E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
Volume 35, No. 33, August 19, 2021
Afghanistan: The Defeat of NATO
Opens the Potential for a New Era
The dramatic developments surrounding the Taliban takeover of Kabul and the humiliating defeat and retreat of the U.S. led NATO forces in Afghanistan, have been presented in apoc alyptic terms in Western media. Contrary to such hysteria, however, Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted on August 17 that this does not mean “the end of the world”. Rather, she said in her weekly Schiller Institute webcast, it is very good, first of all for the Afghani people, that 40 years of war is now finally ending, and it opens up the possibility of integrating Afghanistan into a regional economic perspective to begin reconstruction of the country, for example as part of China’s Belt and Road Initia
tive ((https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2021/08/17). There is now a real opportunity, she went on, to “bring sta bility and economic development to the region”. That is clearly in the interest of the Central Asian and neighboring nations, and Russia and China are ready to cooperate in this endeavor. Now, it is time for Europe and the United States to join in. But, Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned, that requires a com plete change in approach. German CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet correctly stated that this was the biggest fail ure of NATO ever, and a few other Western leaders have re acted thoughtfully.
However, they need to recognize that the entire policy ad opted since 9/11 – the regime-change wars, the “humanitar ian interventions”, the attempts to impose so-called “western values” with military means – has failed completely.
In Afghanistan itself, the intervention was “ill defined from the beginning”, and there was never a viable war plan. (Presi dent Biden, by the way, just openly stated that “nation build ing” was never the intention of the war, only protecting the U.S. from further attacks. Thus, it is not surprising that the Afghan army, despite the countless billions NATO spent on training, was not willing to defend the “puppet regime” in Kabul, but immediately surrendered.)
As for the Taliban takeover, Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted in this webcast and on other occasions, much hysteria is being spread. However, their leaders have agreed to a general am nesty for members of the previous regime, to sever ties with terrorist groups, to protect embassies and foreign nationals in the country, etc. If they are offered the perspective of eco nomic development, in particular participation in the Belt and
road projects, there will be great pressure on them to uphold these commitments.
Several transportation projects for the country are already on the drawing boards and ready to be implemented. The humanitarian needs are enormous, starting with building a modern health system and improving agriculture and food production, as viable alternatives to the opium production which flourished during the NATO occupation.
In fact, the United States and Europe have everything to gain from such an approach, Helga Zepp-LaRouche stressed, as their image has been severely damaged by the Afghanistan debacle.
However, if leading institutions and personalities “would now say, ‘OK, we made a mistake, and we will change our view. We will cooperate with Russia and China in the con struction of a new paradigm, where sovereignty is respected, and the advantage of the other is part of the equation”, then we could be at the beginning of a beautiful new era. And I think that is the kind of discussion that is needed right now.”
After Kabul, the Necessary Paradigm Change On July 31, the Schiller Institute held a video conference titled “Afghanistan: A Turning Point in History after the Failed Regime-Change Era,” which brought together experts and diplomats from Russia, China, Italy, South-West Asia and Afghanistan to discuss a national development program which would be beneficial for all components of Afghan soci ety. The event can be viewed at https://schillerinstitute.com/ blog/2021/07/29/..
U.S. Infrastructure Bill Falls Far Short of What Is Needed
On August 10, the U.S. Senate passed a $1 trillion infrastruc ture bill after months of negotiations, which was hailed as a major bipartisan victory for President Biden. The congratu lations, however, are likely to prove premature, for various reasons:
* The House of Representatives is on recess until Sept. 20, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not pass the infrastructure bill unless it is coupled with a $3.5 trillion Budget Plan, which has little prospect of gaining Republican support. While it might pass the House (with a majority of Democrats) , the Senate Republicans who voted for the infra-
structure bill are speaking out against the overall budget as too costly, and could still derail it in the Senate. * A bigger problem for President Biden is what is actually in the bill. Hailed by him as one which will “help make a historic recovery a long-term boom,” the provisions fall far short of what is minimally needed even to repair existing deteriorating infrastructure, much less provide a modernizing factor which could improve economic productivity. Of the $1 trillion price tag, only $566 billion is in new investment, to be spent over the next five years, a paltry sum given the needs. And of that amount, only $20 billion is allocated for spending by the end of 2022. While there has been talk of supplementing the amount with funds from state and local governments, many of them are facing severe deficits as a result of the costs of the COVID pandemic, and have had steep declines in revenue. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which does an an nual assessment of the “gap” between funds allocated, and the actual need, stated in their annual report that there is a $2.6 trillion deficit, far beyond the funding level contained in the Senate bill.
* Though not fully specified in what has been released so far, much of the U.S. spending will prioritize Green technolo gies, which will reduce overall productivity in the economy, by substituting efficient and reliable energy production with inefficient and unreliable “sustainable” sources, such as solar and wind.
