E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
Volume 28, No. 41 - October 9, 2014
Indian Prime Minister’s Message in U.S.:
Make Development a Mass Movement
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi’s visit to the
United States (Sept. 26-30) was a personal success for him.
He addressed a rapturous Indian-American crowd of thousands
in Manhattan and spoke before the United Nations General Assembly
(cf. SAS 40/14). What was evident is that the Obama
administration, beleaguered and unsure of everything around
the world, did not contribute in any significant way to Modi’s
highly successful trip.
At the end of the PM’s visit, he sent out a tweet expressing
the main message he brought to Americans: “Let us make development
a mass movement, just like Mahatma Gandhi made
the freedom movement a mass movement.”
In his meeting in Manhattan, Modi praised the “capacity” and
“competence” of the Indian population, combined with the fact
that “India is the most youthful country in the world, with the
oldest [cultural] heritage. 65% of the population is under 35.”
“Youth with competence and capabilities can make their own
future. We do not have to look back. There is no reason for
pessimism, because I can say with conviction, that we will move
forward very fast.”
Flying in the face of the depopulation lobby, he insisted several
times that “1.2 billion people is a blessing from God.”
Modi’s visit to the U.S. came just over two months after
the BRICS Summit last July in Fortaleza, Brazil. Subsequently
he visited Japan where Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
promised India $35 billion investment in India’s infrastructure
over the next five years.
A few days later, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited India
for three-days (Sept. 17-19), during which major investments
were decided on both sides (cf. SAS 39/14).
In Washington, no such important deal was signed. And while
the Obama-Modi meetings were not acrimonious, the outcome
was less than meaningful. The Indian leader made clear that he
would not yield compromise on food security for all Indians,
by accepting the WTO’s agricultural policies, and that he would
not give in to the pharmaceutical lobby’s demand that India
stop producing and exporting high-quality generic drugs for
the world’s most impoverished nations.
One promising sign is that the Indian Space Research Organization
(ISRO) and the NASA signed an agreement to develop
closer collaboration in future Mars missions and they also put
in place an agreement to develop jointly the Earth Imaging
Satellite.
Modi, however, did not go back to India empty handed either.
Members of the US-India Business Council are ready to
invest over $41 billion in India over three years to help raise
the country’s manufacturing capabilities.
A Wealth of Economic Development Projects
for the BRICS
The members of the new non-monetarist cooperation alliance
BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have
moved quickly over recent weeks on the realization of crucial
industrial and infrastructural projects, many of which have
been stopped for years because of a lack of funding under the
IMF/World Bank dictates. As Russian President Vladimir Putin
recently stressed, projects between Russia and China “will become
the largest construction projects in the world.”
* The Chinese will assist in the construction of a new ice-free
sea port of Russia at Zarubino, 18 kilometers from the border
between both countries, facing the Sea of Japan. To use the full
potential of the new port, designed to handle 60 million tons of
cargo annually, Russia will have to build links from the Trans-
Siberian Railroad to Zarubino.
* Russia and India agree to expand bilateral trade which is
hovering around a total of 11 billion dollars -- far below its
real potential. In science and technology, both countries defined
have 17 priority areas of cooperation, notably in transport infrastructure,
mineral deposits, biomedicine, space technology,
and smart computers.
* Russian and Chinese leaders have committed themselves to
help South Africa develop civilian nuclear power.
* South African Agriculture Minister Senzeni Zokwana, in India
in mid-Sept., called on South African farmers to take advantage
of the BRICS development bank, to finance partnerships.
BRICS projects are also underway or envisaged with numerous
countries that are orienting toward the group, in particular
in South and Central America. Just to name a few of the projects
involving the Chinese:
* China is expected to assist Bolivia to build its nuclear power
facilities. The first reactor, President Morales has announced,
will be used for research, medical diagnostic and cancer treatment
purposes, and food preservation, seed improvement and
insect control.
* China is also assisting Ecuador in its national aerospace program,
which is to include technology transfer so that the Ecuadorians
acquire the know-how to build their own satellites.
* China is offering to partner a number of large infrastrucEIR
STRATEGIC ALERT
2 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n°41 / 2014
ture projects in Mexico, with agreements expected to be signed
during the Beijing meeting of the Presidents of both countries
on Nov. 13, Several high-tech agroparks are also planned.
