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The desperation evident in the succession of increasingly blatant lies, coming from Anglo-American spokesmen about an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, demonstrates that they know their attempt to dictate the shape of the post-Cold War world is reaching an end. Each day, a new fabrication is produced, while in the background, a new Russian-China alliance has been cemented, calling for a new global security architecture which protects the interests of people in all nations. The issue of war or peace has never been so clear -- can the Anglo-American war drive be stopped?

· February 6, 2022 “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the five nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council affirmed in a joint statement on Jan. 3 of this year. Since the use of nuclear weapons always involves the risk of using the entire nuclear arsenal, a percentage of which is enough to cause the extinction of the human species, the confirmation of this fundamental insight should actually have practical implications for the military strategy of all nuclear powers. Notwithstanding this joint statement, in the last week of January, the U.S. Strategic Command launched the Global Lightning exercise, designed to test the readiness of U.S. nuclear forces. Although this was a so-called “routine” maneuver integrated this year with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and thus aimed at a possible confrontation with China, in the context of heightened tensions between Russia and the United States and NATO, it can be seen as just another—but perhaps the most dangerous—element in the way that the West is playing with fire with respect to Russia and China. The timing of the maneuver coincided with hitherto unproven allegations by the United States and UK that Russia was planning a military attack on Ukraine between late January and mid-February, which the Russian government has repeatedly denied. The nuclear command-and-control exercise is based on the U.S. Strategic Command’s current nuclear war plan. Hans M. Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists, was able, under the Freedom of Information Act, to obtain the cover page of this plan, entitled Stratcom Conplan 0810-12, Strategic Deterrence and Force Deployment, Change 1. Kristensen, one of the most competent specialists in the field of nuclear strategy and weapons, explained to Newsweek that the Global Lightning exercise does not simply assume a nuclear first strike by one side or the other, but an extended nuclear war that will continue after the first exchange of strikes. Even though the individual components of this new war plan, which has been operational since April 30, 2019, are subject to the highest levels of secrecy, the outlines of this conception emerge. The assumption is that the United States and NATO would be able to survive a nuclear first strike by Russia or China, then retaliate, absorb further attacks, retaliate again, etc., in an ongoing military confrontation. This nuclear war plan includes not only nuclear weapons but various other lethal systems such as missile defense systems, directed energy weapons such as electromagnetic pulse weapons and lasers, cyberattacks, and Space Force attacks from space. Who would be able to survive such a prolonged nuclear war? The few people who can nest in deep underground bunkers? It makes the morbid fantasies of Dr. Strangelove look like a child’s birthday party. Last year’s Global Lightning maneuvers in April 2021 focused on a potential conflict with Russia; this year it was devoted to a possible confrontation with China. The Pentagon’s various strategy papers since 2017 had increasingly defined Russia and China as geopolitical rivals and adversaries, replacing the fight against global terrorism with great-power competition as a strategic priority. At the same time, the modernization of the nuclear triad begun by the Obama Administration continued and the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons was increasingly lowered by the stationing of low-yield warheads on Trident submarines, among other things. The Strategic Conflict Although there was little official comment, President Putin’s March 1, 2018 announcement was about Russia’s new nuclear systems. These included the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle (launched from an ICBM, it travels at 20 times the speed of sound and boasts excellent maneuverability that renders the American missile defense system essentially obsolete;" the hypersonic aeroballistic missile Kinzhal; as well as nuclear-powered cruise missiles, fast underwater drones and laser weapons—a shock to the western military establishment. Meanwhile, China has also developed its own hypersonic missiles with infrared homing technology, a capability that the American military may not have for two to three years. American satellite imagery has also located about 300 missile silos under construction in scattered locations across China, some of which may remain empty, but others would have nuclear missiles in a state of “launch on warning” to forestall a disarming surprise attack. This is broadly the strategic background against which Putin presented two treaties to the United States and NATO on Dec. 17, demanding that they be legally binding: no further eastward expansion of NATO, and no offensive weapon systems stationed on Russia’s borders; plus guarantees that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO. Unlike many trans-Atlantic politicians and media outlets, Gen. Harald Kujat, the former Inspector General of the German Armed Forces, believes that the gathering of some 120,000 Russian troops near the Ukrainian border—some of them, however, hundreds of kilometers away—is not indicative of an impending attack on Ukraine, but that Russia wants to demonstrate strength with this threatening backdrop in order to force negotiations with the U.S.A. and NATO on an equal footing. So far, the United States and NATO have refused to make any commitments on Putin’s key demands, and appear only willing to make what Russia considers secondary commitments on new disarmament talks. Putin has announced “military-technical measures” in the event of a definitive refusal. In view of the fact that the stationing of potentially offensive weapon systems in the vicinity of the Russian borders in connection with NATO’s eastward enlargement—this includes, for example, the Aegis missile defense system stationed in Poland and Romania—created a situation for Russia comparable to the stationing of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the question arises as to what these “measures” might look like. The American Russia expert Gilbert Doctorow suspects that they could include the stationing of nuclear-armed SS-26 Iskander-M short-range missiles in Belarus and Kaliningrad in order to threaten the NATO front-line states and eastern Germany in return. He further suspects Russia may plant sea-launched hypersonic Zircon nuclear-armed cruise missiles off the coast of Washington, D.C., which Russian experts have previously said could destroy the American capital so quickly the President would not have time to board Air Force One to escape. Theoretically, the Zirkon hypersonic missiles could, of course, also be used anywhere on the seven seas and are very difficult for conventional air defense to detect and intercept in view of their velocity—nine times the speed of sound—and maneuverability in flight. So it is only logical that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock on Jan. 20, 2022 showed only 100 seconds to midnight. That’s only about a minute and a half until the nuclear apocalypse. Even though, since the escalation of the Ukraine crisis, after a deep sleep of almost 40 years, the anti-war movement has issued a whole series of appeals, public calls and open letters—most recently from 100 organizations in the U.S.A. demanding that President Biden de-escalate the tensions with Russia—the enormous extent of the threat has by no means penetrated the public consciousness. Uncertainty about the Causes But even among most Westerners who recognize the imminent danger, there is a lack of clarity about the underlying causes of the existential danger to human existence. They are to be found, on the one hand, in the systemic character of the crisis of the neoliberal financial system, which has now entered its hyperinflationary final phase; and on the other hand, in the claim of the financial establishment in the City of London, Wall Street and Silicon Valley to a unipolar world in which only the power interests of this establishment determine what shall happen in the “rules-based order.” The dilemma now arises from an opposing dynamic. Since the paradigm shift of August 1971, prophetically recognized by Lyndon LaRouche—when Nixon effectively ended the Bretton Woods system by abolishing fixed exchange rates and thus paving the way for speculative profit maximization—there has been an increasing shift in the trans-Atlantic world away from investments in the productive physical economy and towards speculation in increasingly exotic derivative-based financial products, of which the most recent folly is “shifting the trillions” into the Green New Deal. From the standpoint of the physical economy this policy—of making investments in industries with the lowest possible energy-flux density—ultimately represents an extensive destruction of capital, just like investments in the military production of weapon systems and the army. The fact that this effect is usually not recognized has to do with the confusion about monetary values, money vs. real wealth, and the illusion that the share values ​​of listed companies say something about the productivity of the economy. Of course, it is in the interest of the yacht-owning billionaires, some of whom have long since acquired condominiums in deep-seated bunkers in Australia and elsewhere, that the bubble economy be sustained for as long as possible, even as the proportion of the population that is impoverished continues to increase, and the middle class shrinks. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and the trans-Atlantic establishment, despite all warnings—for example from Pope John Paul II—succumbed to the fantasy of having “won” the Cold War, and interpreted the “end of history” to mean that the whole world must now subject itself to the neoliberal rules-based order, there was no longer any need to keep any promises made to Russia not to expand NATO eastward. The whole spectrum of instruments for cementing the unipolar world was used: regime change, either through color revolutions or “humanitarian” wars against all governments that held other values. Victoria Nuland publicly boasted that the State Department had spent $5 billion on NGOs in Ukraine alone, which initially led to the 2004 “Orange Revolution.” When President Yanukovych refused to join the EU Association Agreement in late 2013, not least because the EU is fully linked to NATO in terms of treaties and security, the not-so-democratic side of the rules-based order came to the fore in the form of the Nazi Maidan coup of February 2014. This did not result in any annexation of Crimea by Putin, but rather a referendum by the people of Crimea, who wanted to withdraw from Kiev’s fascist policies. Even then, Putin stated that the West was actually concerned with containing Russia and that, if not in Ukraine, they would have found another excuse for doing so. The decisive hardening towards Russia and China became visible, in 2017 at the latest, in the changed language in the security doctrines of the Pentagon and the characterization of these two countries as “enemies” and “autocracies.” While the Western institutions initially reacted to the announcement of the New Silk Road by Xi Jinping in September 2013 with an extensive blackout for an amazing four years, these institutions have now reacted to this largest infrastructure project in human history as if it were an existential threat—namely to the unipolar world! Virtually all sanctions that have been imposed anywhere in the world unilaterally, i.e., without UN Security Council resolutions, ultimately had the chief purpose of preventing China’s economic rise and Russia’s regaining the status of world player. The transcript of the Jan. 25 background press briefing by two unnamed White House officials shockingly reveals this intention. They present a whole spectrum of “serious economic measures”—starting at the highest level of escalation—to thwart Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy, by denying him access to all modern, advanced technologies, such as AI, quantum-computers, and any technology related to defense or aerospace, to prevent him from “diversifying” the economy beyond exporting oil and gas. The objective is the atrophy of the Russian economy. This policy, formulated in incredibly brutal language, is nothing more than a continuation of Jeffrey Sachs’ so-called “shock therapy” of the 1990s, which had the explicit aim of reducing Russia from the status of a superpower at the time of the Soviet Union to that of a commodity-exporting Third World country. That policy was then, as it is now, a declaration of war—the only difference being that Putin is not a pathetic figure like Boris Yeltsin, pampered by the West for geopolitical motives, but a brilliant strategist who knows how to defend Russia’s interests. The no less hateful tirades against China, which can be heard today from court scribblers of the Empire, as well as from former Maoists of the SDS era who have now risen to top positions in the Green Party, cannot change the outstanding success of the Chinese economy, which recorded a growth rate of over 8% in 2021 despite coronavirus. China has done more for human rights than any country of the so-called Western community of values, lifting 850 million people out of poverty domestically— including the Uyghurs, who now enjoy vastly better living standards and faster-than-average population growth—and offering many developing countries for the first time the chance to overcome poverty. The silence of the same circles on the largest of all humanitarian catastrophes, triggered by Western sanctions in Afghanistan, in which one million children are starving and a total of 24 million people are at risk of dying this Winter, seals their complete discrediting. Joint Statement by Putin and Xi If various authors have warned that the campaigns against Russia and China could lead to even closer ties between these two countries, then rest assured that this is exactly what has now happened during Putin’s visit to the Olympic Games in China. However, there is an urgent need to remove the ideological spectacles and recognize the extraordinary opportunity presented for the whole world by the joint declaration of Presidents Putin and Xi in this extremely dangerous world situation. The 16-page document entitled, “Joint Declaration of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and Global Sustainable Development,” calls for replacing geopolitical confrontation with economic cooperation as the basis for a common security policy. Both nations are calling on NATO to refrain from further expansion plans, to move beyond Cold War thinking, and to enshrine the long-term security guarantees that Russia is demanding. The role of international organizations such as the G20, BRICS, APEC and ASEAN should be strengthened, they say. Russia will cooperate in realizing China’s proposed “Global Development Initiative” and emphasizes the importance of the concept of the “community of a common destiny for mankind.” Let’s think back to the hundred seconds before midnight on the doomsday clock: Who can deny that we are an indivisible community of destiny? In recent weeks, more level-headed voices have spoken out in favor of a new pan-European security architecture including Russia and Ukraine, which could be enshrined in a new Helsinki agreement. However, in view of the complexity of the world situation, the threat to world peace affecting all states, and the inseparability of the security of all, it is necessary to go beyond Helsinki and create an international security architecture that encompasses the security interests of all states on Earth. This architecture must be based on the principles of the Peace of Westphalia; i.e., it must guarantee the interests of all states and, above all, their right to economic and cultural development. The maintenance of world peace presupposes a total and definitive renunciation of Malthusian politics, and requires undivided access to the achievements of scientific and technological advance for all nations. This new order— the prerequisite for the survival of the human species—requires a new paradigm of thought that must draw upon the best traditions of all cultures at the highest humanistic level. We have a choice: Either we keep the clock ticking until the last of the hundred seconds has struck, and then there will be no one left to comment on the result; or, we can remember that we are the only known creative species in the universe, and shape our common future together.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945, announced on Jan. 20 that for the third year in a row, their Doomsday Clock remains fixed at 100 seconds to midnight. “Steady is not good news,” said Sharon Squassoni, a professor at George Washington University and a member of the group. “We are stuck in a perilous moment—one that brings neither stability nor security. Positive developments in 2021 failed to counteract negative, long-term trends,” she said.The clock was originally only concerned with the threat of nuclear war, but has recently included the politically correct issues of climate change, disruptive technologies and biological hazards, including sections of their report on these issues. They even bring up Jan. 6. The organization’s website says: “Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet.” This year’s report begins by saying the new administration in the U.S. raised hopes of decreasing the danger, with the extension of New START, talks between the U.S. and Russia, and revived talks on the JCPOA. However: “U.S. relations with Russia and China remain tense, with all three countries engaged in an array of nuclear modernization and expansion efforts—including China’s apparent large-scale program to increase its deployment of silo-based long-range nuclear missiles; the push by Russia, China, and the United States to develop hypersonic missiles; and the continued testing of anti-satellite weapons by many nations. If not restrained, these efforts could mark the start of a dangerous new nuclear arms race.” They express hope that the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review will reduce the danger of a nuclear war. They would not be pleased by the new reports by William Arkin and others elsewhere in this briefing.

