Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 50, December 11, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Don’t Give In to the Psywar— The Fight Can Be Won! by Jason Ross

- EDITORIAL AFRICA NEEDS YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP Urgent Appeal for Aid in Fighting the Killer Virus and Famine in Africa by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

- EIR Contents www.larouchepub.com Volume 47, Number 50, December 11, 2020

- I. Truth in Elections

- International Investigative Commission Releases Report on the Not Yet Decided 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

- A Turning Point: Fraud Evidence Pours Out in Battleground States by Barbara Boyd

- REPORT FROM PARIS After 25 Years, Release of French Documents Proves the Injustice Done to Candidate Cheminade

- What the Rejection of My 1995 Presidential Campaign Account Means Today by Jacques Cheminade

- II. Terrorist Assassination

- URGENT MESSAGE FROM HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE Assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: Is This a Trap for Trump?

- Behind the Assassination of an Iranian Nuclear Scientist: a British-Nazi Network by Carl Osgood

- III. Defeat Fascist Ideology

- CENTRAL BANK GREEN DICTATORSHIP Listen to Hjalmar Schacht, and Greta Thunberg Will Not Be Necessary by Paul Gallagher

- COVID-19 Impact Exposes the Collapse of the Swedish Model by Ulf Sandmark, EIR Bureau Chief, Stockholm, Sweden

- There Are No Limits to Growth Mother Nature Kills German Forests by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1983)

- IV. An Optimistic Science and Culture

- Chang’e-5: Bringing a Bit of the Moon to Earth by Marsha Freeman

- A Fight for Culture During the Pandemic by Jen Pearl

There Are

No Limits to Growth

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Michael Billington, Stephanie Ezrol, Paul Gallagher

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Elke Fimmen

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Richard Black, Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Rainer Apel

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EDITORIAL

Don’t Give In to the Psywar—

The Fight Can Be Won!

by Jason Ross

Dec. 1—Don’t give in! Although there is a nearly universal call from all the legacy media—including Fox—as well as such government officials as Attorney General William Barr, for President Donald Trump to accept his defeat and move on, to submit to the claims that there is “no evidence” of fraud, and that any such claims are “baseless accusations,” the legislative battle being waged in hearings in Pennsylvania (last Wednesday), Arizona (Monday), and Michigan (Tuesday and Wednesday) are bringing to light numerous direct witnesses to voting irregularities and fraud, and expert testimony as to the extent of that fraud.

The election watcher yelled at and shoved out of the room, the data analyst who has identified tens of thousands of votes cast by people ineligible to vote, the legal teams that are fighting to ensure that evidence is maintained and examined, to the volunteers staking out election warehouses, the citizens participating in rallies, the President who has no intention of giving up—will you join in expressing such a passion for defending the American republic? One of the witnesses in Michigan warned today that if the fraudulent election is allowed to stand, “we’re seeing our Republic slipping away from us.”

In Wisconsin, Trump’s campaign has filed a lawsuit to invalidate over 200,000 votes in Dane and Milwaukee counties. Arizona State Rep. Mark Finchem, who chaired the hearing in Phoenix on Monday, November 30, is calling for the legislature to retake control of the appointment of the state’s electors: “We are clawing our Electoral College votes back, we will not release them,” he said. He noted that a simple majority can call the House and Senate back, “and in a day pass a resolution, and cause those electors to basically be held. And it is binding. I’ll see you in court.” Also in Arizona, a judge has agreed to allow GOP lawyers to examine a random sampling of mail-in ballots to see whether the signatures match those in the voter registration system. And in Nevada, a judge has ordered the maintenance of records and voting machines, for inspection.

Such evidence, and the multi-faceted account brought to life at the Schiller Institute’s International Investigative Commission on Truth in Elections on November 28, must be brought to light. And the wacky QAnon-style claims introduced to discredit these efforts must be discounted as the elements of psywar that they are.

While the action of this fight appears to be located primarily on the stage of the United States, the implications are worldwide.

Will the world embrace the green, Malthusian outlook that demands energy poverty, a return of farmland to its “natural” state, the early death of the elderly (better to die by 75 says Biden’s would-be Covid commission member, Dr. Ezekiel “EZ-Kill” Emanuel), and submission to the idea that human beings are fundamentally destructive consumers of nature’s finite bounty? Will the geopolitical worldview in which one’s gain is another’s loss, be allowed to drive the NATO alliance to war against China and Russia, to prevent their rise and independence?

Or will we look to our common destiny as a spacefaring species, whose future lies not in spats on this planet, but in developing the technologies to colonize Mars and beyond, and recognizing that people of all nations, as human beings, have the innate ability to contribute to the mission of advancing human culture?

Tuesday evening, Beijing time, China’s Chang’e-5 lander touched down on the surface of the Moon, where it will carry out its mission of bringing samples back to Earth—the first such sample-return mission in over 40 years. China will be the third nation, following the United States and the Soviet Union, to have brought to Earth pieces of our celestial neighbor. This success reminds us that in times of turmoil, it is useful to reflect on what the human race is capable of. In his 1983 book, There Are No Limits to Growth—written in response to the Club of Rome’s Malthusian work of fiction, The Limits to Growth—Lyndon LaRouche touches us with a vision for the future:

Imagine Mars fifty or sixty years from now, and so imagine yourself seeing a square kilometer thickly planted with young trees, each grown already to approximately a meter in height. Is this “science fiction?” Unless we destroy civilization with thermonuclear warfare, or, alternatively, famines and pandemics caused by neo- Malthusian policies, between A.D. 2030 and 2040, there should be a significant beginning of large-scale colonization of Mars by humankind….

Why shall we do this? What is the purpose behind such developments of the century ahead?… “Because it is there?” For sake of curiosity, love of adventures?…

The most profound thinkers among scientists will direct this space effort to a religious purpose, a purpose consistent with St. Augustine’s emphasis upon insertion of the Filioque into the Nicene Creed.

Mankind is unique. The same creative powers of mind which enable mankind to increase willfully the potential relative population-density of our species on Earth by three orders of magnitude, are a creative power to discover, ever more perfectly, that lawful composition of the universe by which the universe as a whole is governed….

What endures is our contribution to the advancement of culture … an increase in the creative powers of mind of those who come after us.

What can you do today to contribute to this universal mission?

EDITORIAL

AFRICA NEEDS YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP

Urgent Appeal for Aid in

Fighting the Killer Virus and

Famine in Africa

by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

Leader of the LaRouche movement in South Africa

Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

---------------------------------------------

Dec. 5—Today, I write not as a representative of my country, but on behalf of all Africans, especially those who are dying or are about to die in the millions from the twin killer scourges of COVID-19 and the equally terrible killer, starvation.

Nearly two months ago, I appealed to the American President, Donald Trump, that he mobilize the full resources of his powerful nation, including the great power that is the American military, to bring the necessary aid to Africa to deal with the onrushing mass deaths that these twin crises are bringing to my continent. Only that type of mobilization, led by the American Presidency, and joined by the other great nations of this planet, including President Putin’s Russia and President Xi’s China, has the potential to reverse the greatest threat of genocide faced by Africa in this century.

Already, then, the unreported and under-reported deaths from the virus were mounting, as could be expected on a continent suffering from decades of under-development imposed by the Anglo-American global financial elites and their murderous allies among the African leadership.

The ultimate salvation of Africa lies in the adoption of the plans and programs for development proposed by the greatest man of the recent century, the late physical economist Lyndon LaRouche, and his wife and chairman of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche—programs that will finally bring an end to the decadent imperium of the Brutish Empire, and its City of London and Wall Street satrapy.

In repeating the warnings of the Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP) and Trump friend, Mr. David Beasley—that unless food were brought to people who needed it, as many as 300,000 a people a day would soon be dying—I was indeed trying to shock people into sanity, out of their often narrow-minded concerns of their personal present, to impel them to act and to support bold action by President Trump.

South Sudan is one example of the hunger in Africa. There, 6 million of the 11 million people are hungry. But it’s much worse than that. Twenty-three percent of children under 5 are suffering from acute malnutrition. Many of them will die unless they can be reached with food. Many of the survivors may still suffer permanent mental impairment. But all of the major roads in a large part of South Sudan are highly insecure and are currently closed. There are only 280 km of paved roads to begin with, in this country the size of France. So an extraordinary logistical capability is called for.

There are many other hunger crisis areas in Africa—northern Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, northeastern Nigeria, a part of North Sudan, Zimbabwe, and southern Angola, to mention a few.

So far, my appeal, although repeated at the end of October, and despite the strong support of Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche and her newly-formed international Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, has gone unanswered by the powers who must act, most notably President Trump.

While I understand Mr. Trump’s necessary focus on the recently conducted fraudulent election, which the global elites have used to anoint their chosen empty suit, Joe Biden, as the President-elect, President Trump must act decisively on these matters, if millions of Africans are not to die.

The President is still the President, no matter what the fake-news media and the murderous establishment says.

• President Trump has the power to declare an emergency, and to give America’s farmers the mission of raising the food that Africa needs.

• President Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, has the power to order the U.S. military, whose civilian command he recently seized from the proponents of perpetual war and death, to use its resources in concert with the WFP and allied agencies to get the food to where it is needed, even in remote areas, where the starvation conditions are already acute.

• President Trump can also make available as rapidly as possible supplies of vaccines and antivirals to Africa, at no cost.

• President Trump can order the U.S. military to assist in the distribution of anti-COVID medicine and related medical equipment and supplies, and call up an army of American volunteers, especially young people who can be trained to help.

• President Trump can show that black lives matter, not just in American cities and in the face of police violence, but also in Africa, where millions face death already and millions more will.

Mr. President: We need you to act as President right now. Time is running out. Hear my appeal and call on Presidents Putin and Xi to help solve this greatest humanitarian crisis of all time. You are the only hope for people on my continent whose cries for help have fallen on deaf ears. Greatness beckons you.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com Volume 47, Number 50, December 11, 2020

Cover This Week

NASA/Apollo 17

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THERE ARE NO LIMITS TO GROWTH

2 EDITORIAL

Don’t Give In to the Psywar—The Fight Can Be Won!

by Jason Ross

4 AFRICA NEEDS YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP

Urgent Appeal for Aid in Fighting the Killer Virus and Famine in Africa

by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

I. TRUTH IN ELECTIONS

7 Statement of the International Investigative Commission for Truth in Elections

12 A Turning Point: Fraud Evidence Pours Out in Battleground States

by Barbara Boyd

17 REPORT FROM PARIS

After 25 Years, Release of French Documents Proves the Injustice Done to Candidate Cheminade

19 What the Rejection of My 1995 Campaign Account Means Today

by Jacques Cheminade

II. TERRORIST ASSASSINATION

22 URGENT MESSAGE FROM HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE

Assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: Is This a Trap for Trump?

22 Behind the Assassination of an Iranian Nuclear Scientist: a British-Nazi Network

by Carl Osgood

III. DEFEAT FASCIST IDEOLOGY

28 CENTRAL BANK GREEN DICTATORSHIP

Listen to Hjalmar Schacht, and Greta Thunberg Will Not Be Necessary

by Paul Gallagher

37 COVID-19 Impact Exposes the Collapse of the Swedish Model

by Ulf Sandmark

43 There Are No Limits to Growth

Mother Nature Kills German Forests

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

June 1983

IV. AN OPTIMISTIC SCIENCE AND CULTURE

52 Chang’e-5: Bringing a Bit of the Moon to Earth

by Marsha Freeman

56 A Fight for Culture During the Pandemic

by Jen Pearl

I. Truth in Elections

International Investigative Commission Releases Report on the Not Yet Decided

2020 U.S. Presidential Election

The International Investigative Commission for Truth in Elections met on November 28 in a hearing sponsored by the Schiller Institute to hear testimony regarding irregularities and charges of voting fraud in the U.S. Presidential election. The following is the statement issued today by the distinguished panel of jurists. A number of the members of the Commission also issued additional, individual statements of their findings, which are included here after the joint statement.

Dec. 5, 2020

Statement of the International Investigative Commission for Truth in Elections

Commissioners:

1) Marino Elsevyf (Dominican Republic): Attorney-at-law; member of the 1995 Martin Luther King International Tribunal.

2) Simón Levy (Mexico): Doctor of Law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); former Under-Secretary of Tourism of Mexico.

3) David Meiswinkle (United States): Attorney-at-law in the state of New Jersey.

4) Juan Francisco Soto (Argentina): Constitutional attorney; legal counsel to Yacyretá Binational Entity (Paraguayan-Argentinian Yacyretá Dam).

Witnesses:

1. William Binney

2. Harley Schlanger

3. Col. Richard Black

4. Sen. Mario Scavello

5. Bennie Smith

6. Leah Hoopes

On Saturday, November 28, 2020, a virtual meeting was held on Zoom with a group of attorneys and legal experts who served as Commissioners in order to hear testimonies of six witnesses to alleged election ballot fraud concerning the recent U.S. elections, held on November 3, 2020, which included a record number of mail-in ballots sent before the election began.

Witnesses presented testimony regarding the different problems and incidents that they were aware of that occurred in the recent general election, as well as their insights into those problems.

In summary: The witnesses recounted a host of what they understood to be violations of election law and of equal protection under the law concerning the fundamental right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.

From their observations, they believe the election law was violated and that the massive violations could have been the result of an organized and orchestrated plan to violate election law, especially in swing states, and to unfairly and illegally alter the outcome of the election, including but not limited to the following examples:

1) The Smartmatic and Dominion companies were reported to be owners of voting machines and software that were used to alter the vote and direct that vote in favor of the Democratic presidential candidate, according to testimony presented to the Commission. Testimony was given concerning fraudulent voting results involved with the use of these particular machines in Venezuela and the Philippines, and that the Commissioners were informed that these vote tallying machines were banned from use in elections by such countries as Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and Great Britain. Electronic fraud was alleged particularly in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

2) William Binney, the former technical director of the National Security Agency, testified about the security problems involving the vote tallying machines, and spoke about the evident inconsistency, in one case, of having 100,000 votes in Philadelphia which were stated to have been counted at 3:00 a.m., all for Joe Biden. Binney asserted that he believes that this anomaly cannot possibly be explained without recognizing the strong possibility of the existence of fraud.

3) Bennie Smith, a voting machine expert, testified that algorithm programs were used in voting machines which cause the fractioning of the vote in favor of Democratic party candidates, thereby violating the principle of “one person, one vote.”

4) Former Virginia State Senator Colonel Richard Black, USA (ret.) stated that the circumstances surrounding the U.S. elections and the planned protests that accompanied the elections were similar to the Arab Spring protests, and government changes in the Far East and Eastern Europe.

He also highlighted the arson of St. John’s Church, a few feet from the White House, the undermining of Presidential authority, and the media’s praise for the turbulence and insurrection.

He also noted articles published in Defense One magazine, where retired officers practically called for a coup against President Trump and his removal from the Presidency if he did not accept the current election result.

