Kiev Podolynsky Conference Paper:
The Principle of Mind
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
March 4, 2009
SYNOPSIS: Academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, and his contemporary, Albert Einstein, situated the summation of their greatest scientific achievements within that Riemannian concept of dynamics which is traced, formally, in modern science, from Gottfried Leibniz's 1690s resurrection of that concept of dynamis known to the Classical Greek of the Pythagoreans and Plato. As Einstein emphasized, the relevance of this for the presently known foundations of competent modern science, is expressed in that uniquely original discovery of the general principle of gravitation by Johannes Kepler, as in Kepler's The Harmonies of the World. When our attention is turned to include the subject of certain related, deeper implications concerning the human mind, implications which are prompted from within Vernadsky's treatment of the Noösphere, a certain, implicitly very important, but presently still controversial question is posed....
This Week's News
U.S. Economic/Financial News
March 26 (EIRNS)—Happy times are here again? Not on your life.
* GDP contracted in the fourth quarter 2008 by a 6.3% annual rate, the weakest since 1982, the Commerce Department said today. Profits dropped 16.5% from the prior quarter, the most since 1953.
* Initial claims for jobless benefits last week rose 8,000 to 652,000, topping 600,000 for an eighth straight time, the Labor Department reported. Total benefit rolls jumped by 122,000 in the week ended March 14, from 5.44 million the previous week to 5.56 million.
* IBM plans to lay off about 5,000 U.S. employees, with many of the jobs being transferred to India. Workers abroad accounted for 71% of IBM's nearly 400,000 employees at the start of the year, up from about 65% in 2006. IBM employed 74,000 people in India in 2007.
* GM announced that 7,500 UAW members have signed up for buyouts, which will allow the company to hire replacement workers for half the current union wage.
* The International Association of Machinists (IAM) bi-weekly newsletter March 24 cited the Labor Department's latest report showing that "Mass lay-offs for all industries, including the manufacturing sector, rose to their highest levels on record" in February. Of the "2,769 mass layoff events in of February, which resulted in 295,477 people losing their jobs," 1,235, or 45%, were in manufacturing, which resulted in 152,618 new unemployment claims.
* The delinquency rate on about $700 billion in securitized loans backed by commercial property has more than doubled since September 2008, to 1.8% this month, according to Deutsche Bank AG. Foresight Analytics in Oakland, Calif. estimates that the U.S. banking sector could suffer as much as $250 billion in commercial real-estate losses and that more than 700 banks could fail as a result of their exposure to commercial real estate.
* The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City voted to boost fares as much as 30% and sharply cut services on the system's rail lines, subways, and buses. The cost of a monthly subway pass will rise from $81 to $103.
March 23 (EIRNS)—"It is remarkable that after the Wall Street boys wrecked the economy, and then paid themselves billions of dollars of bonuses with bailout money, Geithner comes up with a plan that will involve handing billions more to Wall Street, with no strings attached. The simple, honest approach is to trash the exotic schemes for rescuing the banks and acknowledge the truth: they are bankrupt. The public has paid enough already for the incompetence of the Wall Street crew. They've lost their jobs, their homes, their retirement accounts and hundreds of billions of tax dollars."
That was the opening of a statement March 23 by Dean Baker on Politico.com. Baker is co-founder and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank whose advisory board includes economist Joseph Stiglitz.
Baker continued, "Compare the alleged injustice in the AIG bonus babies seeing most of their million dollar bonuses being taxed away with retired autoworkers in their fifties losing their health care in the GM or Ford deal. I can't muster too many tears for the AIG folks."
March 25 (EIRNS)—The Chicago Tribune reports today that Illinois' "jobless rate continued to climb in February, with the economy's meltdown driving Illinois unemployment to 8.6 percent—its worst level since December 1991." The "0.8 percentage point jump in Illinois' unemployment rate, from a revised 7.8 percent in January, represents the largest one-month increase since the department began keeping records in 1976 ... a year ago, the rate was 5.9 percent." In February, the "damage was most prominent in manufacturing, where 16,400 workers lost their jobs. Over the past 12 months, the manufacturing sector has lost 52,000 workers, bringing employment to 616,600 last month."
Global Economic News
March 23 (EIRNS)—Efforts by the German government to keep unemployment down, by various measures like short work on a massive scale, will not work. Such measures were designed to score points with the voters for the European election in June and the German Federal election in September. Some elements of the truth are coming out:
* A study by Commerzbank economists, published March 23, predicts that the German GDP is going to collapse by 6-7% this year, whereas before a 3-4% drop was anticipated. Commerzbank chief economist Jörg Krämer writes that this is especially due to the "dramatic collapse" of orders and production in January, which "had no precedent in German post-war history."
* The head of the German National Unemployment Office, Frank-Jürgen Weise, warned that unemployment could be much higher than expected, that is, 4 million by the end of the year. So far, his office had calculated an increase in unemployment from 3.6 million (in February, over 7%) to 3.6 million by the end of the year. The Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) already has calculated its estimate of 4.5 million in 2010.
* The vast effect on the foundations of physical economy is starting to dawn on some people. The boss of Boston Consulting in Germany, Christian Veith, warns firms against making too many layoffs, especially of skilled people. If you do that, "you endanger the future." Also, the chief advisor of Chancellor Merkel, Joachim Milberg, in a position paper for the Technical Academy (Acatrech), warned that the number of retired engineers in 2015 will increase from 37,000 per year today to 43,000. At present, Germany is only graduating 44,000 new engineers. The study demands that firms and the state invest in the future, lest there be a shortage of skilled people, once the economy should get going again. How that will happen, they do not say.
