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.
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.
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.
As the usual lying media, intelligence and military officials, and politicians debate “Who Lost Afghanistan?”, the people of the U.S. and the E.U. must demand full accountability for those responsible for the Afghan debacle. This begins with a commitment to end the idea of imposing a unilateral Rules-Based Order backed by U.S. and NATO military force. We must never again demand that nations surrender their sovereignty to that order. And it should include a commitment to aid the government that is constituted there in a process of economic development, with full cooperation among Afghanistan’s neighbors, along with Russia, China and the U.S. It is not adequate for American officials to admit “We didn’t have the foggiest idea” of what we were doing there — we must overcome the damage by doing what should have been done years ago, recognizing that peace comes from development, not war.
Beethoven: Sparks of Joy – Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 19
What was published as Beethoven’s second piano concerto was actually composed between 1787 and 1789 while Beethoven still lived in Bonn. He took it with him to Vienna, probably premiered it at the Burgtheater in 1795, and wrote a different finale for a 1798 performance in Prague. It was an important display piece for the young composer’s virtuosity at the keyboard.
Appropriately, the 12-year-old Harmony Zhu performed this concerto with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Arie Vardi, demonstrating impeccable technique as well as maturity well beyond her years. [Notes by Margaret Scialdone.]
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.
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
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?
Stay tuned for upcoming conferences!
The most important lesson from the chaotic retreat of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan is that we must end the era in which geopolitics determines foreign policy. The present nervous uncertainty surrounding Afghanistan is not simply the result of an intelligence failure, of Trump’s negotiations with Taliban, or a mistaken decision by Biden: It is the result of the domination of U.S. and western thinking, for the last fifty-plus years, by the intentionally deadly principles of British imperial geopolitics! Will we use the crushing defeat of geopolitics as an opportunity to reject the axioms of a global imperial power, and replace them with the prospect of cooperation for development, which is the true legacy of the American revolution?
For more details on what is now possible, contact us to order from the Executive Intelligence Review, “Will Afghanistan Trigger a Paradigm Change?”
Thanks to an admission by former Treasury Secretary John Connally, made nearly 17 years after Nixon moved to break the Bretton Woods system, we know that the real perpetrators were not the former Texas Governor, but global operators George Shultz and Paul Volcker. Their manipulation of Connally and Nixon launched the world financial system toward its present demise, by downgrading the power of sovereign governments to invest in the physical economy. Instead, increasing power was put into the hands of central bankers, who today are running a disintegrating casino economy, based on floating exchange rates. The “inside story” of how this happened confirmed Lyndon LaRouche’s late 1960s forecast of an intention to impose Schachtian/fascist austerity regimes, while turning productive industrial and agricultural centers into decaying rust heaps.
For more on this, watch “So, Are You Finally Ready to Learn Economics” at the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website.
At the end of a fifty-year period of the deliberate dismantling of the western world’s physical economy, by a criminal cabal of oligarchs and their flunkeys, now is the perfect time to “finally” learn economics. Lyndon LaRouche was defamed and persecuted during that period, not for any crimes he committed, but because he never gave up his commitment to create a new Renaissance, to mobilize people from every nation to defeat that cabal. Join us on August 14, at 9 AM EDT, to learn what made LaRouche a heroic figure in the battle to overcome the oligarchy, and defeat their efforts to bestialize mankind, to preserve their self-proclaimed elite status.
Event details: https://www.larouchelegacyfoundation.org/news/august-15