Feb 5—At 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon (Feb. 4), the following headline appeared on the Bloomberg News website: “Russia Invades Ukraine.” Note that it was then midnight in Moscow, and that President Vladimir Putin was not in the country, but in Beijing. For a full 30 minutes, this headline remained on the website, before it was finally removed, with Bloomberg News posting an attempted apology: “We prepare headlines for many scenarios and one of those headlines was inadvertently published at around 4 p.m. ET today on our website. We deeply regret the error.”Error? For months the Western media, with Bloomberg News right up front, have peddled the lie that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was “imminent.” The U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines briefed NATO leaders in October that the invasion would come in the last weeks of January or the early weeks of February. Day after day the lie was peddled that over 100,000 Russian troops were poised for the invasion on the Ukraine border, despite denials by not only Moscow, but even by Kiev! Error? Keep in mind that Sir Michael Bloomberg made his billions with a software which provided information on every trade taking place in the world in microseconds. “The chance that this was an accident is essentially zero,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche exclaimed today. “There must be a Congressional investigation immediately.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he could not say whether or not it was an accident, but in any case, “This is a perfect demonstration of how dangerous the situation is when provoked by the endless aggressive statements that come from Washington, London and from other European governments. This is probably also a great demonstration of how such messages can lead to irreparable consequences.” Who is Sir Michael Bloomberg? Not only is he “Mr. Wall Street,” with his computer software used in virtually every financial institution, but he is also “Mr. Green New Deal,” taking great pleasure in the fact that he personally financed the campaign that shut down half of the U.S. coal mines, and also served as the United Nations’ Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions. At the Glasgow COP26 climate conference in November he announced a new effort aimed at closing a quarter of the world’s 2,445 coal plants, as well as stopping efforts underway to build 519 new coal plants by 2025. As any African leader will tell you, this means poverty and death for Africa. The fact that it is Michael Bloomberg, who is the operative in this war-mongering ploy, further proves the point emphasized for the past 50 years by Lyndon LaRouche and EIR: It is the collapse of the Western financial system (now apparent to all but the morally blind) which is the driving force for war, not the fake geopolitical accusations about “aggression” or “human rights abuse.” Not coincidentally, this incident comes on the same day that Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in Beijing, releasing a communiqué, titled “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.” To understand the profound importance of this historic document, it is instructive to read what a leading mouthpiece for the British Empire and the City of London, the Daily Telegraph, has to say about it. Under the headline, “Russia and China Rise from Their Knees To Challenge U.S. Dominance,” The Telegraph writes: “The message here is anything but routine. At a moment of immense international tension, Russia and China are asserting the arrival of a new geopolitical era. From now on, the dominance of the U.S.-led global West will no longer be taken for granted—or tolerated.” It is quite interesting that they dropped the usual phrase, “U.S.-led international order,” effectively acknowledging that the U.S. is no longer the “world’s only superpower,” but at best the leader of the “West.” The Telegraph continues: “After decades of humiliation, the world’s autocratic superpowers have risen from their knees and will now up-end the inequitable post-Cold War world order.” But they add, we are now entering “a long and frosty Cold War Two.” They also effectively acknowledge that the multiple efforts to turn Russia and China against each other have failed: “The hope that Mr. Xi might be persuaded to restrain his ally or remain aloof—or conversely that Mr. Putin could be enlisted to help contain China—has been dashed.” Unstated, but implied, is that all that is left for the dying British Empire is war, both military and economic warfare, in order to return Russia and China to their knees. Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed this utopian insanity in an article to be released soon, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock—We Need a New Security Architecture!” This is a reference to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has kept its annual Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight for the third year in a row. Zepp-LaRouche insists that the new security architecture, demanded by both Russia and China, must include all nations; must include the right to development for all nations; and must end forever the Empire’s Malthusian paradigm. On February 19 the Schiller Institute will sponsor a virtual conference on this existential strategic crisis. It is essential, Zepp-LaRouche declared, that people everywhere recognize the incredible potential of this moment. Arriving at the brink of extinction is waking people up, causing them to look to see who has been lying and who has been telling the truth—and most important, who knows the necessary solution. This is the LaRouche Moment in history.

February 4—On the occasion today of the opening of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in China, President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin attended the opening ceremony, held extensive talks, saw to the announcement of 15 economic and policy deals, and issued a “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.”The 16-page document opens with an assessment of the world situation—crises and potential—then proceeds through four areas of strategic concern, giving specifics. The statement is a leadership call to action for humanity, not a call to “take sides” in deadly geopolitical games. Most of all, it is grounded in commitment to economic advancement as the basis for security. The place in dire need for immediate, concerted world action, is Afghanistan. The death toll mounts by the hour among the children, from malnutrition, cold and illness, all of which can be prevented. On Feb. 2, the Afghan Ambassador to India Farid Mamundzay made a point of saying how many nations have “turned their back” on Afghanistan at this time of desperate need. But he otherwise singled out India with appreciation, for having sent six tons of medicine, and other supplies, and new funds, and for the Indian wheat donation that will start to be trucked across Pakistan to Afghanistan, beginning Feb. 10 to 12. A full 50,000 tons should be delivered within a month. There are other individual donations coming in, but the scale-up and mobilization are lacking. Moreover, there is the fundamental requirement for the U.S. and Europe to free up the Afghanistan government’s $9.5 bil in funds they have wrongfully frozen, so the country can function. Yesterday, in the U.S. House of Representatives, an amendment on that topic was raised, but didn’t pass. As the Schiller Institute tweet said at the time the amendment was taken up, “Don’t do to Afghanistan what the British Empire did to the Irish, letting them starve, or emigrate! BREAKING: Progressives [in Congress] to force vote on Biden’s policy of arbitrarily starving Afghanistan to death. BUT: The House voted it down! Shame on you!” In the China-Russia document’s opening section, it notes—without naming names—that there are nations and figures which take “unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they intervene in the internal affairs of other states, infringing on their rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences and confrontation, thus hampering the development and progress of mankind…” The first of the four areas discussed by the statement in detail, is that “democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of States…” It is wrong that “certain states” attempt to impose “their own ‘democratic standards’ on other countries,” and act to “establish blocs” that go against genuine democracy. Secondly, “development is the key driver in ensuring the prosperity of nations,” and thus, security. “It is vital to enhance partnership relations” to further development. China and Russia commit to further cooperation between the Belt and Road Initiative and the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union.) Russia will participate in the “Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative (proposed by China) under the UN auspices.” Thirdly, the longest section, which addresses “serious international security challenges,” contains the emphatic statement that, “The two sides (the term used in the statement for Russia and China) oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches…” Also, “The Chinese side is sympathetic to, and supports the proposals put forward by the Russian Federation to create long-term legally binding security guarantees in Europe.” The two sides also, “stand against the formation of closed bloc structures and opposing camps in the Asia-Pacific region…” And, “The Russian side reaffirms its support for the One-China principle, confirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, and opposes any forms of independence of Taiwan.” The fourth section identifies the United Nations as having a “central coordinating role in international affairs,” and calls for cooperation, not confrontation among world powers. The role of the G20, BRICS, APEC, ASEAN and WTO (to undergo “reform”) are discussed at length. The two sides “advocate expanded functionality of the SCO Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure.” Affirmation is stated for the recent “Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear Weapons States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races,” and steps for the drawdown of nuclear weapons and risks are discussed. These are only selected points of the joint statement, but the significance is clear. This is a welcome initiative that throws into stark relief the dangerous geopolitics in play over Ukraine from the U.S./UK/NATO ploys, and their depraved, deliberate inaction which is killing people in Afghanistan. The Schiller Institute’s role as an active platform for getting out the truth, and fostering the dialogue for the needed policies is critical. An international conference is planned for later this month. The sense of what can be done was included in a statement issued today by Senatorial candidate for New York, Diane Sare, on the eve of street rallies Feb. 5 in New York City and several dozen other towns around the country, to protest the Washington/UK/NATO war drive. In the statement entitled "Truth is the First Casualty of War" Sare wrote, "Lyndon LaRouche’s widow and founder of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has advanced an alternative to this path toward annihilation. The fulcrum is the fate of the people of Afghanistan, who are currently condemned to a tortuous death of starvation and disease because of sanctions and the decision by the United States and European banks to freeze their funds in the wake of the abrupt exit by the United States. Right now, over 7 million children are starving, with one million near death. “The United States, Russia and China, could combine to lead an effort involving the surrounding nations, to not only supply desperately needed humanitarian aid, but to build a fully operational modern healthcare system in that war-ravaged nation. This would require new infrastructure to deliver water and electricity along with modern transportation systems. Obviously, the Taliban would have to be in the center of the negotiations, but they have already opened talks with many of these nations, and have nothing to gain through the suffering of their people. “This initiative, called by Zepp-LaRouche ‘Operation Ibn Sina (Avicenna),’ after the brilliant Islamic scholar and physician born in this region over 1200 years ago, is the opportunity to build trust between the major powers, now perilously close to war, while preventing the imminent death by starvation of as many as 23 million people. By embracing ‘Operation Ibn Sina,’ the United States could avert nuclear war, and save the lives of millions in Afghanistan. Action is urgently needed now. As poets have understood better than politicians, universal law dictates that the fate of these starving children is likely to become your own, sooner than you might imagine."

Ever wonder why you keep thinking the the things you do, despite knowing those thoughts are wrong? Or perhaps, why do our political leaders seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over again? Tonight, we are going to discuss how the most evil man of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, convinced you "snow is black" but also, to celebrate his death by being a creative human being. Join Anastasia Battle of Leonore and Diane Sare of the LaRouche Movement National Executive Committee to discuss!

The ability of the Empire to keep the world on a course of war and depression depends on their ability to control the narrative, through intense psychological warfare. Their most important weapon in this is to promote the belief in the "Magic of Money", to seduce otherwise intelligent people to seek personal security, rather than to mobilize to defend the Common Good. Join us to mobilize to bring down the Empire of the Mind, and replace it with the principles of the American System of physical economics, as developed by Lyndon LaRouche in his Four Economic Laws.

