E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
Volume 35, No. 50, December 16, 2021
The War Party Escalates Calls for Military Action over Ukraine and Taiwan
Despite clear actions for de-escalation coming out of the Biden-Putin summit Dec. 7, the strategic situation remains a tense one, as war hawks in the Transatlantic region are working to sabotage that thrust. The centers of Western geopolitics, led by the British Foreign Office, are quite alarmed by the decision to have a NATO-Russia dialogue, as indicated by Joe Biden, when he announced an upcom
ing summit with Russia and “at least four NATO member countries”.
That meeting has not yet been set up, while the other ini tiative coming out of the Dec. 7 summit, the continuation of high-level US-Russia negotiations, is taking place with the visit to Kiev, Moscow and Brussels by Karen Donfried, the number two at the State Department, as of Dec. 13. According to some reports, she was supposed to put pressure on the Ukrai nian government to abide by the Minsk agreement. Another initiative for de-escalation, in the form of a French-Russian Ukrainiansummit, was announced by French President Em manuel Macron on Dec. 9.
A major handicap for Biden’s policy however is Congress, as former U.S. ambassador Chas Freeman explained in a long interview to EIR magazine on Nov. 29. Congress as well as Biden’s own Administration, he said, are strongly influenced by “people who built careers focused on the manipulation of domestic American opinion rather than on diplomacy, or for
eign policy in general” (see more below).
That problem with Congress was illustrated in a shock ing way a few days later in the incendiary statements made Dec. 7 by Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker on Fox TV. “I would not rule out military action“ over Ukraine, he said. Military options against Russia would include “that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea and we rain destruction on Russian military capability. I would not rule out American troops on the ground”, he stated, adding that U.S. shouldn’t “rule out first-use nuclear action”. Now, Sen. Wicker is not just anyone, and not just an ordinary senator, he is the sec
ond highest-ranking Republican in the Senate Armed Service Committee and his views are very popular among American politicians.
His insanity was quickly blasted by Tulsi Gabbard, a former Congresswoman from Hawaii and a lieutenant colonel in the
U.S. Army. She told Fox TV the next day that “Anyone who would propose or even consider what he is saying as an option must be insane, a sociopath or a sadist. Let’s go and launch a nuclear attack that would start a war that would destroy the American people, our country and the world and, oh, also, the Ukrainians, so that we can save Ukraine’s democracy? I mean, it literally is insane.” Unfortunately, she added, the same rhet
oric is heard both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as well as in the administration and the media.
One can only agree with Tulsi Gabbard, who has witnessed war up close, having been deployed to Iraq twice between 2003 and 2009. In addition to the provocations against Rus sia, the risk of a major conflict with Iran is growing. Even more dangerous is the conflict which is being artificially con cocted with China over Taiwan and the South China Sea. The United States and NATO could never win any such wars, but they would serve to prolong indefinitely the current “perma nent and endless war” policy.
Therefore, it is to be hoped that Joe Biden will listen to the saner voices. But unless and until there is a dramatic shift in policy-making, the chances of long-lasting de-escalation re main dim.
Exclusive Interviews to EIR
on U.S. Foreign Policy
In his interview to EIR on Nov. 29, Ambassador Chas Free man attacked Washington’s policy toward China and Taiwan, an area he has followed for decades. People in the Penta gon, according to him, understand that this is “a replay of Cold War-style Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation”, but “it’s pretty clear that the American political elite does not make that connection”. Therefore, such a replay “is looking more likely every day”.
The Trump and Biden administrations have gone past the “red line” which could provoke a war with China, said Free man, who played a major role in the opening of relations with China in the 1970s. “In the finessing of the issue of Taiwan in U.S.-China relations, essentially, the United States agreed to three conditions: one, that we would end official relations with Taipei; two, that we would withdraw all military person nel and installations from the island; and three, we would void our defense commitment to the island. We have now gone back on each of these commitments.”
Graham Fuller, a scholar of Islam who served for 25 years in the CIA, including in several Middle East countries and four years in Hong Kong, also gave an interview to EIR, in which he strongly warned against the drive for war aimed in par
ticular at Russia and China (https://larouchepub.com/other/ interviews/2021/4850-graham_fuller.html). And he added another hot spot to the picture, namely Iran. If the U.S. fails to “tamp down its rhetoric,” he warned, the consequences could be catastrophic. Calling Iran the number one terrorist threat state is “grotesque”, in his view, especially in light of Saudi Arabia’s promotion of terrorism. In the same vein, he finds it “ridiculous” to accuse China of genocide against the Uyghurs, a people he knows very well.
Both Chas Freeman and Graham Fuller believe President Biden does not want a war, but neither are they confident that he will be able to overcome the addiction to war among the United States’ elites and the military-industrial complex.