March 25 (EIRNS)—The Financial Times on March 25 reported that at a mining conference in Perth, Australia, Rio Tinto "became the first global miner to acknowledge publicly that annual contract iron ore prices for the year starting in April will fall as demand for steel collapses amid the economic crisis." Sam Walsh, head of Rio Tinto's iron ore division, said, "We need to recognize the fundamentals of the market and the market would show that there does need to be a downward adjustment." The company's acknowledgement "signals that the industry is about to break with six consecutive years of price increases totaling 500 per cent, which had been propelled by the industrialization and urbanization of China, the world's largest iron ore consumer."
March 20 (EIRNS)—"Hundreds of millions of dollars on aid projects to provide water and sanitation in Africa have been wasted, as the projects have failed," according to a new report cited in the London Financial Times today. The problem, notes the article, "is that aid organisations and governments are keen to provide the initial infrastructure, such as boreholes, pumps, wells and sanitary facilities, but without money to maintain them these can quickly fall into disrepair, so that local people return to their prior, often unsafe, sources of drinking water." The report "estimates that somewhere between $215 million and $360 million has been wasted on water infrastructure," and "about 50,000 boreholes, wells and other water supply points have fallen into disrepair."
March 27 (EIRNS)—South Korean President Lee Myung-bak told his country's automakers yesterday "to do everything they can to overcome the economic slowdown before seeking government assistance, saying their workers may be getting more benefits than those of international competitors," according to the Yonhap press agency.
The President that noted the average salary of workers at Hyundai Motors, the country's largest automaker, is higher than that of American employees at the company's Alabama factory, though productivity has lagged behind that of the U.S. plant.
Labor and management will first have to announce "drastic measures" to prop themselves up, the President said. In other words, government measures to aid the auto industry, such as reduced taxes, are contingent on "drastic" wage and benefit reductions and other cost-saving measures such as "job sharing."
March 26 (EIRNS)—A British government bond auction failed for the first time since 1995, just as Prime Minister Gordon Brown was on Wall Street yesterday, trying to show himself off as the world's economic savior.
The £1.75 billion ($2.6 billion) sale of 40-year Gilts (bonds) only got 1.63 billion pounds in bids, which is said to be the worst show of interest in Gilts by investors in the history of their sales.
Both the IMF and the European Commission have forecast that Britain is heading towards the biggest budget deficit of all the G-20 countries—11% of GDP.
"The notion that Brown is leading us to the promised land is laughable," Bloomberg.com quotes one British banker as saying. "He cannot get to grips with how other people see this country, as the sick man of Europe."
United States News Digest
March 26 (EIRNS)—New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo today subpoenaed AIG's credit default swap contracts, as part of an expanded investigation to see if AIG customers Goldman Sachs, Société Générale, and Deutsche Bank, among others, were improperly compensated with U.S. taxpayer dollars. "Our investigation into corporate bonuses has led us to an investigation of the credit default swap (CDS) contracts at AIG. CDS contracts were at the heart of AIG's meltdown last September. The question is whether the contracts are being wound down properly and efficiently, or whether they have become a vehicle for funneling billions in taxpayer dollars to capitalize banks all over the world."
Yesterday, 27 Congressmen, led by Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), sent a letter to Neil Barofsky, inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), calling for a Federal probe into whether banks, including Goldman Sachs, received more funds than necessary from the AIG bailout. According to Bloomberg.com, a person familiar with Cuomo's investigation pointed out that while Lehman Brothers' counterparties got a few cents on the dollar, AIG's payouts appear to have been 100 cents on the dollar. Cuomo is looking into the negotiations that led to the winding down of the contracts. The person said there's a possibility that AIG is becoming a portal through which the Federal government is pouring in money to capitalize banks in the U.S. and overseas.
Former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has called for an investigation of the relationship between AIG and Goldman Sachs. Edward Liddy, the new CEO of AIG, was on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs for five years, and headed up its audit committee. When questioned whether there had been any concern about a potential conflict of interest in appointing Liddy, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congress this week that the nomination did not originate at the New York Fed, which he headed at the time. The others involved in the decision to bail out AIG reportedly included former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, previously CEO of Goldman Sachs; Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke; and the current CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein.
March 24 (EIRNS)—Amb. Chas Freeman, in a letter excerpted in the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill today, struck out at the "self-destructive behavior in political Washington, [where] self-appointed thought police assure that there is severely narrowed space for the discussion ... of issues of great importance to the nation." The pattern of "viewing intelligence not as a resource for decision making, but as raw material for polemics," may have started with the Bush Administration, he rote, but it is now "endemic in both parties."
Freeman was forced to withdraw his name from nomination to serve as the head the National Intelligence Council, based on spurious charges by an indicted Israeli spy, Steve Rosen, a "former" top official of the right-wing Israeli lobby group AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). In his letter to The Hill, Freeman was responding to a slanderous piece in the Washington Post last week, by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who argued that Freeman's downfall was of his own making, and tried to implicate Freeman as complicit in the crisis both in Darfur and in Tibet. Freeman charged that Wolf had "repeated verbatim the bill of particulars drawn up and shopped around the blogosphere and Congress by a group of lobbyists with a narrow and very particular agenda."