Feb. 3—The days of UK-U.S.-NATO hegemony are over. Will that oligarchical reign end in the hell of thermonuclear obliteration by thousands of hydrogen bombs? Or will it be overcome by the people of the U.S. and other trans-Atlantic nations throwing off their self-imposed shackles, to demand a new mission of progress and growth for all people of the planet?With every passing day, the potential to organize people out of their day-to-day activity grows. This potential takes force from the gathering danger of war—thermonuclear war—that could be unleashed by design or by what would be called, in the realm of events, “an accident,” but which would simply be an included feature of the UK-NATO-U.S.-created geopolitical environment against which Russia is raising its just and insistent demands. (In a recent example, Boris Johnson promises Ukraine the noose-like “support” of his nation’s military and diplomatic “assistance.”) This opportunity for change is fed by the economic collapse brought on by the twin factors of a relentless financialization of the economy—whereby a shrinking productive layer is squeezed harder and harder still to extract growing wealth for the oligarchy and its pathetic lackeys—and the direct and intentional destruction of the physical potential of the economy, under the guise of achieving “green” goals. But the greatest impulse towards an enlivened sense of human potential—and the accompanying impulsion to cast off injustice—comes from visions of the future: development initiatives crafted by the LaRouche movement over decades, China’s meteoric growth and its Belt and Road Initiative, Russia’s rock-solid commitment to multipolarity and sovereignty, and the electrifying moments of inspiration sparked by scientific discovery and works of cultural beauty. In Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on Friday, the next level of their collaboration in the fields of economy, science, medicine, and security cooperation. China has conquered extreme poverty within its borders, and it has addressed a threat of terrorism in its western Xinjiang region in a way far superior to the treatment of Afghanistan at the hands of the West, whose spokespeople cry alligator tears for the suppression of Muslim Uyghurs while murdering the people of Afghanistan through starvation brought on by withholding that nation’s rightful financial resources — not to speak of the refusal to provide the additional development collaboration that should be provided by its repentant erstwhile occupiers. The interests of the people of the U.S., of Canada, of Ibero America, of Europe, lie not with the grotesque geopolitical system of the Anglo-American oligarchy, but in repudiating that outlook in exchange for the joy of collaboration, of international friendship, of joint work to expand humanity’s powers in outer space and our mastery of the subatomic domain. The war-time propaganda of the legacy media and the social media censors must be defeated. The LaRouche Organization and the Schiller Institute play the key international role in bringing together the shared interests of Russia, China, India, and the United States, and identifying the deadly axioms that cause people to choose their own doom. The future is human, not green!

On Dec. 17, 2021, Russia publicly presented two draft treaties for urgent adoption—one with the United States, one with NATO—which addressed Russia’s existential security concerns regarding the inexorable eastward expansion of NATO and the placement of threatening weapon systems on its borders. Russia demanded immediate written responses to their urgent proposals, in order to brake the rush to war emanating from the West.On Jan. 26, the U.S. and NATO did provide private written responses to Russia. But on Feb. 1 Russian President Vladimir Putin stated at a press conference: “Let me note that we are closely analyzing the written responses received from the U.S. and NATO on January 26. However, it is already clear … that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored.” Putin then turned the tables on the entire matter: He told the press that the U.S. and NATO weren’t really concerned with Ukraine’s security, but were using that issue as a kind of bear trap, as an excuse to launch all-out economic warfare against Russia in order to destroy its economy and prevent the country’s industrialization. “Its main task is to hamper Russia’s development…. Ukraine just serves as a means to achieve this goal … by drawing us into some kind of armed conflict.” The next day, Kremlin adviser Yuri Ushakov announced that Putin will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Feb. 4, making it clear that the two countries are deeply allied on both economic and security matters. The two Presidents will issue “a joint statement on international relations in the new era and global sustainable development … [that] will reflect the shared views of Russia and China on the most important global problems, including security issues,” Ushakov reported. Helga Zepp-LaRouche today welcomed the emphasis on the underlying economic crisis behind the war danger, and also on the needed total international economic transformation required to forge a durable peace. Recent threats from American and especially British officials of their intention to totally wipe out Russia’s ability to industrialize and develop, are finally waking people up to the reality Lyndon LaRouche warned about for decades. Zepp-LaRouche stated in her Jan. 28 weekly webcast: “The language of this is so brutal, it’s basically saying: Look, we managed with the shock therapy in 1990s, with Jeffrey Sachs in the Yeltsin period, to turn a former superpower into a raw materials producing, third world country, and now we will deny Russia the right to industrialize, by applying such measures. Now, that is a form of a declaration of war already! How can you deny a country to develop industrially?… If you read the language, how this is written, it portrays a mindset which is the mindset of a party declaring war already.” Zepp-LaRouche continued: “We’re sitting on a powder keg: The reason for all the war danger is the fact that the financial system is about to blow up. There are many reports that the so-called ‘emerging markets,’ which is a synonym for the developing countries, that they may have a huge debt crisis if there is the slightest ‘tapering’ of interest rates by the Federal Reserve. So the urgency to go with LaRouche’s Four Laws, and really go in a completely different direction, rebuilding the world economy by having actual development, starting with a world health system, is of the greatest urgency.” Zepp-LaRouche took note of the fact that, in many countries around the world, there are the beginnings of some significant opposition to the war drive, and even to the economic policies that are causing it: some people are becoming conflicted and uneasy, and rightly so. “This is an opportune moment to focus the growing war anxiety in many nations around the world, against the British,” Zepp-LaRouche stated, “who, after all, are the policy authors of the global drive towards superpower warfare. This could ruin their capability for good.” Zepp-LaRouche again drew attention to the unspeakable genocide underway in Afghanistan, where half the population is in danger of starving to death over the winter, in large measure due to the illegal freezing of the country’s assets abroad and the merciless economic sanctions being imposed on the country. Those most immediately threatened include 1 million children who are so malnourished that, were they in a developed country, they would belong in hospital ICU facilities. This is a crime against humanity underway before our very eyes, and it is being committed by the same British and American financial interests that are behind the war drive against Russia and China.

President Putin yesterday called out the War Hawks, who claim they are concerned with "protecting Ukraine's sovereignty." They are using this narrative, he said, as an excuse to draw Russia into an armed conflict, "to hamper Russia's development." A memo released by the White House last week actually stated this as the intention of the new sanctions regime they are drafting. Driving the war talk is not Russian military deployments, but the deepening panic that the Great Reset is in trouble, in large part because Russia and China will not surrender their sovereignty to a global dictatorship of central banks!

At the conclusion of a meeting yesterday with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, President Vladimir Putin reported: “Let me note that we are closely analyzing the written responses received from the U.S. and NATO on January 26. However, it is already clear, and I informed Mr. Prime Minister about it, that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored.” Those concerns, including stopping the eastern expansion of NATO, and reversing and preventing the deployment of strike weapons near Russian borders, are existential for the Russian state. The United States and NATO, it has now become clear, however, do not have the cooperation of the present Ukrainian government for the “defense of democracy” pretext they wished to present to their own largely clueless, mentally-captive populations as justification for their mad adventure.“The march of folly” we are seeing, despite certain efforts which are exceptions to that march, will get us to war, one way or another, if not today, tomorrow, or the day after. Though more and more organizations and individuals are speaking out, opposition to war is not enough. Something original, outside of the geopolitical domain, firmly rooted in the immediate moment but tied to the long-term best interests of humanity, that will restore the very idea of humanity, must be adopted, universally, and now. Thanks to the collaboration of South African, Chinese, and other epidemiologists, we now know that a new bat coronavirus, NeoCov, is capable, under certain circumstances, of transmitting a MERS-CoV-2 like disease to humans with, potentially, the sort of efficiency seen in the Delta and Omicron versions of coronavirus. This has not happened yet, but the proposal recently made by Xi Jinping at Davos for a worldwide collaboration to overcome the impending mass death of millions through as yet unknown, as well as known lethal pandemics, a danger possibly greater than even that last seen 660 years ago with the bubonic plague, is probably the only way that this could be avoided, if it can be avoided at all, at this time. This proposal needs an inspired response from the morally depraved trans-Atlantic sector. The World Health Platform proposal of Helga Zepp- LaRouche, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, and others, is, and has been available. But a morally degenerate elite that has lost the will or moral fitness to survive would never properly respond to Xi jinping in time, particularly if they have just proven themselves incapable of properly responding to Russia, and the immediate danger of accidentally launching thermonuclear war on the planet as a whole—which is what we have seen so far. Nonetheless, the scientific capability to do this exists, and because of the Operation Ibn Sina proposal of the Schiller institute, with respect to Afghanistan and the world generally, a clear plan to do this exists. So why is this really not happening? In a June 1981 EIR document entitled “The Strategic Significance of the Ecumenical Negotiations,” Lyndon LaRouche identified the reasons for the morally depraved character of the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic . “St. Augustine addressed the practical side of the doctrinal issue in his devastating proof that not only the Roman Empire but the City of Rome before the Empire represented a morally degenerate society. Pre-Imperial Rome, according to the Roman historian Livius, was controlled by the Cult of Apollo, the same cult notorious as Aristotle’s master at Delphi, and known in the Middle East by the names of Marduk and Lucifer. Imperial Rome was a result of control of the Roman cults from Ptolemaic Egypt. These were representatives of the forces which the Apostle St. John’s Apocalypse (Revelations) identifies as the ‘Whore of Babylon.’” While the United States is still the world’s oldest and most successful republic, since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, America has been culturally dominated in all aspects of policy-making by the Whore, not of Babylon, but of “Perfidious Albion.” In the last weeks and months, whether at the COP 26 Malthusian “Kill Humanity, Save the Planet” fest, or in the Black Sea military chicken game with the Russian fleet, with the AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-United States) adventure, or the present mad gambit against Russia in Ukraine, itself the latest incarnation of the never-ending Christopher Steele/ Sir Richard Dearlove/Robert Hannigan/GCHQ “Russiagate” assault on the American Presidency—the City Of London has been in the driver’s seat of. Britain is now deploying the “junior varsity” of the United States State Department, not only for the greater glory of BAE Systems and such, but for the self-destruction of the United States itself. That’s why the policy pronouncements are both insane, and continuous. Perhaps it was Ukrainian President Zelensky’s one undisputed skill, his penchant for comedy, that has led him to realize that the joke has gone too far. He does not intend to incinerate his nation. He and others have seen “up close” the mental difficulty the United States has in facing reality in the form of “the Other,” be that in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ukraine. A recent example: Take Tony Blinken’s ham-fisted attempt to stop Argentina’s President Fernandez from visiting, first, Putin, and then China’s Xi Jinping, where an MOU on the Belt and Road Initiative is to be signed. On top of that, Brazil’s President Bolsonaro will visit with Putin Feb. 14. Brazilian Vice-President, Gen. Hamilton Mourao (ret.) says that he doesn’t think that Russia plans to invade Ukraine, or that Bolsonaro should not visit Russia because of tensions with the United States. “Let’s remember that Brazil is part of a group with Russia, the BRICS, through which we have a partnership with Russia. Russia is an important country for doing business…and we can’t give that up.” This is the real world, the world of physical economy, the world of what was once termed the American System, but which has been rejected in the United States since the largely-successful 1980s campaign to destroy the reputation and influence of Lyndon LaRouche. In all those areas now in the existential crosshairs—from the spread of lethal pandemics, to the collapse of the international monetary system and what to do about it, to stopping the danger of thermonuclear war though an ecumenical dialogue of cultures, to joint missions on the industrialization of space, and the production of advanced high-density energy platforms based on a revolution in nuclear power plant production, including thorium reactors, HTGR reactors, fission/fusion hybrids,etc.—the writings and campaign of Lyndon LaRouche, featured through the pages of Executive Intelligence Review, has provided a record of what to do, and how to do it. POSTSCRIPT: VERNADSKY, PASTEUR, LAROUCHE In the course of his 1981 discussion of the topic, “The Tragedy of U.S. Education” with a group of academicians in Poland, Lyndon LaRouche may also have provided an idea useful for the next ecumenical and scientific step that could be taken to advance the recent proposal made by President Xi Jinping for an international collaboration of scientists and economists to join together to fight the coronavirus. “Now, we have a case of a very famous Ukrainian-Russian scientist, who probably is one of the most important figures for the 21st Century, Academician Vernadsky. Vernadsky was a student of Curie (the son of Curie, the son-in-law of Pasteur), as well as of [Dmitri] Mendeleyev. Vernadsky went beyond this, but [he was] in the same school of Mendeleyev, of Pasteur, and actually the French school of Arago before them. He went through this, to develop a conception of what he called ‘biogeochemistry.’” “By working in the school of Mendeleyev—he studied originally under Mendeleyev in Petrograd—[he] showed a way of thinking about the relationship between living processes and what we call non-living processes. He demonstrated, for example, that the atmosphere, the oceans, and most of the area on which we live on the surface of the Earth, is a biosphere. These things he called the”natural products of life." That is, one could measure a change in the characteristic of the planet, produced by the continuous action of life, or life transforming the planet. He went further, in his work during the 1930s, and defined what he called the “noösphere,” that is, the action of human cognition in transforming the biosphere, and transforming the relationship of man to the universe. “Vernadsky was also the founder of nuclear science in Russia and Ukraine….” Can the investigation of the work of Vernadsky, and Lyndon LaRouche’s observations on Vernadsky from the standpoint of physical economy, provide a way to initiate an international dialogue that takes up the method of inquiry required to make breakthroughs in the field of biology and medicine, the harnessing of thermonuclear power, and the redefinition of the presently bankrupt notions of ecology and environment, from the standpoint of investigating Vernadsky’s scientific conception of the noösphere? How might that dialogue be proposed by a “Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites” in terms of the collaborations among people in many different nations, and across disciplines, to address both the short-term emergency of saving humanity from an onslaught of infectious disease, and the long-term investigation of the very nature of life, and of creativity as a unique form of life distinct from all others?

