E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
Volume 30, No. 10 - March 10, 2016
Helga Zepp-LaRouche Is Featured Speaker  at the Raisina Dialogue in Delhi The Indian Ministry of External Affairs, together with the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), sponsored the first Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi from March 1-3, 2016. The focus of the international conference was Asia’s physical, economic, human and digital connectivity, as well as the needed international partnerships to address the challenges of our century effectively. Speakers included many high-level government officials as well as leaders of business and industry, and members of the strategic establishment, media and academia. Among the speakers on the inaugural panel were the Foreign Affairs Ministers of Bangladesh and India,  Abdul Hassan Mahmood Ali and Sushma Swaraj, and several former presidents: Hamid Karzai (Afghanistan), Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (Sri Lanka), and Sir James Mancham (Seychelles). Several Indian ministers gave speeches, including Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, as well as China’s former Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, the Senior Vice President of the Silk Road Fund Ding Guorong,  and many other political leaders, including the founder and chairwoman of the Schiller-Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. The three-day conference addressed different aspects of the strategic situation. Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke on the panel “Connecting a Continent: An Asian Union”, and expressed the hope that China, Russia and India would extend the dynamic underlying China’s One Road, One Belt program to South-west Asia and Africa. This, she stressed, is the only way to avoid the danger of world war today. In the ensuing Q&A, Zepp-LaRouche further developed her remarks, raising the discussion to the strategic level. In the panel “Whither the European Union” the panelists, among them two members of the European parliament, dealt with the challenges to the Eurozone due to the refugee crisis and terrorism. Most of them blamed the lack of solidarity among EU member states as the core reason for the crisis. However, in the Q&A, Helga Zepp-LaRouche intervened by making the point that the only way to solve the refugee crisis is through a kind of Marshall Plan to rebuild the entire region, that has been destroyed by all these wars. Although the panelists did not respond directly to her challenge, it was brought up later in the day by another speaker, and in many discussions on the sidelines. Throughout the proceedings, Zepp-LaRouche was ap
proached by many concerned people to discuss more about the issues she raised, especially the war danger and the New Silk Road initiative. Other panels included topics on “Asia’s Strategic Order”, which addressed the role of nuclear weapons in the context of regional stability, or “Waters of Asia”, which dealt with transnational development of river basins and the implications of energy corridors and international waterways. There were also several panels on different security items, one focussing on asymmetrical and sub-conventional security threats from state and non-state actors and how to respond to them. Click here for more information on the Raisina Dialogue. The Right Name for Human Rights Is Development, Say the BRICS At the annual High-Level Panel of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Feb. 29, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) launched a welcome and timely intervention into an institution that has long been wielded as a club against the leaders of numerous developing nations, who refused to follow the dictates of the Western oligarchy. The five countries submitted a joint statement on the need to eliminate poverty, as a basic human right. “We consider the eradication of poverty,” it reads, “as an indispensable requirement for, and overarching objective toward, the attainment of sustainable development, promoting social progress, safeguarding fairness and justice, and enhancing ecological conservation.” It says that all countries should avoid a “one-sizefits-all” approach, given the different levels of development, national realities, and histories. As the president of the AIIB Jin Liqan has stressed, over the past 30 years, China has managed to lift 600 million people out of poverty, thanks to a policy of targeted debt-financed investment into infrastructure. That has done more to further their human rights than all the pontificating on “democracy”, “free elections”, and “human rights” heard ad nauseam in western forums. As for the credibility of the UN Human Rights Council, suffice it to recall that the chairmanship of a key panel, the one that appoints experts to examine human rights violations, was awarded last year to.... Saudi Arabia, which certainly has one of the worst records in the world on that account. Routine beheadings, no religious freedom, and next to no women’s rights, just to name a few.