The tremendous potential of the BRICS’ advances in industrial
and infrastructure development has not been lost on all
in Europe. The German DB Schenker logistics group which is
already involved in several rail transport corridors between
eastern China and western Europe, carried out a trial run in
Aug. of a well-coordinated intermodal (rail, road, air) container
transfer from China to Brazil, beating the respective maritime
transport route which would take up to 55 days, by no less
than 30 days.
Argentine President Charges “Look North!”
for Death Threats Against Her
Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner responded
swiftly to the preposterous Sept. 30 ruling by New York Judge
Thomas Griesa that the nation of Argentina is in contempt
of his court, because the government has enacted a new law
on the “Sovereign Payment of Foreign Debt” passed by the
Congress. In several speeches on the same day, the Argentine
President asked: by what right can a U.S. court intervene into
Argentina’s constitutional system, one directly modelled on
that of the United States, and dictate what its parliament may
or may not do? The United States government, she insisted,
would never accept such a foreign ruling.
Furthermore, Fernández charged, Griesa’s decision stemmed
from the intention of the Obama Administration, its allied vulture
funds, and their local collaborators in Argentina, to destabilize
or overthrow her government, and these imperial
forces may even go to the point of arresting or assassinating
her. She’s right, Lyndon LaRouche stated. “The very claim that
these judges have jurisdiction, is itself a fraud.”
Fernández also noted the British pedigree of the local interests
in Argentina, including large grain producers and certain
factions of industry and finance, who are working with the
foreign vultures to force a devaluation, destabilize the government,
and ultimately overturn all of the social programs
enacted over the past decade. They remind her, she said, of
those who “came on the Anglo-French ships in the 1845 naval
invasion of Argentina to impose free-trade on the country…
They came to fight against the interests of their own country.”
Their modern counterparts “apparently came flying in with the
vultures to again provoke misery and destroy all that we’ve
achieved.”
The Argentine President added that she would not be surprised,
if in another 20 or 30 days, economic sanctions were
imposed on the country, or if she is arrested the next time she
goes to New York. She identified recent media reports that ISIS
had threatened her, as planting a cover for a possible assassination
attempt. No state intelligence agency has ever advised her
of any such threat.
“If anything happens to me, and I say this very seriously, no
one should look to the Mideast, but look to the North.”
Fernandez’ government has also moved to crush the speculators
and monopolistic financial groupings engaging in “financial
crimes.” Central Bank Governor Juan Carlos Fabrega resigned
on Sept. 30, and was replaced by Alejandro Vanoli, head of
the National Securities Commission (CNV). Fabrega came from
the financial establishment and reportedly favored a deal with
the vultures, while Vanoli, in his position, has aggressively investigated
the shady deals of foreign and domestic banks and
corporations.
ECB’s Second QE Action Was Drafted
by Financial Vultures
The global financial collapse is now in a phase where central
bank actions, previously considered dramatic, produce no effects
or are even counterproductive. That is the case with the
new QE program of the European Central Bank. The first step
-- the “money for lending” program -- failed in mid-September,
as the demand for T-LTRO, with the exception of Italian and
Spanish banks, was virtually inexistant.
Then the second step, purchase of Asset-Backed Securities
(ABS) from the banks, produced a stock market collapse just
at it was announced Oct. 2. The ABS market in Europe is €300
billion, and the T-LTRO plus ABS program of the ECB aims at
injecting €1 trillion in the financial system. But the plan is a
fraud, since the ECB has made it clear that the ABS it purchases
will be guaranteed by shareholders, bondholders and taxpayers.
Thus, it is a bail-out/bail-in action.
EIR has found that the plan was drafted by the financial vultures
which created the toxic paper, and the standards used by
the ECB have been issued by those banks as well. The idea is
that the financial powers put a “Prime” label on the junk, which
the ECB then accepts as sound.
One year before the ECB announced initiatives, in May 2103,
“to revitalize the ABS market”, the financial vultures set up
their own initiative in London, called Prime Collateralised Securities.
In official papers published in May 2012, the ECB admitted
that it “acted as an observer and catalyst in a market-led
initiative called the Prime Collateralised Securities (PCS) Initiative.
This initiative rests on EU-wide standards for ABSs which
relate to quality, transparency, standardisation and simplicity.
These standards are expected to lead to increased liquidity for
securities which acquire the PCS label.”
The ECB argues that buying the junk will increase bank credit
to the economy. Such an argument comes from the financial
boardrooms. Welcoming the ECB ABS-purchasing program,
PCS secretariat head Ian Bell said in a round table organized
by GlobalCapital, that, “You do not need to do securitization of
SMEs [Small and Medium Enterprises] in order to fund SMEs.