Russian President Putin yesterday issued a public statement on the response of the U.S. and NATO to his demand for security guarantees. He said that "the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored." Meanwhile, the Brits threaten tougher sanctions, against anyone doing business with Russia! There is further confirmation of the European Union's war on people, in a report on how Green policy will reduce food production in many crops between 10% to 30%. This will drive up food prices further for more wealthy Europeans, but take food off the table for up to 400 million people in poorer countries, which will have to export their food to EU countries. Watch the Schiller Institute video, "Why Are Farmers NOT Allowed to Produce Food?"

Jan. 28 -- On January 20, Jeremy Grantholm, founder of the asset management firm GMO, warned that a "superbubble", comprised of stocks, housing and commodities, will soon pop, wiping out $35 trillion in assets. This would be the fourth superbubble collapse in the last one hundred years, he said, citing stock bubbles which imploded in 1929 and 2000, and the housing bubble in 2008. He stated that: "...we face the largest potential markdown of perceived wealth in U.S. history." However, no one is listening, he complained, because superbubbles "are often the most exhilarating financial experiences of a lifetime." Among those not listening, he identified the U.S. Federal Reserve and the other central banks, which he reports do not "seem to recognize the danger. As if to prove his point, {Bloomberg Business} ran as its headline for its lead story on January 27, "America's Economy Is Booming", citing statistics which show a "better-than-expected" GDP growth in the latest quarter. Further down in the article was a mention of the decision taken at the Fed Open Market Committee earlier that day, to move ahead, finally, with "tapering", scaling back the Quantitative Easing program and raising interest rates. It reports ominously, "Traders are bracing for higher borrowing costs, with money markets now expecting almost five interest-rate increases from the Federal Reserve this year and another four from the Bank of England." This unacknowledged contradiction, of the disconnect between the "good news" of a growing GDP -- which measures monetary expansion and not goods production of the real economy -- and the fears of the effects of an interest rate spike, demonstrates precisely why the Fed and others cannot "recognize the danger." Backing Grantholm's view are a spate of articles and reports on the unsustainability of various forms of debt, especially of the danger of default among poor, heavily-indebted countries. David Malpass, President of the World Bank, warned that the "risk of disorderly defaults is growing....Countries are facing a resumption of debt payments at precisely the time when they don't have the resources to be making them." Larry Elliott, financial correspondent for the {Guardian}, elaborated on this in his January 23 column, writing that debt payments by developing sector countries have more than doubled since 2010, and will increase more if the Fed raises interest rates. In 2010, 6.8% of government revenues went to debt repayment; in 2021, this rose to 14.3%. There are fifty-four countries in a "debt crisis", and nearly 50% of that debt is owed to private lenders, that is, banks and investment funds -- including those where many people have placed their retirement and pension funds -- and another 27% to institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Further, reports proliferate of the accelerating rates of delinquency in personal debt, such as home mortgage payments and credit cards, while the website www.wallstreetonparade.com has been documenting that the Federal Reserve has been pumping trillions of dollars into the major private banks -- such as JP MorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Citibank -- since the 4th Quarter of 2019, through the Repo lending window, to prevent a collapse of corporate debt, or a chain-reaction default on derivatives. What Is "Irrational Exuberance"? At a time when stock valuations were soaring in the mid-1990s, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan delivered a speech to the free market fanatics of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on "The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society". In his speech, on December 5, 1996, he spoke of the overall favorable climate for continued appreciation of stock values, referring to a combination of low interest rates and low inflation. He then asked, "But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?" In attempts to untangle typical Greenspan Fedspeak, this was interpreted as a dismissal of such a concern, designed to continue to fuel speculation, while offering a cover in case the stock bubble did pop, as it had in October 1987 in the same week he became Fed chairman. The speech to the AEI came at a moment of euphoric belief in "American Exceptionalism" and the U.S. as the unipolar Superpower, bolstered by the "victory" in the Cold War, which U.S. leaders hailed as a result of the unparalleled strength of the U.S. military, and the limitless economic potential fueled by the wonders of a "free market" economy, which the U.S. was celebrating as the successful transition from a "heavy" industrial economy to a "new (weightless) economy". The "weightlessness" refers to an explosion of funds flowing into "new financial instruments", the vast majority of which had little or no tangible assets to back up their trading value. Greenspan's attempt to dismiss the dangers inherent in this shift should have been definitively shattered by events of the next years. In 1997, the speculative bubble in Asian stocks and real estate popped, as currency exchange speculators, led by George Soros, rushed in to rake in profits. In 1998, the collapse of the Russian GKO bonds led to a devalued ruble, default on domestic debt, a moratorium on foreign debt payments, and a near-collapse of leading U.S. banks, requiring a bailout fund organized by the Fed of more than $16 billion. This was largely due to the effort, run by western financiers, to impose on Russia an economic transformation through "shock therapy", which was a thinly-disguised looting operation, dismantling Russia's physical economy and making it dependent on raw material exports. The economic and demographic collapse which followed brought Vladimir Putin in as acting President in January 2000; he has devoted the last two decades to reversing that collapse, with an emphasis on rebuilding Russia's scientific tradition. Most devastating to Greenspan's attempt to dismiss the danger of this transition in the U.S. was the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which occurred beginning in the fourth quarter of 2000. He addressed this by creating a new bubble, with an emphasis on trading mortgage-backed securities and derivative transactions, which then collapsed spectacularly in September 2008. Greenspan, who left the Fed in 2006, admitted in October 2008 -- after the collapse of the housing bubble -- that he had "found a flaw" in his model, but offered an excuse. As a bubble develops, he rationalized, "almost everybody is bullish, expects the market to go up, and is fully committed....This is the reason," he explained, "why everybody missed September the 15th, 2008" referring to the day of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Not Everybody "Missed" It Among those who did not "miss it" was former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who told the {Welt am Sontag} on August 1, 1999, that "many people are enthusiastic about the United States [economy]. But these people do not realize that the stock market boom is totally over-valued, and that there are psychopaths who are driving the stocks upwards." The most clear and consistent critic of the advent of the modern bubble economy was American economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, who called attention to this in the late 1960s, then famously in his attack on the August 15, 1971 decision by President Nixon to take down the post-war Bretton Woods system. LaRouche, who was responsible for advances in understanding the method behind the success of the American System economic model, applied the scientific/philosophical approach of the German genius Gottfried Leibniz, to develop his conception of "physical economy". For example, as the Dow Jones stock average and profits from mutual funds were soaring in 1999, driven by wild investments in the tech bubble of the dot-coms, LaRouche wrote on August 14, 1999, that this "is not to be seen as a sign of prosperity, but directly the opposite. This so-called 'boom' -- in financial asset price hyperinflation -- is actually the highly-elevated fever that signals, and will bring about the financial system's approaching collapse." Shortly after he wrote this, the dot-com bubble began a rapid and deep unwinding. LaRouche's prescience was again seen in a July 25, 2007 webcast, when he stated that the present financial system, driven by the mortgage-backed securities bubble, "can not continue to exist under any circumstances, under any Presidency, under any leadership, or any leadership of nations. Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general, immediate chain-reaction type of collapse. At what speed we don’t know, but it will go on, and it will be unstoppable! And the longer it goes on before coming to an end, the worse things will get." Following the 2008 meltdown, he offered a specific approach to reversing the ongoing downward plunge resulting from the adoption of British neoliberal policies in the name of "share-holder values", which repeatedly create bubbles which benefit the super-wealthy, while devastating the real economy. He presented his idea for a global bankruptcy reorganization in an address to the Rhodes Forum on October 9, 2009. "I have picked out four nations [the U.S., Russia, China, India], as absolutely crucial, that they must cooperate, because with their cooperation, and with that of others who join them, it will be possible to take reorganization of the world economy, by eliminating financial derivatives—just cancel them; they're worthless paper, cancel them. Go back to the honest debt of nations, go to a commercial banking standard, and create new credit to replace the worthless old debt. By creating new credit, and launching physical production programs, in infrastructure and other terms, we could, by agreement among nation-states, prevent a general collapse, and actually launch a program of orderly recovery. And these problems that we now face could be solved." He continued: "The problem is, that the world is dominated by financier interests, which are essentially parasitical in character. Our industries, our agriculture, our infrastructure is decaying, worldwide—especially in the Americas, especially in North America, and especially in Western Europe. Western and Central Europe is a disaster area. They no longer have national security, economic security: They're dominated by the British, entirely, under the British system, which was established in the context of the breakdown of the Soviet Union and East German economy."At that point, the British succeeded, with the support of [French President François] Mitterrand, and with the support of George H.W. Bush, the President at that time, in imposing upon Germany, and other nations of Western and Central Europe, conditions which are destructive. And the Western European economy is generally bankrupt, today, hopelessly so. It could be reorganized, through bankruptcy reorganization, but presently the whole system of Western and Central Europe is hopelessly bankrupt, as other parts of the world are." The present crisis can only be solved by adopting LaRouche's unique approach, based on restoring the principles of "physical economy", and rejecting all forms of British, neoliberal monetary schemes. It is not just "Superbubbles" which are collapsing, but the entire system, which is built on the ideological delusions of those billionaire predators running it, and profiting from it.

After a tremendous increase in fertilizer prices since 2019, and particularly during the course of 2021, the world stands on the brink of a substantial drop in global food production in 2022, at a time when mass starvation has already hit Afghanistan, Yemen, and six nations in Africa. If dramatic actions are not taken to reverse this process right away, more than 100 million more human beings can be added this year to the ranks of those in danger of starvation, which already number more than 200 million in the latest judgment of the World Food Program and its head David Beasley.The causes of this terrible toll of hunger and starvation are mostly a failed economic model which must be replaced; but in Afghanistan, they are viciously geopolitical and we must undo this punishment now. Regarding the economic failure: The World Bank Fertilizers Price Index for the world, which in April of 2020 was at 66.24 and in January 2021 had risen slowly but steadily to 82.96, by December 2021 had exploded to 208.01, more than tripling in 20 months. The rise of 60% in just the last two months of 2021 has particularly devastated farmers around the world. Their situation is even worse in the Northern hemisphere where fertilizer (and pesticides) for the spring planting look entirely inaccessible. The Wall Street Journal’s Jan. 21 article, “‘Farms Are Failing’ as Fertilizer Prices Drive Up Cost of Food,” reported that despite global food prices having risen to the highest level in a decade, rapid food inflation is almost certain to continue in 2022 due to fertilizer prices and accessibility. This, the paper understates, “would exacerbate hunger—already acute in some parts of the world.” World wheat output is set to drop by 10 million tons in 2022, according to the French agriculture analysis firm Agritel. The effect on maize production will be worse. Corn/maize production costs are rising 15-20% in the major producers America and Ukraine. Lower yields of many foods and agricultural products are projected around the world in 2022. Amid widespread famines already in 2020-21, and loss of informal agricultural work in the developing countries, food may enter global shortage in 2022. And according to the International Fertilizer Development Center, exceedingly high fertilizer prices could result in a reduction of agricultural output in Africa alone, which will be “equivalent to the food needs of 100 million people.” Although this monumental fertilizer price increase coincides with sharp rise prices of natural gas and is exacerbated by them, it is far larger, and far more widely and evenly spread around the world, than the natural gas spikes. As corn/maize growers in the United States insist, the gas price spike is not the primary cause of the fertilizer shock and loss of food production. In fact, as fertilizer use and price both rose in 2019, the International Fertilizer Association forecast that global production and use would drop after 2019, as they did—by roughly 10% in 2020-21. The huge fertilizer price rise after 2019 went along with sharp price rises across the whole range of important global commodities for industry and agriculture; its cause was wild money-printing by the major trans-Atlantic central banks starting late 2019; and global monopoly of production by a few big firms. Four monopolies control 75% of nitrogen-based fertilizer distribution: They are Nutrien Ltd., (Canada-based), Yara (Norway-based), CF Industries (U.S.-based), and Mosaic (part of Cargill, U.S.-based). Afghanistan is a terrible special case, where when NATO countries withdrew their forces after 20 years of destructive war, they retaliated with a punitive cutoff of international aid and development investment, and the United States Treasury seized Afghanistan’s own financial reserves. A German official just back from Kabul reported in Tagesspiegel Jan. 30 that 7 million children are starving now in Afghanistan; 1 million, he said, would be in hospital ICUs if they were in Europe. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said of the plight of Afghanistan’s population, and the world threat to food-growing this year, “This is the greatest threat to civilization, not nuclear weapons.” She demands, now with many others, that the frozen Afghan funds be released to restore the lost liquidity in the entire economy; and has launched Operation Ibn Sina, to make the nation an exemplar for building a modern healthcare and public health system in every country in the world. To do this the United States must cooperate with Russia, China, and India in particular. And it must break up both its biggest banks with Glass-Steagall, and with anti-trust acts break up the food monopolies.

