York reported yesterday: “Health officials are investigating a new cluster of eight or more COVID-19 cases in Rockland County tied to a large party earlier this month, but they’re running into trouble with contact tracing because people refuse to cooperate. The county plans to resort to subpoenas, as it did during its measles outbreak some years ago, to compel people to work with contact tracers as they work to contain a new potential outbreak… That party linked to the new potential cluster was the first of three large parties in Rockland County in the last two weeks. It was hosted June 13 by someone in New City who was sick with coronavirus at the time, sources say. County officials said Wednesday that the host knew they were symptomatic and held the party anyway.”

Insight into such problems, which affect both “left-wing” radicals and “right-wing” libertarians in the country, was provided 310 years ago by Gottfried Leibniz in his {Theodicy} (1710):

“Men have been perplexed in well-nigh every age by a sophism which the ancients called the `Lazy Reason’, because it tended towards doing nothing, or at least towards being careful for nothing and only following inclination for the pleasure of the moment. For, they said, if the future is necessary, that which must happen will happen, whatever I may do…

“The false conception of necessity, being applied in practice, has given rise to what I call {Fatum Mahometanum}, fate after the Turkish fashion, because it is said of the Turks that they do not shun danger or even abandon places infected with plague, owing to their use of such reasoning as that just recorded…

“It is true that they are not inactive or negligent when obvious perils or great and manifest hopes present themselves; for they will not fail to abandon a house that is about to fall and to turn aside from a precipice they see in their path; and they will burrow in the earth to dig up a treasure half uncovered, without waiting for to finish dislodging it. But when the good or the evil is remote and uncertain and the remedy painful or little to our taste, the lazy reason seems to us to be valid. For example, when it is a question of preserving one’s health and even one’s life by good diet, people to whom one gives advise thereupon very often answer that our days are numbered and that it avails nothing to try to struggle against that which God destines for us. But these same persons run to even the most absurd remedies when the evil they had neglected draws near…

“One will employ the lazy reason, derived form the idea of inevitable fate, to relieve oneself of the need to reason properly.”

Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise across sections of the United States, leading to crisis conditions in the South and Southwest, in particular. Arizona, Texas and Florida together reported about 25,000 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday. In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey (R) adopted statewide mask-wearing as daily deaths hit an all-time high. In Mississippi there are mandatory mask-wearing orders in 13 counties, and Gov. Tate Reeves (R) urged people to wear them statewide.

In Georgia, hospitalization has risen above earlier peaks from April, and there is concern that they may run out of critical care beds soon in a number of counties. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that “shares of open critical care beds in regions surrounding Athens, Dublin, Macon, Marietta, Savannah and Tifton have dipped into the single digits…. Disease experts at Georgia Tech and elsewhere have warned that Georgia is running out of time to prevent surges of cases that have overwhelmed hospitals in Florida, Arizona and other states that eased restrictions.”

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) added to a list totaling 22 states whose visitors will be required to quarantine for 14 days if they visit the tri-state region. Out-of-state travelers arriving in New York airports from those states face a $2,000 fine and a mandatory quarantine order if they fail to fill out a tracing form.

DC, Maryland and Virginia are all once again “trending up” in the last week as lock-downs have been eased, prompting warning from VA Gov Ralph Northam (D) on wearing masks in public. “Hospitals in [DC] have been running at just short of 80 percent capacity — a threshold that could trigger additional restrictions or measures to handle a surge of coronavirus patients,” according to the {Washington Post}.

The situation in nursing homes continues to be a dangerous hot spot in many states. The New York State Department of Health produced a report on nursing homes, tracking the source of spike in infections/deaths to the lack of testing: “approximately 37,500 nursing home staff members, or one in four of the state’s approximately 158,000 nursing home workers, were infected with COVID-19 between March and early June 2020… It is likely that thousands of employees who were infected in mid-March transmitted the virus unknowingly—through no fault of their own—while working, which then led to resident infection,” the NYSDOH report stated.

TASS reports today that South Korean President Moon Jae-in telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin and the latter welcomed the results of the inter-Korean summit.

“While exchanging their opinions, the two sides positively assessed the agreements reached at that meeting. Special attention was paid to the intention to secure the non-nuclear status of the Korean Peninsula enshrined in the Panmunjom Declaration through its total denuclearization. It was affirmed that coordinated measures to develop inter-Korean cooperation will also contribute to the region’s advancement towards peace and stability,” the Kremlin specified.

Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed Russia’s intention to further contribute to the development of cooperation between North and South Korea. “Russia’s intention to further contribute to the development of practical cooperation between the Republic of Korea and the D.P.R.K., in particular through the implementation of large trilateral infrastructural and energy projects, was confirmed. Vladimir Putin highlighted the importance of continuing efforts by all parties concerned for a politico-diplomatic solution of the Korean Peninsula problems, including with regard to milestones contained in the Russia-China roadmap,” the Kremlin press service said.

The South Korean news agency Yonhap reported today that the South Korean Transportation Ministry is reviewing a set of measures to prepare a potantially full-fledged implementation of criss-border economic projects. Officials said that inter-Korean cooperation can be discussed, as the two Koreas are expected to hold working-level talks to execute the railway construction projects to connect them.

July 2 – The proper way to commemorate the upcoming July 4 anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document of universal importance for all nations to this day, is by carrying that same spirit forward into organizing an urgent summit of world leaders around the New Deal and Good Neighbor policies of American statesman Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In her weekly webcast yesterday, Schiller Institute founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche picked up on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcement of the adoption of FDR New Deal-style economic policies by his government, by stating:

“If, however, Boris Johnson would be serious about it [the New Deal approach], and he would immediately agree to participate in the summit called by Putin, and would insist that the New Deal in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt is being made the subject of such a P5 summit, then it could be taken seriously and would actually be a useful contribution.”

There is little doubt that such an approach would be welcomed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, who told a Seattle business group during a visit to the U.S. in 2016: “In my younger years…I was interested in the life story and thinking of Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and other American statesmen.”

The same holds for Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose call for a new, global security architecture in his famous 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, was shaped around FDR’s approach after World War II: “It is well known that the field of international security goes well beyond issues of military and political stability. It involves the stability of the world economy, overcoming poverty, economic security, and the development of a dialogue among civilizations. This all-encompassing, indivisible character of security is expressed in its fundamental principle, that `the security of each is the security of all.’ As Franklin Roosevelt put it in the first days after the outbreak of the Second World War, `When peace has been broken anywhere, peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.’ These words remain topical today.”

Trump has also turned directly to FDR on numerous occasions, including in his victory speech the night of the 2016 election, stating: “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” President Trump’s leading participation in such an international summit would also be the perfect rejoinder to the British-led efforts to remove him from office, either now with fabricated scandals (such as the absurd Russian “bounty-gate” hoax), or by trying to defeat him in the November elections, by attempting to blame {Trump} for the economic and coronavirus pandemic crises which {the British} in fact caused by 50-plus years of their policies of economic looting.

Nor is there any doubt that the global systemic breakdown crisis makes such a summit of leaders urgently necessary, whether it be under the aegis of a Four Power meeting of the U.S., China, Russia and India, as Lyndon LaRouche long proposed, or the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, as Putin has called for — so long as the agenda is building a New Paradigm of world peace based on universal economic development.