Ibero-American News Digest
March 18 (EIRNS)—Lyndon LaRouche addressed a packed auditorium at the Nueva Granada Military University in Bogota, Colombia today, on the subject, "Proposals To Solve The Global Economic Crisis." The two-hour videoconference was sponsored by the Association of Graduates of the Economics Department of that University, with the support of the university's Department of Economic Science. (See EIR, March 27, 2009, for a transcript of LaRouche's remarks.)
Under the leadership of President Alvaro Uribe, with conditional support from the United States, Colombia has succeeded over the past seven years in driving back the narcoterrorist armies which had seized control over up to 40% of national territory under the protection of the British liberals. Those hard-won gains, however, are now threatened, by the disintegration of the global free trade economy to which the national elite had been blindly committed, and the renewed assault from the British Empire's Dope, Inc.
The first question to LaRouche addressed a central strategic issue being fought out across the Americas today: What effect would legalizing drugs have on the economy? President Uribe has been engaged with virtual hand-to-hand combat on this issue with former Colombian President César Gaviria, one of Soros's top hitmen in the continent, since Uribe began organizing last year, internationally and within Colombia, against the drug cartels' legalization strategy.
LaRouche was uncompromising: "Legalizing drugs would mean the death of the economy.... Drug traffic was invented by the British as a way of destroying countries.... This traffic is a mass murderer of individuals, is a mass murderer of nations. Any toleration for legalization of drugs is implicitly a crime against humanity."
March 16 (EIRNS)—Drug kingpin George Soros's agents in Ibero-America, such as former Colombian President César Gaviria, are furious over the results of the March 11-20 meeting of the United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND) in Vienna. The political declaration emerging from that gathering rededicated member-nations to wiping out the scourge of drugs by 2019, and rejected Soros's fraudulent "harm reduction" approach, which is just a cover for outright legalization.
"Absurd!" cried Gaviria, during a March 14 speech in Asunción, Paraguay, before the Inter-American Press Society. One of three co-chairs of the Soros-sponsored and -financed Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy (LACDD), Gaviria told his audience that drug decriminalization is the only rational option for Ibero-America. The UN, he said, only offers "foolish promises" to eradicate the drug trade through continued application of the United States' failed "prohibitionist" model.
"We can't adopt the U.S. model," Gaviria declared. "Nor can we wait for the UN to give us permission" to try a different approach, such as that used by many European nations, where dope-cafes are proliferating. Gaviria complained that the United States blocks any attempt to seek "alternative" approaches internationally, and Cuba, Russia, Iran, Colombia, and other countries, as well as the Vatican, share the U.S.'s view on this issue.
Gaviria's remarks were echoed a day later by former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, who told the daily La Tercera that all nations should "evaluate" the LACDD report issued Feb. 11, calling for marijuana decriminalization throughout the Americas.
March 27 (EIRNS)—The visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Mexico March 25-26 established the groundwork for the kind of intelligence and operational cooperation between the United States and Mexico required to defeat the London-centered drug trade.
Recognizing the drug cartel war which exploded against Mexico under the watchful eye of the Bush-Cheney regime as a national strategic threat to the United States itself, the Obama Administration has put together a policy package vis-à-vis Mexico, which, while not sufficient to solve the problem, contains several of the principal elements long identified by Lyndon LaRouche as necessary for any workable strategy, including real-time sharing of intelligence and non-lethal surveillance technologies (satellites, imaging, etc.), and respect for sovereignty.
The self-righteous Mexico-bashing which previously dominated Washington, is being trumped by official acknowledgement that the drug problem is a "two-way street," as President Obama put it: Drugs come up from Mexico, but weapons and cash flow south from the United States. This new tone is also heard in U.S. Congress, which held some ten committee hearings on the border crisis in March alone, where discussion focussed on how the U.S. could clean up its own side of the border, and come to the aid of its neighbor.
On the eve of Clinton's trip to Mexico, top officials from State, Homeland Security, and the Justice Department announced the beginnings of a comprehensive plan to take the fight to the Mexican drug cartels operating on the U.S. side of the border. While underfunded, it sets in motion expanded use of technology at the border, and beefing up "prosecutor-led, intelligence-based task forces" to go after the money and head honchos of the cartels in coordination with Mexican officials. The arrests of three top cartel leaders, from the Sinoloa and Gulf cartels in the week before Clinton's trip, indicates that intensified intelligence coordination between the U.S. and Mexico is already underway.
Clinton's message in Mexico, was that the United States views its relations with that country as "one of the most important relationships that exists between any two countries in the world," extending beyond the fight against drugs which is, nonetheless, the "co-responsibility" of both nations. In their joint press conference, Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa called Clinton's meeting with President Felipe Calderón "extremely fruitful." Clinton announced that "Mexico and the United States will establish a bilateral implementation office ... where Mexican and U.S. officials will work together, side-by-side, to fight the drug traffickers and the violence which they spread."
Homeland Defense Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder will follow up, attending an April 1-2 binational conference on weapons trafficking in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Presidents Obama and Calderón will then meet in Mexico on April 16-17, before the Summit of the Americas.
Missing in the cross-border agenda thus far, is a policy to address the economic crisis which the drug trade feeds off. The LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC) and the LaRouche movement in Mexico are finding great interest in their proposal that the solution can begin with cross-border cooperation on great projects such as Mexico's Northwest Hydraulic Plan, a tri-state water management project known as the PLHINO, which has been on the books, ready to implement, for decades.