As war mongering loonies from U.S. and U.K. intelligence and diplomatic circles keep foaming at the mouth about Russia's "invasion plans", saner voices are being heard. Even Ukraine's President Zelensky doubts U.S. intelligence reports of an imminent invasion, which has made him a target for the War Hawks who ran the 2014 Maidan regime change coup, as inadvertently revealed in an article in the {Washington Post}. With nuclear war as a real possibility if the war hawks are not stopped, it is time to place them in an asylum, and let diplomacy take over.

While the Biden cabinet continues to rant against an imagined Russian intention to invade Ukraine, and while Russia, China and Iran continue to be painted by European and American political and media pundits as evil villains out to destroy the freedom and prosperity of the Western world, there is a mounting backlash emerging against the madness, from leading figures and average citizens as well.Start with the lead story in every media outlet, every day and every hour, for the past two months: “Russia has amassed over 100,000 troops, tanks and related military hardware on the Ukraine border in preparation for an invasion, stealing freedom and democracy from the heroic Ukrainian people.” But let’s hear what the Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov has to say about this supposedly existential danger: “The situation on the Ukrainian-Russia border at this time is no different from what it was in the spring of last year. Now there are no significant actions or phenomena.” Even Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the U.S. to stop shouting that war is imminent, that it is a “mistake.” But don’t make the mistake of concluding that this means there is no chance for a war between two nuclear powers, threatening civilization itself. As EIR Economics Editor Paul Gallagher proves in the current issue of EIR, the war is being driven by the onrushing collapse of the Western financial system (see: “The U.S.-NATO Hidden War Threat: The Green New Deal”), not by the imagined “aggression” by Russia, China or Iran. Former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, in a very polemical manner, ridiculed the war hysteria which is based on thin air: The war threat in Ukraine, she said, “is a picture that emerges but does not quite correspond to reality—it is a reality that the media have manufactured…. The British in particular are jumping into the breach,” while “more and more weapons and even troops from NATO countries” are being shipped into Ukraine, despite the mass destruction that would hit all of Europe if war were to break out. Now look at Iran, where the Biden Administration has refused to reverse the dangerous and imbecilic scrapping of the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) nuclear agreement with Iran, which was abdicated by the Trump Administration in 2018. Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces from 2015 to 2019, told Al-Monitor that then-Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu had conspired with his Mossad chief to pressure the Trump Administration to scrap the Iran deal, without even consulting the Israeli military as to the consequences. Eizenkot not only asserted that the result was Iran’s expanded enrichment of uranium, bringing them closer to a nuclear weapon capacity, but that Iran had done so “with legitimacy,” since the JCPOA allowed them to do so when the U.S broke its agreement. The madness of the British and American threats and war preparations, said Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche today, are “no different in mentality than the troglodytes, killing their neighbors with stones—except now they have nuclear weapons.” The Anglo-American war party does not intend to “compete” in the new multipolar world, in which China and Russia are now “near peer” powers to the declining trans-Atlantic nations. Rather, they imagine that they can stop the rise of China and Russia through sabotage, financial warfare, and the hideous “sanctions” policies. A “senior administration official” who briefed the press anonymously on Jan. 25 regarding the intended sanctions to be imposed on Russia, did not hide this illegal and immoral fact: the intention, he said, is to “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard.” This is clearly also the policy toward China, where the Biden Administration has refused to drop the destructive sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration against Huawei and many other Chinese companies (in fact, the Biden team has increased such sanctions), using political means to sabotage the economic development of China. As Zepp-LaRouche noted, this is the exact opposite of the Peace of Westphalia, the foundation of the modern nation-state, in which sovereign nations respect the sovereignty of others. But the backlash is growing. Americans, who have been drawn into manufactured debates over such things as vaccines, climate, and party politics, while the economy is exploding and the world is “sleepwalking into thermonuclear World War III,” increasingly recognize that the world is descending into chaos, and they are looking for answers. Those answers were always there, in the form of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws, but were hidden from the population by the illegal prosecution of LaRouche and the blackout of his ideas, by the same corrupt institutions and individuals who brought us to this sorry state of affairs. This backlash demonstrates that this is a moment of great potential, of optimism rather than fear and anxiety, as the sleepwalkers are awakening to the danger, and need only be given the proper tools to bring the world together, to build the new paradigm for mankind.

