| | | | The upcoming international Schiller Institute is devoted to American economist and thinker Lyndon LaRouche, who was born 100 years ago on September 8, and passed away in February 2019. Only now is the world coming to realize how advanced LaRouche’s economic ideas and forecasts have been over the past more than fifty years. From the August 15, 1971, decoupling of the U.S. dollar from gold, to the presentation in June 2014 of his “Four Laws” to save the U.S. and the world economy, Lyndon LaRouche provided solutions for each phase of the crisis of the past decades.
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The purpose of this conference is to deliberate upon and propose solutions, based upon the principles of physical economy he developed, which might still rescue mankind from what might appear to be, but need not be, the road to self-destruction.
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Speakers from around the world will participate in the four panels, two on Saturday Sept. 10 and two on Sunday, Sept. 11, starting at 16:00 CET on both days:
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PANEL I: How To Inspire Humanity To Survive the Greatest Crisis in World History
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PANEL II: Defend the Right To Deliberate! Speak Out Against Blacklists and the Suppression of the Search for Truth
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PANEL III: “Presenting the ‘LaRouche Library’: LaRouche in Dialogue with the World’s Nations”
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PANEL IV: The Art of Optimism: Using the Classical Principle To Change the World
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| | | One after the other, Western “leaders” are telling their citizens that not only perpetual war to defend their “values,” but also fascist economic austerity, is the order of the day. So learn to live with it.
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“We must be clear: the coming months will be difficult; the coming winters will be difficult; the next five to ten winters will be difficult,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexandre De Croo announced on Aug. 22. The very next day, electricity futures prices passed €400-600, with Germany the highest.
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On Aug. 24, French President Emmanuel Macron advised his Cabinet ministers that the “age of abundance” has ended. Government and economy must be shaped to conform to the end “of endless cash flow” and “of an abundance of products and technology”, land and resources such as water, he told them. Living standards and human economic activity are to be sacrificed on the altar of Malthusianism and “climate change”.
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Two days later, U.S. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell delivered the same message to the American people: Expect “pain,” and lots of it, on the pretext of “reducing inflation”, he said (cf. below).
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Meanwhile in Germany, Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck seems to take a perverse pleasure in predicting how bad things will be in the coming months, if people don’t voluntarily cut consumption. And the list goes on...
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Such policies of fascist austerity cannot be imposed “democratically,” and these leaders know it. Social ferment has only begun, but it will explode, despite the attempts to criminalize and repress protests. In that context, the would-be world government being assembled under Global NATO’s umbrella is issuing “hitlists” against prominent thinkers and policymakers, who refuse to repeat the “narrative” of war, austerity, and denigration of human beings. The freedom to deliberate and express one’s opinion without fear of reprisals is to be suppressed.
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Schiller Institute chairwoman, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who is high on Global NATO’s “list of enemies”, has called for the greatest worldwide mobilization ever to defeat such fascist policies. We must make the population at large aware of the significance of this monstrous attempt to impose fascist economic policies through hitlists, she told a planning meeting of associates of the LaRouche movement around the world on Aug. 29.
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We have to find people, she said, who understand that we are in the “breakdown crisis” of a financial system that “has favored speculation over real production for decades”, and that, after the “trillions of dollars and euros” that have been pumped in since 2008, is now exploding in hyperinflation.
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In such a situation, Helga Zepp-LaRouche warned, if it is de facto prohibited to discuss any alternative, such as a New Bretton Woods system, or solutions that would lead to the elimination of the reasons for the acute danger of world war, then “democracy is out the window”.
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| | | The speech that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was to pronounce on Aug. 26, at the annual meeting of current and former central bankers in Jackson Hole, was anxiously awaited, as he was going to reveal what the global financial system would die of. In the end, he delivered a shock to all those who hoped he would pooh-pooh inflation and resume an expansive monetary policy, including to help the Democrats in the coming November mid-term elections. But the head of the U.S. central bank announced that “reducing inflation is likely to require a sustained period of below-trend growth”, monetary policy “will be sufficiently restrictive;” and defeating inflation “will likely require maintaining a restrictive policy stance for some time”.