March 26 (EIRNS)—Sen. Alfonso Elías Serrano, an outspoken supporter of the Northwest Hydraulic Plan, or PLHINO, won a landslide victory in the Mexican PRI party's March 8 primary for candidate for governor of the state of Sonora. There was a record turnout for the open primary (anybody could vote, not just PRI members), and Elías won with almost 65% of the vote. The CTM labor federation played an important role in organizing support for Elias.
In both the U.S. and Mexico, the LaRouche movement has been mobilizing to get the PLHINO underway, as the key to preventing chaos on both sides of the border. This tri-state great water project has been planned and studied for more than three decades. With Mexico now on the Obama Administration's agenda, the LaRouche movement's concept of the PLHINO as the element of cross-border economic development which needs to be added to U.S.-Mexican cooperation, is beginning to spark the imagination of serious officials in Washington.
Elías is no Johnny-come-lately to the fight for the PLHINO. In November 2007, he identified the project as emblematic of the kind of change required in how people think, in the closing speech to a packed audience at a forum organized by the LaRouche movement-founded "Pro-PLHINO Committee of the 21st Century." We must turn away from the errors of NAFTA, back to the commitment to think about the future, as the way to solve day-to-day problems, as "normal people" did four decades ago, he stated.
What is at stake with the PLHINO, he added, "is a question of recovering, as a nation, the vision of the future that we had in the days when great infrastructure projects were proposed in Mexico; in the days when advances were made in space exploration internationally; in the days when our universities carried out ambitious research toward eradicating diseases and epidemics in the world." Senator Elías subsequently fought to get funding for the PLHINO project.
Western European News Digest
March 28 (EIRNS)—German Social Democratic MEP Martin Schulz, spokesman of the Socialist group in the European Parliament, says it does not look good for the European Union's Lisbon Treaty; if it is rejected by the Czech Republic, one might just as well bury it. This would throw the EU back to the Treaty of Nice, which was ratified years ago by the 15 EU member-states; today, the EU has 27 members, all of which are dissatisfied with the Nice Treaty. That is why—as Schulz stresses—after the failure of the first draft for a European Constitution four years ago, the Lisbon Treaty was formulated. "If that also fails, it would be a fiasco," Schulz says.
In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio on March 27, David Donoghue, Ireland's ambassador to Germany, claimed that the economic crisis is making the Irish more pro-European, which he thinks will help the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. The Irish defeated the Treaty in a referendum last June, but the government has agreed to a second referendum. A date for that has not been set. Donoghue forgot to mention that the pro-EU policy of the present Irish government is growing increasingly unpopular among the Irish people, especially the youth who have no jobs, and among the labor unions. A second referendum runs a high risk of yielding an even stronger "No" to the Lisbon Treaty, therefore.
March 26 (EIRNS)—Prof. Tilman Hoppe, a scientific advisor to the German Parliament, has published an essay in the European Review of Economic Law (Europäischen Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsrecht), which demonstrates statistically that EU-originated laws already comprise 80% of the current laws in Germany. Such a figure has circulated for 20 years, Hoppe says; however, it was based on a "prophecy" by former EU official Jacques Delors of France, and "the evidence was never produced up to now."
Hoppe's work provides powerful support for the current constitutional challenge against the Lisbon Treaty in Germany, which, he writes, "considers the Treaty unconstitutional because it 'de-statizes' member-countries in favor of the [European] Union. One argument is that in the member countries, the quota of EU-originated laws is prevailing over the quota of national laws.... A statistical survey of the current laws in Germany now shows for the first time that the 80% is indeed a realistic figure, and not only concerning economic laws."
PARIS, March 29 (EIRNS)—British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced his full support for a second mandate for José Manuel Barroso, as president of the European Commission—the man who told the world that the "EU is an empire without an empire." Barroso's nomination "was a political invention of Tony Blair," the Paris daily Libération, wrote today. Like Blair, Barroso was in favor of the Iraq War.
Against the London-backed Barroso, Paris and Berlin supported former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who opposed the war. But London "sold" Barroso as a an acceptable compromise. "Seen from London, Barroso behaved with gratitude," the paper wrote. "Elected to make 'fewer laws,' the amount of activity of the Commission was pretty much reduced to a minimum. Barroso promoted 'self-regulation' with the results one can see today. Besides the climate-energy package, all the other major laws under Barroso come from the preceding Commission."
March 24 (EIRNS)—A senior "green" advisor to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for cutting the population of Great Britain from the current 61 million subjects to no more than 30 million, in order to build a "sustainable society."
A former leading member of the Ecology Party, which was founded by Teddy Goldsmith, Jonathan Porritt, announced this at the annual conference this week of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is the patron. The OPT will release "research" calling for cutting Britain's population in half, the level it was in Victorian England—that is, at the height of the power of the British Empire.
Another patron of OPT is Prof. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), a call for radical population control.
March 23—ATTAC, controlled by a section of George Soros's pro-dope apparatus and the British Fabians, has recently been leading demonstrations across Europe, tapping populist rage against the economic collapse.
The street actions effectively implement a report published this month by London's Economist Intelligence Unit, "Manning the Barricades." That report promises Jacobin upsurges, to try to intimidate any nation moving towards sovereign protectionism, and proposes an eventual global pattern of coups, revolutions, and wars among nations.
The Paris-based group ATTAC was taken over, in a 2006 organizational coup, run by Susan George, chairman of Soros's Transnational Institute of Amsterdam. On the Institute's website, George boasts of her success in overturning the ATTAC internal elections and pushing her nominees into control of the group. The American-born George is an associate of the British Fabian Society.