* A further problematic aspect of the bill is that it has been pushed by the White House team as needed to “send a signal” to China that the U.S. is not in decline. Both Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Tony Blinken made this point in com
ments after the vote in the Senate. But a comparison done by the daily Politico of what is in the bill with what China is planning highlights the inadequacy of the Biden legislation. In 2018, China’s infrastructure spending as a percent of GDP was 5.57%, compared to only 0.52% for America. In the same year, China spent $8 trillion in its state infrastructure budget, the U.S. $146 billion. The article pointed out that be
tween 2011 and 2013, China poured more concrete than the U.S. in the entire 20th century! As for modernizing transpor tation, while the Biden bill allocates $25 billion for upgrading airports, China will build 162 new state-of-the-art airports by 2035.
* The final point which must be made is that the idea of competition with an adversary as the basis of determining funding is an example of the worst kind of geopolitical calcula tion. Instead of competing against the Belt-and-Road Initiative -- as was the talk at the G7 summit -- why not cooperate, to take up the challenges faced by both the poorer countries, and the so-called advanced nations of the G7?
Failure of Renewables in Germany
Relaunches Debate on Nuclear Power Unless changed, the timetable of the German government on nuclear power is to switch off three of the remaining six nu clear power plants by the end of 2021, and the other three by the end of next year. Germany’s neighbors are shaking their heads over this strategy, most notably France.
In an interview on Aug. 2 with Die Welt, the executive di rector of the state-owned French energy company EDF, Ce dric Lewandowski, called the German nuclear exit “the most
drastic” example of anti-nuclear policies, which will cause the country “enormous difficulties” by increasing the need for carbon-based coal and gas. That contradicts, of course, gov ernment announcements about the shift of the energy mix into “renewables”.
And in fact, a survey presented a few days later showed that with the exception of mineral oil, all other fossil energies as well as nuclear power provided more to the national German energy mix in the first half-year of 2021, than “renewables” such as solar, wind and biomass. Mineral oil use was down by 12.1% due to the Corona-related reduction of motor ve
hicle use and because its high market price deterred citizens from stocking reserves for the coming winter period. But for the other sources, natural gas consumption went up during the same period by 15.6%; hard coal by 22.7%; lignite by 33.5% and nuclear by 7%. Renewables decreased by 1%, and wind power by a huge 20% due to less wind blowing. The year-on-year figures, taken from a report of the AGEB (Working Group Energy Balance), show a sobering reality, which the Greens notoriously refuse to acknowledge.
With national elections only weeks away and the prospect of major gains for the Greens, a rethinking of the nuclear exit strategy may be on its way: on Aug. 10, Theo Sommer, editor at-large of the Die Zeit weekly, wrote that Germany will need nuclear power for some time to come, noting that the Fed eral Audit Office has warned of a blackout due to the energy transition. Sommer points to the considerable gap between the ambitious target of 65% of energy generated by renew ables and what such sources can actually produce, especially if the Green’s proposal to shut down all coal-powered plants by 2030 instead of 2038 is implemented. At best, Germany will face a gap of 40% that cannot be provided by renewables, he writes, citing an assessment by Siemens Energy.
The only way out, concludes Sommer, is to extend the op eration of the six remaining nuclear power plants beyond the end of 2022. He also points out that with 28 countries inter nationally that want to enter the nuclear power era, the global trend is diametrically opposed to the official German policy.
IPCC: A Climate Report Riddled
with Conjectures and Contradictions News media all over the world have presented recent flooding and wildfires as evidence that the climate “has gone mad”, even though it is known that such fires are often set by arson ists and that the floods are often due a lack of infrastructure. However, such disaster, together with the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are used by the political establishment to push for so-called “decarbon ization” (cf. SAS 32/21). The IPCC report, despite its title (The Physical Science Base), is not based on science but on unproven dogmas.
For instance, the report acknowledges that “During 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a rapid, temporary decline in fossil CO2 emissions, estimated to be around 7%” on a global scale. “Global daily CO2 emissions from fossil fuel sources had a maximum decline of 17% in early April, compared with the mean 2019 levels.” (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/ downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf)
These are dramatic figures, if one considers that emissions have never decreased globally, but have rather, since the Paris
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT 2 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n° 33 / 2021
agreement, increased until now (for man-made reasons ac cording to the climate lobby and the IPCC). Were this theory correct, the dramatic drop in emissions during the lockdowns should have a positive effect on the global temperature – but did not.
Thus, the IPCC found a “magic formula” to defend its the ory, even though the empirical evidence contradicts it. Its argument: “Short-term reductions in CO2 emissions, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, do not have detectable effects on either CO2 concentration or global temperature. Only sustained emission reductions over decades would have a widespread effect across the climate system.”
In other words, it’s all a question of believing: “Have faith and you will be saved.”