At this point, the rationale for that “addiction to war” is to be found in the dynamic of economic collapse, due to the continuation of looting financial policies under the guise of the “Green New Deal” (cf. following slug).
Climate Policies Are Leading the World to War
At a presentation at the weekly Manhattan Project Meeting of the LaRouche Organization, EIR economics editor Paul Gal lagher pointed to a scarcely mentioned consequence of the “Green New Deal” policies: war. He showed how the institu tions, media and figures leading the global push for a “climate neutral” economy are the same ones that manipulate western public opinions into a hostile attitude against Russia and Chi na, and create provocations to justify a military confrontation. A leading role in both campaigns is Chatham House, the think thank of the British Empire.
The hostility attitude intensified noticeably after the failure of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, a flop correctly blamed by Joe Biden on Russia and China, whose leaders refused to attend in person and who inspired opposition from other de
veloping nations, including India, which refuse to sacrifice de velopment for the alleged sake of “saving the planet”. At the same time, the initial enforcement of such climate policies in the advanced economy has already created an un precedented economic crisis. Investment in fossil fuel extrac tion has dropped to less than half of what it was ten years ago. Labor productivity both in the U.S. and the EU plunged during the course of 2021, which is very rare. As for real wages, they are falling in both economic areas as well. In the United States they have dropped by just under 2.2% in the past year for all employees in the economy. Infla tion in November, although understated, officially hit 5.2% annually in Europe, 6.8% annually in the U.S.. Having failed to make inflation “transitory”, the Federal Reserve announced that it would introduce, starting January, a transitory way of computing it.
The largest banks in the United States, London, and Euro pean capitals are in a zombie condition, due to the vast money printing by the central banks in the past two years, and the enlistment of these banks by the Great Reset elite to force the “shifting of the trillions” out of all carbon-intense eco nomic activity. These banks have become unwilling or unable or both, to loan. Therefore, they now typically have 75-100% more deposits on hand than loans, and rather than injecting
credit into the industrial economies, they are withdrawing it, month by month, which means less productive investment and lower productivity.
This is a situation, Gallagher said, “where financial elites enlist media and government to generate anger, even hatred of ‘adversary nations’, and then crises are developed and pro moted. In one way or another, as in the case of the inadver tent, but nearly completely disastrous Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago, these crises lead towards war. This alone, should lead us to fight this Green New Deal until it has been stopped and reversed by economic development policies, in particularly those directed toward the developing countries and involving the cooperation of the major leading technological nations.”
Washington’s Farcical Summit for Democracy To call the virtual Summit for Democracy organized by the Biden Administration on Dec. 9-10 an exercise in hypocrisy is a huge understatement. Some 100 leaders from around the world were invited, but no one from China or Russia, or other so-called “autocratic” regimes, was among them.
Officially, the event was devoted to “strengthening democ racy and countering authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.” But showing just how little regard “the West” has for freedom of speech and human rights, on the second day of the summit, it was an nounced that a court in the United Kingdom had ruled in fa vor of extraditing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States for revealing U.S. war crimes! The fact that Dec. 10 also happened to be the UN-declared Human Rights Day was just another slap in the face to all those who oppose the West’s self-proclaimed “rules-based order”.
Many articles and commentaries in Chinese and Russian media, but also in the United States, pointed to Washington’s lack of credibility to preach the virtues of democracy. One more humorous description, reported in Global Times, came from a Russian observer who compared the U.S. initiative to “a mistress of a brothel teaching morality to schoolgirls”. The Chinese television station CGTN also ran comments on the event from two Schiller Institute representatives from France, Karel Vereycken (English language news) and Sébastien Péri mony (French language news). They both pointed to the cyni
cism of the trans-Atlantic elites who invoke “democracy” as a means of imposing on all countries their neo-liberal model -- including by military force and murderous sanctions.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche for her part, in a recent article, blasted the attempt to divide the world into “good guys” and “bad guys”, or human rights and freedom fighters against “autocrats”. One look at the catastrophic situation today in Afghanistan shows how little the United States actually cares about such values. “We should speak of the millions of dead, injured, and refugees as a result of the endless wars built on lies. And what about Julian Assange [who] is being murdered by legal means before the eyes of the world?”
The same can be said of the European Union and its igno minous use of Frontex to prevent refugees from arriving here and then confining them to virtual concentration camps, she wrote, or its defense of the “Malthusian policy of the Klaus Schwabs of this world, which regards the attempt to over come poverty as the greatest threat to the ‘climate’ and thus says any development must be suppressed for decades...”