The Transnational Institute (TI) is funded by the Soros Open Society Institute, and by other Soros organizations devoted entirely to stopping drug law enforcement; by the Dutch Foreign Ministry, and by the European Commission. TI deployed against this month's United Nations drug policy meeting in Vienna, defending Britain's 19th-Century Opium War against China, and circulating literature criticizing the recent reduction of dope production in Asia's Golden Triangle.
In preparation for their planned "anti-globalism" street demonstrations, ATTAC distributed a pamphlet in German cities over the past few days, portraying a fantasy future in which former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his allies will have solved the world economic collapse through a new globalism.
March 26 (EIRNS)—A high-speed train for the first time made the run between Milan and Rome (550 km) in three hours. The ride, with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on board, inaugurated the completion of the Bologna-Florence mountain route (with 73 km of tunnels). Passengers will be able to regularly travel on the high-speed train starting in December. The state-owned rail company will issue special fares for students at an incredibly cheap EU33.
On the Milan-Bologna and Florence-Rome routes, the train reaches speeds up to 300 km/h. The train, named "Frecciarossa" (literally, red arrow) is the newest version of the Italian-made ETR 500, a technology used since the 1980s, but which could not be fully exploited up till now, due to lack of adequate rail lines. Since the activation of the high-speed connection, passenger traffic has increased to 45,000 people a day through the national grid. In the last three months, there has been an increase of 30% in passenger traffic on the Milan-Rome route. The date of Dec. 14 has been set for completion of the whole Turin-Salerno high-speed system.
March 25 (EIRNS)—In a letter to the online magazine Effedieffe.com, a reader reported that he had watched LaRouche's March 21 webcast, and asked whether LaRouche is right when he says that, unless his policies are implemented, there will be a 14th-Century-like collapse of civilization and a population reduction by two-thirds. Editor Maurizio Blondet, who has covered LaRouche for many years, answered: "I am afraid that Lyn is right."
March 24 (EIRNS)—The government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown today released a new counterterrorism strategy document, which promises to continue turning the British Isles into a police state. Pre-release statements by Home Secretary Jaqui Smith advertised that MI5 would be coordinating the recruitment of up to 60,000 agents for surveillance—of shopping malls, sports facilities, and other public places—effectively "doubling the size" of the organization.
The centerpiece of the 170-page document, a four-point program called CONTEST: Pursue, Prevent, Protect, and Prepare, is at the center of these "community-based" efforts, but, with the assistance of the most advanced biometric detectors, and the most invasive network of security cameras in the world.
Russia and the CIS News Digest
March 16 (EIRNS)—Responding to an official position paper for the April 20 London G-20 summit, published today on the Kremlin web site, Lyndon LaRouche warned, "This is amateur night! No competent result can occur with an approach like that." He urged that the G-20 immediately have one member subtracted, namely, the British Empire.
The Russian document endorses dozens of "improvements" in the existing, bankrupt international monetary system and its institutions. Included are an upgrade of the International Monetary Fund, a proliferation of "regional reserve currencies" and regional "financial centers," and the issuance of "a supranational reserve currency" by the IMF or another supranational institution.
"This is all monetarism," exclaimed LaRouche, "This would take us right back to the monetarist schemes of John Maynard Keynes in 1937, when he said the Nazi system would be the best one for implementing his monetary policies."
Russian leaders should "break this pattern of sophistry," LaRouche said. "We are looking into a long dark age ahead. We must eliminate the institutions, which have brought on this problem. And that means the Group of 20 should be minus 1. If the British Empire is included, the result will be a disaster. Don't let them in on the negotiations stage. Reforming these failed institutions won't work. It will result in failure. The first failure is to let the British Empire in! Sure, Britain can come in—but, only after a working system has been set up.
"The Russians don't know what they're doing," LaRouche continued. "This is a general breakdown crisis, and we are on the verge of a dark age. In these circumstances, any reforms based on looking for agreement with the existing institutions, with the British Empire's monetarist system, will be a disaster.
"I have laid out a simple, American-model system," LaRouche said, referring to his four-power plan for the USA, Russia, China, and India to take the initiative. "Eliminate the monetary system. Go with a credit system, for long-term investment projects in infrastructure. Eliminate the monetarist characteristics of the world system which we've had, ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was replaced by that creep, Harry S Truman.
"The British have to be out of the picture, in creating a new system. They can come in after you've made the new system. But the Russians have to know that the group in Britain and Wall Street is an extension of that, is fascist, and you cannot reach agreement with them without submitting to fascism. Stalin would have known that, at a certain point."
The Russian expressions of hope for institutions to "finance development," including nuclear power, are ridiculous, as long as Moscow is seeking "agreement" with the London agenda, said LaRouche. "It's like trying to cross a donkey with an ostrich. You'll get a feathered species which brays like a jackass, and lays eggs."
LaRouche summed up as follows: "Gentlemen, you've got to understand that this is a general breakdown crisis, and you cannot compromise with the existing system if you wish to survive. You're on the edge of a dark age, a new dark age. If you don't know it, you're not qualified to negotiate anything. Because, the problem is, we have to deal with the onrush of a global new dark age, now. Now! Not some distant time in the future. So, so-called reforms, based on trying to find an agreement, are a damn waste of time. This will not work, and I'm afraid that people who don't listen to me, are going to get us all killed."