By widening the scope of any programme beyond SME ABS,
the ECB has given itself the possibility of helping with the mezzanine
tranches to solve the capital problem.”
The ECB has made clear that it will buy those “mezzanine”
securities, but wants governments to guarantee them.
The Italian government, among others, has already moved
to do so, according to a Reuters report Oct. 3. In a draft paper
discussed in a government meeting Oct. 2, it is also suggested
to immediately adopt PCS standards.
In Germany, constitutional challenges to the ECB program
have been announced.
Targetting China Through Hongkong
with Color Revolution
The Anglo-American “Project Democracy” apparatus has geared
up to orchestrate another “Tiananmen Square” crisis in China,
this time centered in Hongkong. Since Sep. 27, thousands of
mostly students have filled several busy intersections in downtown
Hongkong, protesting China’s policy for the selection of
candidates for the 2017 election of Hongkong’s Chief Executive
through an election committee composed of 1200 prominent
Hongkong citizens. They are also demanding the resignation of
the current Chief Executive, Leung Chun-ying.
The irony is that this is the first time in Hongkong’s history
that the Chief Executive will be elected by popular suffrage, as
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT
n°41 / 2014 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 3
was agreed to in the Basic Law adopted in 1997, when Hongkong
was returned to Chinese sovereignty by the British Empire.
That Basic Law explicitly states that the candidates are to
be nominated “by a broadly representative nominating committee.”
That means that the demonstrators, and the foreign
leaders supporting them under the banner of the “rule of law,”
are actually demanding that the law be abandoned.
The most hypocritical aspect is that Chris Patten, the last
Governor General of colonial Hongkong (in whose selection the
people of Hongkong had no say whatsoever), demanded in the
Sept. 4 Financial Times, that London intervene on behalf of
the protesters, saying that “the UK has a continuing moral and
political obligation to ensure that China respects its commitments
to guarantee Hong Kong’s way of life [!] for 50 years
from 1997.”
There are multiple foreign “Project Democracy” operations
involved in the ongoing mass demonstrations in Hongkong.
These include substantial annual funding from the National
Endowment for Democracy, the leading U.S. institution implementing
subversion and “regime change” around the world,
composed of both Republican and Democratic “neo-cons.”
Both the White House and Secretary of State John Kerry
have given their support to this subversion. Kerry, in a press
conference Oct. 1 with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in
Washington, backed the protesters, ranting about “open society”
and “rule of law. Wang Yi responded bluntly: “Hong Kong
affairs are China’s internal affairs. All countries should respect
China’s sovereignty. And this is also a basic principle governing
international relations. I believe for any country, for any society,
no one will allow those illegal acts that violate public order.
That’s the situation in the United States, and that’s the same
situation in Hong Kong.”
One of the leading financial backers of the “color revolution”
subversion is Hongkong media mogul Jimmy Lai, who, together
with his American cohort Mark Simon, have worked with archneocon
Paul Wolfowitz and others in planning the attempted
subversion of China through Hongkong. Lai and Simon are also
active in Taiwan, having supported the mass demonstrations
in March against the government’s peaceful collaboration with
Mainland China.
United States and Europe Pursue a Fiasco
in South-West Asia
In a speech at Harvard University Oct. 2, Vice President Joseph
Biden told an embarrassing half-truth about the Obama Administration’s
doomed strategy for defeating the Islamic State. He
lamented that leading allies of the West, including Saudi Arabia
and Turkey, were actually responsible for assisting in the rise of
IS through arms and funds to the radical jihadists.
Less than 48 hours later, the White House issued a “clarification”
of Biden’s remarks, essentially apologizing to the leaders
of those countries. But the Vice President was correct as
far as he went. He did not, however, acknowledge that the
Obama Administration has also boosted the very jihadists that
it is now fighting in both Iraq and Syria. Indeed, from at least
2011-2013, U.S. entities were running a weapons smuggling
operation out of Benghazi, Libya, funneling arms to Syrian rebels
seeking to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad government in
collusion with Turkey and Qatar, as has now been confirmed by
a United Nations report.
On the ground, the situation has become more complicated
since the Turkish parliament passed a resolution to provide
support to the coalition fighting against the Islamic State in
both Syria and Iraq. While Damascus has publicly stated its tacit
support for U.S. bombing missions against IS targets in the
north of the country, and has acknowledged unofficial coordination
of those attacks, the government warned that any Turkish
involvement would be viewed as a foreign invasion. The
Turks have made clear that their main objective is to target the
government, and not the IS.