Compared to that, Helga Zepp-LaRouche observed, the record of some “autocratic” governments might not look so
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT 2 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n°50 / 2021
bad. “China has not only lifted 850 million people of its own population out of extreme poverty, but has given develop ing countries the chance to overcome poverty and underde velopment for the first time. The United States has almost 800,000 coronavirus deaths with a population of 330 mil lion people, while China has fewer than 5,000 deaths with 1.4 billion people.” Perhaps those great self-proclaimed champions of democracy in the West, she suggests, should ask themselves whether human life is worth more to “au tocratic” regimes than to them. (A translation in English of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s article is available at https:// larouchepub.com/pr/2021/20211213_lead-editorial.html)
In Devastating Blow to Freedom of Speech, British Court Rules to Extradite Assange On the morning of Dec. 10, Britain’s High Court overturned the previous denial of the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. His crime? Publishing in Wikileaks information passed on to him as a journalist, including proof of U.S. war crimes. There, he faces obscure charges of espionage, which could put him in prison for 175 years! The two-judge appel late panel in London accepted the proffered guarantees from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that Assange: would not be put in the “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado; would not be put under SAMs (Special Administrative Measures, in cluding solitary confinement) “unless subsequent behavior by Assange justified it”; and, if convicted, would be allowed to serve his time in Australia.
Assange’s fiancée, Stella Moris, asked: “How can it be fair, how can it be right, how can it be possible, to extradite Julian to the very country which plotted to kill him?” Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald found “the High Court’s faith in these guarantees … particularly striking”—given the revela
tion that the CIA under Mike Pompeo had “plotted to kidnap or even assassinate” the journalist. Yet the court said it was satisfied that the assurances given by the U.S. Department of Justice would protect Assange’s physical and mental health.
After living holed up in London in asylum for nine years to avoid facing charges by a notoriously unjust U.S. judicial system, Assange has spent the past 32 months in the high security Belmarsh prison of London. Last January, a London court ruled that his treatment by the U.S. prison system would likely overwhelm his fragile mental health, but forced him to return to “Britain’s Guantanamo” while awaiting the appeal. As Greenwald points out, from 2010 to 2016, liberal advocacy groups were vocal in defense of Assange’s exposure, as a journalist, of torture and war crimes. “One thing and only one thing has changed since then,” which was that in 2016, Wikileaks exposed the efforts of the Hillary Clinton presiden
tial campaign and the Democratic Party in sabotaging Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
The publication of those Democratic Party documents were used by the FBI and other intelligence agencies as an excuse to launch the entire “Russiagate” hoax, which paralyzed needed efforts to improve U.S.-Russia relations and was used to at
tempt to effectively undo the democratic election of political outsider Donald Trump in 2016.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche:
Germany Must Leave NATO!
In an article reviewing the strategic situation following the Biden-Putin summit, Helga Zepp-LaRouche wrote on Dec. 11
that “in light of the political orientation of the new govern ment in Berlin, it seems almost hopeless to demand Germa ny’s immediate exit from NATO. But if Olaf Scholz is serious about the oath of office he took two days ago when being sworn in as Federal Chancellor, namely that he will ‘dedicate my efforts to the well-being of the German people, promote their welfare, protect them from harm”, then he will have to initiate such an exit immediately. Because in NATO, and espe cially in the U.S. and Great Britain, there are influential forces who, for geopolitical reasons, are playing with the existence
of Germany and beyond that, of all of humanity.’” After going through the acute danger of a major war, Zepp-LaRouche concludes that Germans should realize that “remaining in a military alliance which will lead, in a crisis situation, to their annihilation, may not be such a good idea. There is an alternative to the confrontation policy of a NATO which, has been obsolete since 1991. We need to urgently establish an international security architecture that takes into account the security interests of all nations.”
Several proposals going in the direction of a new security arrangement have surfaced in Germany over the past days. On the eve of the Biden-Putin summit, 27 senior retired mili tary, diplomats and defense experts published an open letter urging four steps toward a de-escalation: 1) convening an in ternational conference modelled on that of Helsinki in 1975; 2) renouncing any military escalation on both sides while the conference is ongoing; 3) reviving the NATO-Russia Coun cil and 4) constructive offers of economic cooperation with Russia, implicitly in place of the current sanctions approach (https://www.johannes-varwick.de/rauf/AUFRUF_Raus-aus der-Eskalationsspirale_05122021-3.pdf).
Parallel to the Biden-Putin summit, a new call was issued by the Berlin-based Freidenker (Free Thinkers) Association, which has campaigned for several decades for detente and cooperation with Russia (https://neinzurnato.de/aufruf/). In addition to calling for Germany to leave NATO, they note that a new form of partnership is developing in the greater Eurasia area, which includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Belt and Road Initiative. Most interestingly, the state
ment notes that NATO and the EU are the instruments of a bankrupt Western financial system, based on speculative or gies (including on CO2) to the detriment to real production.