March 27 (EIRNS)—Delivering the inaugural speech at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) special conference on Afghanistan, held in Moscow today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that "for several years now in the framework of the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group, the tasks of fostering cooperation in the fight against common threats, including along the perimeter of the Afghan borders, have been considered.... In this spirit, through joint work with Kabul, not by creating any 'cordon sanitaire,' the SCO and CSTO [Collective Security and Treaty Organization] suggest creating anti-narcotics, anti-terrorist, and financial security belts in the region."
Although Moscow has spoken on a number of occasions of creating anti-narcotics and anti-terrorist belts, this is the first time that the urgency of a financial security belt has been identified.
The SCO includes Russia, China, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan as full members, and India, Iran, Pakistan, and Mongolia as observers. One of the key objectives of the SCO conference was to team up with the West and international organizations to address the Afghanistan problem. Among the participants were: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon; Mark Perrin de Brichambaut, Secretary-General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Patrick Moon; and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. In addition, there were representatives from the Group of Eight countries, the CSTO, the European Union, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The meeting was to be followed by an international conference on Afghanistan, under UN auspices, in The Hague on March 31. Lavrov will attend.
A U.S. official, who asked not to be named, said on the sidelines of the SCO meeting: "We see Iran as an important player related to Afghanistan. We see this as a very productive area for engagement in the future."
In advance of the two international conferences, Lavrov visited Kabul, on March 16. He and Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta, who was to attend the SCO meeting ten days later, signed an intergovernmental agreement to cooperate in the war on drugs. In Kabul, Lavrov spoke out against a surge of foreign troops into the country, which he said would not solve its security problems. A Russian foreign ministry spokesman, quoted by Itar Tass, said that the two "sides pointed out the special importance of regional cooperation, including Afghan-Pakistani, in fighting terrorism and drugs-related crimes."
March 21 (EIRNS)—In the run-up to the first meeting between Russian President Medvedev and U.S. President Obama, scheduled for April 1, on the eve of the G-20 summit, there has been a density of contacts between high-level Russian and American emissaries. Notable are:
* A meeting of the Kissinger-Primakov Commission in Moscow. According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta of March 20, this was an expanded session which, in addition to Kissinger, included James Baker, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, Robert Rubin, and William Perry. The Russian side included Igor Ivanov and former Chief of Staff Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky. The Commission group was received by President Medvedev.
* Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachov visited the White House March 20, where he briefly met Obama, and then held an hour-long session with Vice President Biden. According to Itar-TASS, the subject was potential U.S.-Russian partnership.
* An Atlantic Council delegation was in Moscow for a conference at the USA-Canada Institute, to discuss the U.S. NSC document, "Global Trends 2025." At that meeting, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow John Beyrle announced that Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Patrick Moon, would attend the Moscow SCO conference on Afghanistan, and emphasized that the U.S. attendance, the first ever, is an indication that Washington is now listening more to Moscow.
Southwest Asia News Digest
March 24 (EIRNS)—Turkish President Abdullah Gul has made the first visit to neighboring Iraq by a Turkish head of state in over 33 years. This visit, on the heels of Gul's visit to Iran, and after meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, could become a key component of the kind of regional cooperation for the stabilization of Iraq that Lyndon LaRouche outlined in 2004 in "The LaRouche Doctrine." In 2007, the same point about engaging all of Iraq's neighbors was made in the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. But under the Bush-Cheney regime, this approach was not allowed. Until Israel's Gaza War was launched in December 2008, Gul played a central role in the three-way peace talks with Israel and Syria.
Gul met in Iraq with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and Nechirvan Barzani, the Prime Minister of the autonomous Kurdish region. The Kurdish separatist issue has been the cause of Turkey's long rift with Iraq, and for the last two years, Turkey has carried out air strikes and hot pursuit ground actions into Kurdish Iraq, claiming that the region was being used to safehouse the narco-terrorist PKK (Kurdish Workers Party). The PKK has been running terrorist attacks inside Turkey.
After the discussion with Barzani, Gul told reporters, "Once the PKK is eliminated there are no bounds to what is possible: you [the Iraqi Kurds] are our neighbors and kinsmen." Barzani told journalists, "We are determined, and we confirm again, our territory will not be used to attack Turkey."
The landmark visit to Iraq was also the occasion to discuss water, which Iraq badly needs from Turkey, because of two years of drought. The visit is also important because of President Obama's upcoming trip to Istanbul in early April after the G-20 meeting.
March 28 (EIRNS)—Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat, in a Washington Post op-ed today, attacked Israeli Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu's phony "economic peace" plan as a ploy to extend the occupation of Palestine. "Rather than ending the occupation, Netanyahu has proposed an 'economic peace' that would seek to normalize and better manage it," wrote Erekat. "Instead of a viable Palestinian state, his vision extends no further than a series of disconnected cantons with limited self-rule."
Erekat warned that the patience of Palestinians was not "unlimited."
Calling for a complete halt to settlement construction in the occupied territories, he wrote, "The new Israeli government must unequivocally affirm its support for the two-state solution and the establishment of a viable, independent, and fully sovereign Palestinian state based on 1967 borders, and it must commit to past agreements between Israel and the PLO. Without these commitments, Palestinians have no partner for peace."
Erekat praised President Barack Obama's renewed commitment to peace efforts, writing that the U.S. must play the honest broker in "a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis."