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Syrian Ceasefire Holding,  But Dangers Remain High The ceasefire in Syria, being jointly administered by Russia and the United States, has been in place well over a week now, and with the exception of minor violations, it is still holding. A shift has taken place, with even some hard-core critics of President Assad now admitting that the ceasefire holds open the possibility of a genuine peace agreement, ending five years of war. Russian President Putin conferred on March 4 with European leaders from the International Syria Support Group (France, Germany, Italy, UK) and all concurred that the ceasefire was holding and that emergency relief was getting to civilian populations in many parts of the country. UN officials, including Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Special Syrian envoy Staffan de Mistura said the climate was right for the resumption of peace talks, scheduled for March 9. The Saudi Arabia-backed rebels continue to claim that the Syrian and Russian government forces are engaged in major violations, but there is no evidence that the claims are true. If anything, Saudi-backed rebel factions are indistinguishable from the Nusra Front, which is excluded from the ceasefire, and remains under attack from Syrian-Russian forces, as per the terms of the agreement signed by a majority of the rebel groups and the Syrian government. There is, however, a wild-card factor that could blow apart the fragile ceasefire and wreck the chances of a durable peace and reform, and that is Turkey. The Turkish army continues to fire artillery at YPG Kurdish fighting units battling against the Islamic State and Nusra Front in the northeast of Syria. And there are widespread reports of rebel fighters crossing from Turkey into northern Syria to join Nusra and ISIS in the ongoing battle. Increasingly, the would-be Ottoman Sultan, President Recep Erdogan, is finding himself isolated from European and Arab governments, as well as the United States, for his blatant, illegal moves to shut down targets opposition groups. The latest target is the widely-read daily Zaman of the opposition, which was shut down last week, by court order. Given the momentum for a genuine solution to the Syria war, it is vital to keep a close watch on other vulnerable fronts, that could be exploited by the British and Obama to set the course back towards confrontation with Russia and China. The Normandy Group countries met, for the first time in a long time, in an effort to get the Ukraine Minsk Accords back on track. But the Ukraine government in Kiev has so far refused to pass election laws granting greater autonomy to the Donbass region. The Foreign Minister of Ukraine, attending the Minsk talks, insisted that there would be no changes in the law until the Ukraine authorities established total control over the Russian borders. Northeast Asia has also become a power-keg, as the result of North Korea’s recent nuclear test, and a satellite launch, which the US and other Western powers denounced as a thinly-veiled ICBM test (cf. SAS 9/16). European Parliament Members on Capitol Hill to Lobby for Glass-Steagall Two Italian members of the European Parliament (MEPs), invited by EIR , held intensive meetings on Capitol Hill March 1-3, asking Congressmen to break up the Wall Street banks by restoring the Glass-Steagall Act, which would also lend impetus to widespread efforts among European constituencies to separate commercial from investment banks.
MEPs Marco Zanni and Marco Valli met with 11 Members of the House from both parties -- some sponsors of the existing Glass-Steagall bill, and others on the fence -- and told them “we are standing before another global crisis of the financial system, and we need to act now in both the United States and Europe.” Both MEPs are from the Five Star Movement (M5S), now Italy’s second-largest party, whose delegates have introduced several bank separation bills in the Italian Parliament. They conveyed in detail the chaos, impoverishment, and banking crisis triggered since the “bank bail-in” rules went into effect across the European Union at the end of 2015. Their briefings on the “ticking bomb” represented by financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank or Royal Bank of Scotland, with their immense derivatives exposure, hit home with several lawmakers, underscoring the urgency of a Glass-Steagall reform. The MEPs received strong offers of collaboration from several Glass-Steagall sponsors,  and were informed by others about the fight throughout the Democratic Party in particular, over Glass-Steagall vs. the Dodd-Frank Act. Many lawmakers had taken note that two Federal Reserve Bank presidents recently said Dodd-Frank will only lead to another gargantuan bank bailout, and suggested that they break up Wall Street institutions instead. The Italian MEPs, together with representatives of EIR , also met with the staff of more than a dozen other members, including the Democratic leadership of both the House and Senate. It was clear from those meetings that the party’s Congressional leadership has formed a defensive line for Dodd-Frank and against Glass-Steagall, in line with Hillary Clinton. However, the leadership offices, aware of the constituency strength of the fight