Col. Black emphasized that, in his experience as a former state senator, the vast majority of voters who indicate their preference in the category of President, go on to fill out their choices for the various other categories on the ballot. Therefore, the unusually large number of ballots that were filled out only for the office of President, but which left the other lines empty, seemed implausible. This indicated to him the existence of massive fraud, which made a Democrat the winner for President, but which made Republicans victorious throughout the rest of the ticket, including the election of congressmen, senators and state and local officials.

5) Harley Schlanger, a spokesman for the Schiller Institute, testified about the reported electrical blackouts in the early morning hours of the elections, which affected the voting machines. He also referred to reports of improper linking of voting machines to the internet, as well as ballots cast with missing signatures and without verification of the same. He highlighted the developments in Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona, where narrow margins of victory for Biden were reported.

He further spoke about the close business and political connections between Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, the Chairman of Smartmatic’s parent company SGO, and the billionaire financier of the Arab Spring, George Soros. He also stressed further the fingerprints of Wall Street, the City of London and the “Deep State” as players in this election.

The significance of so-called “glitches” was also discussed, and that “glitches” were actually indications of vote fraud opportunities in the software, as were the existence of backdoor access to the machines.

6) Leah Hoopes, a Republican Committeewoman and poll worker in Pennsylvania, testified that starting at 7:00 a.m. on election day, many polling centers had no Republican observers present. She observed that many voting machines did not provide receipts to voters, after they cast their ballots, exercising their right to vote. She said that she had seen between 50,000 and 70,000 unopened ballots without a chain of custody. She also stated that she felt intimidated and very angry about the inability to exercise the right to vote. She stated that, as an observer, she was kept 20 feet or more away, and could not even see, and therefore was unable to challenge the ballots from where she was located. She stated that scanners were not working and that votes were being counted for two-and-a-half days in a back room without observers present to see how the ballots were being handled.

7) Pennsylvania state Senator Mario Scavello testified that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had no problems with their previous voting machines, but that the state’s governor nevertheless decertified the voting machines this year and forced the adoption of new, problematic voting machines on Pennsylvanian voters. He said that those machines are a suspected source of fraudulent voting. This 2020 general election is the first time the new voting machines were used.

8) Mexican citizen Daniel Marmolejo, a journalist, in the course of asking a question of the witnesses, spoke about the importance of scanners in creating a voting record and the vulnerability of electronic voting. He made a reference to the electoral crisis in Mexico in the 2006 elections, which involved fraud against Andrés Manuel López Obrador, currently the President of Mexico.

The Commission of attorneys and legal experts had the opportunity to question each witness concerning their testimony. The legal battle that is currently being waged in the courts of swing states was taken into consideration by the witnesses, and they expressed serious concerns over violations of election rights law, and questioned whether the Federal Election Commission would investigate fraud.

Finally, all the participants and the members of the Commission stated their appreciation of the Schiller Institute’s efforts in organizing this hearing on the 2020 electoral crisis in the United States.

The Commission heard testimony from six credible witnesses and concludes from that testimony the following:

1) The U.S. Presidential elections held on November 3, 2020, appear to have had serious irregularities, especially in key swing states, which raise legitimate legal and civil questions regarding the violation of both Federal and state election laws.

2) The Commission recommends that evidence of voter fraud must be specified in each state, whose validity must be determined in part through forensic tests, audits of voting machines, expert testimony, eyewitness accounts, and examination and cross examination of witnesses in the courts.

3) There must be a determination by the courts as to whether the alleged fraudulent votes which apparently occurred were so significant and appreciable, that they could have altered and impacted the results of the election sufficiently to make that election null and void in those states where the manipulation or alteration of the vote occurred.

4) The competent committees should be called into session in each of the state legislatures where there were reports of serious irregularities. Votes cannot be validated where there is a “reasonable doubt” that they may have been fraudulent. Furthermore, it is a Constitutional responsibility (cf. Constitution of the United States, 1787) that falls to each of the states, to arbitrate with all means at their disposal in order to protect votes cast according to the will of the voter.

5) There must be a federal criminal investigation into the possibility of a conspiracy to undermine the Presidential election of 2020, not only by domestic and internal interests who may have been involved, but also by the possible connection to foreign agents and or countries that would trespass on the sovereignty and freedoms of the United States and its citizens.

Some of the questionable voting-day practices which were mentioned during the witness testimony, and which should be investigated, include:

1) Third parties voting on an untold number of unlawfully acquired absentee mail-in ballots with no signature verification.

2) Republican challengers denied the right to observe and monitor voting.

3) Republican challengers denied access to monitoring of absentee votes.

4) Ineligible ballots counted.

5) Lack of signature verification.

6) Receiving absentee ballots not requested.

7) Remote access to voting machines.

8) Remote troubleshooting of voting machines.

9) Back door possibilities on those machines.

10) Lax control of memory cards.

11) Early processing of absentee ballots.

12) Absentee ballots never requested.

13) People moved out of state voting.

14) The integrity of the voting machines and the manner in which the votes are counted.

15) Scanners not working.

16) The influence of the news media.

17) The influence of social networking platforms.

18) The influence of George Soros, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, and others.

19) The influence of Wall Street, the City of London and the “Deep State.”

Statement of

Marino Elsevyf

International Investigative Commission for

Truth in Elections

Dec. 5, 2020

After listening to the testimony and assessments at the virtual hearing of the International Investigative Commission for Truth in Elections held on November 28, 2020, sponsored by the Schiller Institute, I would like to state my individual opinion regarding the crisis in the United States in the aftermath of the Nov. 3, 2020 elections.

The American people have been tampered with and frustrated by electoral manipulation, while exercising their right to vote and casting their ballots at the polls, where there is reasonable doubt of fraudulent results coming from the companies that provided the voting machines and software (Smartmatic and Dominion). The electrical blackout that occurred in the middle of the night, affecting the counting of votes, as well as the consistent complaints about the possible use of algorithms to divert electronic votes, are also of concern.

This is a long-standing practice of which Lyndon LaRouche was also a victim in his candidacies in the Democratic Party primaries. He was also targeted by the media, and state and federal officials, who have privatized the electoral process in the United States and subjected it to the control of supranational private interests committed to globalization and turning the American political parties into private clubs, in order to hand-pick their own associates who best suit their global strategic interests.

We are reminded of the example of Tennessee, the home state of the then-presidential candidate Al Gore, and the treatment given supporters of LaRouche in January 2000. Only 2,500 signatures were needed to place Lyndon LaRouche on the ballot, and yet local officials refused to certify the signatures. The same thing happened in Connecticut, and in Michigan, Arizona, South Carolina and Utah, where they not only privatized the elections but also the rights of Americans to choose a candidate.

Today the victim is President Donald Trump himself, who has seen the country mobilized around countless organized mobs and protests, in a strategy ordered by the financial elites who have desperately taken sides to avoid free, fair and democratic elections, respecting the electoral rights of the American people.

Now, in the middle of this great public health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has triggered the most serious economic crisis since World War II and the 1929 depression, the economic forces of what were once Venetian groups are today found in the casinos of Wall Street and the City of London, and who are ensconced in the media and on social networks that control the private information of citizens in their privacy, these forces have divided the American people in a radical way.

Our legal opinion is that, in each of the states where there is evidence of manipulation of the elections through the voting system and mail-in ballots, the vote count must be verified in accordance with the electoral laws of the American people. Where significant vote fraud is found in states, those elections must be annulled. This may well alter the preliminary results of the present American elections, since there are reasonable doubts which require the investigation of electoral crimes.

Statement of

David R. Meiswinkle

International Investigative Commission for

Truth in Elections

Dec. 5, 2020

1. I, David R. Meiswinkle, an Attorney at Law in the State of New Jersey since 1989, was asked by the Schiller Institute to be a member of a panel of legal experts and attorneys to hear witness testimony concerning perceived violation of election law pertaining to the 2020 General election.

2. I was joined on the panel by three distinguished legal experts.

3. We listened to the statements of seven witnesses who made specific references to numerous actions which they considered violations of election law.

4. I was involved in this proceeding as a private citizen and an attorney at law, not as an expert in election law.

5. I have, however, had the experience as a private attorney of overturning a Primary election by proving in a State court the fraudulent use of absentee ballots.

6. I have also been involved in a number of General elections as a candidate, which required the notification of the State Attorney General during the election seeking his assistance because of major outrageous violations of election law by the opposition. and which resulted in Federal lawsuits.

7. The evidence presented to the Commissioners was not sworn to under oath, but the tenor of the witnesses and information conveyed appeared to be sincere, consistent and credible. Some questions were asked of each witness after they gave their presentation.

8. The bottom line for myself is that the witnesses appeared to be in agreement that serious and multiple violations of the election law occurred which were related to the 2020 General election.

9. There was also a consensus that this appearance of impropriety must be investigated and challenged.

10. I am not partisan to any political groupings for the purpose of my involvement in this proceeding, but I am dedicated to the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights and the necessity for free elections and the importance and sanctity of the vote in preserving and protecting our freedoms and democracy in the United States.

11. Both my private and professional opinion concerning the witness testimony is that there is a serious appearance of impropriety and unlawful conduct surrounding the 2020 General election which has been raised by credible witnesses that needs to be further investigated and challenged in the courts on both a State and Federal level.

Statement of

Juan Francisco Soto

International Investigative Commission for

Truth in Elections

Dec. 5, 2020

We have heard very clear testimony about different ways in which the U.S. legal electoral system was altered and violated in the November 3, 2020 elections, which allows us to assert with conviction that massive fraud occurred, and that therefore President Donald Trump won the elections. Now it is up to the relevant Constitutional authorities to address these matters.

In complying with the wise provisions of the 1787 Constitution of the United States of America, whose Article II, Section 1 states: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector,” those states must bear in mind the wise Constitutional guarantee that they cannot deprive citizens of their right to hold property (in their capacity as taxpayers who indirectly, through their representatives, paid for Smartmatic and/or Dominion election software and machines) nor their freedoms (to freely elect their representatives and to guarantee the protection of the vote) without respecting Due Process of Law, as required by the 14th Amendment, Section 1: “… nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” We highlight the last part of this Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which also implies an urgent call to the courts with Federal jurisdiction to guarantee compliance with the laws that protect all citizens under conditions of equality before the law.

Therefore, the Federal justice system and each of the aforementioned States must submit to the principle that guarantees that each of its citizens has certain basic guarantees, in order for the result of this electoral process to ensure fair and equitable treatment for all voters. This right means that citizens who report fraud must be heard before the proper courts, and have the opportunity to provide the evidence they consider relevant. The same holds for all the state legislatures, which are also obligated to authorize the procedures for receiving all testimony and evidence.

Commissioners (clockwise from upper left): Marino Elsevyf, Simón Levy, David R. Meiswinkle, and Juan Francisco Soto.

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A Turning Point: Fraud Evidence Pours Out in Battleground States

by Barbara Boyd

EIRNS/Stephanie Nelson

“A new American Revolution is underway in which resolute citizens ... will overthrow that oligarchic superpower ... the British Empire.” Shown, a pro-Trump rally against vote fraud, Washington, D.C., November 14, 2020.

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Dec. 2—If you try to find out what is happening in the various lawsuits in the battleground states and in the battleground state legislatures concerning the ballot fraud coup of November 3, 2020 and continuing, it is not an easy task. Solid investigations take time and thought. Witnesses have to be coaxed out of fear and come forward when they know they will be doxed, harassed, and threatened. The President’s countercoup has been taking place amidst the four-year sustained coup against him, which now involves complete and total censorship of any positive news about him and harassment and threatened violence against those supporting him or simply stating what they have seen.

C-SPAN

Attorney General William Barr.

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) is sitting on its hands with Attorney General Bill Barr issuing a statement December 1, equal parts lawyerly and cowardly, saying that fraud significant enough to overturn the election has not been found to date. When the President’s lawyers shot back that not one of their witnesses had been interviewed, Barr hastily shot back, saying the DOJ is and would be investigating.

Yet, despite this, in the past few days huge progress is now being made, both in the lawsuits and in efforts to have Republican legislators recognize the massive fraud and act accordingly in directing their electors in the Electoral College vote for president. Moreover, given the nature of the explosive disclosures by whistleblowers and witnesses over the past few days, there is little chance that this battle will ever be ceded, even if full exposure of the fraud extends beyond the January 20 inauguration date of the fake President Joe Biden.

A new American Revolution is underway in which resolute citizens are moving to educate themselves, to become the 21st Century Latin Farmers, who, like their forefathers, through superior intellect and strength of character, will overthrow that oligarchic superpower known as the modern British Empire, creating a new birth of freedom. There is no turning back now.

State legislatures, beginning with Pennsylvania on November 25 and followed by Arizona on November 30 and Michigan on December 1, have heard massive evidence of fraud from witnesses—fraud of such significance as to change the outcome of the election in the President’s favor. The Michigan hearings will continue in the State House on December 2. Now citizens are demanding that the state legislatures move to instruct their electors to the Electoral College to cast their votes for Donald Trump, and in Pennsylvania such an effort is actively underway. Lawsuits are moving forward in Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. Citizens continue to rally in the streets and at state capitals in major numbers and to flood their legislators with hundreds of thousands of calls demanding that they stand up for the Republic and recognize President Trump’s election victory.

In addition to censorship, defamation, and threats, an aspect of the psychological warfare against the President and his supporters involves British and American intelligence assets planting false evidentiary trails and leading honest citizens down internet rabbit holes of unending, fruitless, and impotent speculations.

C-SPAN

Attorney Sidney Powell has filed significant lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia.

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Typical is the explosive claim of potential electoral interference by China and Iran, found in Sidney Powell’s otherwise hugely significant lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia. Amidst well-documented incidents of ballot stuffing and documented incidents of vote rigging involving Dominion Voting Systems, an anonymized affidavit from a U.S. government cyber expert claims that internet traffic has been observed between Dominion and servers in Serbia, Iran, and China. There is no demonstration that any of this “traffic” had anything to do with Dominion’s operations in Michigan or Georgia on November 3.

Systems Prone to Fraud

There is no question that the three major voting systems employed in the United States—Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic—and Smartmatic software, in various older and other installed iterations, are uniformly prone to fraud and hacking. That has been proved repeatedly already by white-hat hackers and credible investigators such as Harri Hursti. A Hursti affidavit, attached as an exhibit in the Powell lawsuits, details multiple vulnerabilities in the Dominion devices as installed in Georgia for the November 3, 2020 election. That affidavit should, in and of itself, trigger a forensic audit of the Dominion system without reference to Hugo Chavez’s activities, 14 years ago, in Venezuela, in 2006.

There are no real security checks on administrators in any of these systems and there are multiple ways in which votes can be fixed and switched. A forum conducted by the Schiller Institute on November 28 featured a thorough exposition on this subject in the context of the ongoing coup against Donald Trump. Testimony in the Pennsylvania legislature’s hearing included the fact that multiple keys to the entire system had been stolen prior to the election, and Gregory Stenstrom, a cyber security expert, reported that forty-seven USB cards from the election had gone missing. He also witnessed a vendor of Dominion machines and local election officials download and update counting machines, in violation of election system protocol, and the commingling of machine jump drives, also in violation of election protocols, rendering audits impossible without direct forensic access to the machines.