March 23 (EIRNS)—The political leader of Palestinian Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, noted, in an interview to the Italian daily La Repubblica, that "a new language towards the region is coming from President Obama.... The challenge for everybody is for this to be the prelude for a genuine change in U.S. and European policies. Regarding an official opening towards Hamas, it's a matter of time."
Meshaal continued, "The great powers need us in order to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Our weight in resolving the Palestinian question stems from our roots in society, in the people who have voted for us and who will do so again."
March 27 (EIRNS)—Official representatives of NATO and the Islamic Republic of Iran held their first meeting ever on March 9. NATO Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs Martin Erdmann and Iranian Ambassador to the European Union Ali-Asghar Khaji held the first meeting between the two sides since the Iranian revolution three decades ago. The topic of discussion was Iranian cooperation with the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
"The Iranians have problems with drugs and refugees flowing out of Afghanistan [and] so do we," NATO spokesman James Appathurai is quoted by Associated Press. "There is certainly a common interest there. This is another good step in engaging Iran in the international community's effort [in Afghanistan]. I'm sure there will be follow-up meetings."
This follows statements by NATO's military commander, Gen. John Craddock, suggesting that individual member nations could strike deals with Teheran to supply their forces in Afghanistan via Iran. Teheran is expected to attend a conference on Afghanistan next week at The Hague, Netherlands, that also will be attended by the United States.
March 26 (EIRNS)—A U.S. State Department spokesman stated today, in response to Iran's announcement that it would participate in a UN-sponsored conference on Afghanistan conference on March 31 at The Hague:
"We welcome an Iranian participation in the conference in The Hague. We have not yet been officially notified by the organizers that they have accepted, but I am speaking from the press accounts that we have both seen, you and I, that if this is, indeed, the case ... then it is a welcome move, because we do want this conference to be a regional conference. A regional conference would be incomplete without Iran. Iran does share a border with Afghanistan, and that border is strategic.
"The Iranians have not always played a helpful role in Afghanistan. We are hoping that their attendance here is a demonstration that they are planning to play a positive role in regards to Afghanistan."
Spokesman David Diguid also said that "no substantive meetings are planned with Iranian officials at this time," but "the Iranians will be around the table. They will speak; we will listen to them. We will hear their points of view, and they will also hear our points of view in a discussion about Afghanistan."
Asia News Digest
March 24 (EIRNS)—Speaking at a British Tamil Forum in Harrow, England, urging a ceasefire in Sri Lanka to protect the Tamil Tiger terrorists, Conservative Party politician Dr. Rachel Joyce apologized for the error of Colonial Britain in making a unitary Ceylon (now, Sri Lanka) out of two nations, the Tamils and the Sinhalese.
The British Tamil Forum has called for an immediate ceasefire in Sri Lanka and initiating peace talks; demanded that Sri Lanka allow access by international humanitarian organizations and UN agencies; demanded to put the Sri Lanka issue on the UN Security Council's Agenda; and urged the government of Sri Lanka to allow a human rights monitoring mission, under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Endorsing the Forum's demand, the Tory Member of Parliament said: "The Tamil people have lived on the island currently called Sri Lanka for millennia—in their own contiguous, distinct, geographical territory. They lay claim only to the territory they have historically lived in. In fact, the 3 million Tamils of the island constituted a self-governing nation until invaded and occupied by Colonial powers—in particular Britain, who amalgamated them with the Sinhala nation purely for convenience. In retrospect, this cultural naiveté was a mistake that has caused problems since independence. I would like to apologize for the British part in that error."
March 25 (EIRNS)—An orphanage owned by Green Crescent, a charity run from London, was raided by Bangladesh security forces on March 24. The raid netted enough explosives and other equipment to make several hundred grenades. "We found some ordinary Islamic books, but others that are in line with extremists like Osama bin Laden. We found small arms—about nine or ten in total—plus equipment to make small arms, about 3,000 rounds of ammunition, two walkie-talkies, two remote control devices, and four sets of army uniforms," Lt. Col. Munir Haque, an officer involved in the operation, told the media. Bangladeshi media reported that security forces suspected the orphanage was used by Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), a banned militant group, for arming and training terrorists.
Although Dhaka has not linked the finding of this bomb factory with the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed and her Army chief during the killing of some 70 senior Army officers in February, it is likely a part of the same Saudi-British network.
Green Crescent is the creation of a British Muslim of Bangladeshi origin, Faisal Mostafa, who was picked up in Britain in 2002, along with accomplice Moinul Abedin, for having bomb-making equipment, electronic devices, and gloves containing traces of a chemical known as HMTD, a high explosive. While Abedin was given a 20-year jail term, Faisal was allowed to go free. It is evident that Faisal was protected by the British intelligence service MI5 for what he was planning to accomplish in Bangladesh.
Faisal's uncle, Maj. Hafizuddin Ahmed, who lives in London, was involved in a counter-coup that brought down the pro-Mujibur Rehman (father of Sheikh Hasina Wazed) government in the 1970s. The counter-coup involved killings of top leaders inside a Dhaka jail. He was reportedly involved in those killings.
March 26 (EIRNS)—Less than 24 hours before U.S. President Barack Obama was scheduled to unveil his administration's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy, his envoy to Afghanistan-Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, while briefing NATO officials in Brussels this week, said the prime source of funding for the Taliban is not narcotics, but private individuals in the Persian Gulf region, according to a Western diplomat cited by the Financial Times of London. No further details were given. EIR has reported on the Saudi funding of terrorists through its Wahhabi network of religious fundamentalists.