Harley Schlanger gave a presentation on Saturday, January 29, at the LaRouche Organization Manhattan Project. Here is the transcript from the presentation. THE BRITISH HAND BEHIND THE U.S./NATO WAR DRIVE HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, everyone. I want to just give a little bit more background on the reasonable nature of the Russian demand for a new security guarantee, and then look at that from the standpoint of the threats and the bullying that Helga was talking about, and then go back to the deeper question of what’s really going on here, who really is behind the war drive. Because it’s really very difficult to believe that the Russians have any intention to invade Ukraine, for reasons that were just explained by Helga. So, what’s going on here? Putin’s proposal was a highly reasonable one. After 30 years of broken promises, after 30 years of Western moves toward the Russian border, wars launched, regime-change operations carried out, psychological warfare inside Russia, blaming Russia for use of chemical weapons, and on and on. After 30 years of that, Putin basically said, look we want legally binding written guarantees on three major points, which you just heard from Helga. No further eastward motion of NATO. This was promised in 1990 and again in 1994, and it’s been violated ever since. No membership in NATO for Ukraine. There are a lot of reasons for this, but basically Ukraine is a divided country, there’s no unity inside the country. It’s not a secure country; there’s a corrupt oligarchy. Its membership in NATO would require overriding most of the requirements that exist for NATO membership. So, why the push to bring Ukraine into NATO? That gets to the third point. The danger of the deployment of offensive weapons in Ukraine on the Russian border, as Putin has said, within 5-7 minutes of Moscow launch time. So, the Russian proposal is, let’s go back to the end of the Cold War. Let’s go back to 1997 in particular, and write an agreement which will give security guarantees to Russia, which include a guarantee that Russia will not be the target of a surprise attack from the West. In response to this, we’re seeing, as Helga pointed out, Blinken going into the meeting with Lavrov a week ago, saying we’re not going to give in to your requests. We’re not taking NATO membership for Ukraine off the table. You can’t tell us what to do. You don’t have a right to spheres of influence; no nation has a right to spheres of influence. Well, what kind of sophistry is that? The United States sphere of influence is the whole world. We have troops and bases in close to 100 countries around the world, many of which are far removed from the geographic location of the United States. This idea of sphere of influence—what about the Monroe Doctrine? This is where you see the sophistry, but it goes further, because they’re making very serious threats. In particular, there was a January 25th meeting at the White House, and a memo from this meeting was produced. What they said is, they defined what they mean by severe economic measures. They said they will hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize the economy. So, the sanctions that would be imposed—and there are some people who say these sanctions should be imposed preemptively, before Russia invades Ukraine. Well, the idea that you’re going to stop the industrialization or the modernization of the Russian economy? That’s economic warfare. That’s what’s being talked about in the White House. To deny Russia access to modern technologies. Well, the Russians are coming up with some of their own, like the hypersonic missiles, they’re working with the Chinese. But they say to prevent Putin’s intention to diversify from exporting oil and gas. This goes back to the argument that Russia is basically a gas station; that it makes all its money with the profile of a Third World country from raw materials. And let’s keep it that way so they can’t develop modern technology. That’s a wartime, aggressive prewar operation coming from the White House. Is that really what Biden intends? We don’t know. We hear this from Blinken, we hear this from spokesmen from the administration. Biden himself said the United States will not get involved in a war in Ukraine, but that our allies are totally united behind the U.S. desire to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty and democracy. Which as I pointed out before, is a joke, given that the sovereignty of Ukraine was violated by the United States and its allies, including people like George Soros and non-governmental organizations in the February 2014 coup. But the other question that’s coming up now: Is NATO really unified? Well, there’s a discussion between Macron and Putin where the main discussion topic was reviving the Normandy Four proposals for the Minsk Accord, which essentially is being violated by Ukraine. Ukraine signed an agreement in which they said they would negotiate with leaders of the breakaway republics, so-called. The Donbas region. But they refused to do it; they say they want to negotiate with Russia. But Russia says, this is part of your country. Instead of deploying half the Ukrainian army on the river facing the Donbas, why don’t you meet and discuss this with the leaders of the people who are demanding more autonomy? So, Macron said that he agrees with Putin that this process should be strengthened. What that means is that Germany and France, who are the other two signers besides Russia and Ukraine, must put pressure on Ukraine. Then you had a video conference between Putin and the Italian-Russian Chamber of Commerce, or the Russian-Italian Chamber of Commerce. A dialogue in which Putin said again, Russia has no intention to invade Ukraine. But mostly, they talked about trade issues. This did not sit well with the European Union, which initially tried to dissuade the Italians from having this, and then responded that this was an inopportune thing to do, given the Russian threat to invade Ukraine. There’s another group, the German Committee on East European Economic Relations, which wants to have a similar video conference with Putin. It’s apparently coming under pressure also. In their request, they cited former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who once said, “The highest good is the maintenance of peace.” This is what is the intent behind these kinds of discussions. We’re seeing the emergence in Germany of something very interesting. The old tendency towards Ostpolitik—Eastern politics—which goes back to the Willy Brandt administration from 1969 to 1974. Where the discussion was of a change in relations through rapprochement, détente, negotiations. This, of course, was something that was very antithetical at the time to the British-U.S. control over NATO, although Nixon himself then launch certain discussions with Russia. These are a little more murky, but in any case, this tendency is now re-emerging in Germany in spite of the vitriolic tendency of the war party in the Greens who are in the Cabinet. I’ll just review very quickly this Zelenskyy-Biden call, because it gets to the question that I want to go into in more depth, which is: Who is trying to sabotage a peaceful resolution? A reporter from CNN named Matthew Chance, who by the way just happens to be a British subject. We haven’t investigated this enough yet, but that in itself is telling. He apparently either made up a source, or found a source who told him something that was not true. That Biden said to Zelenskyy during the meeting that the Russians will come in and sack Kiev; there will be harmful impact, and you better be prepared for that. It was also said from a CNN editor that Biden said that Russia will definitely invade when the ground freezes. A Zelenskyy spokesman denied that Biden said that. A National Security Council official named Emily Horn said that CNN is citing anonymous sources who are spreading falsehoods about the call. Why should we be surprised that something like this comes from a British subject through CNN, which is a totally disreputable psychological warfare operation rather than a news network. This comes at a moment when the U.S. is talking about withdrawing the family members of diplomatic personnel in Kiev, which a Ukrainian former Defense Minister mocked by saying, “They’re safer in Kiev than they would be in Los Angeles or any of the other cities in the United States under siege.” Zelenskyy himself said this kind of talk is causing panic. It creates the perception that there’s a war underway. He said, “That’s not the case.” Also, Zelenskyy in his response said this is harming Ukraine’s ability to get foreign aid, which they need. They need $4-5 billion in aid to stabilize the economy. Well, maybe instead of asking for billions of dollars of weapons, they should see if they can get new loans. But why are they in trouble? Why do they have such a large debt? When the coup took place in February 2014, one of the first things the new government of oligarchs did was to bring in the International Monetary Fund, which imposed a form of shock therapy on Ukraine. The idea of a transition to a free market economy, which drove the living standards down, shut down a lot of industry in Ukraine, and created a problem that the loans that they had taken previously could not be covered. They had to borrow more, and now they’re one of the 54 nations that is heavily indebted that the World Bank and others say could be headed toward a debt default which could trigger a global financial crisis. So, if you put this together, what you see is Ukraine, which was always a difficult country because of the ethnic divisions, because of the post-Soviet period, and so on, was worsened by the coup by bringing in the IMF, and by making the demand that it be brought into NATO to increase the tension that exists already between the Russian population in eastern Ukraine and the majority so-called Ukrainian population in Kiev, which includes in very important positions in its defense and security forces open neo-Nazis who are out to kill Russians. That’s the situation on the ground at present. Let me just do a little bit of brief background on why it’s important that this is a British-initiated story. Because it comes at the same time that the British intelligence agencies put out a report saying that they have evidence that the Russians are trying to pull a kind of reverse Maidan; a coup in Kiev to put in a pro-Russian president to replace Zelenskyy. This was heavily covered in Europe, heavily covered in the United States. When the Ukrainians said they don’t believe it, and the person British intelligence named as the target, or the one who would be brought in by the Russians, when he denounced it and denied it, those stories were never covered. But the fact that the Russians supposedly were organizing a coup was given heavy coverage. Now, what’s the British interest here? Many people say, well, you LaRouche people always talk about the Brits, but Britain is a collapsed country. The United Kingdom is no longer very significant. Well, it is still a nuclear power, but more importantly, the British Commonwealth is a political force in the world. The City of London is the dominant financial force in terms of setting the policies. People who are focussed on Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum in Davos, their policies for the Great Reset come from the City of London. Klaus Schwab is not an original thinker; he works closely with Mark Carney, the former director of the Bank of England who is the person overseeing for the United Nations the Green New Deal and the Great Reset. So, this is a British operation. But, what’s the British interest here? This goes back to the 19th century, what was known as the Great Game, which is the background to the Afghan war. But more importantly, the overall strategy of empire is called geopolitics. And I’m not going to go through the history of that, Mackinder; I’ve done that before, you can find that on YouTube. But the important conception behind British policy from the 1890s to the present, is the greatest threat to the ability of the British and now the United States to dictate the terms of the post-Cold War order, would be the same threat that they had in 1900: That of Eurasian integration. And by that, they mean Western Europe, France, Germany, Italy, the countries of Eastern Europe uniting economically with Russia, with China, with the Asian countries. Because that would undermine the power of the City of London. Why? Because of what you just heard from Lyndon LaRouche before. The City of London bases its supremacy on monetarism, on neo-liberalism, on the ability to speculate, and in opposition to investing funds into physical economy. That’s always been the fighting issue between the American colonies and the new American republic against the British Empire. The Brits are for free market policies, free trade policies. The United States was founded on policies of protectionism, investment in physical economy, and in favor of industry based on science and technology as opposed to looting and predatory policies based on speculation, which is the core of monetarism and has been from the time of the British East India Company in the 18th century. Let’s look at the recent history of this to get a sense of the British role in controlling U.S. policy. I’m going to look very quickly at two prominent British figures, who themselves were just spokesmen for the City of London and the oligarchy, but are known for their policies. Let’s look at that. First, you have Margaret Thatcher, who in 1983 in an ongoing fight that the City of London was having with people who were saying the City has too much power, she came down along with high court on the side of the City of London. The result was what was called the Big Bang, which was a deregulation policy which did away with much of the control that the government had over the banks and the financial institutions. This opened the door for a bigger speculation that goes back to the 1971 decision by Nixon to end the Bretton Woods system. The next step in this was 1983 in Britain. Ronald Reagan took leadership from Margaret Thatcher on this, and the Reagan economic policy, even though there was somewhat of an economic impact from the big spending on defense, nevertheless in October 1987 we had giant stock market crash, which had been forecast by LaRouche earlier that year. Why did that happen? Because of the shift to a speculative economy under Thatcher. Nigel Lawson, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Thatcher when the Big Bang took place, and after the 2008 crash, in a moment of candor, said that the crash of 2007-8 was an unintended consequence of the Big Bang. Thatcher’s policy, as I said, was adopted by Reagan, Bush. In 1999, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the United States is right there with the United Kingdom, that is Wall Street and Silicon Valley with the City of London, as a deregulated money center for monetarism and neo-liberalism. Also with Thatcher was the neo-con policy of war, the fight to protect the Empire. There’s a really interesting story: In 1991, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the question was, would the United States do anything or not? Margaret Thatcher was staying with the U.S. Ambassador to Britain in Aspen, Colorado for a vacation. She was visiting the U.S. Ambassador to Britain in Colorado, and George H.W. Bush, the President of the United States, flew to Aspen to meet with her to discuss what should be done about Saddam. She made this famous comment to him, “Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly.” She encouraged him to invade. Later, she said it more colloquially, she said she “stiffened his spine” at that meeting. Just of interest, the Ambassador to Britain that she went to visit was Raymond Seitz, who had spent three years before being the Ambassador to Britain as the Executive Assistant to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a British monetarist to his core. So, that’s the Thatcher policy—neo-liberalism, neo-con, U.S.-British Empire must set the rules of the rules-based order. The next step in that was Tony Blair. Blair was also a neo-liberal and a neo-con. His neo-liberalism was called the Third Way, democratic socialism, but also free-market policy. Blair always represented the City of London. He was just given the Noble Order of the Garter, the highest honor that you can get from Queen Elizabeth. Blair’s policies were deregulation and neo-liberal economics: Tear down the role of the government, make everything a stakeholder society, shareholder values. That’s what Klaus Schwab is talking about now. LaRouche was attacking this back in the 1980s, when it started with Thatcher, but under Blair, the impact was especially profound with the Clinton-Gore administration, where Bill Clinton signed on, and this goes back again to the ’80s when Gore set up the Democratic Leadership Council which said Democrats have to move to the center, shouldn’t be left wing, and so on. They fully embraced the deregulated economic system. In fact, Clinton, under the influence of Robert Rubin, signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, which took away any prohibition against speculation for the commercial banks. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which opened the door to the crash of 2007-2008, as Nigel Lawson said. William Black, who is a very prominent columnist, analyst, former bank regulator, said that the Third Way pretends to be a center-left policy, but is actually completely a creation of Wall Street. He called it a “false flag operation” of Wall Street. That’s what Clinton embraced; that’s what Obama was full-fledged. That’s why Obama bailed out the banks in 2008 instead of listening to LaRouche and putting them through bankruptcy reorganization. On the war question, Blair is the same as Thatcher. Blair is the outspoken proponent of getting rid of the idea of the principle of Westphalia, which is that you must recognize the security interests of other nations. You must act toward other nations as you wish they would act toward you: no interference in the internal affairs of other nations. That was signed in 1648 as the Peace of Westphalia. Blair in 1999 said, “no, no, no, no, no, we can’t have that anymore.” There’s too much evil that has to be taken on, that’s why we have to get rid of the Westphalian principle. What he put forward instead was the idea of Responsibility to Protect, which is essentially a justification for regime-change coups. This was brought into the United States by people like Samantha Power (who by the way is a Brit) and others who insisted that the Clinton administration get involved in the Balkan war, in which the U.S. and NATO bombed Yugoslavia. And especially regime change in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, and in Ukraine. In April 2002, there was a meeting at Blair’s country home, Chequers, which included Lord Boyce, the Chief of the Defense Staff; it included Richard Dearlove, the Chief of MI6; and Sir John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee. They met to discuss Iraq. This was in April 2002, just after the U.S. and NATO invaded Afghanistan. Then on April 6th and 7th, four days after this meeting, Blair flew to Crawford, Texas to the Bush ranch, and had two days of meetings with Bush, Jr. in which they discussed Iraq. Less than a year later, the U.S. invaded Iraq. But before the invasion, in September of 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove provided the original dodgy dossier =, which claimed Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction, getting yellow cake uranium from Niger in Africa, and that this was to show that Saddam Hussein had a capability, according to that report, to hit the United Kingdom with nuclear bombs, nuclear weapons within 45 minutes whenever they decided to do it. This was cited by the United States when they went to the United Nations to get support for the invasion of Iraq, in the February 2003 discredited presentation by Sir Colin Powell. There’s more you could go into on this British question. The Syrian chemical weapons charges which came from the White Helmets, which were essentially a British operation working for the overthrow of Assad. You had the Skripal affair, the claims from Porton Down, the British chemical weapons lab, that Putin was deploying agents to kill off Russian defectors with a highly poisonous chemical. Same thing against Navalny. And then the most recent example again being this British report, at the height of the tension over whether Russia is going to invade or not, claiming that Russia had a plan to overthrow the Zelenskyy government and put in a pro-Russian government. I want you to think about this question, because this British question is real. The British Empire’s power is the power of shifting the narrative, of creating new narratives, and of invading your mind to convince you that the greatest threat to peace and security in the world is the demon, Vladimir Putin, and the authoritarian dictator Xi Jinping in China. And not the fact that, under British direction, the United States has taken the lead in shifting the world to a neo-liberal economic system, which is responsible for poverty, for absolutely unsustainable debt, putting us on a pathway toward an economic crash, and at that same time, one war after another, and now targetting Russia and China. So, what’s the lesson from all this? Join with the Schiller Institute. Find out how the world really works. This was Lyndon LaRouche’s great contribution to humanity. Not just being able to find out who the bad guys are, but to provide an understanding of how the human mind is the battlefield, and that the British are highly sophisticated in their ability to shift the way you think; including the development from Silicon Valley of social media networks and so on, the spy operations and so on. The running of Russia-gate; on and on and on. This has to end. The United States has to stop being a dangerous ferocious beast on a British leash. That’s why the hope is that we can pull back from this situation with Ukraine. But more importantly, move toward a new security arrangement for the world, which does not start from the City of London and Washington and NATO. That’s what I wanted to present today.

What if the U.S. and the U.K. declared war, but nobody came? Day after day the U.S. and U.K. media post screaming headlines about the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today’s edition includes the Daily Mail reporting that the U.K. government will announce moves to “target Russia’s strategic and financial interests tomorrow,” while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss ranted to Sky News: “Currently, the economic sanctions are fairly narrowly drawn, so we could only target companies with a direct involvement in destabilizing Ukraine. What we are looking to do is widen that so any company of interest to the Kremlin and the regime in Russia would be able to be targeted, so there will be nowhere to hide for Putin’s oligarchs, for Russian companies involved in propping up the Russian state. That’s what we are looking at doing this week.”This follows the open admission by the White House in a published rant on Jan. 25 by a “senior administration official” that U.S sanctions are intended to “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy.” There it is—bring down the Russian state, and stop Russia’s industrialization. Hitler had a similar ambition, and it is hard not to recognize the comparison to today. That insanity resulted in the death of 73 million souls. There are major differences, of course—for one, the U.S., U.K., and Russia have nuclear weapons, and 73 million or more would likely be killed on the first day. Nor is the U.S. hiding its intention to use nuclear weapons. Recall that U.S. Strategic Command chief Adm. Charles Richard said in February 2021 that nuclear war is no longer considered “unlikely,” but is now “a very real possibility” due to the rise of China and Russia. On Jan. 25, 2022 U.S. Strategic Command announced the kickoff this week of “Global Lightning 22,” “an annual command post exercise designed to train Department of Defense forces and assess joint operational readiness across USSTRATCOM mission areas,” that this year is being conducted “in coordination with U.S. Indo Pacific Command.” Newsweek yesterday quoted Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, that the exercise “includes practicing operations during a trans-/post-attack nuclear environment, including reconstitution, redirection and targeting of STRATCOM forces.” In other words, it not only contemplates nuclear first use by one side or the other, but also continued nuclear warfighting after the initial exchange. Then there is the “cheering on” of today’s Nazis. A Fox News report (with help from AP) today runs the headline with kicker: Ukrainian Volunteer Forces Prepare To Fight Off Russian Invasion as U.S. Troops Deploy to Eastern Europe—More than 130,000 Ukrainian volunteers are on reserve to defend against a potential Russian invasion." Such heroic coverage leaves out the fact that the “volunteers” they interview are members of the neo-Nazi militia, condemned even by the Israeli government as fascists. So what about the Ukraine government itself, and the Ukraine military? Today’s “egg on your face” story comes from Reuters on Jan. 28, claiming that three “unnamed U.S. officials” had informed them that the Russian military buildup along the Ukraine border had “expanded” to include “blood products” and other medical supplies, which certainly shows (they say) that Putin is prepared for an “imminent” invasion, as CNN says White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki has insisted. Not so, said the Ukraine Defense Ministry in a Jan. 29 statement: “The Center for Operational Information commented on information spread in some media about the alleged accumulation of blood supplies by the Russian Federation in the troops near the Ukrainian borders. First of all, it should be noted that this information, with reference to anonymous officials, was not confirmed by any official source from the relevant agencies of the partner countries. Monitoring and analysis of the current situation around the Ukrainian borders does not record such activities. This is evidenced by the exchange of information between intelligence services and foreign partners. Such information ‘interventions’ are an element of information and psychological warfare, the purpose of which is to provoke fear and panic in our society. The Operational Information Center urges not to disseminate unverified information from anonymous sources and to use official data.” Is this the nation we are to “defend” by going to war with Russia, and possibly also China? We must assure the maximum possible viewership for the Jan. 22 Schiller Institute forum: “A Difference In Leadership: Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?” featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche and First Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy, along with host Dennis Speed, LaRouche Organization expert Harley Schlanger, EIR Economics Editor Paul Gallagher, and Schiller Institute Representative at the United Nations Richard A. Black.