Germany’s new Foreign Minister, however, Annalena Baer bock of the Greens, has come firmly down on the side of the neocons in the “war party” when it comes to relations with Russia and China. In that light, she apparently got on very nicely with her British counterpart, Liz Truss, on the occasion of the G7 meeting in Liverpool, with both rantig against “autocratic regimes”. It remains to be seen whether and to what extent Chancellor Scholz and his SPD will be foolish enough to let Mrs. Baerbock and the Greens run the country’s foreign policy.
How and Why the IMF Has Failed in Africa, and China Has Not
Dr. Justin Yifu Lin, the former chief economist at the World Bank, issued convincing criticism of the Western approach to the “development” of Africa in an article posted Dec. 6 on Project Syndicate, co-authored by Dr. Yan Wang from Boston University. The Western method basically assured there would be no development, which is very different from the concept of China’s Belt and Road Initiative to infrastructure develop
ment and poverty reduction.
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT n°50 / 2021 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 3
For Mrs. Wang and Mr. Lin, now the Dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics and Dean of the Institute of South South Cooperation and Development in China, the IMF/World Bank measure of a nation’s wealth and the so-called “sustain ability” of its debt is severely flawed, as it only takes account of liabilities and GDP, neglecting the tangible economic assets. “This reflects the predominance of short-term thinking,” they assert. “Whereas GDP indicates how much monetary income or output a country produces in a year, wealth also covers the value of the underlying national assets, including the human, natural, and produced capital that form the foundations of a country’s comparative advantages. As such, wealth accounting provides essential insights into a country’s prospects for main taining and increasing its income over the long term.”
As a result of the failed IMF method, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, “many low- and lower-middle-income countries continue to suffer more fundamental deficiencies, such as a lack of health-care personnel and resources, from hospital beds to ventilators. For some, it is the inability to deliver clean water, electricity, and sanitation that is choking the economy.”
The IMF and Western countries have been supplying devel opment aid and cooperation for 70 years now, the two au thors note. So why have so many countries remained “stuck in low- or lower-middle-income traps without sufficient capacity to meet their citizens’ basic needs? Both market and govern ment failures -- rooted not least in the longstanding neoliberal orthodoxy -- can be blamed.”
One major problem, they argue, is all that aid over all those years did not adequately address “infrastructure bottlenecks”. That is contrary to the Chinese approach to investment in Africa, which they summarize (cf. SAS 49/21 for more in
formation on this point). The article goes on to suggest ways in which China should improve yet more its choice of projects and funding them.
Afghanistan: Unfreeze the Afghan Government Funds and Save Lives with Emergency Aid On “Human Rights Day”, celebrated Dec. 10, the Commit tee for the Coincidence of Opposites (CCO) issued a state ment calling for the immediate release of the $9.5 billion in Afghan funds, which is now being withheld by the U.S. Federal Reserve and various international banks, including Commerzbank. The refusal to unfreeze those assets, which rightfully belong to the Afghan people, directly contributes to the intense and worsening suffering of millions of people. An estimated 24 million people are right now threatened with starvation and death from the cold during the winter.
The CCO’s statement calls this human rights emergency in Afghanistan “a moral priority for the world.”. The Com mittee reiterates its call “for a multi-nation collaborative ap proach -- called Operation Ibn Sina -- to both rush the needed medicines, food, fuel, shelter, logistics, and other necessities to save lives; and start the construction of a full-scale health system, including all needed basic infrastructure to support it (power, water, transportation, medical facilities). Only in this way, can we respect and provide the means to life -- the basic human right -- for everyone....” (To learn more and to sup port the COC, please go to: https://schillerinstitute.com/the committee-for-the-coincidence-of-opposites/)
On the same day the COC statement was released, the World Bank finally announced that $280 million of the $1.5
billion in the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund would be released to the World Food Program and UNICEF. The ARTF, which is funded by 31 donor countries, was the main source of development financing before the takeover of the Taliban, after which all payments were frozen (cf. SAS 49/21)
Now, UNICEF is to receive $100 million to “provide essen tial health services through providers active in the Sehatmandi program in partnership with WHO”, while the WFP is to re ceive $180 million to “scale up food security and nutrition operations in the country,” reports the World Bank.
Those sums should allow UNICEF “to provide 12.5 million people with basic and essential health services and vaccinate one million people, while the World Food Program will be able to provide food assistance to 2.7 million people and nutri
tional assistance to nearly 840,000 mothers and children.” Already three weeks ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had warned that Afghanistan’s economy is going into free-fall, as a result of sanctions on banking ser vices, the freezing of assets, and the lack of humanitarian aid where it is most needed. Dominik Stillhart, the ICRC’s direc tor of operations, charged that “the international community is turning its back as the country teeters on the precipice of man-made catastrophe.” Unless the international community engages with Afghanistan, there will be a total collapse of essential services, including of the public health system, he warned.