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In other words, the Federal Reserve will do nothing to avoid a recession. Assuming the role of a modern-day Marquis de Sade, he added that the fight against inflation will bring “some pain” to producers and households. Between the frying pan of inflation and the fire of an economic recession – with company foreclosures, layoffs and impoverishment for millions -- Powell seems to have chosen the latter.
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Many analysts have compared Powell's choice of policy to Paul Volcker's famous monetary squeeze following the 1973-74 oil shock, forgetting that Volcker had raised central bank rates up to 21.5%. The mini-steps of half a point announced by Powell are just tickling the current double-digit inflation rate. But they further penalize producers and consumers already plagued by astronomically high energy prices and rising producer costs and consumer prices.
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Some economists insist that a prolonged recession, by reducing the global demand for energy and material supplies from the productive sector, will curb inflation by “naturally” re-balancing supply and demand. Such academic theories do not come to grips with the fact that an economic downturn will generate a chain-reaction of insolvencies and a collapse of the transatlantic financial system.
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Instead, liquidity should be drawn out of the global financial bubble in a targeted way, including out of the energy bubble, which central banks have created through decades of monetary expansion. This can be done if a Glass-Steagall type of bank separation reform is implemented globally, insulating the commercial-industrial sector of the financial system, and implementing a two-tier credit policy: high interest rates for merely financial activities, investment banking and hedge funds, and low interest rates for commercial banks, and credit to producers and households.
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| | | In an unsigned editorial titled “Are Sanctions on Russia Working?”, The Economist worries that the answer to that question is no. However, what the mouthpiece of the City of London proposes to do about it, is a recipe for a permanent global war in all domains, including economic and financial, not only against Russia but also China.
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The editorial posted on Aug. 25 notes that in Ukraine itself, “a war of attrition is taking place along a thousand-kilometer front line of death and destruction”. But beyond it, “another struggle is raging -- an economic conflict of a ferocity and scope not seen since the 1940s, as Western countries try to cripple Russia’s $1.8 trillion economy with a novel arsenal of sanctions. Worryingly, so far the sanctions war is not going as well as expected.”
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The editorial board claims that behind the West’s “ambitious goal” is a new doctrine of Western power. Given the strategic implications of The Economist, it is worth quoting their point of view: “The unipolar moment of the 1990s, when America’s supremacy was uncontested, is long gone, and the West’s appetite to use military force has waned since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sanctions seemed to offer an answer by allowing the West to exert power through its control of the financial and technological networks at the heart of the 21st-century economy.... The trouble is that the knockout blow has not materialized.”
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Indeed, Russia’s economy has not shrunk as much as was expected, and while it has found new markets for products it used to sell to Europe. Given the flaws of the sanctions weapon, among them the time lag and blow back, the editorial proposes to “discard any illusions that sanctions offer the West a cheap and asymmetric way to confront China, an even bigger autocracy. In order to deter or punish an invasion of Taiwan, the West could seize China’s $3 trillion of reserves and cut off its banks. But, as with Russia, China’s economy would be unlikely to collapse. And the government in Beijing could retaliate by, say, starving the West of electronics, batteries and pharmaceuticals, leaving Walmart’s shelves empty and triggering chaos. Given that more countries depend on China than America as their largest trading partner, enforcing a global embargo would be even harder than with Russia.”
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Nonetheless, The Economist concludes, the “good news” is that that “democracies are adapting to this reality. Heavy weapons are pouring into Ukraine, NATO is fortifying Europe’s borders with Russia, and Europe is securing new sources of gas and speeding up the shift to clean energy. … Ukraine marks a new era of 21st-century conflict in which the military, technological and financial elements are intertwined. But it is not an era in which the West can assume it has pre-eminence. Nobody can counter aggression through dollars and semiconductors alone.”
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| | | The rotating Czech presidency of the EU has called for an emergency meeting on energy on Sept. 9. At the same time, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has finally discovered financial speculation on energy and called, on Aug. 29, for a reform of the energy market in Europe. One is tempted to say they are closing the stable door, once the horse has bolted.
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In fact, unpayable gas and electricity prices have hit both businesses and households throughout Europe with a sledgehammer, with many producers and commercial business receiving bills up to ten times higher than last year. Those who are unable to pay, will cease their activities in the short term.
