ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

America’s Historic Enemies—
and Trump’s ‘Russiagate’ Enemies—
Are Behind the Escalation Against China

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s May 20, 2020 interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, by Harley Schlanger. Subheads and embedded links have been added. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is May 20, 2020.

We have had a series of crises, and there’s a definite push coming from especially the City of London and their allies in the United States to augment these destabilizations. Their anti-China campaign has escalated around the World Health Assembly annual meeting. What was going on there?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Most people cannot have but noticed that the anti-China tone has become absolutely shrill. Listen to what Peter Navarro, the Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy; Secretary of Defense Mike Esper; talk show host Tucker Carlson; and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are saying. It’s a kind of accusation which, if it all were true, would be casus belli—but it’s all lies, it’s even more casus belli.

One has to remember that a lot of the anti-China forces—it originated with British intelligence, MI5, MI6—these were the same forces that during the first three years of the Trump Administration focused on Russiagate, making accusations that Russia manipulated the 2016 election. If one looks back now, what was happening there? Nothing! It was all a big lie. What were the grounds for impeachment? And it is exactly that same apparatus that is now focussing on the effort to divide China and the United States. These forces need this kind of geopolitical manipulation to keep control. If the large powers of the world were to work together, then the role of the British imperial power diminishes into insignificance.

The coronavirus pandemic has created a total crisis. This is an enormous health crisis. The so-called “opening up” of the economy is creating all kinds of dangers, this in the context of the effort to get President Trump to go with this whole anti-China campaign.

Unfortunately, he signed a letter—it’s not clear if he really wrote it, there’s a lot of detail in there that I doubt the President would fill out himself—but the letter was sent to the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on the occasion of the World Health Assembly’s annual meeting. All of these accusations, that China covered up, that China didn’t transmit the information in time, that by delaying caused all these economic hardships, are in the letter. It accuses the WHO of being completely in the pocket of China and demands that the WHO prove, within 30 days, that it is independent of China, or else the U.S. will leave the WHO altogether, or permanently cut U.S. funding.

Now this is very unfortunate. Many of the remarks in there are factually not true. The letter quotes the British medical journal, The Lancet, having reported in the beginning of December about the virus. Immediately the editor of The Lancet said that it never had published anything like that, in fact the first report in The Lancet was on January 24. This is really an Achilles’ heel for President Trump. We need to underscore the geopolitical nature of these lies. We should remember what Pompeo said: that when he headed the CIA, they made it sort of a sport to lie, to cheat; and that is obviously what is going on right now.

This is very dangerous. If you make such enormous lying accusations against another nation, it can be seen as the kind of black propaganda released as a prelude to war. And it’s being noted in China very seriously. We should all try to do our best to undo this.

Schlanger: Is this coming from the same British networks? We see it from Pompeo and others in the U.S., but we’ve also identified British-based groups like the Henry Jackson Society. They’re continuing their escalation against China, aren’t they?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. And the aim is really, potentially, to even decouple the countries allied with the United States from those allied with China. At the minimum this is bloc building as existed in the Cold War. Under the present conditions, this would lead to a collapse of the world financial system and a hyperinflationary blowout of the system. This is playing with fire.

Schlanger: The letter from Trump was addressed to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who spoke at the annual World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization. Xi Jinping also spoke there. The U.S. was only represented by HHS (Health and Human Services) Secretary Alex Azar. What was said to address the concerns of the entire world about the coronavirus pandemic?

Zepp-LaRouche: Dr. Tedros said that this pandemic must never be repeated. It caught the whole world relatively unprepared, though all the warnings were there. He said the tools were there, but not used, due to a “temporary amnesia.” He called for that to be remedied, and called for the establishment of a world health system.

Xi Jinping made a remarkable speech. Since we all are being bombarded by anti-China propaganda, I challenge everyone to read his speech. It’s extraordinary. He says that we must think about the many lives which have been lost all over the world in this pandemic, and that we must remember that the most precious thing is human life.

I wish that the former finance minister of Germany, Wolfgang Schäuble had such a noble conception of human beings. Recently he said that it’s not the function of the state to protect life as the highest priority. So in that case, I must say that the leader of the Communist Party of China has a better standard of the value of every human life—and I’m saying this deliberately as a polemic.