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EIR STRATEGIC ALERT 4 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n° 50 / 2021
Volume 35, No. 50, December 16, 2021
The War Party Escalates Calls for Military Action over Ukraine and Taiwan
Despite clear actions for de-escalation coming out of the Biden-Putin summit Dec. 7, the strategic situation remains a tense one, as war hawks in the Transatlantic region are working to sabotage that thrust. The centers of Western geopolitics, led by the British Foreign Office, are quite alarmed by the decision to have a NATO-Russia dialogue, as indicated by Joe Biden, when he announced an upcom
ing summit with Russia and “at least four NATO member countries”.
That meeting has not yet been set up, while the other ini tiative coming out of the Dec. 7 summit, the continuation of high-level US-Russia negotiations, is taking place with the visit to Kiev, Moscow and Brussels by Karen Donfried, the number two at the State Department, as of Dec. 13. According to some reports, she was supposed to put pressure on the Ukrai nian government to abide by the Minsk agreement. Another initiative for de-escalation, in the form of a French-Russian Ukrainiansummit, was announced by French President Em manuel Macron on Dec. 9.
A major handicap for Biden’s policy however is Congress, as former U.S. ambassador Chas Freeman explained in a long interview to EIR magazine on Nov. 29. Congress as well as Biden’s own Administration, he said, are strongly influenced by “people who built careers focused on the manipulation of domestic American opinion rather than on diplomacy, or for
eign policy in general” (see more below).
That problem with Congress was illustrated in a shock ing way a few days later in the incendiary statements made Dec. 7 by Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker on Fox TV. “I would not rule out military action“ over Ukraine, he said. Military options against Russia would include “that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea and we rain destruction on Russian military capability. I would not rule out American troops on the ground”, he stated, adding that U.S. shouldn’t “rule out first-use nuclear action”. Now, Sen. Wicker is not just anyone, and not just an ordinary senator, he is the sec
ond highest-ranking Republican in the Senate Armed Service Committee and his views are very popular among American politicians.
His insanity was quickly blasted by Tulsi Gabbard, a former Congresswoman from Hawaii and a lieutenant colonel in the
U.S. Army. She told Fox TV the next day that “Anyone who would propose or even consider what he is saying as an option must be insane, a sociopath or a sadist. Let’s go and launch a nuclear attack that would start a war that would destroy the American people, our country and the world and, oh, also, the Ukrainians, so that we can save Ukraine’s democracy? I mean, it literally is insane.” Unfortunately, she added, the same rhet
oric is heard both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as well as in the administration and the media.
One can only agree with Tulsi Gabbard, who has witnessed war up close, having been deployed to Iraq twice between 2003 and 2009. In addition to the provocations against Rus sia, the risk of a major conflict with Iran is growing. Even more dangerous is the conflict which is being artificially con cocted with China over Taiwan and the South China Sea. The United States and NATO could never win any such wars, but they would serve to prolong indefinitely the current “perma nent and endless war” policy.
Therefore, it is to be hoped that Joe Biden will listen to the saner voices. But unless and until there is a dramatic shift in policy-making, the chances of long-lasting de-escalation re main dim.
Exclusive Interviews to EIR
on U.S. Foreign Policy
In his interview to EIR on Nov. 29, Ambassador Chas Free man attacked Washington’s policy toward China and Taiwan, an area he has followed for decades. People in the Penta gon, according to him, understand that this is “a replay of Cold War-style Cuban Missile Crisis confrontation”, but “it’s pretty clear that the American political elite does not make that connection”. Therefore, such a replay “is looking more likely every day”.
The Trump and Biden administrations have gone past the “red line” which could provoke a war with China, said Free man, who played a major role in the opening of relations with China in the 1970s. “In the finessing of the issue of Taiwan in U.S.-China relations, essentially, the United States agreed to three conditions: one, that we would end official relations with Taipei; two, that we would withdraw all military person nel and installations from the island; and three, we would void our defense commitment to the island. We have now gone back on each of these commitments.”
Graham Fuller, a scholar of Islam who served for 25 years in the CIA, including in several Middle East countries and four years in Hong Kong, also gave an interview to EIR, in which he strongly warned against the drive for war aimed in par
ticular at Russia and China (https://larouchepub.com/other/ interviews/2021/4850-graham_fuller.html). And he added another hot spot to the picture, namely Iran. If the U.S. fails to “tamp down its rhetoric,” he warned, the consequences could be catastrophic. Calling Iran the number one terrorist threat state is “grotesque”, in his view, especially in light of Saudi Arabia’s promotion of terrorism. In the same vein, he finds it “ridiculous” to accuse China of genocide against the Uyghurs, a people he knows very well.
Both Chas Freeman and Graham Fuller believe President Biden does not want a war, but neither are they confident that he will be able to overcome the addiction to war among the United States’ elites and the military-industrial complex.