All of these systems are owned by private hedge funds with multiple interfaces with the world’s oligarchy. Therein lies the problem. They will sell their intellectual property to virtually any state actor. Local and national governments, aside from the black operators of the intelligence community, are at their mercy. Governments, other than the intelligence agencies which use them, do not regulate these systems in any respect and, in the various U.S. states, the operators of these systems, rather than state election officials, are actually on the ground, directing and implementing the counting of the vote.

With respect to Dominion, there are numerous claims out there that Eric Coomer, a developer and patent holder on Dominion devices and systems used in the November 3 election, participated in an Antifa phone call in which he bragged that he fixed the November election. The seriousness of this claim requires immediate FBI investigation.

WEF/Jakob Polacsek

“Lord Malloch-Brown, the man who runs George Soros and who has played a role in running fraudulent elections worldwide through operations of private companies.”

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A Replay of the Fabricated ‘Russian Hack’?

It is this context which calls into question the sudden and strange emergence of the Communist bogeyman in Powell’s pleadings. For example, the most notable name concerning Smartmatic software, the target in Powell’s lawsuit, is Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, the man who runs George Soros and the man who has played a role in running fraudulent elections worldwide through operations of private companies. Hugo Chavez, upon whom the Powell lawsuits lavish way too much attention, was nothing but a British agent, deployed to secure the hot drug money so essential to the continuing functioning of the City of London.

The intelligence community of the United States, through the National Endowment for Democracy, the military, the CIA, and the NSA, has repeatedly rigged results in foreign countries. Ask yourself this question: If Mr. Chris Krebs, the now-fired director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at Homeland Security, was charged with hardening all election infrastructure in every state against foreign attacks, doesn’t this government agency and others it works with have far more knowledge about how to synchronize an attack across six U.S. states, all of which use a mix of different voting processes and methods, at about the same time, than some foreign actor?

DHS

Chris Krebs, former Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He was fired by President Trump on November 17, 2020.

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Could it be that we are witnessing, in some of these false trails, the same players who fabricated the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016? Why, if we can show that every tool employed by Five Eyes in regime-change operations worldwide, including military-grade, full-spectrum information warfare, has been turned against Donald Trump for four years, does anyone believe that the final stage of the coup, a fraudulent election, would feature an exotic foreign Communist conspiracy?

A sane investigation of cyber manipulations which took place on November 3 would start right here, focused on that Ninth Circle of Dante’s hell known as the Washington Beltway. What are the current tools used by our own agencies to rig foreign elections? What does the NSA say about activities taking place across the internet and otherwise on November 3?

Massive Evidence of Fraud Grows Daily

With respect to ballot stuffing, the amount of evidence is now exploding in the courtrooms and in the state legislatures. In Wisconsin, for example, the recount just finished. You probably read the derisive accounts in the media: Trump Campaign paid $3 million but came out on the short end because Biden gained votes. Turns out, to the contrary, that the Wisconsin statutory scheme allows immediate court challenges based on the recount. Some 220,000 ballots have been challenged based on the recount and will now be subject to a lawsuit, filed December 1, with the Wisconsin Supreme Court seeking to overturn the election.

At a press conference of the Amistad Project on December 1, a postal contractor said that he had driven a truckload full of filled-in and completed ballots, numbering in the range of 188,000 to 288,000, from New York to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where the trailer carrying the ballots disappeared. Other postal workers in Wisconsin and Michigan told of an organized scheme to back-date late-arriving ballots and to simply throw Trump ballots out.

In Nevada, a state judge in the First Judicial Circuit in Carson City has granted discovery to the Trump Campaign’s lawyers in a lawsuit focused on the counting procedures and machines used for counting mail-in ballots in Clark County. Marc Elias, the author of the wide-open fraud scheme implemented in Nevada—mailing mail-in ballots for the first time to all registered voters automatically without request—and his partner at Perkins, Coie, have now come into this lawsuit full force to block any further discovery and kill the lawsuit. An evidentiary hearing is scheduled in the case on December 3.

The Nevada lawsuit documents how a faulty and malfunctioning artificial intelligence scanner was used to scan signatures to validate mail-in votes. Nevada law requires that humans make ballot determinations. In Clark County, election personnel were instructed to validate signatures which the machine rejected if even one letter seemed to match a signature on file with the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles. As the result of a failure to update registration rolls and resultant fraud, the dead and people who had moved out of state voted in the November 3 election in numbers sufficient to change the result.

In Michigan, the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit with the Michigan Supreme Court on November 27, seeking to invalidate the Michigan results based on widespread ballot stuffing in Wayne County and other Michigan locations. Many of the affiants in this lawsuit testified in a special hearing before the Michigan Senate on December 1, which continues in the House of Representatives December 2.

The Michigan Senate testimony and the petition before the Michigan Supreme Court detail stunning ballot fraud which occurred in Detroit and environs, fraud so pervasive as to require overturning the election. Thousands of ballots were delivered wholesale, almost all of them marked for Joe Biden, in the early morning hours of November 4. Ballots were altered and backdated to meet the statutory deadlines. There was widespread double counting of ballots.

Ballots filled out by individuals not registered to vote or lacking other critical information, if they existed at all, were counted by assigning a birthdate of 1/11/1900 to them, overriding the registration system, or by assigning the vote to a registered voter who had not voted. Military ballots, all marked exclusively for Biden, looked to be pristine and xeroxed and involved unregistered voters, a fact which was disregarded by overriding the registration logs by listing a birthdate of 1/1/20.

CC/Anthony Quintano

Mark Zuckerberg, founder, Chairman, and CEO of Facebook, Inc. laundered millions through P.I.E. Management and the Center for Technology and Civic Life.

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Zuckerberg Funding the Vote Counters

Most significantly, a firm called P.I.E. Management, owned and operated by Democratic activists, staffed and ran the vote counting. P.I.E. received funding from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who laundered more than $9.8 million through an organization called the Center for Technology and Civic Life, and then on to Michigan state operatives. More than $9.8 million in Zuckerberg money went to Michigan operatives for precisely this purpose. Michael Bloomberg has made similar donations in battleground states, in the millions of dollars, directly purchasing or placing public officials in key positions counting the vote.

This lawsuit and Sidney Powell’s separate federal suit pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, both with eye-popping incidents of ballot fraud, if fairly litigated, will change the outcome of the election.

Gage Skidmore

Attorney L. Lin Wood is challenging the Georgia election results, charging fraud in the counting of absentee ballots.

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In Georgia, where control of the United States Senate, in addition to the presidency, is at stake, two significant lawsuits are now on appeal to the 11th Circuit. Famed attorney L. Lin Wood is challenging the Georgia result based upon the fact that a legal settlement between the Democratic Party and the State opened the floodgates of fraud in counting of absentee ballots. The legal agreement violated mandatory state statutes enacted by the legislature as to how counting was to take place. In Sidney Powell’s lawsuit, in which Wood is co-counsel, an appeal has been taken to the 11th Circuit after Judge Bratton only allowed voting apparatus inspections in three counties. Both lawsuits feature massive lawyering up on the Democratic side, including lawyers from Perkins, Coie.

There is a futile state recount taking place in which there is no real audit of absentee ballot signatures so that, in effect, the same tainted ballots are being run through the machinery once again. Even in that bizarre process, Dominion Voting Systems has come up short in Fulton County, where Atlanta and the major vote fraud operation sit. Dominion’s server employed in the recount reportedly crashed and even Brad Raffensperger, the timid and Stacey Abrams–dominated Secretary of State, called Fulton County’s election officials “totally dysfunctional.”

A separate lawsuit was filed in state court on November 30, seeking to overturn the election based on the fact that an estimated 20,312 out-of-state persons voted and thousands of absentee ballots were simply counted, contrary to state law, without adequate verification of signatures or identities.

CC/Nydia Tisdale

Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, has called Fulton County’s (Atlanta) election officials “totally dysfunctional,” and has announced an investigation.

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A major campaign to escalate the fraud has been undertaken by the national news media and its Democratic allies with respect to the Georgia U.S. Senate races. Thousands of absentee ballot applications have been sent to out-of-state voters, and Hollywood celebrities and others are moving to the state in order to cast votes fraudulently for control of the U.S. Senate. Raffensperger, the impotent Republican Secretary of State, has announced an investigation, but this is really a national civil rights conspiracy to dilute the vote which should be investigated and prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

In Pennsylvania, two lawsuits challenging vote fraud and the ballot stuffing involved in absentee and mail-in balloting have been rejected by the notoriously partisan Pennsylvania Supreme Court and are now on their way on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Pennsylvania legislators are seeking to reclaim control of presidential electors following a hearing conducted by Republican senators and representatives on November 25 demonstrating fraud, particularly in Philadelphia.

Arizona has a pending state court lawsuit seeking a forensic audit of mail-in votes. Here signatures did not match, but the ballots were counted anyway. The Amistad project says 75,000 Republican votes were not counted. Ballots which the machines could not read were duplicated by election workers and sent out, unsecured, to a printing company which, with no observers present, printed new ballots which the machines could read in Maricopa County. The software reading these electronic ballots flipped votes from Trump to Biden. These were among the dramatic irregularities cited in state legislative hearings held with the Trump legal team on November 30, and legislators are now moving to investigate the fraud and, hopefully, to appropriately instruct the state’s presidential electors based on that result.

REPORT FROM PARIS

After 25 Years, Release of French Documents Proves the Injustice Done to Candidate Cheminade

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Jacques Cheminade, speaking at a Schiller Institute Conference in Morristown, New Jersey, February 16, 2019.

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Oct. 24—In a clear phase-shift preceding the French presidential elections of May 2022, major French media outlets—including the widely heard radio stations France Info, France Culture, and France Inter—have at long last provided detailed coverage of the way the French Constitutional Council (the highest judicial authority of France), during the summer of 1995 and through October of that year, validated the absolutely fraudulent presidential campaign account filings of several leading candidates in the just concluded May 1995 election, while rejecting without grounds that of Jacques Cheminade, the candidate of the Solidarity and Progress Party, thus denying him the mandated reimbursement for his campaign expenses.

The event that precipitated the unraveling of this fraud, after 25 years of secrecy, was the release of the records of the proceedings of the Constitutional Council into the public domain. On Monday, Oct. 19, the very first day of their “becoming public,” a special ten-person journalistic team, the “Inquiries and Investigations Department” of Radio France, sent journalists to the National Archives to go through the records.

What they found confirmed everything presidential candidate Cheminade had declared 25 years earlier: The official result of the 1995 election was a mixture of fraud, injustice, and crime. The newly elected French President, Jacques Chirac, as well as his main contenders, Edouard Balladur and right-wing populist Jean-Marie Le Pen, all had several manifestly illicit transactions (both in terms of income and spending) registered in their campaign records, and yet they all saw their campaign funds validated, and were therefore reimbursed for nearly all their campaign expenses. On the other hand, the campaign accounts of Cheminade, a friend of Lyndon LaRouche and an enemy of the financial oligarchy, who was viewed as an “outsider,” were invalidated and rejected under a pretext invented for the occasion, deliberately creating enormous financial problems, political isolation, and then eventually personal bankruptcy for Cheminade.

Both Chirac and Balladur flooded their accounts with “funny money,” i.e., huge amounts of cash from unknown and very dubious origins and used subterfuge to hide the real costs of their campaigns. Balladur, the incumbent Prime Minister, deposited four bags containing 10.25 million francs into his campaign account in the form of 500 Fr banknotes, claiming they had been derived from the sale of campaign T-shirts, whereas nobody would ever use such a large denomination banknote to pay for such an item.

It has been revealed in the last several years that Balladur, as Prime Minister, had channeled funds coming from kickbacks in weapon sales by the French government, financed from secret accounts of the French secret services, into his own political campaign. On August 27, 2020, an AFP wire reported that Balladur “will stand trial next year over allegations that kickbacks from an arms deal with Pakistan helped finance his failed 1995 presidential bid.” Balladur had been charged in May 2017 with “complicity in misuse of corporate assets and concealment” regarding the sale of submarines to Pakistan in 1994. He was then Prime Minister.

CC/Mbzt

The French Constitutional Council rejected, without grounds, the financial filings of Jacques Cheminade in his campaign for President of France in 1995, while validating the illicit transactions of his opponents.

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According to the press reports, the records of the Constitutional Council confirm the frenetic effort of its president, Roland Dumas, an intimate of Françcois Mitterrand, to validate, at any cost, Chirac’s election. While four of the nine members of the Council were in favor of rejecting Balladur’s campaign account, Dumas, with his vote against rejection, made the decisive move, arguing that if Balladur were rejected, it would be impossible to claim Chirac’s campaign account was clean. Le Pen’s account, which was also completely irregular, was validated for the same reasons.

For Cheminade, however, there was nothing of the sort. As France Info reported: “Upon arrival, Jacques Cheminade was the only candidate whose account was effectively rejected that year.” Those checking his account for the Constitutional Council claimed that, because he received a large loan from a campaign supporter, at zero interest, it was instead a contribution—a totally illegal assumption—and also claimed, without evidence, that he might have tried to “invent ‘fictitious’ expenses and revenues to increase the state reimbursement to which he was entitled.”

France Info added: “But they did not have absolute proof of this. While they have regularly argued that ‘the candidate must have the benefit of the doubt’ in the cases of the Chirac and Balladur accounts (which they accepted), the ‘Wise Men’ decided to sanction the ‘minor’ candidate. To do so, they had to find a legal basis. They alleged that the absence of interest on a loan of 1.4 million francs could be deemed an illegal donation.”

Archives Nationales

Official records just released at the French National Archives confirm that the official count of the 1995 election was a mixture of fraud, injustice, and crime, as Cheminade has been saying for 25 years.

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Cheminade responded to these reports in his editorial for the monthly Nouvelle Solidarité, and in a longer, more detailed statement, translated from the French in this issue of EIR. While the revelation of this state scandal is a healthy start, the media are not yet ready—as should be required at this dramatic historical juncture—to debunk entirely the fraudulent allegations against Cheminade.

What the Rejection of My 1995 Presidential Campaign Account Means Today

by Jacques Cheminade

The editors of EIR draw our readers’ attention to the fact that the revelations with respect to the presidential candidacy of Jacques Cheminade in France in 1995, have surfaced at a time that the “party system” of France—as also those in the United States and much of the rest of Europe—is losing credibility. The Cheminade case therefore erupts in the middle of an overall power crisis where many bubbles are coming to the surface of very muddy waters. Cheminade is a longtime representative of the LaRouche philosophical outlook in France. He is the president of Solidarité et Progrès. This is an edited translation from the statement that first appeared on Cheminade’s website on October 23.

EIRNS/Christopher Lewis

Jacques Cheminade (right) campaigning for President of France in April 1995.