against Wall Street, were extremely interested to know what the European Parliament members and EIR had to say. H.R.381, the House bill to restore Glass-Steagall, now has 71 sponsors. Schäuble’s Radical Balanced Budget Policy under Attack in Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy on the refugee crisis is finally forcing to the fore a much-needed and long-festering debate on the “zero deficit” policy defended with religious fanaticism by Wolfgang Schäuble, her Finance Minister. While Schäuble’s insistence, backed by the Troika, on imposing murderous austerity on the countries in southern Europe, emphatically Greece, was already broadly criticized, it is only with the waves of refugees of the past months, and the alarming rise of xenophobia, that the unsustainability of the policy begins to be reflected in the media. After Vice Chancellor and Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel of the SPD publicly called for more social spending (cf. SAS 9/16), the vice-chairman of the SPD Torsten Schäfer-Gümbel stated in a March 1 DLF ( Deutschlandfunk ) interview that it was unacceptable to withhold funds for helping the lowerincome strata of the population just to avoid increasing the deficit. Beyond SPD politicians, who might be suspected of making such statements in view of state elections, the “black zero” policy was also criticized in the latest issue of  Der Spiegel , by a number of economists, including Thomas Straubhaar, the long-time former director of the Hamburg World Economics Institute. These economists propose that the government borrow new money for the creation of a special fund to integrate refugees, and invest the €12 billion budget surplus from 2015 into a special new fund for job-creation on a broad scale. The
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debt of this new fund, they propose, in the range of €25-plus billion, would be serviced over a period of up to 30 years. It would be paid off by the increased tax revenues due to the numbers of new jobs created. Moreover, Germany’s leading mass-tabloid Bild ran a special story on March 1 highlighting the dramatic lack of public investments in infrastructure, in many cases going back years: police manpower and equipment, maintenance and construction of schools, daycare centers, and hospitals, purchase of modern ambulances, maintenance of roads, highways and bridges, funds for high-tech research and development. Bild notes that more and more voters are turning away from the established parties because they feel the policy makers do not care about their interests and concerns. The message is clear: the “black zero” policy has to go. U.S. Presidential Campaign  Reflects National Dysfunction Do not be confused by those who say that the November Presidential election in the United States will be between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. While both candidates have been marching toward nomination, neither has demonstrated broad-based appeal, and both come with major problems. Their emergence says more about the dysfunctional nature of the American population, and the degeneration of the two major political parties, than about their qualities as leaders. The most recent Republican debate reached a new low, with the choice of the establishment, Marco Rubio, employing vulgar slanders to attack Trump, bringing forth an even more vulgar response from him. But the really vulgar reality is that that none of them can engage in a discussion of the serious issues facing the nation, falling back instead on whipping up anger against “liberals” and at alleged government attacks on individual freedom. Meanwhile, the party bosses are now running a frantic “Stop Trump” effort, even if that means disenfranchising the voters. As for Hillary Clinton, despite her claims of a lifelong commitment to justice and good deeds, her actual policy proposals differ little from those of Ted Cruz and Rubio. She continues to call for the ouster of Syrian President Assad, attacks Vladimir Putin, and defends the Too Big to Fail banking system which has produced more bankrupt banks, while swelling all categories of public and private debt to ever-more unsustainable levels. And while her opponent, Bernie Sanders, eloquently outlines how the financial and economic policies which Clinton and the Republicans support have destroyed the economy, creating the greatest income inequality in world history, he thoroughly undermines his case by his fulsome praise of Obama, whose seven-plus years in office has caused that gap between rich and poor to grow even more than during Bush’s tenure. Both Trump and Sanders have benefited from an overall angry mood among voters against the financial oligarchy and their puppets, such as Barack Obama and Congressional leaders of both parties. However, neither have offered solutions to the problems, nor a challenge to voters to give up their passivity, and fight for real solutions, such as those presented by LaRouchePAC, which include removing Obama, reviving NASA and space exploration as a science driver, and using Glass-Steagall legislation to shut down Wall Street, which would have the welcome effect of eliminating the speculators’ ability to fund the election of their puppets. This could lead to surprises in the scenarios now envisaged.