The real aim of the fake science spread by the IPCC “is to spread panic, in order to gain money or political careers from it or, for some, academic careers otherwise unreacheable”, commented Franco Battaglia in the Italian daily La Verità. Battaglia is professor for chemical physics at the Modena Uni
versity and spoke at a July 24 Schiller Institute webinar on climate change (LINK).
He notes that one thousand scientists recently signed a peti tion to the UN Secretary General entitled “There is No Climate Emergency”. But they have been “ignored by the political and media establishment, which prefers to hang on the lips of the illustrious scientist Greta Thunberg”.
Another recent paper, produced by 23 scientists from 14 countries, challenges the IPCC conclusions because they ig nore the impact of solar activity (http://www.raa-journal.org/ raa/index.php/raa/article/view/4906. Reviewing the report on RT, author Norman Lewis asserts that “The science of climate change – what ought to be a field of open contestation – has been transformed into a narrow one of religious consensus. It has become a barrier to science itself. There is no doubt that climate change is real, and it is a problem facing humanity. But just because it is a problem does not mean we are facing an apocalypse.”
Nonetheless, the IPCC report’s conclusions “are dogmatic and (…) are based on partial research chosen to support a predetermined misanthropic narrative”.
Conference Report:
The LaRouche Method
Versus Monetarism and Cybernetics Will the current world crisis lead to the proliferation of wars, a hyperinflationary explosion of the financial system, and a cultural collapse into a new Dark Age? Or will enough forces come together internationally, in time, to launch a new para digm based on achieving the common aims of mankind? The answer lies not only in what people think, but how they think. This was the theme of the online conference sponsored by the LaRouche Legacy Foundation on August 14, which was devoted to understanding the method of thinking developed by Lyndon LaRouche, building on great thinkers of the past, and how it applies to human economy.
The conference was held on the 50th anniversary of the abandonment by then-President Nixon of the Bretton Woods System, and thus the decoupling of the dollar from its peg to gold, and the introduction of floating exchange rates, which ushered in an era of decline in the trans-Atlantic world. Under
the banner “So, Are You Finally Willing To Learn Econom ics?”, it brought together political leaders, economists, musi cians and others from around the world, who engaged in a dialogue on LaRouche’s fundamental discoveries and the need to propagate his works.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote speech provided insight into her late husband Lyndon LaRouche’s capacity to inspire people from all different layers of society, from heads of state to Peruvian fishermen and Italian shoemakers. He insisted that one cannot separate politics, science, and culture into separate categories, that all aspects of life fall under the cen
trality of creativity as the difference between man and beast, and fostering that creativity in all is the only true object of the science of physical economy.
Zepp-LaRouche traced her husband’s debt to Plato, Leibniz, Kepler and other giants of history, in making his own dis coveries. She reviewed in particular the new instruments for measuring progress which he had created – known as “rela tive potential population density,” and “energy flux-density” -- and the interconnection between these crucial concepts. She went through his initial decision to combat the statistical method of systems analysis promoted by Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, which treat the mind as a computer and consider artificial intelligence as equivalent to creativity. This false concept of the nature of man has grown today into the insanity of the “models” which drive the climate hoax, finan cial speculation, and the oligarchical society. She concluded by calling for the “replacement of the quackery of information theory with the ideas of LaRouche in all universities.”
From Russia and China to Latin America, LaRouche’ s Science of Physical Economy The first panel of the conference then heard from leading Chinese political scientist Ding Yifan, for many years the Deputy Director of the World Development Institute under the State Council in China, who has written several books including chapters on the ideas and discoveries of Lyndon La Rouche. He noted that LaRouche had focused on two crimes from the ending of Bretton Woods: the abuse of currencies through floating exchange rates, leading to vicious attacks on national currencies, and the deregulation of the financial sys tem, which allowed the speculators to take over. Today’s QE and other hyperinflationary money printing, he said, is creat ing a cancer in the economy -- a demonstration of LaRouche’s warning about entropy resulting from the failure to develop the real economy.
Jozef Miklosko, the former Vice Prime Minister of post communist Czechoslovakia and former Slovakian Ambassador to Italy, described his friend LaRouche as the most educated man he’d ever known, and noted that 80 pages of his own book were devoted to LaRouche and his organization. He rec ommended that a “short book” be produced in all languages on LaRouche’s ideas.
Dr. Natalia Vitrenko, an economist and Chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, recalled her years of collaboration with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, including their call for a “new Bretton Woods” system in 1998. She also reviewed the destruction of Ukraine following the 2014 coup, driving the country from being one of the top ten econ
omies in the world to now the poorest in Europe, with 10
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT n°33 / 2021 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 3
million going hungry, and a population decline by over 20% since 1990. She closed: “Will we be a cemetery with windmills in place of crosses?”