Xi Jinping then proceeded to say that there must be a focus on Africa; that the world community has to help Africa in this pandemic. The world has to work together as a community for the shared future of civilization.

An effort to derail the World Health Organization meeting failed. An anti-China resolution did not succeed. Instead, a resolution was accepted, stating that after the pandemic has been successfully defeated, there should be an investigation into the origin of the virus to better understand how it functioned, to protect against future such problems, but this investigation should be done under the auspices of the World Health Organization.

Those who are falling into the propaganda that this is all Bill Gates, who’s trying to become rich—even richer than he is already—that he is behind the WHO, should stop their nonsense. There are many private firms that help finance the WHO. Does it help if the U.S. pulls out, if other governments underpay the WHO? The remedy is that governments act responsibly and supply the World Health Organization with the necessary means.

We have studied this from the very beginning. We were extremely attentive to the first information coming out from Wuhan. We compared what was put out then, by the Chinese government, with what others were saying at the time—those who did not respond correctly. Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn, said in January, “The virus will never come to Germany.” In February he said, “The German health system is perfectly prepared.” We noted this as it happened. A lot of the so-called facts in President Trump’s letter to Dr. Tedros are simply not true.

Once the pandemic is overcome, there must be an investigation. The world needs to better understand the nature of this virus, and viruses in general. The present world health system can and must be improved. But it should be done in a cooperative spirit, in the spirit of a shared humanity and not as a part of a confrontation and geopolitical attacks.

Schlanger: It seems as though some of the discussion and the proposals that were adopted at the World Health Assembly were along the lines of your call for a global effort to improve health service. Where do we stand on a vaccine? There’s a discussion of the U.S. “Warp Speed” program. What do you make of that?

Zepp-LaRouche: We have to see. It’s good to call on all labs to rapidly work on vaccines, and it’s also important that the President of the United States is taking a leading role in mobilizing resources. But I must warn against rushing certain parts of the process. There are many new labs which have promised vaccines soon. A vaccine, especially one that will be used by the entire world population, is something that has to be tested at the highest standards. China has said it will provide the whole world with a vaccine as soon as it is developed there. There must be a cooperative approach.

This is such a big threat to all of humanity. The best practice would be for the United States, the Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and others to work together. The more time that is lost in finding an adequate vaccine, the greater number of people will die.

President Trump is being put under enormous pressure from the effects of the pandemic. There are incredible economic consequences. The Federal Reserve just said that the collapse of the U.S. economy in the second quarter will be 30%; unemployment is going up. The fact that several people tested positive and became sick with coronavirus, in and around the White House, has created a very high-pressure atmosphere for President Trump. I think anybody who is interested in solving humanity’s problems should make their voice heard. This witch-hunt against China, the McCarthyite style of arresting Chinese scientists, or even American scientists with Chinese backgrounds, is really extremely dangerous and foreboding. It has to be stopped.

Schlanger: This started before the coronavirus. Marco Rubio, Senator from Florida, whom Trump had called “little Marco,” has now taken over the Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s directly collaborating with the Henry Jackson Society in the anti-China campaign. A lot of this is going on in the background. Where do you think U.S.-China relations will go, and what’s the view in China?

Zepp-LaRouche: That’s probably the most important strategic question, because if the two largest economies—the previously strongest economy and the rising economy, which after all, has 1.4 billion people—work together, you can solve almost any problem in the entire world; if they clash, it could lead to the destruction of all of humanity. In China, people are extremely aware of what’s going on.

There are many articles in China warning of a new McCarthyism in the United States. The Two Sessions meeting starts in China on May 21. It’s a meeting of the legislative body, called the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. These two bodies have put the U.S.-China relationship on their agenda. We have to see—maybe we’ll get some clarity on what China is intending to do in response to this McCarthyism coming from the United States from that meeting.

Many people don’t understand China. They have prejudices. They don’t make the effort to find out what makes this country tick. Let me open a small window, which should give you some insight. CGTN, the official Chinese TV network, has started a series called “Decoding the Future,” scheduled to air at the start of these Two Sessions. The first episode is The Power of Artificial Sun: Fusion.