Dangerous Geopoliticking  in Libya On March 3, as the Libyan Army was announcing that Benghazi had been encircled and would soon be liberated from the foreign-directed jihadist militia, the United States Ambassador in Rome John Philipps called for Italy to lead a foreign intervention in Libya and to provide 5000 troops for the action. Washington, he told Corriere della Sera , would supply intelligence but no troops. The Libyan National Army is loyal to the internationally recognized government of Libya, which is now based in Tobruk. The U.S. ambassador’s request reflects the fact that the Obama Administration is unhappy with the military successes of that army, in the east, for two reasons. First, because it is part of a strategy backed by Egypt and politically by Russia. Secondly, because they do not want to exclude their Muslim Brotherhood friends who now control Tripoli, in the western part of Libya. The French and the British, who created the chaos in Libya in the first place, with the help of the U.S., are reacting differently. Unable to stop the advances of the Libyan Army, they jumped on the bandwagon and provided military advisors to its military leader, General Khalifa Haftar. However, the not so hidden purpose of the US-Franco-British game is to partition Libya into two or three regions, in a neo-colonial way. Fortunately, the Italian government has so far rejected the requests from Washington. Prime Minister Renzi said on March 6 in a television interview: “I see people saying we should send 5000 troops. Is this a videogame? We should keep calm”. Indeed, an Italian expeditionary force would be nonsense militarily, several military sources have pointed out. It would interfere both with the UN agenda of forming a National Unity Government and with the Libyan Army military campaign. General Leonardo Tricarico, former Air Force Chief of Staff, warned of any intervention “without a request from a Libyan executive” and just to establish a military presence around oil fields in Tripolitania, the western region where the Italian national oil and gas company ENI operates and from which the Greenstream pipeline supplies gas to Italy. Such an intervention would mean that Italy allies with the Libya Dawn coalition “while French and British special forces are deployed in Cyrenaica in support of the Tobruk government. A choice of partitioning the territory according to areas of influence, with a neocolonial taste”. Whereas a foreign intervention would be seen as hostile by the majority of factions in Libya, an all-Libyan solution such as the one backed by Egypt, is a viable solution to unify the country and eradicate terrorism. Hillary Clinton’s Role in Libya Debacle Exposed in the New York Times While the United States and a number of European governments are again getting involved in military operations in Libya, the New York Times , on Feb. 27, published a devastating dossier on that country’s “descent into chaos”, which began with the “rushed decision to go to war”, initially at the prodding of France and Great Britain. The dossier focusses on then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s central role – on the U.S. side -- in the decision to overthrow Libyan head of state Qaddafi and have him assassinated, and in the horror that followed. The lengthy account, based on interviews with more than 50 current and former Obama Administration officials and other knowledgeable figures, made clear that Hillary Clinton was the “tilt” factor in the decision to bomb Libya and ultimately unleash chaos across Africa.