Meanwhile, the jihadists continue to take more territory.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of the US Central Command,
told a Washington audience last week that the Obama plan for
defeating IS is so fatally flawed that it is guaranteed “one hundred
percent” to fail.
In a recent interview with RIA Novosti, EIR editor Jeffrey
Steinberg traced the flaw in Obama’s war plan all the way back
to the President’s refusal to declassify the official report on the
rôle of Saudi Arabia in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Obama has not only rejected the idea of formal collaboration
with Syria and Iran in the campaign against IS, he has also left
both China and Russia on the sidelines, when both countries
face similar threats from Uighur and Chechen jihadists, many
of whom are now fighting in Syria and Iraq with the Islamic
State, the al Nusra Front and the Islamic Front.
President Obama Attempts to Scapegoat
Intelligence Agencies
When confronted with the failure of his counter-terror policy
during an interview Sept. 28 on Sixty Minutes (CBS-TV), Barack
Obama accused the U.S. intelligence community of failing
to adequately assess the threat posed by the Islamic State as
well as the ability of the Iraqi army to fight them.
In reality, President Obama was repeatedly warned about the
threat from the IS -- from no later than Nov. 2013, when then-
Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to Washington and
begged him to launch a bombing campaign against the jihadists.
That was two months before IS launched its first major offensive
in western Iraq. Since then, top US intelligence officials
have repeatedly informed the White House and Congress of
the acute danger, and had warned of a major offensive to take
territory in both Iraq and Syria during 2014.
Obama’s accusations set off a storm of protest in the intelligence
community. A news report surfaced shortly afterward,
showing that the President had only attended 42 % of his
Presidential Daily Briefings since coming into office. These are
the daily in-person reports from the ODNI and CIA given to the
President every morning, which Obama chose not to attend
60 % of the time !
Popular Backlash to Russia-Bashing
by German Media
A revolt against the across-the-board anti-Russian propaganda
line of the mainstream German media has been brewing among
the German population for months over the blatantly unobjective
coverage of the crisis in Ukraine. In September, it finally
broke out into the open in a big way.
The advisory council of the First Television Channel ARD, a
public channel, after a deluge of protests from TV viewers,
looked into the matter and delivered a devastating report on
the station’s biased reporting. The advisory council, whose purpose
is to defend the interests of the public with respect to the
editors, and which is comprised of representatives of different
civic organizations, such as parties, trade-unions, churches,
youth groups, etc., listed ten complaints.
Among them, a lack of reports on the responsibility of the
EIR STRATEGIC ALERT
4 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n° 41 / 2014
EU and NATO in creating the crisis in the first place; next to no
coverage of the influence of “radical nationalist forces, in particular
of Svoboda”, in the Maidan “revolution”; and placing the
blame for the escalation of violence exclusively on the Russians.
The NATO-controlled media reacted with the usual hysterical
denials. The most outrageous was perhaps Die Welt (Sept. 24),
which accused the ARD advisory council of being part of Putin’s
“long arm”.
Then, on Sept. 19, an éclat broke out in the Broadcasting
Commission of Channel 2 (ZDF), also a public channel, when
the editor-in-chief Peter Frey refused to answer questions
about a Sept. 8 report on Eastern Ukraine, which showed
Ukrainian nationalist fighters from the Azov bataillon sporting
swastikas and SS insignia. Parliamentarian Gesine Lötsch of the
Left Party had asked him why the news program showed that
with no comment, as if to whitewash the fascists.
The Chairwoman of Initiative Ständige Publikumskonferenz
(Permanent Conference of Viewers), Maren Müller, has also
harshly attacked ZDF, for presenting the fascists of the Azov
bataillons as bona fide freedom fighters.
Both the head of ARD Thomas Baumann and of ZDF Peter
Frey, denied the accusations, but they did have to take note of
the outrage among the population.
Long-standing, respected figures in the media world have
denounced the anti-Russian propaganda from the beginning,
including the recently deceased, outspoken Peter Scholl LaTour
and Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, a historian and Moscow correspondent
of ARD for many years.
The latter was invited to address the Wiesbaden IHK meeting
on Sept. 25,where she polemicized against the “Putin-phobia”
in Germany and called for dialogue. “It is stupid and extremely
dangereous,” she said, “to think that critics of Putin are friends
of democracy.”