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Any urgently needed reform of the EU energy market would require months to be drafted and implemented. As of now, two proposals are on the table: one from Italy on a price-cap and the other, suggested by von der Leyen, on decoupling electricity prices from gas prices. While the former sounds like “teaching good manners to a tiger”, as former Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti ironized, the latter would only partially solve the problem.
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Meanwhile, astronomical gas prices also spell a serious food crisis next year due to a lack of fertilizers. A large majority of fertilizers are nitrogen-based and produced from ammonia, which is in turn produced from natural gas. The spike in prices has thus led a wave of shutdowns in European nitrogen fertilizer production, some expected to be temporary, others permanent.
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“Over 70% of the European production capacity has been reduced. If the situation continues, we fear that the rest of producers can be hit as well”, said Jacob Hansen, director general of Fertilizers Europe, the association of European fertilizers industry.
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Yara, the world’s largest chemical fertilizer producer, announced Aug. 25 a cut in nitrogen fertilizer output in Europe by 50% and has already shut down plants at several locations. The major producer in Great Britain, CF Fertilizers (a subsidiary of U.S.-based CF Holdings) plans to temporarily halt nitrogen fertilizer output at its Billingham plant. In July, it shut down its plant in Cheshire, at Ince, which had already stopped production temporarily in Autumn 2021 (that is, before the 2022 Russian operation in Ukraine).
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In Poland, Azoty Grupa SA, the second largest European producer of nitrogen and compound fertilizers, has closed its nitrogen fertilizer, caprolactam and polyamide 6 (nylon 6) production facilities. In turn, the group’s Pulawy plants had reduced ammonia production to around 10% of capacity and halted some production in the plastics and agro segments. The largest Baltic fertilizer producer, Achema, located in central Lithuania, will close its nitrogen operations on Sept. 1.
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Top Agrar Online reports that production at SKW Stickstoffwerke in Wittenberg-Piesteritz, Germany, is at a standstill -- for technical reasons. However, the gas levy announced by the German government and the difficult market environment could keep the plants idle for longer. Germany’s BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, is also considering further cuts to ammonia production.
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A collapse of use of fertilizers would have a devastating impact on agricultural production. To avoid a catastrophe, the TTF gas market in Amsterdam should be shut down, as we have often called for in this newsletter. But don't expect the EU to do it. The aim of Brussels’ “Farm to Fork” policy is to reduce production.
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| | | Last April, the Biden Administration established a "Disinformation Governance Board" within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), officially charged with exercising censorship under the noble-sounding pretext of protecting free speech. The person chosen to head the new agency was a certain Nina Jankowicz, who had worked closely with the Ukrainian government, is rabidly anti-Russian and anti-Donald Trump. The appointment of such a blatantly biased person created such an uproar in the U.S. that she was forced to resign and the board was put on hold.
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But the massive outcry over the establishment of a “censorship committee”, dubbed an Orwellien “Ministry of Truth”, continued. To the point that the stillborn Disinformation Governance Board was permanently shut down on Aug. 24. That decision should be seen in the context of the wide exposure by EIR and others of the Ukrainian “Center for Countering Disinformation”, which targets leading individuals around the world as “Russian propagandists,” “information terrorists,” and “war criminals,” simply because they have spoken out against the threat of global war (cf. SAS 31-34/22). Many Americans are now demanding that the Congress investigate the funding of this center by the U.S.State Department and other government agencies.
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Our colleagues in the U.S. warn, however, that the work the disinformation board was supposed to carry out, will continue under other names. In fact, a DHS Advisory Committee stressed once again that the department “must be able to address the disinformation threat streams that can undermine the security of our homeland”.
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| | | In an interview given to EIR on Aug. 23, Colonel Richard Black, who is well known to our readers, was asked about the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) and its blacklist, which he is on, together with members and allies of the Schiller Institute. He addressed the issue by discussing the Biden Administration’s Disinformation Governance Board (cf. above), first set up under the direction of Nina Jankowitz, whom he described as “a rather bizarre, young, narcissistic woman with an extensive background of working within the Ukrainian system and informing those people about how to control so-called disinformation.” (The Board was officially shut down the day after Col. Black’s EIR interview was posted – cf. above item.) He mentioned how Jankowitz said she “feared” that Elon Musk would lift the censorship at Twitter: “She just doesn’t know how the world would deal with the truth. You know, the truth is quite a danger.”