Richard Black in discussion with Daniel Burke and Cade Levinson via Twitter Spaces. Subscribe to the Schiller Institute's Leonore magazine to read Richard's article.

Today’s “news” is that the three full months of escalating British and U.S. accusations that Russia is “imminently” about to invade Ukraine, along with a crescendo of threats to “crush” Russia when it does, are getting so wild that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to reject them publicly and tell American officials to “calm down” and give him some economic aid. But British media still escalate, now putting the most provocative possible words in President Joe Biden’s mouth. Their purpose is to provoke the war they accuse Russia of, then attempt to destroy Russia’s economy.But because Russia has moved more and more into an economic and strategic partnership with China, this is the most dangerous form of bluffing. The United States and European economies are being corroded by “Green New Deal” technological primitivism; their banking systems are facing a hyperinflationary explosion. The partnership of Russia and China is more than strong enough for a new Cold War; but the best would be to cooperate with the United States in international development, and in a new credit system that can replace a bankrupt “everything bubble” of debt. China’s 2021 GDP growth was reported 8.1% over the year. U.S. GDP growth in the fourth quarter was 6.9% relative to the third quarter, but for the full year 2021 it was just 5.7%. Moreover, more than 70% of the fourth-quarter U.S. growth was attributable to businesses building up their inventories; the remainder, to increased consumer spending. China’s national planning and reform body attributed its faster growth to greater and growing investment in research and technological innovation. The other key factor is technology in infrastructure; China is investing $300-$400 billion a year in new infrastructure, led by high-speed transportation and new power supplies in many countries. Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” visit to a Pennsylvania bridge that collapsed just before he arrived was poignant; but putting another bridge there is not going to raise America’s economic productivity. Because U.S. growth for the fourth quarter only was supposedly higher in that quarter than that of China, Biden on Jan. 27 lied to the American people, saying that afternoon, “For the first time in 20 years, American GDP grew faster than China.” But the opposite is true. And just under $16 trillion equivalent, China’s GDP, even in nominal dollar terms, is now more than two-thirds that of the United States at just over $22 trillion, and will overtake it in coming years. China’s industrial production grew by 9.6%, fixed asset investment by 4.9%, job creation was at 12.69 million, according to the National Bureau of Statistics release Jan. 17. China’s real disposable personal income, after inflation, rose by 8.1% in 2021. On the other hand, Americans’ average real weekly wages fell by −2.4% over the year. U.S. Industrial production was 3% lower than its peak level of mid-2018; manufacturing output was 5% lower. And regarding labor productivity, with labor forces growing fairly rapidly in both countries in 2021, a long-term trend nonetheless continued: China’s productivity growth was 1.6%; that of the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 0.6% for the first three quarters of 2021, the latest figures available. The Chinese banking system’s loans outstanding, offered both to the domestic economy and to many countries in the Belt and Road Initiative framework, rose by 11.7% in 2021; loans outstanding of the U.S. banking system grew by less than 0.5% over the year. Americans and people of the NATO countries should think: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s idea of saving Afghanistan from the Soviet Russia, produced al-Qaeda, and a country destroyed by 40 years of war; Tony Blair’s neo-cons’ idea—saving Iraq, Syria and Libya from Russia—produced ISIS. The crazy idea of saving Ukraine from Russia, would give us a country run by neo-Nazis; but before we even get there, it’s producing a new Cold War against the effective partnership of Russia and China, and may produce a world war. Rather than this insane pursuit of a global superpower military confrontation, Americans in particular should look at what Russia and China are actually doing. They are developing their economies, making loans for high-technology infrastructure projects in third countries, developing advanced nuclear power technologies, jointly working toward a base for scientific work on the Moon in the 2030s, and looking for the United States to join in the projects of the Belt and Road Initiative China started in 2013. And the trans-Atlantic nations’ economies need a New Bretton Woods credit and monetary system or their banking systems are going to explode again, soon. This is the way to do it.

The Russian Federation continues to insist that the United States and NATO commit to satisfying Russia’s need for assurances that its national security requirements will be respected. But the responses this week — delivered officially by the U.S. and NATO — fall far short of the mark. While offering room for negotiation on secondary matters, the U.S. and NATO have given no positive response on Russia’s core security demands.Russia, which is moving forward with military exercises in Belarus and the Arctic, and organizing training drills using its nuclear forces, has repeatedly made clear that failure to respond will force the use of “military or military-technical measures.” Will those measures include the forward deployment of hypersonic nuclear missiles? Placing short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad? The U.S. maintains some 200 nuclear gravity bombs in Europe, through joint nuclear missions. If Russia moves to bring similar pressure to bear on the United States, how small will become the window of decision for responding to a real (or perceived) nuclear attack? You and I can’t count on U.S. politicians, British imperialists, or NATO commanders to get this right — to avoid a situation which, whether through calculation or accident, could rapidly escalate to an unsurvivable nuclear exchange that would kill hundreds of millions of human beings within an hour and devastate civilization globally, perhaps permanently. Neither can the NATO/Anglo-American maniacs attempting to force Russia and China into submission count on the acquiescence of their supposed partners and instruments. Secretary Blinken claims that NATO is unified, that there “is no light between” the views of the U.S. and other NATO countries. But he is wrong. Those intent on crushing Russia fret that a single NATO country could destroy the consensus on which its decisions must be made. Will Croatia stand firm? Will Bulgaria? Will Hungary dutifully play its suicidal role? Will Germany, after its 1941-1945 attack on the Soviet Union, truly set up another war against Russia? Will diplomats, politicians, generals, and thinkers break ranks? This is the unanswered question of the moment. As Russian diplomats are kicked out of Washington, D.C., as American diplomats reportedly plan to leave Beijing, as the media drumbeat for war intensifies and as supporters of peace are cast as traitors — as weapons fly into Ukraine, as new sanctions are mulled — as calls for censorship grow — will you stand up for the dignity of the human species, and for your own life as well? Will you overthrow the hideous Malthusian dogma that says we are too numerous, and the false culture that says we are animals? Will we be here to marvel at the shocking observations the James Webb Space Telescope will soon be transmitting back to Earth? A crisis of this magnitude — an absolute branching point in history — demands great things of us. The LaRouche movement, headed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has warned of the magnitude of the crisis, to which increasing numbers are awakening, and has committed itself to catalyzing the needed new paradigm on this planet. In his poem The Artists, Friedrich Schiller — the namesake of the Schiller Institute — expressed the awesome responsibility that forces itself upon each of us today. “The dignity of man into your hands is given, “Protector be! “It sinks with you! With you it is arisen!” Can the future count on you?