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The
New York Times is apparently having second thoughts about having endorsed Clinton for President in January. In one segment on the failure of the pre-war diplomacy, writers Jo Becker and Scott Shane recount that at the very outset of the bombing campaign, retired U.S. Rear Adm. Charles Kubic received a communiqué from a Qaddafi representative, proposing a 72-hour ceasefire, during which Qaddafi was prepared to negotiate his own departure from power and an end to the fighting towards Benghazi. It turned out that Qaddafi had earlier reached out to the Obama Administration through Gen. Wesley Clark and even Tony Blair, attempting to reach Secretary of State Clinton to halt the war. All the efforts were rejected, Qaddafi was killed, and Libya descended into pervasive chaos, with a flood of weapons hitting the black markets on a scale not seen since Vietnam. In fact, we would add, the entire war was launched on a fraudulent claim that it was a humanitarian intervention to prevent a bloodbath in Benghazi, rather than the actual intent: bloody regime-change and the assassination of a head of state, who had dismantled his WMD arsenals and was a leading ally in the fight against al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces – who today rule over much of the country. Lyndon LaRouche nuanced the NYT account by pointing out that Clinton, after accepting to head the State Department, had actually capitulated to President Obama, who from the very beginning, was a “killer President”. In any case, knowing that Hillary Clinton may become the next U.S. President, and that she eagerly supports a no-fly zone and regime change in Syria, this dossier should be seen as an urgent warning to stop the “war party”. South-West Asia : A Program to Rebuild Nations and Unleash the Populations’ Creativity The Arabic version of the full EIR Special Report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge , translated by Hussein Askary, will be available in print form as of mid-March, and can be ordered from the EIR website. It contains an expanded chapter on the reconstruction of Southwest Asia, as well as a special foreword by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, written Feb. 26, 2016, which we quote in full. “It may be a happy coincidence or divine providence, that the Arabic translation of the World Land-Bridge book comes out just as the prospect of a ceasefire in Syria is becoming a reality. The accord between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has the potential of bringing a war of five years, which cost hundreds of thousands of human lives, to an end. But given the enormous intricacies of the region, it should also be clear that a mere contract to stop fighting, will be too fragile to last and survive new provocations, by the same forces which were responsible for the war. “The only way that a durable peace can be guaranteed, is to immediately launch a comprehensive development plan for all of Southwest Asia, with an integrated infrastructure development plan, which not only reconstructs the cities and villages destroyed by the war, but which takes a much more fundamental approach to return this region, which was one of the cradles of human civilization and at various points in history harbored the most developed cultures of the time, to one of the most advanced regions of the world again. The aim must be to unleash the creativity of the people of the region and bring their productivity up to the level of Europe, the United States, or China. “This is absolutely possible, most emphatically because the collaboration of Russia, China and India represent the powerful
neighbors which can, together with the countries of the region, bring this development about. If the development projects proposed in this report are implemented, starting literally tomorrow, so that the peace dividend becomes visible for all sides in the region, then the ceasefire in Syria and the implementation of what one could call a Silk Road-Marshall Plan, without a cold war connotation however, can become a game-changer for the whole world. “At a moment, when the refugee crisis is threatening to become an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, detonating the cohesion and possibly even the existence of the European Union, a vision of hope to develop Southwest Asia and Africa, is the only way to turn the situation around. At a moment when the financial system of the trans-Atlantic world is about to crash, the development perspective to rebuild the Near and Middle East to become the bridge between Asia, Europe and Africa, is the only engine of economic growth to prevent Europe and the U.S. from going down in chaos. “So on the realization of this program, the fate of all of humanity depends.” Vitrenko Releases Video:  Ukraine Needs LaRouche Economics A new video by Ukrainian economist Natalia Vitrenko, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, is now available on YouTube with English subtitles. Vitrenko, a long-time friend of the Schiller Institute, co-authored a call for a new Bretton Woods together with Helga Zepp-LaRouche in 1997. Her new video is titled “The World Order – Natalia Vitrenko’s View,” and alludes to Vladimir Solovyov’s documentary “The World Order,” aired in mid-December on Russian state television. Solovyov, a prominent Russian journalist, timed the release of his film to the finalization of Russia’s updated National Security Strategy, which defined the need to respond to Western-backed “regime change” policies, targeted against Russia’s allies and the Russian Federation itself (cf. SAS 1, 2/16). He attributed that policy, including the horrendous examples of Iraq and Libya, to the “unipolar world” doctrine adopted by the United States, under which no nation must ever be allowed to gain enough power to challenge U.S. hegemony in the world, a doctrine fully espoused by the Obama administrations. Vitrenko welcomes the discussion opened up by Solovyov, and by Putin’s remarks within his film on the nature of the current world order. She argues, however, that the number of geopolitical “poles” in the world -- one or two, or more -- will not in itself make the world more just. What is important is to put an end to the economic model of looting the British Empire, which is known today as globalization. Discussing the needed fundamental change in economic policy, Vitrenko gives special attention to American economist Lyndon LaRouche’s work on public credit systems, and to the damage done by International Monetary Fund policies in Ukraine since 1992.
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