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Disinformation boards, in his view, “are not instruments of the people. They’re not instruments of liberty and freedom. They are instruments of tyranny.”
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Col. Black noted that the Schiller Institute was particularly targeted on the CCD list, because “the Schiller Institute and the Executive Intelligence Review publish highly accurate, very balanced foreign policy assessments, and also raw intelligence from which people can simply look and see what the media from all different nations are saying.”
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On the physical threat from being on the list, he noted that he had been targetted by ISIS because of his exposure of U.S. support for the Islamic State in Syria, but added that “the hit list published by the Ukrainian government is probably a more deadly hit list,” noting the assassination of Darya Dugina.
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Concerning Diane Sare’s presence on the list, he said: “She is an amazingly bright, informed, articulate, appealing candidate. I can’t imagine anyone being a better representative of the American people than Diane Sare. She would certainly have my vote if I were in New York.”
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Turning to the war in Ukraine, he said, “I hate to see these young Ukrainian men being slaughtered; they’re just being used as cannon fodder” to get at the Russians and to allow the West to “achieve certain political gains, and sell weapons and so forth”. While the effort to destroy Russia has failed, Washington has “thrown Europe under the bus, because they depend on the Russian gas, oil, commodities”.
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He described the U.S. military leadership as far worse than incompetent, and as having flatly refused at the time to follow President Trump’s orders to end the endless wars. As for today, he described the spectacular raid on Trump’s home as “absolutely outrageous” and “an election year stunt”, designed by the Democrats to prevent Trump from running again.
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Col. Black said that the U.S. engaged in wars all over the world, and many are not even known about by the American people. He said the military should get out of these wars, and should be fighting the drug cartels who are killing over 100,000 Americans every year.
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The video and transcript of Col. Black’s interview are posted here.
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| | | For weeks now, the mainstream media have served us the line that “Putin has lost the war, he’ll soon be ousted in a putsch”. That propaganda campaign was taken to new heights in a story published on Aug. 28 by the British daily The Sun, and taken up in other British media, which names outright three senior Russian politicians as would-be-successors to the Russian President. They are: Alexander Bortnikov, head of the Russian security service FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, and Sergey Glazyev, Minister of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Union and former adviser to Vladimir Putin.
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Naming Glazyev is of particular interest and the most unexpected, as he is relatively little known in western circles. He has been an outspoken opponent of the neo-liberalism which has prevailed among Russia’s financial and economic elites, arguing instead for development of the real economy. In 2000, he had personally introduced Lyndon LaRouche at a Moscow press conference, as someone whose views on economics, particularly on the urgency of a new just world economic and monetary system, he would trust. A book he wrote in 1997 on the economic and population warfare waged against Russia after 1991, titled Genocide, Russia and the New World Order, was published in English translation by EIR Washington.
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None of that escaped the attention of the London-based monetarist elites , nor has Glazyev’s campaign today in favor of a kind of “Chinese approach” to building up Russia’s financial and economic sovereignty. As a key figure in the Eurasian Economic Union, he is actively organizing new monetary and trade arrangements with Russia’s partners outside of the transatlantic world.
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The Sun story cites one Olga Lautman, a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, who calls Sergey Glazyev “a lunatic”, who would be far worse than Putin if he took over the Kremlin. She also claims he is "more mentally unstable and fascist than Putin", and believes “the West needs to be destroyed”, even frequently discussing "nuking the whole West". Very strong accusations indeed, but the British media offer no evidence to support them, because there is none. What Glazyev has pointed to, repeatedly, is the inner dynamic of the collapsing international financial system, which will inevitably lead to the West’s self-destruction. And concerning the role of the British more specifically, in the context of the assassination of Darya Dugina, he has accused the MI6, as well as the CIA, of basically running the Ukraine intelligence agency SBU, and deliberately exacerbating the conflict there.