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At first glance, it may seem out of place to mention the rejection of my campaign account for the 1995 presidential election right now, when the abominable murder of a teacher in France is on everyone’s mind. However, the link between what is happening today in France and those pathetic sessions of the Constitutional Council of July-October 1995 is very real—because the door opens to barbarism when the highest court of a country flouts the rule of law. That is what did happen then, and it is now indisputably established by the Council’s archives that were just recently made public 25 years later.

Not only did the councilors validate the manifestly irregular accounts of Edouard Balladur and Jacques Chirac, but they also rejected mine using a fallacious legal argument and, by their own admission, “without material evidence.” Jacques Robert, then a member of the Council, acknowledged in Le Parisien of December 1, 2011 that “raison d’etat” had prevailed over the law.

Thus, on May 4, 2011, President of the Council Roland Dumas, in the TV program Face aux Français on France 2, justified validating Balladur’s and Chirac’s accounts, and rejecting mine, by explaining shamelessly that I had been “rather clumsy” and the others “clever.” A strange concept of justice, but even more so, a false argument: The two right-wing candidates had been protected by a rogue system, not “clever” at all. Even Jean-Marie Le Pen’s account was validated, despite its “lack of documentation,” no doubt because he was considered to be part of the same political world into which it was impossible for me to be integrated.

Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

Roland Dumas (left), then President of the Constitutional Council and an intimate of François Mitterrand, worked successfully to secure victory for Jacques Chirac as President of France in the election of 1995.

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Roland Dumas exhibited his cynicism, in responding to Lyon Capital’s statement, “You were carrying suitcases of cash to finance Mitterrand’s campaign,” saying, “Yes, of course.” All French people with any interest in politics know that Chirac had recourse to the same sources. Noelle Lenoir, who was then a member of the Constitutional Council, said she was “at peace with her conscience,” having voted against the validation of Balladur’s account, but she ardently defended Chirac’s accounts. Maurice Faure of the Constitutional Council had declared of Chirac’s candidacy, “We know where the money had come from,” which had caused the candidate to “soar above the authorized spending limit.” As for Noelle Lenoir, her “peace” was rewarded with a Ministry during the presidency of Jacques Chirac.

As Jacques Robert acknowledged, it was necessary to “cover up the accounts” and find a legal expedient. Like crude mafia men laundering drug money accounts, this is what the councilors did during several sessions.

Left: Dutch National Archives; right: UN/Michelle Poirž

Édouard Balladur (left), Prime Minister of France, 1993-1995, channeled funds from government weapons sales kickbacks into the campaign of Jacques Chirac (right), to ensure Chirac’s victory in the 1995 presidential election.

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Before the accounts of Chirac and Balladur were whitewashed, Cheminade’s was unanimously rejected. The Council, in its decision against the latter, asserted that the absence of interest rates on loans made by private individuals was suspicious, and thus re-qualified those loans as donations, thus making Cheminade’s accounts exceed the legal limit of donations.

The legal argument was so wobbly that Olivier Schrameck, the Council’s General Secretary, insisted that the case should not be referred to the courts in order to avoid the smell of a scandal. Indeed, the provisions of Article 1905 of the Civil Code define a loan by “the fact that it must be repaid,” without regard to whether interest payments are involved. Thus, the Council violated the rules of the Civil Code, against Cheminade.

The Dishonesty of the Press

The reports of some of the Radio France team of journalists indicate an intention to harm Cheminade, raising a suspicion concerning allegedly unjustified loans to the Cheminade campaign coming from an account in Switzerland. These were in fact legitimate funds, from the inheritance of a campaign organizer. And the journalists added that the candidate had “invented” expenses, while the invoices being questioned had all been validated by the communication to the Council (in a letter dated September 22, 1995), of a copy of the various printed documents. The conclusion of Jacques Robert and Maurice Faure was reported in an article of the French magazine Les Inrocks of February 23, 2012: “They rescued their own reputation at his expense.”

Even France Info and France Inter had to recognize this report: “While they have regularly argued that ‘the candidate must get the benefit of the doubt’ in the case of the Chirac and Balladur accounts, the Wise Men have decided to sanction the ‘minor’ candidate.”

There is much more than that, however. The “minor candidate” was not just a scapegoat in order to cover up for the major ones. Throughout my campaign, I had been defamed by the media, and I have a large file—available to anyone—which demonstrates that. The Superior Council of the Audiovisual Media on April 24, 1995 acknowledged, with figures in hand, that my media access amounted to far less time than other candidates, and the National Campaign Control Commission on September 20, 1995 observed that I had been subjected to “unequal treatment.”

Footprints of a Political Mafia

All throughout, the French state legal apparatus insisted that I personally had to reimburse the state’s advance of 171,325.46 euro to me for my campaign expenses, which advances had been given to all of the other candidates. The government finally recovered the funds by withholding reimbursement of my 2012 campaign account, which at that time had been declared perfectly in order and validated! Such a relentless pursuit can only be understood if one examines what I never ceased forecasting at the time: the collapse of an international financial system leading to social looting in which almost everyone was then complicit. This is where we are today.

I am not posing as a personal victim, but rather accusing the political mafia that caused this disaster. The rejection of my campaign account is revealing. It is our economic roadmap for the future that is essential. The members of the Council were, at the time, only more or less conscious expressions of the City of London and Wall Street system. The issue at stake here is not only what would have happened had my candidacy been dealt with fairly, but what we all must do for the common good today, and what we must do for the good of future generations.

Watch the videos and Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche

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II. Terrorist Assassination

URGENT MESSAGE FROM HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE

Assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: Is This a Trap for Trump?

Wikimedia Commons

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s leading nuclear scientist, assassinated on November 27, 2020.

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Nov. 30—The brutal assassination of Iran’s leading nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, must be seen for what it was—an act of terrorism. This terrible development, which the Iranian leaders blame on Israel (which has assassinated other Iranian scientists), has the potential to function as a trap for President Donald Trump, who is now battling to prove the massive vote fraud which was used in an effort to steal his reelection to a second term.

Although the planning and approval of the assassination are still unclear, some Iranians and such fake-news media as the New York Times in the U.S., suggest that the U.S. approved the killing, since it was the U.S. which carried out the January drone murder of Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

President Trump has called for ending the evil “regime change” wars launched by Presidents Bush and Obama, and has recently removed military commanders who refused to carry out his orders to withdraw U.S. forces from these wars. The greatest danger from the recent assassination is that the U.S. could be drawn into a war with Iran, which could devolve rapidly into a new world war with Russia and China.

To prevent such a disaster for civilization, Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute call upon President Trump to accept the call from President Vladimir Putin to convene, immediately, a summit of the leaders of the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. The summit would address the war danger, as well as the simultaneous crises of COVID, onrushing famine in Africa, and the global economic and financial breakdown crisis.

Whether President Trump succeeds is proving the vote fraud or not, he is the President until January 20, and the danger faced by mankind today can not wait.

Behind the Assassination of an Iranian Nuclear Scientist:

a British-Nazi Network

by Carl Osgood

Dec. 4—The November 27 assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist, Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was the most serious escalation between the U.S. and Israel on one side and Iran on the other so far, since the U.S. assassination by drone of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani on January 3, 2020. In her message included above, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has warned that this terrorist action could be a trap aimed at drawing President Trump into a disastrous war.

While details of the attack on Fakhrizadeh’s three-vehicle convoy are not clear—the latest Iranian account has it that the attack was done by remote control—it is clear that the attack was the result of a longstanding and meticulously planned operation that was expertly executed. As of this writing, no one has claimed responsibility for the attack. Iranian suspicions immediately fell on Israel with possible U.S. involvement. While Israel has made no official statements on the assassination, Israeli officials have also done little to deflect the suspicions. Fakrizadeh did not have a high public profile but was long suspected to have headed Iran’s nuclear weapons program, known as Project Amad, from 1989 to 2003, when, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, it had been closed down.

After news of the assassination broke, the Times of Israel republished the speech that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had delivered on April 30, 2018, the day that Israel revealed the Iranian nuclear archive that the Mossad had claimed to have stolen from a warehouse in Tehran. In that speech, Netanyahu pointed to a directive signed by Fakhrizadeh:

Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh. His directive says: “The general aim is to announce the closure of Project Amad,” but then he adds, “Special activities will be carried out under the title of scientific know-how developments.” And in fact, this is exactly what Iran proceeded to do. It continued this work in a series of organizations over the years, and today, in 2018, this work is carried out by SPND, that’s an organization inside Iran’s Defense Ministry. And you will not be surprised to hear that SPND is led by the same person that led Project Amad, Dr. Fakhrizadeh. And also, not coincidentally, many of SPND’s key personnel worked under Fakhrizadeh on Project Amad.

Fakrizadeh was the head of the SPND when he was killed.

Also making no official comment on the killing of Fakrizadeh was the Trump Administration. The New York Times, however, cited three unnamed administration officials, including two intelligence officials, confirming that Israel was behind the assassination:

Some American officials argued that the death of Mr. Fakhrizadeh, the latest in a string of such mysterious killings of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, would send a chilling message to the country’s other top scientists working on that program: If we can get him, we can get you, too.

MSC

Mohamed Javad Zarif, Foreign Minister of Iran, called on the international community to condemn the assassination of Fakhrizadeh.

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In Iran, great anger erupted in response to the terrorist assassination. Many people saw Fakhrizadeh’s killing not just as an attack on one man, albeit one of Iran’s greatest scientists, but as an attack on Iranian science itself. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamed Javad Zarif wrote this in his Twitter account:

Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This cowardice—with serious indications of Israeli role—shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators. Iran calls on int’l community—and especially EU—to end their shameful double standards & condemn this act of state terror.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani vowed:

The Iranian nation is so courageous and zealous that it won’t allow the crime to remain unanswered, [but will respond] at the appropriate time.

Other Iranian officials noted that Fakhrizadeh had been playing a key role in Iran’s battle against the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed about 50,000 Iranians.

Israel’s Bloody History of Assassinations

The “string” of mysterious killings that the Times referred to is the violent killings of about a half dozen nuclear scientists in Iran in the 2010-2012 time period, all also attributed to Israel. Israel’s history of assassinating those it considers enemies of the Israeli state goes back, in fact, much further, to at least the early 1960s.

A lengthy article in Ha’aretz published in March 2016, provides a window into one of these cases and offers some useful insight.

The Ha’aretz account focused on a German rocket scientist by the name of Heinz Krug who was working for Egypt as part of an Egyptian project to develop advanced weapons for its military. One day, September 11, 1962, he went to his office in Munich but never came home.

ANeFo

Otto Skorzeny, a Nazi Waffen-SS Lt. Colonel during World War II, was hired by the Mossad to kill the German rocket scientist Heinz Krug in 1962.

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The story, as retailed to Ha’aretz by anonymous Israeli intelligence veterans and reflected in archival documents, was that Krug was the victim of an Israeli assassination plot in which the trigger-man was none other than Otto Skorzeny, who had been Hitler’s favorite commando during World War II. The hiring of Skorzeny by the Mossad seems bizarre on its face. The sources for the Ha’aretz article chalk it up to pragmatism, however.

Despite the two sides’ distaste for each other—among other things, Skorzeny was a notorious killer of Jews—the Mossad concluded that Skorzeny had the skill set it needed, and Skorzeny was reportedly thrilled at being given a challenging mission.

IDF

Rafael Eytan, one of Otto Skorzeny’s controllers.

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One of Skorzeny’s controllers, the Ha’aretz report revealed, was Rafael Eytan, a veteran of decades of dirty Israeli intelligence operations, including kidnappings, murders, and terrorist attacks, and a long-time close associate of Ariel Sharon. Eytan was also suspected of running the spy ring that employed Jonathan Pollard. “Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eytan confirmed to the authors of the Ha’aretz report.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Jabotinsky

Benjamin Netanyahu is a direct descendant of the Sharon-Eytan networks. The Likud Party of Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu today, originated with Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was such an admirer of the Nazis that Israel’s founding statesman, David Ben-Gurion, called him “Vladimir Hitler.” Netanyahu’s father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, was the personal secretary for Jabotinsky. Both the Nazis and the Zionists of the Jabotinsky variety came from the same mother, uniquely identified as the British Empire by EIR founder Lyndon LaRouche.

Left: Government Press Office of Israel; right: Chatham House

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current Prime Minister (right), is a true continuation of the avowed fascist Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky (left), a product of the Russian pogroms and the Russian secret police, the Tsarist Okhrana.

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In an April 22, 1997 interview with the weekly radio program EIR Talks,, LaRouche characterized Netanyahu as entirely a British asset:

Entirely. Even though he is largely financed, he and his goons, out of Brooklyn, New York. But, nonetheless, as Yitzhak Rabin emphasized just before he was assassinated by these goons, and as Mr. Rabin’s widow has emphasized again recently: In the press in Europe, the report is, this week, that the recent experience in dealing with this rogue, Netanyahu, has persuaded the White House—I haven’t verified this myself, but the report is interesting because it responds to reality; I don’t know what the President believes, but I do know what Netanyahu is, and the report says that the President has discovered what Netanyahu is. The argument is that the President has come to understand that Netanyahu is a true continuation of the avowed fascist, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the one who was referred to by a former prime minister of Israel, as “Vladimir Hitler.” Now, Jabotinsky is key in understanding Netanyahu, as is Ariel Sharon.

Jabotinsky was a product of the Russian pogroms, and the Russian secret police, the Tsarist Okhrana. He was turned up as a British agent in the context of the Young Turk operation, which was entirely a London-run operation, through, probably assisted through the B’nai B’rith International lodge of Salonika in what is now Greece. And the Young Turk government was actually a creation of the British Intelligence-controlled International B’nai B’rith lodge in Salonika. Now, this lodge had a publication, which was named in French, because it was the diplomatic language of the time, Jeune Turque. The editor was Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky was associated with a fellow, who was later upgraded, Volpi di Misurata, famous as the finance minister who put Mussolini into power. And through Volpi and company, Volpi di Misurata, Jabotinsky, who was the editor of the Young Turks’ ideological magazine in an earlier period, moved on, to become closely associated with Mussolini, and became an avowed Fascist, and the leader of the Fascist movement within Zionism.

Netanyahu is a continuation of that today. You see it in his style. If you understand fascism, particularly the Mussolini variety, the Jabotinsky variety of fascism, you’ll see that Netanyahu’s policy, his style, his way of making decisions, his duplicity—all of these objectionable, obnoxious qualities that make him civet cat of the region. These are truly echoes of the fascism of Mussolini, and Mussolini’s client, Jabotinsky. And if people understand that, they’ll understand why Jabotinsky was called by a prime minister of Israel, Vladimir Hitler, which for any person in the Jewish community, particularly the Zionist community, is very strong language, but very appropriate language. He was Vladimir Hitler.