Sergei Lavrov expressed the Russian disappointment with the written response from the U.S. to President Putin's demand for new treaties which guarantee Russia's security interests. While agreeing to further discussion of secondary issues, the Biden administration appears to have refused to meet Putin's demands. At the same time, the U.S. is escalating its plans for sanctions against Russia, and the media -- led by CNN -- is running false reports about Biden's discussion with Zelensky, to stoke tensions.Despite Blinken's claim of complete unity among NATO allies, fault lines continue to become visible. In Italy and Germany, businessmen and manufacturers want to speak with Putin, as they recognize that a war, or escalation of sanctions, would have disastrous consequences for western economies, which are already weak. The desperation in the west is also visible, in reports of a likely wave of debt defaults of highly-indebted poor nations, if interest rates are raised in the U.S. Helga took note of the positive potential which emerged from the meetings in Oslo with a Taliban delegation, and motion in support of her Operation Ibn Sina. She appealed to viewers to join with us to break out from under the war drive of the geopoliticians, and bring about her husband's perspective of a New Bretton Woods, which would uniquely address the common interests of all nations. Transcript War Danger Still Exists — A New Paradigm Is in the Common Interest of All Mankind Weekly Strategic Webcast with Helga Zepp-LaRouche Friday January 28, 2022 HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger. Welcome to our weekly dialogue with Schiller Institute founder and Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is Friday, January 29, 2022. While the world was kept waiting for a couple of days for the United States’ response to President Putin’s demand that there be new security guarantees extended to Russia, the response was delivered on Jan. 26. Sergey Lavrov said that while there’s ongoing discussion there was no response to the core issues. Helga, what’s your thinking on where this leaves us? HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think the war danger clearly still exists, because it’s very clear that there are elements who are not satisfied with the relationship between United States, and Russia, and China, for that matter, to go into a civilized direction. But because of the systemic collapse going on in the Western financial system, the desperation is big. And there are, despite what is officially being said, where always psywar ops, covert operations being threatened, it’s a very complex picture. To start off with what the Russian response has been, Lavrov, and the Russians in general, have said that they are very disappointed that the United States and NATO did not respond to the core issue of their demand that NATO should not further expand to the East, that no offensive weapons system should be placed along the Russian borders, and that Ukraine should definitely not be ever in NATO. These were the absolutely important issues, and they were rejected by both the United States and by NATO. And what was offered instead was all kinds of, what from the Russian standpoint are also useful discussions, but not the essential ones. So it’s like, make offers for arms control, for continuation of the dialogue—all of that is useful, naturally, but I think it is to be noted that the basic position of the West to not respond to the very legitimate security interests of Russia. And it’s very difficult to say where this will all end up, but the bullying coming from people like Blinken, in particular, is so blatant, and the obvious neglect of the United States, not only for the security interests of Russia, but also the security interests of European countries like Germany, or economic interests, is also so absolutely blatant, that this whole thing may end up in a complete backlash, in a blowback. Because if the United States insists on being the hegemon, and keep a unipolar world, and in then in the process of trying to ram that through, tramples over the interests of its so-called Allies, and creates an open hostility with the so-called adversary—, namely Russia and China—this may end up in not what the architects of the confrontation have intended, but it may reveal the absolutely uncivilized behavior of those who are pushing this confrontation. Now, Lavrov said that compared to NATO, the response of the United States was almost diplomatic decency, while the response from NATO was so ideologically blatant that it leaves almost no room for any civilized discussion. So we have to see. Now there are different voices. There is a lot of psywar and it’s sometimes very difficult to know what is true and what is not. The latest flareup is this CNN report by Matthew Chance who claims that in yesterday’s phone discussion between President Biden and President Zelenskyy, Biden supposedly would have said that once the ground is frozen, the Russia attack will come, and he would have told Zelenskyy that Kiev will be sacked, that he should prepare for a big impact—all language that is draconian and barbarian. The White House denied that this was said in this form. In any case, I think it’s very unlikely—there is not even an interest by Russia to occupy Ukraine! They have an interest to protect the Russians in east Ukraine, but for sure, not to overrun Ukraine, where the entire west is filled with Nazis and neo-Nazis and would be a complete mess to even think of occupying a terrible place like that. So, I think there is an incredible psywar going on. Zelenskyy himself said he does not think anything has changed, only the hype has increased. Papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung say that they think there is a very low probability for a Russian attack. One has to differentiate between the confetti which is being thrown around, and the core question. And the core question is that a solution must come out of all of this which takes into account the basic security interest of Russia, and that is the bottom line. SCHLANGER: I think, Helga, for the sake of our American listeners, who don’t get any of this reporting, it’s worth noting that what CNN said was not only denied by the Zelenskyy spokesman who said that no one in the President’s office said such a thing in the discussion with Biden, and described it as completely false, but National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne said that CNN’s sources are leaking falsehoods. So that’s what you’re getting in the United States, with the psywar. And speaking of psychological warfare, there is the British intelligence report that came out this week which said that they have evidence that the Russians are about to try to install someone to run the President’s office in Ukraine, presumably as a coup, who’s favorable to Russia. The Russians denied this, the person whom they named said this is completely preposterous; but we’re seeing this kind of psychological warfare. Now, countering the psychological warfare, there’s been a continuing diplomatic offensive from Russia. Putin had an interesting discussion with the Russian-Italian Chamber of Commerce, and it appears that the German business and manufacturing grouping wants to have a similar discussion. And the EU has denounced this. This is part of what appears to be a growing split occurring within Europe, isn’t it? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s deepening, and if Blinken goes around and talks about the “unity of the allies” and NATO and so forth, I think this is absolutely not true. As you say, the EU tried to pressure Italian businessmen and corporations not to go into this dialogue with Putin, and only two or three did back down, but the vast majority did have this dialogue. And in Germany, the German Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations (Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft), which is basically the core of German industry, they also came out and want to have a videoconference with Putin. And they also reminded people of the statements by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, that the most important good is the maintenance of peace. And they also made emphatically the point that the security interests of Russia must be respected. That is important. Then you have in the Social Democracy (SPD) an appeal circulated that Germany has to remember and return to the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr, the détente. And there are similar other appeals circulating. So I think there is a reawakening of the peace movement in several countries, and this is a reflection of the fact that people are becoming very, very upset about the possibility of war. There is one demand coming from Vladimir Yermakov, who is the Director of Arms Control and Nonproliferation in the Russian Foreign Ministry, and he demands that the modernized nuclear weapons which are in Europe, the B61 and other types, that they all be withdrawn back to the territory of the United States, and that the five non-nuclear members of NATO who are training for the case of a nuclear attack on Russia, that that must be absolutely halted. I think this will be a demand that will be picked up by peace-oriented people in Europe, because the fact that these weapons do exist on European soil makes the countries that have these weapons prime targets if it comes to any kind of a confrontation, because it is generally very clear that conventionally there is no way how the United States and NATO could win a war against Russia. The United States may have all kinds of modern equipment, and right now both the British and the United States are having continuous transport of so-called “lethal weapons” into Ukraine; and also from the Baltic states, whom the U.S. has given permission that they can transfer weapons which they got from the U.S. to Ukraine. But if you look at the map, Russia has the advantage of territorial depth—Russia is a country with 11 time zones—and any time somebody tried to conquer Russia, starting with Napoleon, and continued with Hitler, they got such bloody noses: The great Napoleonic army was decimated to a few hundred, poor lost souls who returned from that campaign. Hitler could not defeat Russia, at a tremendous loss for the Russian people, but there was no way how Hitler could have won that war; and that would be the fate of anybody who was trying to have a war that would involve Russia. So the danger, naturally, is that it would come to the question of the use of nuclear weapons. Now, we are still sitting on a powder keg, because Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has warned that there is evidence of American or British mercenaries operating already inside the territory of Ukraine. There are reports about private military companies, in part these are the “gray zone” people, former soldiers who now have private firms training people who have a crazy affection for military questions. So there is a big danger, because a provocation could be launched at any moment, and false-flag operations, as well, so this is something to be watched very carefully. Then there is the discussion that supposedly Xi Jinping would have asked Putin to wait until after the Winter Olympics are over before attacking Ukraine—which is ludicrous, but increases the danger, and I can only say that people must really step back from this whole question and get back to their senses. One has the feeling that the people who are pushing this confrontation have gone completely mad: They’re playing with the existence of civilization. And I can only tell people, this is something where we have to walk back from the brink of the potential annihilation of the human species. SCHLANGER: There is one other aspect I want to bring up, which you mentioned before, which is the bullying by Blinken. We’re seeing more signs of insanity from Congress in terms of sanctions that they’re talking about, new economic sanctions against Russia. “Preemptive sanctions,” which is being discussed by a number of different people—including some in Ukraine—saying the best thing to make sure that Russia doesn’t invade is to have “preemptive sanctions.” And then you have the threats against the diplomats, the fact that more diplomatic offices are being shut down—this is all part of what seems like a pre-war mobilization. ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I must say that this is not civilized behavior any more. First of all, the U.S. recalling its non-essential diplomats from Ukraine is an unfriendly act. There is no reason to do that. Then there is this talk about the Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov, that may be forced to leave in April. Now, that would be a very, very dramatic escalation, to basically force the ouster of the most important diplomat between the United States and Russia. And then, there was a readout from the White House, from unnamed “senior administration officials” discussing what the nature of potential economic sanctions against Russia would be, in the case of a Russian attack. Now, obviously, the Russians have stated again and again, they do not intend to attack, and Lavrov has said it many times, that if it is up to Russia, there will be no war. And other officials have said the only people who are pushing a war between Russia and Ukraine is the West. Russia has no interest to attack. They just put up these troops along the border to make the point that they have a security interest, and they want to have a solution to it, but they never said they intended to attack. Now, what this White House readout says, it is quite incredible. This was a meeting which took place on Jan. 25. They discussed a whole range of “severe economic measures” starting “at the top of the escalation ladder”—in other words, not moving up slowly, getting stronger and stronger, but going full blast from the beginning. And they say want to “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard,” by denying him access to all modern advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, anything having to do with defense aerospace. And they basically say the aim is to prevent Putin’s intention to “diversify” from exporting oil and gas, causing an atrophy of the Russian economy. And on and on with this language. The language of this is so brutal, it’s basically saying: Look, we managed with the shock therapy in 1990s, with Jeffrey Sachs in the Yeltsin period, to turn a former superpower into a raw materials producing, third world country, and now we will deny Russia the right to industrialize, by applying such measures. Now, that is a form of a declaration of war already! How can you deny a country to develop industrially? This is really big, and I would like people to read this, because if you read the language, how this is written, it portrays a mindset which is the mindset of a party declaring war already. And naturally, I remember, there was a report by the CIA in 1991, which had similar language, which basically said Russia has more raw materials than the United States and they have better educated scientists, and therefore, any economic development of Russia must be discouraged. And that was the beginning of the shock therapy, which reduced the industrial capacity of Russia between 1991 and 1994, to only 30% of what it had been before. And the 1990s were a decade which the Russians regard as “genocide,” because the demographic curve was absolutely reduced by 1 million people per year. Naturally, this is also not very realistic, because in the meantime, the Chinese economy is in the process of overtaking the United States, and while there may still be certain areas where such sanctions would be felt in a painful way by Russia or anybody else who is affected by it, but the idea that you can deny Russian industrial development by applying such sanctions, it’s a reflection of the same kind of arrogant mindset; because China has put a rover on the far side of the Moon, where nobody in the West has, so they could not have stolen that technology from anybody—they’re the leader. They’re also the leader in terms of fusion energy research and fast train systems and many other areas. But it shows you an intention, and that mindset is the same one as Mr. Blinken thinks he can force the Europeans to go along with these sanctions, even if it would destroy their own economies, which if you go in this direction, then Russia would cut off all oil and gas supplies which would hit Europe, not the United States. So this is really wrong, and I can only say that hopefully there will be some people inside the United States who will say this is not the true character of the United States, because you cannot build peace on the basis of doing the utmost damage to whoever you want to have a relationship with. SCHLANGER: It’s also a confirmation of what your husband, Lyndon LaRouche talked about in his 1998 “Storm Over Asia” video, in which he said the attempt to deny economic development to Russia and China is part of the traditional British geopolitical doctrine, which is dictated from the City of London. And the idea, obviously, that they’re trying to stop any Eurasian integration with Europe is really one of the key, underlying features. Now, on that, there are some developments around Afghanistan: There is a Taliban delegation in Norway this week. There’s continued discussion of your proposal for Operation Ibn Sina. Why don’t you let us know what you have on developments around Afghanistan? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s good there was this conference in Norway, where a delegation of the Taliban met with representatives from the U.S., Germany, I think France, Italy—and I don’t know the full extent of what measures came out of that. But the fact that this took place, and there are now more organizations working with the Taliban and that there is a recognition that the only way to save the 25 million people who are in acute life danger is to work with the Taliban—this is definitely a breakthrough. I think the German head of UNICEF gave a report from Kabul, where he said 1 million children are in acute danger and are actually dying; 7 million children are in acute danger. And he said this is as many children altogether as there are in Germany. I haven’t checked this figure, but it makes sense, and it shows you the incredible dimension of the need to change the thinking. And as we have mentioned on this show several times, I launched the Operation Ibn Sina, which refers to the great physician from 1,000 years ago from this region. And I’m very happy that there are now more people picking up on it and really think this is a very good idea, to use Afghanistan as a model to create a modern healthcare system for every country in the world. And the speech I gave about it, which is the cover story in the January 28 issue of EIR, which you can download and circulate it. We can also put the link underneath this show afterwards. The video of the speech I made is also available. And these are being tweeted by several influential people, and they are sending it through their social media. So I hope this will lead to a really broad discussion and becomes the basis for actually implementing a modern health system for Afghanistan and every other country on the planet! Because the pandemic is still here, and despite what people hope, new variants are still a possibility. And in any case, the conditions of many, many countries in the developing sector, they must have a development perspective, because it cannot go on that billions of people are on the verge of famine, and losing their livelihoods, and in danger of dying. So Operation Ibn Sina must be the beginning of a new paradigm. And this becomes all the more urgent, because we’re sitting on a powder keg: The reason for all the war danger is the fact that the financial system is about to blow up. There are many reports that the so-called “emerging markets” which is a synonym for the developing countries, that they may have a huge debt crisis if there is the slightest “tapering” of interest rates by the Federal Reserve. So the urgency to go with LaRouche’s Four Laws, and really go in a completely different direction, rebuilding the world economy by having actual development, starting with a world health system is of the greatest urgency. SCHLANGER: Among those issuing a warning was Guardian columnist, Larry Elliott, who pointed out that almost 50% of the debt which could be lost in a wave of defaults from poorer countries that are heavily indebted, is owed to financial institutions and investments. That means, people’s personal retirement funds are invested in this debt. David Malpass, the president of the World Bank, also warned that we could be seeing a trigger of debt defaults from the developing sector: So, in that sense, the interconnection between the war danger, the spread of disease and collapse of healthcare, and the overall economic system, really comes back to the importance of Lyndon LaRouche’s proposal for a New Bretton Woods. And I think that would be a good place to wrap this up. ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. I think there are many countries in the world that clearly are preparing for the eventuality of a sudden collapse. You see it in many details: Gold buying is up again, which always happens when the population starts to get hysterical, then you have large buyers of gold. You have more and more a tendency to go out of the dollar. So, even if Russia would be cut off from the SWIFT system, I don’t think it will have that devastating an affect on Russia, but it could be a “nuclear bomb” for the Western capital markets—at least, that’s what Friedrich Merz, the new head of the German Christian Democracy has been saying, and I tend to agree with him on that point. So, I think we have to have a discussion about a new paradigm: We must completely change the orientation of colonialism, the idea to keep the developing countries suppressed. We have to replace that with a new just world economic order, along the lines with what China is doing with the Belt and Road Initiative, and we must get the Europeans and the United States, hopefully, to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, in the development of Southwest Asia, of Africa, of Latin America. And you know, if we join hands, no problem could not be solved! So I think, in the same way as the relationship between Russia and China has been named by former Russian Prime Minister Medvedev, he said that that relationship has become a model of what relationships among nations should be: In other words, that each furthers the best interests of the other, respects its sovereignty, doesn’t meddle in its internal affairs. And China has offered that many years ago, already, as the model for a great power relationship between the United States and China. So, we have to have a new thinking, and the common interest of mankind must be put first. If we cannot mobilize the thinking of the population to that level, we may not make it as a species, so there is right now the urgent need to have such a debate. And if you want to help this effort then join the Schiller Institute, and we will soon have a big new conference on all of these issues, probably in the week of February 7-11, so stay tuned: Become a member, help our mobilization, and hopefully we’ll see you next week. SCHLANGER: And I would urge people, as you mentioned before, but your presentation from last Saturday’s Manhattan Project meeting of the Schiller Institute—“Can War with Russia Still Be Averted?”—was very effective at identifying what this new paradigm would be and how we would get there. So, I would urge people, go to the Schiller Institute YouTube channel and it’s the presentation from January 22, 2022. So Helga, thanks for joining us. It’s always good to get a note of optimism, but it’s also important that people face the fact, as you say, that we’re still sitting on a powder keg, and it’s a little hard to be totally optimistic when you have a powder keg underneath your rear end: So, join us now, and let’s see what we can do about it. So, Helga, we’ll see you next week! ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I hope so—next week.

Once again -- Surprise, Surprise! -- CNN is caught lying to promote a war. CNN "reporter" Matthew Chance said that Pres. Biden told Ukraine's Pres. Zelensky that Kiev could be "sacked" by invading Russian forces, while CNN "reporter" Marquardt said Biden told Zelensky that a Russian invasion "is virtually certain." A spokesman for Zelensky said the first report, which cited a Ukrainian official, is "completely false", while a spokeswoman for the U.S. National Security Council, Emily Horne, told CNN that "anonymous sources are ‘leaking falsehoods'”. Help us get out the truth -- share these Daily Updates, and subscribe to our Daily Alert!