It’s about the EAST program. EAST stands for Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, a magnetic fusion energy reactor, located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, where about a year ago they succeeded in confining a plasma at a temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius. That is six times the temperature at the core of the Sun. They were able to confine that plasma for more than 10 seconds, a world record. So, China is right now the world leader in fusion research, and is also participating in the ITER [International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor] program in Cadarache, France, in which 35 countries are participating.

Fusion is revolutionary. Once a breakthrough is made and commercial use of fusion power begins, it will provide energy security not only for 1.4 billion Chinese, but for the whole world for millennia to come. And that is why China right now is bringing the best minds of the world together to quickly get such a result. They say that fusion is as important and as great as man’s landing on the Moon. People who know China’s fusion program will recognize it as exactly what the fourth point of Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws is all about, namely, that we have to have international cooperation for a crash program for fusion power, that we need a new platform of the fusion economy, and that we need international cooperation in space exploration. And that is the way to go!

I’m absolutely sure that the offers from China for all nations to cooperate in these programs are still on the table, and if we are to avoid a clash that could lead to World War III, it has to be in this kind of visionary cooperation for decoding the secrets of the future of the universe and our human civilization, that we will get out of this terrible crisis. I think this is very inspiring.

And if some people think this is “Communist China” doing that—well, maybe there is something to this approach which is right! People should not just say “Communist China….” If they’re going to get a breakthrough in fusion and they put an absolute priority on that, maybe there is something in their policy which is right. I just want to put this out.

Central Banks Want To Take it All

Schlanger: And then you contrast that with the insanity of the Green financial bubble, which seems to be the approach that came out of this Merkel-Macron session to discuss the financial crisis in Europe. This is BlackRock, the equity firm, the speculation firm, to which the Federal Reserve handed the right to determine who gets the funds to engage in speculation, and they’re behind the Green financial bubble. What happened with Macron and Merkel? And is Europe fully committed to this Green policy?

Zepp-LaRouche: Under this Macron-Merkel deal they want to buy €500 billion worth of bonds, supposedly financed by taking this money from the financial markets. But then it’s supposed to be paid back through the EU [European Union] budget—so it’s not really a grant, because if the EU budget is supposed to finance it after three years, it will be paid by the taxpayers. So the southern Europeans, who are all very happy, saying, “This is a grant”—it’s not. It’s basically just another effort to keep the banking system afloat.

This deal is opposed by Austria, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden. And important people within the CDU [the German Christian Democratic Union] are calling on all CDU Members of Parliament and of the European Parliament to prevent it from happening, so I don’t think it’s necessarily agreed that it will go anywhere. But one should always keep in mind that this is happening in the context of the EU Commission having hired who but BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, to write up new legislation to integrate the Green Deal with the general EU program.

Now you can hire the Devil to do your job, because you have now the EU Commission being run by BlackRock and the Federal Reserve having hired BlackRock to manage their $4 trillion program to keep the banking system afloat. So BlackRock is de facto running the financial policies of the United States and Europe. And it just happens to be that that is exactly what was discussed last August at the big meeting of bankers and central bank governors, which takes place every year in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That is where the central bankers, especially the then Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, and Michael Bloomberg, and BlackRock and others, put out the line that there needs to be a “financial regime change,” that practically the power has to go entirely to the central banks, and it is they who will run the international financial system.

What you see here in action, is exactly that. And given the fact that Carney and Bloomberg are at one with this Green Deal agenda, does not bode well at all. So, if they succeed in imposing the Green Deal on top of the physical economy, already extremely weakened by the pandemic, you will have a collapse of Europe and the United States as industrial powers. You cannot do that.

I think you have to contrast that with the opposite approach taken by China with the fusion crash program. We have to do everything to change what is happening here, and that is why the Schiller Institute and our associates in the United States are working on a crash program for a completely different approach: To respond to the pandemic and other critical problems with a program for 1.5 billion new productive jobs. [That jobs program, in eight chapters, is in this issue of EIR.]

Schlanger: Let me just remind people who don’t remember, that Carney and BlackRock worked out a compact among leading banks by which they said they will not make any credit available to any bank or any corporation which is still engaging in creating a “carbon-footprint.” In other words, they’re forcing the credit to go into the Green financial bubble.