Timeline of Escalation: From the U.S. Presidential Election to the Killing of Fakhrizadeh

Nov. 11—The Associated Press reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found that Iran as of November 2 has a stockpile of 2,442.9 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, up from 2,105.4 kilograms reported on August 25. The IAEA reports that Iran is also continuing to enrich uranium to a purity of up to 4.5%, higher than the 3.67% allowed under the deal, but nowhere near the level needed for weapons. IAEA Director General, Rafael Grossi, says in a statement to the UN General Assembly that the agency “continues to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement.” Grossi later notes that the uranium enrichment level in advanced centrifuges at Iran’s underground nuclear facility in Natanz is not significantly different from what the IAEA last knew about it. In other words, Iran is not keeping any secrets from the agency.

Nov. 12—Elliott Abrams tells Bloomberg TV that more sanctions will be imposed on Iran before January 20 and also dismisses concerns that Trump may be planning to launch military action against Iran, saying the so-called “maximum pressure” economic strategy had created “an enormous amount of leverage” for the next occupant of the White House.

Nov. 14—The New York Times reports that Abu Muhammed Al-Msari, said to be the second ranking leader of al-Qaeda, was gunned down in his car on a street in Tehran last August. The M.O. of the assassin, the Times notes, was similar to that used in the killings of a number of Iranian scientists in the 2010-2012 time period. In Tehran, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh denies the story.

Nov. 15-16—Iraqi Defense Minister Lt. General Juma Anad Saadoun, travels to Tehran on an official visit with a large entourage with the obvious intention of developing Iraq-Iran military relations. According to Iranian news reports, Saadoun meets with all of the top Iranian defense and security officials to discuss a range of topics relating to defense industries, security of the common border, exchange of experiences, training programs, and holding joint military exercises. Saadoun reportedly voices his country’s willingness to take advantage of Iran’s valuable military experience and its technological capabilities in the defense sphere. Plans to sign a military and defense cooperation agreement between Iran and Iraq are revealed.

Nov. 16—The New York Times publishes a story, citing unnamed sources, claiming that on November 12, Trump met with his national security team to seek options for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. A range of senior advisers reportedly dissuaded the President from moving ahead with a military strike, the Times said. While elements of the story may be true, it has the whiff of being a provocation itself, like an earlier Times story from late June claiming that Russian military intelligence was paying bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Foreign Policy reports that the Trump Administration, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is mulling designating the Houthi movement in Yemen (Ansarallah) a terrorist group. This would have detrimental effects not only on efforts to end the war but also on humanitarian relief efforts in areas controlled by the Houthis. The motivation for such a decision would be not so much the Houthi drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia, which are responses to the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen, but rather the support provided to the Houthis by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), already designated by the Trump Administration as a terrorist group.

Nov. 18—Iranian Government spokesman Ali Rabiee issues a warning against potential U.S. military strikes on Iran. He says he doesn’t believe the U.S. wants to “cause insecurity in the world and the region [by its actions]. Any action against the Iranian nation would certainly face a crushing response.”

Israel launches a series of air strikes against presumed Iranian targets in Syria. They include an Iranian headquarters at Damascus International Airport and a “secret military site” that served as a “hosting facility for senior Iranian delegations when they come to Syria to operate” and for the 7th Division of the Syrian armed forces, says a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces.

The U.S. Treasury Department announces new sanctions against the Mostazafan Foundation of Islamic Revolution, a foundation controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as against the Iranian minister of intelligence and dozens of other entities and individuals.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issues a press statement, “The Importance of Sanctions on Iran,” bragging about the destructive effect sanctions have had on Iran’s economy, and vowing that the Maximum Pressure campaign will not be relaxed.

Nov. 19—Pompeo lands in Israel for a two-day visit. He meets with Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi on the Golan Heights, making very inflammatory statements regarding Israel’s rights in these places. Netanyahu gushes praise for the U.S. Maximum Pressure policy on Iran. Pompeo in turn thanks Israel for its support of the policy. Pompeo vows that the U.S. will not relax the sanctions on Iran.

Nov. 20—Associated Press, citing Iraqi sources, reports that Iran has put its allies in the region on alert not to do anything provocative during the next two months, until, as they expect, Joe Biden takes office.

Nov. 21-22—A pair of B-52 bombers takes off from Minot, North Dakota for a round trip flight to the Persian Gulf and back. The fact that the bombers can be followed on popular flight tracking websites suggests that the mission was a show of force and a message to Iran.

Pompeo lands in Baghdad, Iraq threatening more U.S. “measures” against Iraqi Shiite militias aligned with Iran. He does not specify what those measures might be. He makes no reference to the Iraqi defense minister’s visit to Tehran in his public statements. Both Iran and Iraq are currently in serious negotiations with China on “oil for infrastructure” agreements as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. It is likely that Pompeo, aligned with the most fanatic wing of the British and the Likud, is even more interested in sabotaging these developments than countering Iran-backed militias. (See “A Solution Is Possible—Iran, Iraq and the World in This Moment of Crisis” by Hussein Askary, in the January 10, 2020 issue of EIR.)

In an apparent message to Biden, Netanyahu declares during a speech in southern Israel that there must be no return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Nov. 25—Reuters reports that Elliott Abrams told a virtual Beirut Institute event the previous day that the Trump administration plans further pressure on Tehran, with sanctions related to arms, weapons of mass destruction, and human rights: “We will have next week, and the week after, and the week after—all through December and January—there will be sanctions that deal with arms, that deal with weapons of mass destruction, that deal with human rights.... So this will continue on for another couple of months, right until the end.”

Nov. 27—Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is assassinated.

Schiller Institute International Online Conference

December 12-13

Save the Date and Register Today!

The World after the U.S. Election:

Creating a World Based on Reason

The unprecedented battle over the recent U.S. election is not only a domestic American event, but an event of the highest international strategic importance. The world must understand: This battle is the choice between World War III or peace. The two days of dialogue and deliberation will include these panel discussions:

Panel I. “Hang Together, or Hang Separately”: Free and Sovereign Republics, or Digital Dictatorship?

Panel II. Escaping the Danger of World War III: A Strategic Order Based on the Common Aims of Mankind.

Panel III. Overcoming the World Health Crisis and the Hunger Pandemic: Thinking on the Level of the Coincidentia Oppositorum.

Panel IV. A Human Future for Youth: A Beethoven-Driven Renaissance of Classical Culture.

III. Defeat Fascist Ideology

CENTRAL BANK GREEN DICTATORSHIP

Listen to Hjalmar Schacht, and

Greta Thunberg Will Not Be Necessary

“If the Germans had listened to Schacht, Hitler would not have been necessary.”

—Keynesian economist Abba Lerner, Dec. 8, 1971

by Paul Gallagher

CC/BoE

Former Director of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has proposed a “global digital synthetic currency controlled by central banks” to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

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Dec. 1—Eighteen months ago EIR published my comment on Facebook’s quixotic plan to launch a private, global digital currency called the Libra [(“Another Silicon Valley Monster: Facebook Wants to Coin World Money,” EIR July 5, 2019]). My purpose was to explain that Facebook would not be allowed to do this; it was floating a trial balloon for what was really coming, digital currencies issued and controlled by the world’s biggest central banks.

Quoting from that article:

Since the 2007-08 global financial crash, the biggest central banks have revived their dream from the 1930s: To get fingertip control of the amount of currency in circulation, not allowing banks to increase it by lending or paying interest, nor governments by new issues. They could then, their theory goes, absolutely control inflation and deflation, ignoring the factor of economic productivity. They have intensively studied digital currencies for that purpose, and the added purpose of automatic tax collection.

As Lyndon LaRouche wrote:

Whenever the state fails to exert a monopoly of responsibility for issuance and regulation of its currency, disaster ensues. Basic economic infrastructure, such as large-scale water-management, general transportation, production and distribution of energy, general communications, and essential urban-industrial common services, must be either provided by the government, or provided by governmentally-regulated utilities. Otherwise, disaster ensues. On this point, President George Washington and other leading architects of the 1787 Federal Constitution were emphatically persuaded, and rightly so.

Six weeks after this July 2018 comment in EIR, came a fateful speech by then Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole, Wyoming conference in August 2019. Carney proposed that a “global digital synthetic currency controlled by central banks” would, sometime soon, have to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Sure enough, Carney’s stated purpose was creating and controlling inflation. For a decade since the global financial crash, he said, the central banks had tried to “inflate the dollar” and failed. A “synthetic” currency controlled by central banks could be inflated at will—or so the theory goes.

Since then the big central banks, paced by the Bank of England, have moved no longer in secret but with increasingly loud, giant footfalls to carry out this scheme. At about the time of Carney’s speech, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank published a paper on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) which proposed “giving consumers the possibility of holding a bank account with the central bank directly,” This research paper first revealed the potential, that such a central bank currency issued to businesses and households would very likely cause the disappearance of all commercial banks over time, as the central bank became “a deposit monopolist.” And, “The central bank instead will need to rely on investment banks and their expertise to invest in projects by providing them [the investment banks] with non-callable wholesale loans.” So the result the study found is an economic world of central banks and investment firms only, no commercial banks.

The Boston Federal Reserve, jointly with MIT’s National Bureau of Economic Research, the San Francisco Fed, the New York Fed jointly with the Bank for International Settlements, and the Bank of England were all doing studies of the same thing.

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Loretta Mester, President of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank: The Fed is preparing digital-currency bank accounts for individuals and businesses, despite the danger to commercial banking.

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On September 23, 2020, Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank President Loretta Mester went very public with a “Payments and the Pandemic” speech to the annual Chicago Payment Symposium. She was explicit that the Fed is in preparation for creating digital-currency bank accounts for individuals and businesses, despite the danger to commercial banking. Mester was following up an August Politico interview of senior Fed economists Simon Potter and Sylvia Coronado who proposed the Fed create “recession insurance bonds” and credit them, digitally, to the public. Mester said:

The experience with pandemic emergency payments has brought forward an idea that was already gaining increased attention at central banks around the world, that is, central bank digital currency (CBDC). [It has been] proposed that each American have an account at the Fed in which digital dollars could be deposited, as liabilities of the Federal Reserve Banks, which could be used for emergency payments.

The question should immediately arise: Why couldn’t these digital dollars be used for whatever the recipients want to use them for? We will come to the significance of that.

On October 2, The European Central Bank (ECB) announced that it was conducting studies and technology experiments in preparation for deciding, by mid-2021, whether to launch an ECB digital euro, to be called the DE. By November 9, that decision had evidently already been made, as ECB chief Christine Lagarde announced that the first phase of the DE deployment would begin in January 2021.[fn_1]

In the interim, not only had the Bank of Japan announced plans for a CBDC (on October 9)—for domestic and also cross-border payments—but the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) itself took the reins of this stampede. On October 9, it published guidelines for developing CBDCs, in coordination with the Federal Reserve, Bank of Canada, ECB, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, Swiss Central Bank, and Swedish Central Bank. (Note the absence of the People’s Bank of China, a major BIS member.) CNBC’s October 9 coverage of this BIS announcement noted mildly, “But there are concerns this could leave out the commercial banks.”

And there was this little BIS bullet-point: “Currency should be provided at the minimum possible cost to the end users.” Again, a question: One will take a haircut just to use this currency? The last time the United States had currency which was not free to users, was the Jacksonian period of state bank currencies; if one gave such a bank $100 in gold for deposit and safekeeping, one received the bank’s convenient notes for, say, $96, supposed to be redeemable in gold.

A negative deposit rate on top of negative interest rates?

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Alexander Hamilton, the pioneer of the commercial bank.

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Burr’s Killing of Hamilton Repeated?

Perhaps the most important objective and consequence of the widespread imposition of central bank digital currencies would be one not suspected by many people who are watching this development. That is the elimination of commercial bank money from the economy.

Alexander Hamilton can fairly be considered the pioneer of the commercial bank—as we knew it under the regulation of the Glass-Steagall Act and similar legislation in other nations in the Bretton Woods monetary system—as well as having developed the United States Treasury, its national banks, principles of its national currency, its mint, its Coast Guard, its Bureau of Customs, etc.

In his 1790 Report on a National Bank, Hamilton promoted the benefits of then-embryonic commercial banks for the general welfare, and emphasized the importance of what he called “bank money,” in expanding credit for manufacturing and agricultural development. This is the credit Hamilton described when a bank stores one customer’s deposit for safekeeping and interest-earning; then makes it available to that depositor’s vendors, creditors, dependents, etc. as what we call today a “credit line”; while simultaneously lending out that same deposit (in bank notes) to other customers for business or farm expansion, leading to many other transactions too numerous to track.

The necessity that bankers do this prudently, because of the possibility of bank runs in temporary crises, was also pointed out by Hamilton there. The greater the capital of the bank relative to its deposits and loans, the greater safety with which it can create “bank money”; it also keeps a reserve of deposits. Not often have U.S. commercial banks as a whole put out twice their total deposits in bank credit, or even in total bank assets; and they do not come close to that now.

A Greenback, issued in 1862 by the U.S. Treasury Department.

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During Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency—the first time a U.S. administration tried direct issuance of a Greenback currency by the Treasury rather than through a national bank—Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary also issued: interest-bearing bonds which became used as currency; and what they called “national bank money.” Here nationally chartered banks issued bank money based on, and in excess of, the U.S. Treasury bonds they had bought for their capital reserves and the Greenbacks they had received as deposits.

Right now we see a dramatic example of creation of bank money in the oil-for-infrastructure agreement signed between China and Iraq, the fight for actual implementation of which is a major popular issue in Iraq wherein Lyndon LaRouche’s movement is playing a role. Under this agreement, Iraq upon selling oil to Chinese importers would deposit $1.5 billion in a major Chinese commercial bank, which would lend up to $10 billion for infrastructure projects in Iraq on that basis.

As long ago as the 1930s, the Federal Reserve and Bank of England began to study proposed means of doing away with Hamilton’s “bank money”—which is called “fractional reserve banking” by those who think commercial banks should be stopped from creating this credit channel.

LoC

Irving Fisher, author of the Federal Reserve’s 1936 “Fisher Plan,” which would have made depositing money in commercial banks pointless, except for safekeeping against physical theft.

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There was the Federal Reserve’s 1936 “Fisher Plan,” on which both the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of England did “revival” studies in 2014 and 2015 respectively. And Dallas Federal Reserve president Richard Fisher (no relation to the economist Irving Fisher of the “Plan”) published a review of it in 2005, which he headlined, “Origins of Modern Central Bank Policy.” That plan called for the Treasury to put out a large issue of new currency equaling, replacing and calling in essentially the entire circulating money supply, and to then require commercial banks to limit their total bank credit to the total amount of the new currency they had received. They could add new loans only equal to old ones repaid, or new deposits—except, of course, if and when the Treasury and Fed decided to issue more new currency. This was also called “100% reserve banking,” in opposition to fractional reserve banking.

The Fisher Plan was not implemented then. For American businesses and households trying to grow their capital or savings, the Fisher Plan would have made depositing money in commercial banks essentially pointless except for safekeeping against theft. And in lending or buying corporate bonds, the far more controlling and credit-stingy investment banks and other investment partnerships would have become dominant. But overall, the clear objective of the Fisher Plan was to give the central bank—the Fed in this case—precise control at all times over creation of credit, and creation of either inflation or deflation—Mark Carney’s dream for a global “digital synthetic currency controlled by central banks.”