Narendra Modi Launches “Clean India”
Campaign: Children’s Lives at Stake
Indian Prime Minister Modi took a broom in his hands to launch
a “Swachh Bharat,” or “Clean India” campaign on Oct. 2, the
national holiday marking the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. He
recalled that it was Gandhi, who “gave us the message ‘Quit
India [addressed to the British Empire], Clean India’”, but his
dream on cleanliness is still unfulfilled. Modi has made this a
national priority, pledging to accomplish it by 2019, the 150th
anniversary of the historic independence leader’s birth.
“We reached Mars. No prime minister or minister did it – it
was the citizens, the scientists who did it,” Modi said. “So
can’t we create a Clean India? I am not talking politics...This is
beyond politics. All the governments in this country have made
one or the other effort to do this work.”
For the Prime Minister, going to Mars and providing sanitation
and clean water and food are both essential projects for
India: clean water is a matter of life and death, especially for
the millions of vulnerable Indian children, who are the nation’s
future. Truly getting rid of the filth will require massive infrastructure
investment, especially in advanced technologies to
cleanse the severely polluted water and land.
While India has significantly reduced its infant and child mortality
rates, still, almost one quarter (24%) of the 6.3 million
children in the world who die every year before they reach the
age of five are Indian. The mortality rates are much worse
in many areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, but the huge numbers
alone – almost 27 million children are born each year in India –
means that the Indian death toll is by far the highest. Unclean
water is the primary source of intestinal diseases, which either
kill young children outright, or cause malnutrition and vulnerability
to disease. Some 48% of India’s children suffer from
some level of malnutrition.
According to India’s 2011 census, some 53% households in
the country do not have toilet facilities. In rural areas, it is 70%-
78% of households. People have to defecate and urinate in open
areas, including fields where crops are grown. Millions more,
who live on city sidewalks in Kolkata, Delhi, and other cities,
must use the gutter, with the consequent spread of disease.
Urgent Mobilization Needed
To Stop Out-of-Control Ebola Crisis
Despite the by now acknowledged global threat posed by the
Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the world has still not launched
an urgent international military-style mobilization to stop it.
While there was much talk of containing the epidemic during
the UN Security Council and General Assembly Sept. 24 and
25, appallingly little has been actually done. For Dr. David Nabaro,
who is in charge of the UN response, Ebola poses a worse
threat to humanity than HIV or SARS, but the worldwide effort
to fight it is woefully inefficient.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF), the organization which is
playing the lead care-giving role on the ground in the crisis area
in West Africa, has been sounding the alarm for months.
When the Australian government recently offered $2.5 million
to MSF, it turned down the offer, asking Australia instead
to send desperately needed medical teams. MSF says it “simply
does not have the capacity to do this job alone. We are already
turning people away from our clinics which have been stretched
beyond over capacity for weeks.”
The charity “Save the Children” reported that at this point
five people are being infected every hour in Sierra Leone, a
country that has still not recovered from the destruction of
health care infrastructure during the civil war which ravaged it
and Liberia beginning in the 1990s. The charity reported that
last week 765 new cases of Ebola were reported, but there are
only 327 healthcare beds in the country, where the epidemic
has been raging since at least last December.
The International Rescue Committee, speaking on behalf
of 34 NGOs involved in the fight against the Ebola epidemic,
warned that there is only a four-week window for action, to
break the transmission rate of the disease, and halt the exponential
increase in the number of cases, before the crisis spirals
out of control.
It is still possible to stop it, the but that demands an effort
along the lines of the strategic biological defense initiative,
which Lyndon LaRouche demanded years ago for Africa, which
combines a concrete program of economic development with
a quasi military mobilization to go in with the equipment and
trained personnel needed to protect the populations, and the
rejection of the IMF policy of debt collection.
E.I.R. STRATEGIC ALERT www.eir.de
Published by: E.I.R.GmbH, Bahnstr. 9a, 65205 Wiesbaden
Tel.: 0611/73650, Fax: 0611/7365101, Email: eirna@eirna.com
Verantwortl. f. d. Inhalt: Dean Andromidas, Claudio Celani
Subscription: EUR 3000/ ISSN 0936-7527
© E.I.R. GmbH Alle Rechte vorbehalten, auch die des Nachdrucks
von Auszügen, derphotomechanischen Wiedergabe und der Übersetzung,
Printed in Germany