At this point, the rationale for that “addiction to war” is to be found in the dynamic of economic collapse, due to the continuation of looting financial policies under the guise of the “Green New Deal” (cf. following slug).
Climate Policies Are Leading the World to War
At a presentation at the weekly Manhattan Project Meeting of the LaRouche Organization, EIR economics editor Paul Gal lagher pointed to a scarcely mentioned consequence of the “Green New Deal” policies: war. He showed how the institu tions, media and figures leading the global push for a “climate neutral” economy are the same ones that manipulate western public opinions into a hostile attitude against Russia and Chi na, and create provocations to justify a military confrontation. A leading role in both campaigns is Chatham House, the think thank of the British Empire.
The hostility attitude intensified noticeably after the failure of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, a flop correctly blamed by Joe Biden on Russia and China, whose leaders refused to attend in person and who inspired opposition from other de
veloping nations, including India, which refuse to sacrifice de velopment for the alleged sake of “saving the planet”. At the same time, the initial enforcement of such climate policies in the advanced economy has already created an un precedented economic crisis. Investment in fossil fuel extrac tion has dropped to less than half of what it was ten years ago. Labor productivity both in the U.S. and the EU plunged during the course of 2021, which is very rare. As for real wages, they are falling in both economic areas as well. In the United States they have dropped by just under 2.2% in the past year for all employees in the economy. Infla tion in November, although understated, officially hit 5.2% annually in Europe, 6.8% annually in the U.S.. Having failed to make inflation “transitory”, the Federal Reserve announced that it would introduce, starting January, a transitory way of computing it.
The largest banks in the United States, London, and Euro pean capitals are in a zombie condition, due to the vast money printing by the central banks in the past two years, and the enlistment of these banks by the Great Reset elite to force the “shifting of the trillions” out of all carbon-intense eco nomic activity. These banks have become unwilling or unable or both, to loan. Therefore, they now typically have 75-100% more deposits on hand than loans, and rather than injecting
credit into the industrial economies, they are withdrawing it, month by month, which means less productive investment and lower productivity.
This is a situation, Gallagher said, “where financial elites enlist media and government to generate anger, even hatred of ‘adversary nations’, and then crises are developed and pro moted. In one way or another, as in the case of the inadver tent, but nearly completely disastrous Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago, these crises lead towards war. This alone, should lead us to fight this Green New Deal until it has been stopped and reversed by economic development policies, in particularly those directed toward the developing countries and involving the cooperation of the major leading technological nations.”
Washington’s Farcical Summit for Democracy To call the virtual Summit for Democracy organized by the Biden Administration on Dec. 9-10 an exercise in hypocrisy is a huge understatement. Some 100 leaders from around the world were invited, but no one from China or Russia, or other so-called “autocratic” regimes, was among them.
Officially, the event was devoted to “strengthening democ racy and countering authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.” But showing just how little regard “the West” has for freedom of speech and human rights, on the second day of the summit, it was an nounced that a court in the United Kingdom had ruled in fa vor of extraditing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States for revealing U.S. war crimes! The fact that Dec. 10 also happened to be the UN-declared Human Rights Day was just another slap in the face to all those who oppose the West’s self-proclaimed “rules-based order”.
Many articles and commentaries in Chinese and Russian media, but also in the United States, pointed to Washington’s lack of credibility to preach the virtues of democracy. One more humorous description, reported in Global Times, came from a Russian observer who compared the U.S. initiative to “a mistress of a brothel teaching morality to schoolgirls”. The Chinese television station CGTN also ran comments on the event from two Schiller Institute representatives from France, Karel Vereycken (English language news) and Sébastien Péri mony (French language news). They both pointed to the cyni
cism of the trans-Atlantic elites who invoke “democracy” as a means of imposing on all countries their neo-liberal model -- including by military force and murderous sanctions.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche for her part, in a recent article, blasted the attempt to divide the world into “good guys” and “bad guys”, or human rights and freedom fighters against “autocrats”. One look at the catastrophic situation today in Afghanistan shows how little the United States actually cares about such values. “We should speak of the millions of dead, injured, and refugees as a result of the endless wars built on lies. And what about Julian Assange [who] is being murdered by legal means before the eyes of the world?”
The same can be said of the European Union and its igno minous use of Frontex to prevent refugees from arriving here and then confining them to virtual concentration camps, she wrote, or its defense of the “Malthusian policy of the Klaus Schwabs of this world, which regards the attempt to over come poverty as the greatest threat to the ‘climate’ and thus says any development must be suppressed for decades...”