The central bank, whether a “reserve bank” or even a Hamiltonian national bank, will be able to define and control the market for Treasury debt. That bank’s decision whether, and to what degree, to allow private commercial banks to further augment currency circulation and credit by “bank money,” will have fundamental effects on the potential for economic progress and the freedom of economic activity of businesses and citizens.

Since the 1930s all sorts of economic views have proliferated regarding the supposed evils of allowing commercial banks to create money—fractional reserve banking. We should not lose sight of the fact that these views directly oppose Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s principles of banking and credit.

Today, when numerous studies and comments on central bank digital currencies propose that they could act to eliminate commercial banks entirely, that should grab our attention. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve study from August 2019, and the Bank for International Settlement’s “caution” notice are representative. Top Wall Street investment banking figures are also aware that CBDCs promise a new dominance for investment banks over commercial banking.

There is the comment of Daniel Masters, recently global head of energy trading for JPMorgan Chase Bank, and now become an expert deeply involved in creating what could be called specialized “digital finance companies” or “digital investment firms” for the era of CBDCs. In a Forbes interview on October 24, Masters said:

The most interesting aspect of CBDCs is the impact they will have on commercial banks and the financial system as a whole. Today, central banks issue currency to a slew of commercial banks like Chase and Bank of America…. I think we are going into a new paradigm where central banks issue CBDCs, commercial banks cease to exist, and the service layer is filled by crazy new emerging companies…that are really getting distributed, decentralized finance done today.

These are the companies Masters and other investment bankers are “pioneering” in setting up.

And why is it necessary to do away with commercial banking and enter a completely post-Hamilton world governed by giant central banks’ digital currencies? Masters’ view:

There are some very compelling reasons for central banks to issue their own digital currencies…. Most importantly, if you take physical cash out of the system, you can enforce negative interest rates.

CBDCs are needed, then, to “enforce” the most economically, socially and demographically destructive practice in the history of banking. Embedded in this is the CBDC function of eliminating commercial banks—with their dependence on some form of positive interest on both deposits and loans—and thus eliminating the credit channel of “bank money” in the economy.

CC/Christian Wyrwa

Burkhard Balz, a German central banker: “One option to be investigated would be to allow users to hold digital euros only up to a threshold at any given time.”

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Inflating Away Masses of Debt

Central bank officials are fully aware of this threat. EIR’s Claudio Celani has reported the October 20 warning of Bundesbank exec board member Burkhard Balz, a member of the German central bank’s committee on CBDCs, that:

We must also keep an eye on the risks that could potentially come with the issuance of a digital euro, given its design. For example, depending on its characteristics as a store of value, depositors might transform their commercial bank deposits into liabilities of the central bank. This might lead to the structural disintermediation of the banking sector and, as a consequence, could potentially dampen the provision of bank credit to the economy. What if, in times of crisis, bank deposits were rapidly withdrawn and converted into a digital euro? We call this scenario a “digital bank run” [into the central bank]. The result could be the destabilization of the entire financial system.

But that is the idea. Balz added:

Therefore, we might need to consider introducing tools to ensure that a potential digital euro would mainly be used as a means of payment, but not as a store of value [i.e., forget about saving in this currency]. One option to be investigated would be to allow users to hold digital euros only up to a threshold at any given time.”

And, we could add, allow users to hold digital euros only for a limited time, by which time they must spend them or watch the central bank destroy them.

We come back, then, to Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Financial Stability Board at the BIS, and “green banking” power centers too numerous to name here, and the longest-standing and most influential “save the planet, zero carbon” environmentalist among all central bankers. His closest collaborator for years, after his radical environmentalist wife Diana Carney, has been Sir Michael Bloomberg, the anti-coal anti-Trump billionaire. Carney proposed a “global digital synthetic currency controlled by central banks” as the new world reserve currency, at a Jackson Hole meeting which otherwise heard extensive discussion of a “regime change”—central banks taking the power of spending from governments.

Gage Skidmore

Mark Carney’s closest collaborator, Sir Michael Bloomberg, the anti-coal anti-Trump billionaire.

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There is no faster way to do that, than by a global digital synthetic currency controlled by central banks.

Carney’s stated reason was to create and control price and wage inflation. Central banks issuing reserves to giant primary dealer banks—even in many QE trillions of excess reserves—only inflate the prices of the speculative assets these banks trade. But central banks issuing digital currency direct to households and businesses with the explicit demand to spend, will inflate commodity, industrial and services prices. The People’s Bank of China and the government of the city of Shenzhen are testing this process currently with 50,000 people, although thus far with very small amounts of digital money.

Remember Loretta Mester’s statement that this CBDC issuance would be “in emergencies.” One can hear the instructions:

A digital wallet has been created in the name of your family or business with currency registered to you. You, like all other residents and businesspeople, are strongly urged to spend the blockchain currency quickly, and in the following ways, to help the economy build back better from this crisis.

Fail to do so, and your new currency may disappear again.

But despite the central bank-speak about inflation being necessary to spur investment, invention, raise wages, etc., what the central banks want to inflate away—and have failed to inflate since the 2008 global financial crash—is $277 trillion in debt in the world’s economies, up another $17 trillion in the past year. It is 235% of GDP in the developing world, but 365% of GDP in the developed economies. It is impossible for corporations, in particular, to pay so much as the interest; and it is a matter of a short time until global business defaults en masse and brings down banks.

In August a large New York hedge fund, DoubleLine Investors, issued a report, “The Pandora’s Box of Central Bank Digital Currencies.” It said:

Such a mechanism could open veritable floodgates of liquidity into the consumer economy and accelerate the rate of inflation. While central banks have been trying without success to increase inflation for the past decade, the temptation to put CBDCs into effect might be very strong among policymakers. However, CBDCs would not only inject liquidity into the economy but also could accelerate the velocity of money. That one-two punch could bring about far more inflation than central bankers bargain for.

Green Death

But Carney et al. have another reason—more important to them and more deadly to us—than creating and controlling inflation. That objective is to force financial and business investment to abandon all industry related to fossil fuel production, its use for power and energy, its use in industrial and chemical processing. And compel that investment to go instead into backward solar and wind energy technologies; vast digitally-run “smart” power grids; huge battery blocks to store electricity produced intermittently and inefficiently; relatively primitive agriculture with no livestock; livestock food substitutes; “green” indoctrination films, games and simulations; robot cars and trucks, etc.

Governments are very slow to impose large carbon taxes to stop the former investments, and some governments like President Trump’s and Chinese President Xi’s have effectively fought this whole forced march to low technology and low living standards. But central banks can force private banks, financial firms and their regulators to stop traditional investments, fast.

Governments are very reluctant to provide large subsidies for the latter investments; Russia’s Putin government will not do so, for example. But CBDCs are to provide both the instant investment and the instant spending on these primitive “green” throwbacks.

Whether this drastic “Great Reset” to lower-energy and less-populous human life is allowed to take place, is the great economic question facing the world. For example, South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa’s economically most important nation, is now facing a plan for wholesale shutdown of its primary source of already-inadequate electric power—coal—by 2030, with no hope of replacement of most of it. And this is being done by international capital pulling out of building new, and even completing or maintaining existing coal-fired capacity. They are told they must pull out by financial regulators, who are given orders in turn by the central banks’ Network for Greening the Financial System, Green Finance Institute, etc. The major central banks in that Network are the ones planning digital currency with coordination by the Bank for International Settlements.

The Ghost of Hjalmar Schacht

The objective of Carney, the ECB’s Lagarde, Prince Charles, the BIS and the World Economic Forum is a so-called “Great Reset”—to zero carbon, save the planet and damn the people—using the “great pandemic emergency” and rushing it through so fast that governments and constituency organizations at any level cannot stop it.

Hjalmar Schacht (right), the first central banker whose money printing took over government fiscal spending policy.

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The only central banker in history who brought about such a rapid and complete reversal of the content and quality of economic activity, as this planned “Great Reset” or “Green New Deal” would be, was Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi head of the Reichsbank from 1933-39. Schacht no more dreamed of digital currencies than Irving Fisher, but he was the first master central bank money printer, and the first central banker whose money printing took over government fiscal spending policy to a very large degree—helped by his being Germany’s Economics Minister, as well, for the first four and a half years of Hitler’s rule.

Schacht twice dramatically changed the course of the German economy by introducing a new, central bank currency. He became German Currency Commissioner and then head of the Reichsbank for the first time in early 1924, and introduced the Rentenmark—a very-restricted-circulation currency backed by a big tax on all industrial and agricultural land and a big loan from JP Morgan Bank. This ended the 1923 hyperinflation in Germany, but caused severe economic austerity, leading to an unemployment rate of over 11% in 1929 before the Great Depression hit.

In 1933, coming back as Reichsbank chief with Hitler’s Nazis, Schacht started printing the “MeFo Bill.” This was a central bank currency, which the Reichsbank created by buying very large IOUs from a dummy company, Metall-Forschungsgesellschaft AG, or “MeFo,” formed by the biggest industrial and financial corporations. That currency was used directly for arms spending. Already by 1935, more than 40% of German rearmament spending was not part of the Nazi government budget, but came from Reichsbank MeFo bills. Hitler and Schacht had made a fast “regime change” to where the Reichsbank was dominating the government’s fiscal plans.

And by the end of 1935, German rearmament activity had exploded from 2% of GDP when Hitler and Schacht came in, to more than 20% of GDP, like a $5 trillion defense sector in the United States today. This is where the “work creation” so admired by Keynes and company was going—at first into producing ammunition, uniforms, etc., then tanks and big guns.

That is the exemplar for the unstoppable and rapid transformation to a “green economy” which is planned as the “Great Reset,” and Schachtian policies by the central banks are central to it. Thus the simultaneous appearance at the August 2019 Jackson Hole meeting, of Carney’s proposal of a central bank “synthetic currency,” to replace the dollar as reserve currency; and a proposal for a “regime change,” in which central banks would take over fiscal decisions from governments. The latter proposal was argued by four former senior officials from the central banks of Canada, France, the UK and the Netherlands, all now top executives of the huge Wall Street investment firm BlackRock, Inc.

Here is another analysis by the above-mentioned DoubleLine Investors’ economist, William Campbell:

Central banks are not stopping at the replacement of money as we have known it. In conjunction with their developmental work on digital currencies proper, monetary authorities are devising a new structure for electronic payments to sweep aside the decades-long framework for payment settlements, both domestic and international. The world’s central banks and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) envision a network of multiple cross-border payment systems featuring direct bilateral exchanges in the world’s different currencies. Such a regime would discard the decades-long mediation through the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar.” [Emphasis added]

Once again this is Schacht’s policy. Hitler’s central banker not only repudiated payments on German foreign debt; he also bypassed holding reserves of either sterling or dollars, and negotiated just such “multiple cross-border payment systems featuring direct bilateral exchanges”—they were called clearing agreements. In effect, Germany’s trading partners could not use Reichsmarks they earned by exporting to Germany, for anything except buying German goods in turn. They couldn’t accumulate a trading surplus and invest it at home. The Reichsmark which paid for oil, iron ore, rubber, etc. for Germany’s war mobilization became merely a unit of exchange. Schacht’s bilateral clearing agreements were the basis for John Maynard Keynes’ proposals at Bretton Woods in 1944 for the IMF and his one-world currency idea, the Bancor. The Schachtian clearing agreements are still praised and promoted today as good for developing nations, by Keynesian economists such as those at the Levy Institute of Bard College.

And this would be the operating method of Mark Carney’s “synthetic” world central bank currency.

EIRNS/Alan Yue

Leading Keynesian economist Abba Lerner (speaking) supported Schacht in a debate with Lyndon LaRouche (seated with pipe) in a debate at Queens College in New York City, 1971.

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Keynes and his economic co-thinkers immediately noticed and enthusiastically supported Schacht’s money printing “for work creation” in Nazi Germany. Thirty-five years later, the leading Keynesian economist Abba Lerner still strongly supported Schacht. Lerner lost a crucial public debate with Lyndon LaRouche in December 1971—after which no monetarist economist ever debated LaRouche again. The subject was President Nixon’s August 1971 action to end FDR’s Bretton Woods system, including Nixon’s wage and price controls, which Lerner supported. The leading Keynesian of that time claimed, in that debate, that “If the Germans had listened to Schacht, Hitler would not have been necessary.” But not only did Hitler listen closely to Schacht for seven years; Schacht clearly considered Hitler necessary to Schacht’s economics, because he campaigned aggressively and raised large funds for the Nazis for almost three years to bring Hitler to power.

It’s fitting to note that Schacht was actually not interested in Keynesian “work creation.” Nor did he want to create inflation. What he wanted was rapid rearmament and “recovery of German lands.” But as his central bank and “green new deal” imitators today will find, Schacht got more inflation than he bargained for. Seeing in 1937-38 that his war economy financing was creating serious inflation, he tried to talk Hitler into “pausing” the accelerating war buildup for a while, and was fired as Economics Minister.

Who Can Stop This?

Not the pandemic, but the “Great Reset” from the pandemic; not the current depressed economy, but the “Green economy” demanded by British Royals, by the cabal around Mark Carney and Sir Michael Bloomberg, the World Economic Forum; this is the real existential threat to the human race, its current population and powers. And the central banks’ “regime change” is an existential challenge to all sovereign national governments. Nowhere is this more true than with the United States government; the international reserve currency role played by the dollar was the direct target of Carney and the “regime changers” at Jackson Hole in August 2019.

Around the world, any government striving to build high-technology infrastructure to leave behind underdevelopment for industrial and agricultural progress, is compelled to fight the central banks and their “Great Reset”—look only at the case of South Africa discussed above.

The effective defense must be offense, to assert the sovereign authority of nations over central banks, as President Donald Trump only threatened to do. His pressure was enough to keep the Federal Reserve governors from joining—or even publicly speaking of—the Carney-Bloomberg Network for Greening the Financial System and its “green finance” rules, until a few days ago.

Much more is needed: cooperative action by sovereign governments to launch a new international credit and monetary system based on national banks and national currencies, and with a gold-reserve basis. A national bank in every country creates project credit on the basis of its government’s ability to issue national debt to its own citizens and institutions, and the national bank’s ability to repurpose that debt and direct new national currency to those projects.

The United States has the greatest imperative and means to take the lead in this, beginning by nationalizing the Federal Reserve to make a credit institution which serves national purposes and also cooperates with other major nations in development projects in third countries. This was the guiding purpose of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in leading the creation of the Bretton Woods credit and monetary system after World War II, through an international conference of both major advanced economies and underdeveloped nations in 1944.

From the moment London banking brought down the Bretton Woods system in 1971-73, Lyndon LaRouche organized to restore Roosevelt’s principles to new institutions, proposing many times a new Bretton Woods conference led by the United States, China, Russia and India for that purpose. Letting the “floating-exchange-rate” system of financial speculation metastasize for 50 years instead, has led to the present threat by central banks to establish an effective global dictatorship.