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The question is: if Glazyev is just a senior Russian economist, whose position within the Eurasian Economic Union, is almost never mentioned in the Western media, why does his name suddenly come up so prominently now, as someone powerful enough to replace the Russian President in a putsch? Could it be an attempt to set him up for falling into disgrace, or even for an assassination attempt? In fact, Vladimir Putin would have no reason to eliminate Glazyev, but some among the financial elites in London would certainly welcome his removal.
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| | | Africa is home to nearly one fifth of the world population, but accounts for less than 4% of the total electricity consumed. Nearly 650 million Africans, or well over half the total population, have no access to electricity. In terms of global carbon dioxide emissions, the entire continent accounts for 3% maximum, according to the UN.
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And yet, the Malthusian “climate change lobby”, backed by the financial oligarchy, demands that Africa commit to net zero emissions. And that they sacrifice their own development so that the developed world can continue to pollute (thanks to the swindle of carbon offsets). Leaving aside for the moment the fact that man-made climate change in itself is a hoax, such demands are a sign of blatant moral bankruptcy.
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A number of sub-Saharan countries, including South Africa, which is highly dependent on cheap and abundant supplies of coal, refuse to “drink the kool-aid”. Nigeria too, the most populous and richest country of the continent, insists on giving priority to development. In presenting the country’s Energy Transition Plan on Aug. 24, Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo explained that “For Africa, the problem of energy poverty is as important as our climate ambitions. Energy use is crucial for almost every conceivable aspect of development; wealth, health, nutrition, water, infrastructure, education, and life expectancy are significantly related to the consumption of energy per capita.”
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According to the goals set out at the infamous Glasgow climate change conference last November, Africa is to achieve zero net emissions by 2060. Osinbajo pointed out that for Nigeria to meet that goal, it will need investments in the order of $410 billion -- “above business-as-usual spending”. That means about $10 billion per year will have to come from “external support”. Considering that Western countries have not even come close to the funding packages promised at past climate conferences, this demand is the equivalent of declaring the “climate goals” dead in the water.
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Vice President Osinbajo further pointed out that the “current lack of power hurts livelihoods and destroys the dreams of hundreds of millions of young people. And although Africa’s current unmet energy needs are huge, future demand will be even greater due to expanding populations, urbanization, and movement into the middle class.” Unfortunately, he added, the international community does not take into account Africa’s needs and aspirations. That is an understatement. The World Bank officials present for the occasion offered a “package” in the range of $1.5 billion, and representative of the United States Export Import Bank offered the same amount.
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| | | Die nächste Internet-Konferenz des Schiller-Instituts ist dem amerikanischen Ökonomen und Denker Lyndon LaRouche gewidmet, der vor 100 Jahren am 8. September geboren wurde und im Februar 2019 verstarb. Erst jetzt wird der Welt bewußt, wie fortschrittlich seine wirtschaftlichen Ideen und Prognosen in den letzten mehr als 50 Jahren waren. Von der Abkopplung des Dollars vom Gold am 15. August 1971 bis zur Vorstellung seiner „Vier Gesetze“ zur Rettung der USA und der Weltwirtschaft im Juni 2014 lieferte LaRouche Lösungen für jede Phase der Krise der vergangenen Jahrzehnte.
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Das Ziel der Konferenz ist es, auf der Grundlage der von ihm entwickelten Prinzipien der physischen Ökonomie Lösungen zu erörtern und vorzuschlagen, die die Menschheit vor dem Weg in die Selbstzerstörung retten können.
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Redner aus aller Welt werden an den vier Sitzungen am Samstag und am Sonntag, jeweils ab 16 Uhr MEZ, teilnehmen:
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Panel 1: Wie die Menschheit die größte Krise der Weltgeschichte überleben kann,
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Panel 2: Für das Recht auf freie Meinungsäußerung und Diskussion! Widerstand gegen Schwarze Listen und die Unterdrückung der Wahrheitssuche!
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Panel 3: Vorstellung der „LaRouche-Bibliothek“: LaRouche im Dialog mit den Nationen der Welt
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Panel 4: Die Kunst des Optimismus: Mit dem klassischen Prinzip die Welt verändern
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Die Konferenz wird auf englisch stattfinden und auf der Zoom-Plattform simultan ins Deutsche übersetzt. Für die Teilnahme über Zoom ist eine Anmeldung erforderlich:
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