Dr. Kirk Meighoo, a former Senator in Trinidad & Tobago, author and political activist, described how he become a devel opment economist through his education (in Toronto, Jamaica and the U.K.), but only grasped the real key to development after discovering LaRouche on his own through the internet. He fully endorsed the Four Laws proposed by the LaRouche movement worldwide.
Yekaterina Fyodorovna Shamayeva a senior lecturer in Russia, spoke on the fundamental ideas of the “Schools of Lyndon LaRouche and Pobisk Kuznetsov.” The late Pobisk Kuznetsov was one of Russia’s leading scientists and philo
sophic thinkers, who became a close friend and collaborator of Lyndon LaRouche following the fall of the Soviet Union. He proposed that a new unit of measure of the progress of physi cal economies be based on LaRouche’s dual conceptions of rel ative potential population density and energy flux-density, and that the unit be called the “La,” after LaRouche. Shamayeva described the continuing effort in Russia to bring about a syn thesis of the ideas of Kuznetsov and LaRouche, emphasizing that economics cannot be separated from the laws of nature.
EIR Economics Editor Paul Gallagher gave an overview of the Bretton Woods system, from the post-war period to its demise in 1971, and the consequences thereof. He presented LaRouche’s forecast at the time, that President Nixon’s deci
sion would lead to a new depression and ultimately to a new fascism. This was but one of LaRouche’s economic forecasts, all of which were proven to be fully prescient.
The first panel closed with video presentations and readings about LaRouche from several people who have since passed away, among them: former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark on the miscarriage of justice in the persecution of La
Rouche; Dr. Enéas Carneiro, a former member of the Brazil ian parliament and presidential candidate; former President of Mexico José López Portillo, and former Foreign Minister of Guyana Fred Wills, who in 1976 called on the UN General Assembly to adopt LaRouche’s idea of a New International Economic Order.
Many of the international speakers and participants in the discussion stressed the need to translate more of LaRouche’s major works into other languages, including Russian, Chinese and Arabic, and to disseminate them widely.
Earth’s Next Fifty Years
The second panel of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation’s event took up the topic of Lyndon LaRouche’s vision of “Earth’s Next Fifty Years”. Moderator Megan Dobrodt, Secretary-Treasur er of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation Board of Directors, opened the panel with a 1995 video of the LaRouches’ close friend and collaborator, Norbert Brainin, the lead violinist of the legendary Amadeus Quartet.
In the short clip shown, Brainin explained a musical con cept which in his view is fundamental, that of Motivführung, or “motivic thorough-composition,” an approach to classical composition developed by Haydn and refined by Mozart and Beethoven. Although he often talked about it with profes sional colleagues and students, Brainin said, LaRouche was the only person who really understood it completely.
This was followed by a recording of LaRouche addressing the issue of human creativity at the July 3, 2011 European Schiller Institute conference, and the way it is expressed in both classical art and physical science.
The first speaker on the panel was Jacques Cheminade, President of the Solidarité et Progrès party in France, and a former Presidential candidate. He described his decades of collaboration with Lyndon LaRouche in France, where truly independent-thinking leaders from the entire political spec
trum, from Communists to Conservatives, as well as Maurice Allais, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, appreciated LaRouche’s economic outlook and defense of national sover eignty.
Two representatives from Argentina, Roberto Fritzsche and Eduardo Fernandez, used discoveries of the great Rus sian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky to explain LaRouche’s concept of “relative potential population density” in relation to “energy flux density” and improvements in living standards.
Harley Schlanger, a long-time leader of the LaRouche movement, followed with an ironically revealing behind the scenes report on the origins of Richard Nixon’s disastrous Au gust 15, 1971 announcement. He provided particular insight into the role of Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury, John Con nally of Texas, whom he confronted personally on the issue many years later.
Daisuke Kotegawa, formerly a top official in Japan’s Min istry of Finance and Japan’s Executive Director at the IMF, sent a greeting backing LaRouche’s distinction between in vestments in the real economy as opposed to speculation, and called for restoring Glass-Steagall.
Fred Huenefeld, an agricultural economist who has served in multiple government positions in Louisiana, and is a long time board member of the Schiller Institute, gave an animated description of his years of agitating for LaRouche’s ideas, in cluding in the U.S. Congress.
From South Carolina, former State Senator Theo Mitch ell, a leader in the Democratic Party and a board member of the Schiller Institute, discussed his work to expose the FBI’s misjustice in the prosecution of LaRouche and in the “Fruh menschen” campaign which targeted Black elected officials, including himself.
The concluding section, on LaRouche in the universities, gave youth leaders of the LaRouche movement from Latin America, the Philippines and the United States an opportunity to discuss their commitment to getting LaRouche’s work into universities and elsewhere.
The full conference can be viewed at the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website, at:
https://www.larouchelegacyfoundation.org/news/august-15.
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