Another official attending the meeting said Holbrooke had suggested that much of the funding from poppy production appeared to go to individuals linked in some way to the Afghan government. There is real concern about funding for extremists in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region coming from the Gulf, which rivals or exceeds the money they are getting from drugs, said another diplomat, quoting estimates of $150-300 million for insurgents' drug cash.
Saudi funding of terrorism for the purpose of spreading Wahhabism and destroying nation-states is a conscious policy of Riyadh, and seconded by Kuwait. Saudi funding is destroying Pakistan, a long-time ally of the United States. The Saudis, in alliance with Britain, are also funding terrorists in India and Bangladesh. Recently, Riyadh was deeply involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed.
In the Bush Administration, Stuart Levey, Undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, who retains his post with the Obama Administration, has spoken out on a number of occasions against the Saudi funding of terror. He is on record saying: "If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia." No one identified by the United States and the United Nations as a terror financier has been prosecuted by the Saudis, he stated.
March 25 (EIRNS)—Yuan Gangming of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that "China may offer US$100 billion in additional financing to the International Monetary Fund during the upcoming G-20 summit in London, giving the agency more ammunition to fight the unfolding global financial and economic crisis," according to China Daily. The article adds that "reform in the IMF ... is expected to be a focal point" of the meeting, and complains about the disproportionally small say that China and India have in that institution.
Earlier, Hu Xiaolian, vice governor of the People's Bank of China, told a press conference in Beijing, "If the IMF issues bonds to finance itself, China will actively consider buying" them.
Africa News Digest
March 25 (EIRNS)—Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir visited Egypt today and met with President Hosni Mubarak for more than an hour at the Cairo airport. This is al-Bashir's second flight outside the country since the arrest warrant against him was issued by the International Criminal Court March 4, and since the ICC prosecutor announced that al-Bashir could be kidnapped as soon as he flew outside the country. Yesterday, al-Bashir visited Eritrea.
Behind the defiance of the ICC, lies an interesting development. Arabic press reports hinted today that Egypt is working to narrow the gap between the Sudanese government and the U.S. Administration. Mubarak reportedly sent his intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, to Washington for that purpose. Various Arabic media reported today that the speculation in Cairo is that a deal with the U.S. may be in the making through Egyptian mediation, which includes a U.S. decision to seek to defer or stop the ICC decision, in return for the Sudanese government's acceptance of the return of humanitarian organizations to Darfur. The same reports connect this speculation to the fact that the Obama Administration, unlike Europe, has taken a negative position with regard to the ICC (the U.S. is not a signator of the ICC charter). The Arabic press features statements by U.S. State Department spokesman Brian Wood yesterday, that "we are under no obligation to the ICC to arrest President Bashir. We're not a party to the Rome Statute."
At today's State Department press briefing, spokesman Gordon Duguid was asked about Mubarak's meeting with Bashir, and the reporter commented that it didn't appear that al-Bashir would be arrested in Cairo. "Egypt is not a signatory to the ICC," was the response. He said that all U.S. efforts right now are aimed at finding diplomatic ways to ease the suffering of those in Darfur, and reversing the expulsion of the NGOs, and that discussions about other matters "don't help us get that job done."
For the first time, the Sudanese and the Arabs clearly see that the U.S. position is different than that of Britain and continental Europe. The Arabs and the Sudanese view President Obama and the State Department as focussed on the "humanitarian" aspect, as a sign that Obama would be more inclined to supporting the peace process in Darfur, rather than pushing "regime change" in Khartoum. This is supported by the fact that Obama appointed a special envoy, Gen. Scott Gration, to negotiate with the government of Sudan on these matters.
The Egyptian foreign minister, in a press conference with his Sudanese counterpart Deng Alor, following the meeting between the two Presidents, reiterated Egypt's rejection of the ICC decision. He stated that the talks between Mubarak and al-Bashir focussed on relief work in Darfur and the peace process with the rebel groups there. He suggested that Egyptian, Islamic, and African aid organizations should replace the international organizations removed by the Sudanese government on suspicion of spying. This is regarded as a first step toward opening an international discussion on the relief work and peace in Darfur, as an alternative to the provocations of the ICC.
March 23 (EIRNS)—"We in the South African government have not invited the Dalai Lama to visit South Africa, because it would not be in the interests of South Africa," said Thabo Masebe, spokesman for South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, after South Africa's Embassy in New Delhi denied travel documents to the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama had planned to join notables, including three South African Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and F.W. de Klerk, at a conference March 27, to discuss ways of using soccer to fight racism and xenophobia, as South Africa prepares to host the 2010 World Cup.
The South African spokesman explained, "The attention of the world is on South Africa because of it being the host country for the 2010 World Cup, and we wouldn't want anything to distract from that."
China, which has been steadily increasing its economic and political support for Africa, most notably for the politically embattled countries of Sudan and Zimbabwe, had strongly urged South Africa not to provide a platform for the Dalai Lama. China's minister counsellor at the embassy in Pretoria, Dai Bing, said that his government had urged South Africa to deny the visit, warning it would harm bilateral relations.
China has showed its displeasure with France in a number of ways, after French President Nicholas Sarkozy met with the Dalai Lama.
The British press, along with pro-British organizations such as the Nobel Prize Committee, have expressed pique at South Africa's decision. The various notables have threatened not to attend the conference at all, if the Dalai Lama is not in attendance. And, without the big names, there is no press draw, and no reason for the conference at all, which would be the best of all possible outcomes.
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