Compared to that, Helga Zepp-LaRouche observed, the record of some “autocratic” governments might not look so
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT 2 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n°50 / 2021
bad. “China has not only lifted 850 million people of its own population out of extreme poverty, but has given develop ing countries the chance to overcome poverty and underde velopment for the first time. The United States has almost 800,000 coronavirus deaths with a population of 330 mil lion people, while China has fewer than 5,000 deaths with 1.4 billion people.” Perhaps those great self-proclaimed champions of democracy in the West, she suggests, should ask themselves whether human life is worth more to “au tocratic” regimes than to them. (A translation in English of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s article is available at https:// larouchepub.com/pr/2021/20211213_lead-editorial.html)
In Devastating Blow to Freedom of Speech, British Court Rules to Extradite Assange On the morning of Dec. 10, Britain’s High Court overturned the previous denial of the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. His crime? Publishing in Wikileaks information passed on to him as a journalist, including proof of U.S. war crimes. There, he faces obscure charges of espionage, which could put him in prison for 175 years! The two-judge appel late panel in London accepted the proffered guarantees from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that Assange: would not be put in the “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado; would not be put under SAMs (Special Administrative Measures, in cluding solitary confinement) “unless subsequent behavior by Assange justified it”; and, if convicted, would be allowed to serve his time in Australia.
Assange’s fiancée, Stella Moris, asked: “How can it be fair, how can it be right, how can it be possible, to extradite Julian to the very country which plotted to kill him?” Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald found “the High Court’s faith in these guarantees … particularly striking”—given the revela
tion that the CIA under Mike Pompeo had “plotted to kidnap or even assassinate” the journalist. Yet the court said it was satisfied that the assurances given by the U.S. Department of Justice would protect Assange’s physical and mental health.
After living holed up in London in asylum for nine years to avoid facing charges by a notoriously unjust U.S. judicial system, Assange has spent the past 32 months in the high security Belmarsh prison of London. Last January, a London court ruled that his treatment by the U.S. prison system would likely overwhelm his fragile mental health, but forced him to return to “Britain’s Guantanamo” while awaiting the appeal. As Greenwald points out, from 2010 to 2016, liberal advocacy groups were vocal in defense of Assange’s exposure, as a journalist, of torture and war crimes. “One thing and only one thing has changed since then,” which was that in 2016, Wikileaks exposed the efforts of the Hillary Clinton presiden
tial campaign and the Democratic Party in sabotaging Bernie Sanders’ campaign.
The publication of those Democratic Party documents were used by the FBI and other intelligence agencies as an excuse to launch the entire “Russiagate” hoax, which paralyzed needed efforts to improve U.S.-Russia relations and was used to at
tempt to effectively undo the democratic election of political outsider Donald Trump in 2016.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche:
Germany Must Leave NATO!
In an article reviewing the strategic situation following the Biden-Putin summit, Helga Zepp-LaRouche wrote on Dec. 11
that “in light of the political orientation of the new govern ment in Berlin, it seems almost hopeless to demand Germa ny’s immediate exit from NATO. But if Olaf Scholz is serious about the oath of office he took two days ago when being sworn in as Federal Chancellor, namely that he will ‘dedicate my efforts to the well-being of the German people, promote their welfare, protect them from harm”, then he will have to initiate such an exit immediately. Because in NATO, and espe cially in the U.S. and Great Britain, there are influential forces who, for geopolitical reasons, are playing with the existence
of Germany and beyond that, of all of humanity.’” After going through the acute danger of a major war, Zepp-LaRouche concludes that Germans should realize that “remaining in a military alliance which will lead, in a crisis situation, to their annihilation, may not be such a good idea. There is an alternative to the confrontation policy of a NATO which, has been obsolete since 1991. We need to urgently establish an international security architecture that takes into account the security interests of all nations.”
Several proposals going in the direction of a new security arrangement have surfaced in Germany over the past days. On the eve of the Biden-Putin summit, 27 senior retired mili tary, diplomats and defense experts published an open letter urging four steps toward a de-escalation: 1) convening an in ternational conference modelled on that of Helsinki in 1975; 2) renouncing any military escalation on both sides while the conference is ongoing; 3) reviving the NATO-Russia Coun cil and 4) constructive offers of economic cooperation with Russia, implicitly in place of the current sanctions approach (https://www.johannes-varwick.de/rauf/AUFRUF_Raus-aus der-Eskalationsspirale_05122021-3.pdf).
Parallel to the Biden-Putin summit, a new call was issued by the Berlin-based Freidenker (Free Thinkers) Association, which has campaigned for several decades for detente and cooperation with Russia (https://neinzurnato.de/aufruf/). In addition to calling for Germany to leave NATO, they note that a new form of partnership is developing in the greater Eurasia area, which includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Belt and Road Initiative. Most interestingly, the state
ment notes that NATO and the EU are the instruments of a bankrupt Western financial system, based on speculative or gies (including on CO2) to the detriment to real production.