You’ve mentioned that we’re about to put out a program to create 1.5 billion jobs, with the emphasis on science and research and development investment. This is what we have to emphasize, and our supporters have to promote the LaRouche Four Laws and especially the idea of Hamiltonian credit: That is the complete opposite of this Green New Deal, and is the only way to get out of this crisis.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. People should just step back and look at the situation that is now becoming obvious, as a result of this pandemic. The pandemic spread and the lockdown affected some European countries more than others, but also the United States very severely, and it’s ongoing. But much, much worse was the effect on the so-called developing countries, which unfortunately are not so developing at all, because it hit what is generally called, in a nefarious way, the “informal economy.” But that is just a PR word for the fact that it’s a shadow economy: It’s people working from hand to mouth, who have no resources, who have no benefits, no social security, no health system, and when they are locked down, they are in danger of dying of starvation within days!

That is exactly the warning put out by David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program, who said that the ongoing crisis of agriculture, the collapse of the farm sector in the United States and in Europe, the shutting down of major meat-packing plants, in which people who are living and working in slave-labor conditions—immigrants—became infected because the working conditions were so bad. The farmers have had to “euthanize”—this is a terrible word to even use for animals—they had to kill tens of millions of hogs, chickens, bury them, instead of processing them for food.

This is leading to an interruption and collapse of the supply chain, while, at the same time, as Beasley is warning, we are looking at the potential for a famine of “biblical dimensions,” where the danger is that up to 300,000 people per day could die of hunger in the short term!

That is completely insane, and that, in part, is the result of the neo-liberal policies that denied development of the developing countries for the last 50 years at least—the result of an absolutely profit-oriented system of agriculture under the control of only five cartels. That is why the labor conditions in the meat-packing plants are so absolutely horrendous. That has to be changed.

We need to go back to family farms. We have to have a parity price for agricultural goods; the farmers have to be able to live off their work. We have to double world food production—this is a call I had already made in 2008; that the current production of 2.5-2.7 billion tons of food has to be doubled! If you consider that the world’s population is increasing and you already had almost a billion people who were already food insecure, but now are being threatened with starvation; 2 billion people not having clean water, you need to build up agriculture. If you look at the condition of the world, now is the time to completely reverse this and industrialize the developing sector.

A Call for 1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs

In the United States, that means we will have to create 50 million productive jobs in the short term. For the developing countries, we need more than a billion jobs, because you have a lot of young people, who will either die or try to migrate to the north. We must use this incredible crisis to turn things around, and do what Franklin D. Roosevelt intended with the Bretton Woods system—namely, develop the Global South, or the developing countries

This has to occur. Roosevelt, at the time of the preparation of the Bretton Woods system, said that the increase of the living standard of the whole world’s population will be the basis for stability and peace in the world, and that is exactly the task we have in front of us today. That is the life work of Lyndon LaRouche, who after all, for 50 years worked on development programs for every single part of the world:

• He worked on an Africa development program, which we published in 1976 the first time.

• He worked on an “Oasis Plan,” for the development of the Middle East.

• He worked on a 50-year development program for the Pacific Basin.

• We worked with Indira Gandhi on a 40-year development program for India.

• We worked with José López Portillo on a Latin America-wide plan for economic and infrastructure development and integration.

• A reindustrialization of the United States.

• And the Eurasian Land-Bridge, in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So for the last 50 years, LaRouche, my late husband, and the LaRouche movement, have worked on concrete development programs. We published that in 2014, as an EIR Special Report, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, with an update in 2018 by the Schiller Institute. Now is the time, under conditions of this crisis, to upgrade this program and create 1.5 billion new productive jobs, and really start a new chapter in the history of humanity. And that is what I’m calling on you to support and help us to put on the agenda instead of geopolitical confrontation.

Schlanger: And you can find the key to that on our website: Lyndon LaRouche’s four economic laws. Helga, I don’t have anything else to ask. Is there anything else you want to add?

Zepp-LaRouche: We will put under this program a petition for a world health system, a link to the video about this world health system. I would really ask every one of you to help us to distribute this petition as widely as you can—to all your social media, your email lists, your colleagues, your friends. Make it a snowballing demand, because we need a chorus of forces in the world to demand such a change in the strategic policies.

Schlanger: Helga, with that, thank you very much, and I’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week.