Economies around the world do in fact need to be rebuilt, now that the COVID pandemic has exposed the vast underinvestment, underemployment, and misemployment in them by turning it into mass unemployment and poverty. A new Bretton Woods conference of nations is the means.

[fn_1] The ECB’s patent application for the “DE,” enumerating “functions and applications,” clearly showed that the ECB would use the DE to take over functions of private banks. It lists: “Financial affairs; monetary affairs; banking services; credit card and debit card services; verification, analysis and evaluation of payment transaction data (financial services); financial information concerning foreign exchange transactions; financial information concerning currencies; issuance and redemption of tokens; foreign exchange trading operations; foreign exchange trading; money transfer services; processing of electronic payments; management of real estate assets of electronic tokens (e-wallet); financial services provided by electronic means; cryptocurrency services, namely, a digital currency or digital token, incorporating cryptographic protocols, used to operate and build applications and block chains on a decentralized computer platform and as a method of payment for goods and services.” All this from your central bank. [back to text for fn_1]

Visit the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website

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COVID-19 Impact Exposes the Collapse of the Swedish Model

by Ulf Sandmark, EIR Bureau Chief, Stockholm, Sweden

imagebank.sweden.se/Sofia Sabel

Soaring infection and death rates among the elderly receiving in-home care and in nursing homes have raised questions about Sweden’s measures to combat COVID-19.

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Dec. 1—Alarming reports from Sweden of deaths of the elderly in nursing homes and in-home care, and of the same soaring infection rates as in most other parts of Europe, have raised questions over the Swedish policy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic all along. The lack of a resolute response to the virus in Sweden has been seen as a better model to handle COVID-19 by those in Europe and the United States who oppose lockdowns, and even doubt the danger of the virus. In reality, the so-called Swedish Model for handling COVID-19 came out of bungling practices of a much wider process of collapse of the Swedish welfare state and its Swedish Model ruling system, including its lack of morality towards the elderly.

The preconditions in Sweden to stop the virus were extremely favorable in comparison with most nations in the world. Sweden’s relatively high living standard, modern health services, and low national debt should have made it possible to cope with the crisis as well as its neighboring Nordic nations of Finland and Norway have done. But the death rates in these two nations are a tenth of that in Sweden. Moreover, Sweden has a low number of persons per household and access to extra housing in the countryside for distancing.

As of November 27, there have been 6,681 COVID-19 deaths in Sweden, a country of about 10.4 million, which is 643 deaths per million. This stands in sharp contrast to 59 deaths per million in Norway, 70 in Finland, 138 in Denmark, and 183 in Germany. Sweden ranks with the other nations of high death rates: Spain with 942 deaths per million, Italy with 861, and France with 768. Belgium is very high, with 1,407 per million; the United States is 800 per million.

In Sweden, nursing homes and the elderly in general figure prominently in infection and death rates. Nine out of ten of the COVID-19 deaths are in the age group 70 years and older. A major part of all deaths—2,892—occurred in the nursing homes for the elderly. On November 24, the Health and Social Care Inspectorate (IVO) reported on critical deficiencies of medical care in nursing homes, after officials inspected the medical records of 847 of patients with COVID-19. The results show that in all Swedish regions there were cases in which the elderly had not received individual evaluations from a doctor, or even a nurse. Patients and their relatives had also not been informed about treatment or lack of it, or had not been able to influence decisions.

There was an uproar about this in the spring from health personnel, patients’ families, and professors. They reported that old people in nursing homes were not given hospital treatment nor even oxygen, when COVID-19 was suspected. Instead, they were declared dying and given only palliative care, regularly including morphine, which in the case of a lung disease like COVID-19, kills the patient.

The National Board of Health and Welfare issued an official directive to doctors recommending they not meet their patients physically, citing concern that such in-person contact could spread the virus to the elderly. This decision, however, reflects the policy of long-term neglect of the elderly in the Swedish health care system, and in Swedish culture. In this context, the no-doctor-visit concept became, in effect, a policy of triage, as the main purpose it served was to keep down the pressure on the health care system. This is part of the strategy whose intent is to “keep down the curve,” that is, to keep down pressure for COVID-19 hospitalizations, to stay below the capacity limits in hospitals. This strategy prevails in Sweden to this day.

There is now a second wave of the virus going through the nursing homes, killing the aged, and hitting hospitals. Anonymous reports from hospital staff focus on such infractions as COVID-19 patients sharing rooms with non-infected, severely ill patients. In late November, came an inquiry into the death of two patients who were infected at the University Hospital in Malmö.

British Government

Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser, recommended letting people get infected to develop a herd immunity.

CC/Frankie Fouganthin

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s State Epidemiologist, is in charge of the country’s response to COVID-19. Like Vallance, he promoted the policy of allowing the virus to spread.

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‘Herd Immunity’ Not Eradication

From the beginning, leading authorities rejected the policy of trying to eradicate the virus, or even to contain it. Despite early and continuous protests from other Swedish epidemiologists and physicians, the policy has been to learn to live with the virus, until there is herd immunity either through enough people having acquired immunity, or through a vaccine.

This is so, despite denials by the public authorities in charge, led by State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. Documentation has been provided on this by Johan Anderberg, a journalist and author, who has a forthcoming book, The Herd (Ahlander Agency, spring, 2021) on the Swedish approach to COVID-19. Anderberg provides some early email correspondence of Tegnell, in an article in Svenska Dagbladet November 11 , showing that, as the article states, “herd immunity, i.e., to accept that a part of the population will get infected, was a part of the early policy.”

Anderberg points out that the United Kingdom, in the early stage of the pandemic, had the same policy of “herd immunity” as the Swedish Model. On March 12, Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, presented the government’s policy. Vallance said that it is important to understand that this is not about preventing everybody from being infected, which is neither possible nor desirable, as you want some immunity in the population. He asserted that a level of immunity was needed to protect the UK from this in the future.

Just a few days later, the UK abandoned that strategy and implemented a lockdown.

WHO

Peet Tüll, former head of the communicable diseases unit at Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, recommended large-scale testing, contact tracing, and quarantining.

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A predecessor to Tegnell, now-retired medical doctor and expert on communicable diseases Peet Tüll, listed three alternative strategies in an email found by Anderberg. The first alternative was a total lockdown of the society for four weeks. The second was to find as many infected people as possible, trace all close contacts, and put them in a two-week quarantine. The third alternative was, “Let the contagion happen, slowly or fast, to reach a hypothetical ‘herd immunity.” Tüll recommended the second alternative and warned that the third would lead to thousands of deaths. Later the same day, Tegnell answered, “Yes. we have walked through all this and in spite of everything landed on Number 3.”

The same source reports on other leading Swedish experts also getting the same answer from Tegnell, who explained that the contagion was also already domestic—in the community transmission stage, and contact tracing was futile.

Swedish Constitutional Law

The policy of allowing the virus to spread explains the lax Swedish countermeasures. However, it must also be understood that Tegnell and the bureaucrats in charge had to consider the extreme juridical and even constitutional limits to any effective measures. A policy of lockdown is just not possible under the Swedish basic law which rules that all Swedes have freedom of movement. The Communicable Diseases Act (2004:168) emphasizes and places a responsibility on the individual not to spread disease, and only allows for isolation of infected persons. No preemptive general measures for non-infected persons are allowed, unlike in Finland, where the whole county around Helsinki could be sealed off.

Actually, the only other two laws possible to use are the Swedish Public Order Act (1993:1617) about public order and meetings, and the law regulating alcohol use in restaurants. That is why, besides regulations within institutions—allowing the banning of visits to nursing homes—the only general restrictions against COVID-19 were limited to a maximum limit for public meetings—to at first 500, then 50 persons, which closed most theaters and cultural events but not shopping. Beyond that, restaurants could be regulated using the alcohol law.

Thus, Swedish public authorities are not allowed to implement anything like China did, and they refused to implement any model like South Korea, which has used mass testing, contact tracing and isolation. So, they were left with learning to live with the virus. The result is similar to what happened in other nations overwhelmed by numbers of infected persons, without advance preparations. Sweden started massive efforts to try to organize the health system to take care of the storm of incoming patients. Besides implementing its few available laws, Sweden’s main thrust was to issue recommendations for social distancing, handwashing, avoiding unnecessary travel, etc., which has been the mantra replacing any real policy to counter the pandemic.

CC/JohanSahlen

Even before the authorities issued recommendations, the Swedish people began practicing social distancing, emptying the streets, shops, restaurants, workplaces, and entertainment venues. Here, the Fontänen movie theater.

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Beside the heroic efforts by hospitals, what did happen was that people began taking precautions even before the authorities issued recommendations, by distancing themselves socially, and by emptying the streets, shops, restaurants, and workplaces. When on March 16, authorities declared that persons aged 70 and over were a specific risk group, this age cohort loyally stayed home, and has remained there ever since. A month of such voluntary actions, together with the very limited restrictions ordered by the authorities, broke the trend of rising numbers of deaths and hospitalizations. This lasted until the fall surge.

Actually, the Government in Sweden is a very weak minority coalition and had limited power to take any initiative to override the restrictive laws, and get something done about the highly complicated pandemic, unlike what happened in many other countries. The Government implemented the limited lawful measures demanded by Tegnell and the authorities in charge, not the other way around. Moreover, the bureaucrats quarreled among themselves about the “scientific validation” of the use of masks, which to this day has blocked any recommendation for them.

A Constitutional Crisis

The response to the SARS-CoV-2 reveals another feature of the collapsing Swedish Model. In the Swedish administrative system, it is the public authorities who have executive powers, not the Government, and these authorities are very disunified. The leadership of the Swedish official efforts to contain COVID-19 is entrusted to the Public Health Agency (PHA) of Sweden, which is the public authority for communicable disease control, whose department head is the above-mentioned State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.[fn_1] Tegnell and the Director of the Public Health Agency, Johan Carlsson, are in charge of the Swedish response to the COVID-19 pandemic with input from other responsible agencies at national level, and from international entities such as the European Union and the World Health Organization.

The most important among the other authorities is the National Board of Health and Welfare, which is in charge of medical health care, and coordination with the 21 regions of Sweden, whose county councils oversee hospitals and doctors, and 290 municipalities, which provide care through nursing homes and home care services. These 21 regions are run mostly by the political opposition like many of the municipalities; and they are independent institutions, just as the other municipal national public authorities, which make their own decisions, without any direct control from the Government. In sum, this fragmented, dysfunctional system is run by bureaucrats, each one of whom lacks the oversight of the national efforts, and, in many cases, makes sub-optimizing decisions, putting the priority on their own budget and activity.

This bureaucratic, fragmented rule has been praised as a Swedish policy to rule by science and competence, not by populist politicians. In reality, it is not only a nasty permanent bureaucracy, but an obsolete heritage of the pseudo-democratic corporatist Swedish Model from its heyday of the one party, forty-year rule under the Social Democrats. During that time period, the party was ruling the so-called “independent” public authorities through corrupt corporatist political backdoor dealings, with a myriad of party affiliated peoples’ movements representing “the will of the people.”

Now these corporatist party institutions negotiating with their counterparts from other powerful corporatist influence groups have mostly disintegrated. The structure of “independence” (from influence from the democratically elected Parliament and Government) is still there, guarded by the corrupt interests of the non-parliamentary influence groups. It leaves the public authorities all by themselves, under the influence of the remaining power groups, but more and more responsive to the whims of the media. The COVID-19 crisis is therefore also a constitutional crisis in Sweden.

The response to COVID-19 by the “responsible” public authorities, led by Tegnell, was concentrated on the hospital care system, in keeping below the curve of cases. This failed miserably as these leading authorities “forgot” about not only the nursing homes, but also the homecare for the elderly, overseen by the municipalities. The upper class of public bureaucrats actually had very little knowledge of this part of the society, all the while providing for protective personal equipment (PPE) and other measures for the hospitals.

Meanwhile, the whole population—especially the less educated and marginalized, could see for themselves, and feel in their hearts, that the Swedish arrogant bureaucrats in charge were lost. One Swedish TV program showed how shocked a Swedish doctor was, when dressed in full PPE, she had found an immigrant assistant nurse, without any PPE, giving home care services, treating an old woman up close. The doctor happened to be present only for some occasional medical treatment, but the assistant nurse did daily rounds, seeing to the elderly in their homes. So, the most prevalent public care of elderly, run by the municipalities, was not even included in the “prioritized” national strategy to protect the elderly.

The inevitable epidemiological pattern showed dramatically that at the same time infection rates started to increase among the elderly, it also started increasing in immigrant districts and among typical immigrant professions. The fact of segregation in Sweden was clear for all to see. Moreover, this summer a public investigation reported that the old Swedish Model of low-income differentials has been replaced by its opposite. Sweden now has one of the fastest rates of increasing income disparity in the world.

CC/David Castor

The hospital system has been undermined by privatizations and financial austerity, leading to downsizing and the lowest rate of hospital beds per capita in Western Europe. Shown, the Emergency and Infectious Diseases Unit at Skåne University Hospital in Malmö.

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Hospital Privatization, Increased Contagion

The hospital system of the Swedish welfare model has been much undermined by financial austerity, especially since the Swedish banking crisis 1987-93, and again after the 2008 international banking crisis, which has led to downsizing, and the lowest rate of hospital beds per capita in Western Europe.

On top of that, the most extreme liberal experiment in Europe of privatization of hospitals, and especially, of elderly care, has been implemented. As each privatized health provider puts priority on its own bottom line, this process has further fragmented the Swedish health care system.

The significance of that in the current situation is that pressure for profits has led to downward pressures on the labor conditions for the health workers. Salaries, professional education, and costly medical personnel are kept at minimum levels. The elderly care sector, also the competing publicly owned care, has been reduced to a gig economy, where home care patients/clients are visited, on average, by 16 different workers per two-week period, many of them short term workers, whom the patient/client has never seen before.

This has not been helpful to contain the pandemic. Furthermore, the private hospitals were excluded from any obligation to handle COVID-19 cases. Some of them even continued with their unnecessary, cosmetic medical services. It was the public hospitals, starved to the bone of hospital beds and staff, which represented the capacity level, which “the curve” was not allowed to surpass.

The pressure for cost cutting did not even allow infected patients to be separated from the noninfected, even down to sharing the same room. In the spring, the lack of PPE, and the continuing turnover of health care workers created a toxic mix where the hospitals and elderly care were spreading the virus.

In reaction to the scandalous death wave in nursing homes and home care services, the health care industry has started to listen and partially implement the longstanding demands from the trade unions for long-term employment contracts, and job training. But the privatizations and financial sector behind the extreme fragmentation so far have not been touched.

Delayed Testing

Implementing mass or targeted testing had no place in the “Number 3” herd immunity strategy chosen by Tegnell and the authorities in charge. Instead, limited testing was concentrated on patients with symptoms. Mass testing was delayed, in spite of the generous and portentous cooperation between Swedish and Chinese laboratories, which from April 1, saw planeloads of the most advanced automatic test analysis equipment and test kits arrive in Sweden from China. A private donation from the Wallenberg Foundation financed the exclusive equipment and transport. Sweden had the knowledge of how to handle the equipment because of earlier scientific cooperation between the two countries.