Germany’s new Foreign Minister, however, Annalena Baer bock of the Greens, has come firmly down on the side of the neocons in the “war party” when it comes to relations with Russia and China. In that light, she apparently got on very nicely with her British counterpart, Liz Truss, on the occasion of the G7 meeting in Liverpool, with both rantig against “autocratic regimes”. It remains to be seen whether and to what extent Chancellor Scholz and his SPD will be foolish enough to let Mrs. Baerbock and the Greens run the country’s foreign policy.
How and Why the IMF Has Failed in Africa, and China Has Not
Dr. Justin Yifu Lin, the former chief economist at the World Bank, issued convincing criticism of the Western approach to the “development” of Africa in an article posted Dec. 6 on Project Syndicate, co-authored by Dr. Yan Wang from Boston University. The Western method basically assured there would be no development, which is very different from the concept of China’s Belt and Road Initiative to infrastructure develop
ment and poverty reduction.
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT n°50 / 2021 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 3
For Mrs. Wang and Mr. Lin, now the Dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics and Dean of the Institute of South South Cooperation and Development in China, the IMF/World Bank measure of a nation’s wealth and the so-called “sustain ability” of its debt is severely flawed, as it only takes account of liabilities and GDP, neglecting the tangible economic assets. “This reflects the predominance of short-term thinking,” they assert. “Whereas GDP indicates how much monetary income or output a country produces in a year, wealth also covers the value of the underlying national assets, including the human, natural, and produced capital that form the foundations of a country’s comparative advantages. As such, wealth accounting provides essential insights into a country’s prospects for main taining and increasing its income over the long term.”
As a result of the failed IMF method, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, “many low- and lower-middle-income countries continue to suffer more fundamental deficiencies, such as a lack of health-care personnel and resources, from hospital beds to ventilators. For some, it is the inability to deliver clean water, electricity, and sanitation that is choking the economy.”
The IMF and Western countries have been supplying devel opment aid and cooperation for 70 years now, the two au thors note. So why have so many countries remained “stuck in low- or lower-middle-income traps without sufficient capacity to meet their citizens’ basic needs? Both market and govern ment failures -- rooted not least in the longstanding neoliberal orthodoxy -- can be blamed.”
One major problem, they argue, is all that aid over all those years did not adequately address “infrastructure bottlenecks”. That is contrary to the Chinese approach to investment in Africa, which they summarize (cf. SAS 49/21 for more in
formation on this point). The article goes on to suggest ways in which China should improve yet more its choice of projects and funding them.
Afghanistan: Unfreeze the Afghan Government Funds and Save Lives with Emergency Aid On “Human Rights Day”, celebrated Dec. 10, the Commit tee for the Coincidence of Opposites (CCO) issued a state ment calling for the immediate release of the $9.5 billion in Afghan funds, which is now being withheld by the U.S. Federal Reserve and various international banks, including Commerzbank. The refusal to unfreeze those assets, which rightfully belong to the Afghan people, directly contributes to the intense and worsening suffering of millions of people. An estimated 24 million people are right now threatened with starvation and death from the cold during the winter.
The CCO’s statement calls this human rights emergency in Afghanistan “a moral priority for the world.”. The Com mittee reiterates its call “for a multi-nation collaborative ap proach -- called Operation Ibn Sina -- to both rush the needed medicines, food, fuel, shelter, logistics, and other necessities to save lives; and start the construction of a full-scale health system, including all needed basic infrastructure to support it (power, water, transportation, medical facilities). Only in this way, can we respect and provide the means to life -- the basic human right -- for everyone....” (To learn more and to sup port the COC, please go to: https://schillerinstitute.com/the committee-for-the-coincidence-of-opposites/)
On the same day the COC statement was released, the World Bank finally announced that $280 million of the $1.5
billion in the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund would be released to the World Food Program and UNICEF. The ARTF, which is funded by 31 donor countries, was the main source of development financing before the takeover of the Taliban, after which all payments were frozen (cf. SAS 49/21)
Now, UNICEF is to receive $100 million to “provide essen tial health services through providers active in the Sehatmandi program in partnership with WHO”, while the WFP is to re ceive $180 million to “scale up food security and nutrition operations in the country,” reports the World Bank.
Those sums should allow UNICEF “to provide 12.5 million people with basic and essential health services and vaccinate one million people, while the World Food Program will be able to provide food assistance to 2.7 million people and nutri
tional assistance to nearly 840,000 mothers and children.” Already three weeks ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had warned that Afghanistan’s economy is going into free-fall, as a result of sanctions on banking ser vices, the freezing of assets, and the lack of humanitarian aid where it is most needed. Dominik Stillhart, the ICRC’s direc tor of operations, charged that “the international community is turning its back as the country teeters on the precipice of man-made catastrophe.” Unless the international community engages with Afghanistan, there will be a total collapse of essential services, including of the public health system, he warned.
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