But the bureaucrats hesitated to expand testing, bringing up such excuses as that it had to be done in ways so that the results could be scientifically verifiable as a survey. After much delay, the Government stepped in, and on April 1 mandated the Public Health Agency to expand testing capacity from 50,000 a week to 150,000. On May 8, the Government appointed Harriet Wallberg as a special testing coordinator between the Public Health Authority and the 21 hospital regions and with central supplies of testing buses and test kits. The regions also did contact tracing.

CC/Prolineserver

Harriet Wallberg served as Sweden’s national COVID-19 test coordinator in May 2020. She is a professor of physiology at the Karolinska Institutet.

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By June, Sweden began to implement mass testing as part of its strategy. The approach is in the direction of the South Korea model, which had earlier been dismissed. As of the end of November, testing in Sweden is running at the rate of nearly 270,000 per week, which is the highest per capita rate in Europe.

Summer Slow, Then Fall Infections Surge

The rate of infections increased at first because of the expanded testing. But the death rates were very low when the vacation period started in July, and this continued. On September 30, the ban was lifted on visits to nursing homes. But as of the middle of October, an autumn surge in infections had started.

Among the factors in the pick-up in COVID-19 case infections are the private parties of students and other young people. They just disregarded the recommendations from the authorities. In September PHA warned about outbreaks of infections found in sports clubs and teams. There was a sharp difference in protective behavior expressed by the 70+ folk and the younger generations in following recommendations. Shopping and visits to restaurants increased.

Some Swedes, especially the younger ones, misunderstood “herd immunity” to mean that they should even promote infections among themselves so the nation would arrive at herd immunity sooner, in order to protect the elderly and get out of the pandemic faster.

CC/Mohammad Ali Marizad

Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has now taken control over Swedish policy against COVID-19, announcing strict social distancing measures and supporting the putting aside of some rights in the Basic Law for the same purpose.

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When the second wave began, the recommendations and lax measures were not enough to stop a surge in infections. The predictions by Tegnell about a slow autumn surge proved wrong. On November 20, the Government stepped in and Prime Minister Stefan Löfven announced a ban on public meetings exceeding eight persons, and strict recommendations to avoid all meeting of others beyond one’s own close family. On November 22 he spoke to the nation, delivering a strong message to everybody to change their behavior in order to save Christmas.

What was made clear was that Tegnell and the public authorities are no longer determining the Swedish policy on COVID-19; it is now the Government that is doing so. This change is mostly supported by the established media and the population, and has sparked a full debate about much overdue constitutional changes. Some media point to and support the Prime Minister’s “putting aside rights and freedoms in the Basic Law.” If pursued it could become the beginning of a possible democratic revolution in Sweden against the dictatorship of bureaucrats.

This is an urgent question in the upcoming world financial crisis, and the necessity of defeating the push for the fatal Great Reset. The financial “public authorities” in Sweden and globally are even more tightly controlled by corporatist and other nonelected influence groups, centered in the City of London and Wall Street, than are the health services sectors. Defeating this financial menace is as much a matter of life and death, as defeating the pandemic.

[fn_1] A discussion of the Public Health Agency of Sweden’s COVID-19 work is available here. [back to text for fn_1]

June 1983

There Are No Limits to Growth

Mother Nature Kills German Forests

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The world is now facing the global imposition of a new form of fascism, called alternatively the Green New Deal, Green Finance, The Great Reset, and other euphemisms for the top-down British Imperial destruction of scientific and technological progress under the guise of the “carbon causes global warming” hoax. Thirty-seven years ago, Lyndon H. LaRouche laid to rest, for any thinking person, any form of Malthusian mental aberrations in his seminal book, There Are No Limits to Growth. Had his ideas been adopted at that time, we would not now be facing the threat of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There is still time to reverse the descent into famine, pestilence and war, if the cause of these phenomena are properly understood, as Lyndon LaRouche understood even then. The following is taken from Chapter 1, “Mother Nature Kills German Forests,” of that 1983 book.

Over the past fifteen years, the greatest single cause for destruction of the world’s “ecology” has been the toleration of the policies demanded by the so-called “ecologists,” the so-called “neo-Malthusians” of the Club of Rome, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), of the World Wildlife Fund, the Aspen Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Sierra Club, and so forth and so on. We are not putting enough industrially-produced energy, in the form of water management, chemicals, and so forth, into the farming of the Earth’s biosphere. At the same time, we are using biomass for fuel and other “traditional” uses, in cases we should be using nuclear-generated energy supplies, and using modern, industrially-produced materials in place of timber for housing and so forth.

Meanwhile, at the opposite extreme, since approximately the 1920s in Germany, some of us have been planning mankind’s exploration and colonization of space. During the 1950s and 1960s, well-designed plans for human colonization of the Moon and Mars began to be developed. With development and use of controlled thermonuclear fusion, frequent travel between Mars and a large, orbiting space-station parked near the Earth would become practicable. With thermonuclear fusion energy and use of directed-beam technologies, including high-powered lasers, we will have the basic repertoire of technologies needed to create and maintain “artificial Earth-like” environments on the Moon or Mars, probably beginning with the use of Earth’s natural orbiting-satellite space station, the Moon, as a logistical base in nearby space, from which to launch the long leg of exploration of nearby and deep space.

Can mankind construct a forest on Mars? If we resume the rates of technological progress we may remember from the pre-1967 period of research and development efforts of the U.S.A.’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), we will be able to do just that during the twenty-first century. With thermonuclear fusion technologies we shall possess cheaply-produced, abundant energy supplies in the needed quantities at the best cost required to develop the necessary artificial, Earth-like environments under “plastic bubbles.” With directed-beam technologies, such as high-powered lasers and coherent particle-beams, and with related classes of technology of relativistic physics, the productive power of an average human individual will zoom to between ten and a hundred times that on Earth today. With aid of progress in biotechnology, we shall be able to engineer properties into trees and other plants to produce types suited to the conditions of artificial, Earth-like environments.

If this is possible during a period less than a century ahead, why can we not solve the much less challenging problems of improving the ecology on Earth today? With the combinations of very high energy-flux density thermonuclear fusion, directed-beam and related technologies, and biotechnology, we can manufacture air, water, and so forth where they do not exist today in space, and can provide plant life the properties needed to cope with special problems; perhaps we might even develop a new, improved version of chlorophyll, to double or treble the energy-gathering powers of the plant life. Today, we either have such technologies, or are at the edge of mastering them. Why, then, do we continue to tolerate conditions on Earth which even existing technologies are proven capable of solving?

Miserable Conditions on Earth

The reason for these miserable conditions is a simple reason. Some people, people with a great deal of power over the periodicals, universities, financial institutions, and political parties of much of the world, simply do not wish society to solve these problems.

Take the case of a fellow known as Rudolf Bahro. This fellow once enjoyed an international reputation as a great fighter for freedom and human welfare generally, at the point he was in the process of leaving East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) for sanctuary in the West. Now, many of us suspect that the East German government was delighted to see its competitor, West Germany, enjoy the benefits of Herr Bahro’s advice. In mid-March 1983, Herr Bahro presented an audience some seeds held in his hand—presumably seeds of grain—and declared that these seeds represented the beginning of the evils which afflict man today.

CC/Vindheim

Neo-Malthusian Rudolf Bahro, who proclaimed that the practice of agriculture is evil.

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Some very basic facts about the economic history and prehistory of human life on Earth show exactly what Herr Bahro was implicitly proposing.

The lowest form of human life known is what is called a “hunting and gathering society,” the kind of society to which mankind would presumably return if Herr Bahro’s demands were accepted. In such a form of society, an area of between ten and fifteen square kilometers of the habitable surface of the Earth is required to sustain an average individual. This means a total human population of the Earth of never more than approximately ten millions individuals. This fact prompts us to ask Herr Bahro to list, by name, the approximately four and a half billions individuals presently living on Earth, whom he proposes to kill, in order to reduce the population levels down to those possible without the “agricultural revolution” which occurred most probably ten to twelve thousand years ago?

Not only is such a pre-agricultural-revolution form of society a very thinly-populated society. The prevailing life expectancy is significantly less than twenty years of age, and the life of each local tribe as a whole is extremely precarious. Although Herr Bahro has not stated that he proposes to boycott the food and fiber produced by the agricultural revolution, he seems otherwise sincere in asserting that he considers it a mistake ever to have left the spiritually invigorating cultural climate of the extinct South African strandlooper, pelting to death washed up, dying fish and whatnot which the surf has cast upon the beach.

Admittedly, Herr Bahro’s views are presently those of an extremely eccentric, although organized and growing, tiny minority. Nonetheless, his views are only the most extreme version of the broader spectrum of neo-Malthusian dogmatists generally. So-called “environmentalists” or “ecologists” infest increasingly large portions of most major political parties, as well as the variously neo-Nazi-led and “leftist.” varieties of “anti-technology” sects. Moreover, most of the major news media, the major entertainment media, the courts, legislatures, and powerful, very wealthy foundations, are more or less saturated with neo-Malthusian policies and pro-Club of Rome propaganda.

The Club of Rome

During recent years, it has been overlooked, how recent the mass-based “ecologist” movements are. The first movements were organized, top-down at the end of 1969, pulling together remnants of the 1950s Ban the Bomb movements, the 1965-1969 anti-Vietnam War movements, and the New Left generally, on both sides of the Atlantic. “Sun Day,” during spring 1970, was the first of the demonstrations organized top-down by governmental agencies and private foundations for the “ecologist causes.” The banning of the pesticide DDT, (on fraudulent pretexts), and the campaign against nuclear energy came only slightly later. The spread of this ideology is little more than ten years old.

Dennis Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 1972, which became the bible of the anti-scientific ecologist movement. It was based on a fraudulent computer study.

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The present-day neo-Malthusian organizing did not really get under way outside the ranks of the “re-programmed leftists” until 1972, with the publication of a book called The Limits to Growth. This book’s production was sponsored by the Club of Rome, and its publication was used to launch the public relations campaign which made the Club of Rome almost an instant major policy-influencing institution.

The Limits to Growth was based on a computer-assisted study conducted under the direction of two professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.A.), Dennis Meadows and Jay Forrester. The study itself was most conspicuously fraudulent on two leading counts.

First, in attempting to prove that industrial society was using up its remaining natural resources very rapidly, Meadows and Forrester greatly understated the known quantities of such resources.

Second, more important, Meadows and Forrester projected the rate of consumption of natural resources by using systems of simultaneous linear equations. The very use of such linear equations for a computer “model” of that sort, builds into the computer projections the assumption that absolutely no technological progress is occurring in society. In fact, technological progress, including fundamental redefinitions of what “natural resources” means, has been the outstanding feature of European civilization for five hundred years. The Limits to Growth depended upon the assumption that such technological progress had come to a sudden, absolute stop.

How could anyone have believed such nonsense? Every qualified scientist knew that the kinds of arguments used by the Club of Rome were a fraud. Most engineers knew it. Industrial corporations knew it. If the news media checked with scientists, they, too, would have known it. If governments and political parties had behaved responsibly, they would have denounced the Club of Rome and its Limits of Growth as a monstrous hoax.

If we are running out of coal, and we do have about 200 years known supply at present rates of consumption, why not use more abundant nuclear energy, and why not concentrate on speeding up development of almost unlimited resources of thermonuclear fusion? We are not running out of petroleum either; we are discovering vast new petroleum fields faster than we use up the old fields. However, if we are worried about carbon dioxide build-ups and other pollution caused by fossil fuel combustion, why not shift at an accelerating rate into nuclear and thermonuclear generation of process-heat?

Nuclear Power

“Radioactivity”? Nonsense! A nuclear energy plant radiates less radioactive waste into the environment than a coal-fired plant generating the same number of kilowatt-hours. A nuclear plant radiates less radioactivity into the environment than a brick wall. A person leaning against a nuclear plant receives less radioactivity than while traveling in a transatlantic jet, or a weekend’s ski trip in the U.S. Rocky Mountains or Swiss Alps. If one is concerned about such levels of radioactivity, one ought to insist that never more than two (naturally slightly radioactive) human bodies ought to be allowed in the same bed.

Nuclear reactors producing baseline power provide a much greater energy-flux density and at lower cost than solar, wind, or fossil fuels. Shown is the nuclear-fueled Susquehanna Steam Electric Station on the Susquehanna River in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

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“Nuclear plant accidents”? The “lesson of Three Mile Island” in Pennsylvania is, first, that the combination of circumstances involved could occur only through sabotage, and, second, that the “accident” proved totally the perfection of the safety precautions built into nuclear plants today. The tales of the “China Syndrome” and other Grimm stories issued by the news media were all a deliberate hoax, a lie, as every investigation of the matter proved during and after the “accident.”

To cause a nuclear accident, either one would have to drop a nuclear bomb directly onto the plant, or carry in and place the most sophisticated combination of shaped charges imaginable. In any case, the mass of steel and concrete built into such plants make them the most bomb-proof structures presently in existence in the world. If we employ nuclear fuels of the thorium-cycle, for example, even the infinitesimal possibilities for some degree of nuclear accident become approximately absolute zero.

All this is well-known, even by the scientifically-trained liars trotted out as “authorities” by the anti-nuclear propagandists.

In the case of thermonuclear fusion, the possibility of nuclear accidents is automatically absolutely zero. The components of a thermonuclear reaction, such as those used in hydrogen bombs, are either a combination of lithium and an isotope of hydrogen, deuterium, or deuterium and tritium, the latter another isotope of hydrogen, or deuterium and deuterium. The latter two combinations produce so-called “clean explosions,” without primary radioactive fall-out. To cause a thermonuclear ignition requires temperature equivalents in the order of between 5 × 10^7 and 5 × 10^8 degrees Kelvin, and even then, the ignition will not occur without the proper physical principles of precise hydrodynamic self-focussing of the material, to effect what is called isentropic compression. Any disruption, such as an accident or being hit directly by a 10 megaton bomb, means that the plant’s thermonuclear reaction stops abruptly.

SandiaLabNews/Randy Montoya

“Thermonuclear fusion is far superior to nuclear fission.” The Z machine at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is used to study materials subjected to high temperatures and pressures, a vital field for fusion research.

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Thermonuclear fusion is far superior to nuclear fission, but we require large-scale use of nuclear fission to supply the energy needed to develop a thermonuclear fusion-based economy. Some figures are helpful in making the point.

In the statistical theory of heat, today, we measure the level of heat processes in units we call energy-flux density. This measures the number of kilowatt-hours passing through an area of cross section of the heat-generating process. The following two tables, compiled in 1979, show the comparative energy-flux densities of various sources of energy, and also the comparative costs of electrical energy produced using such sources.

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Energy-Flux Density

The simplest of the physical principles involved in choosing among energy sources is that the higher the level of energy-flux density, the more efficient the energy source is. Not only is less heat wasted, but the higher the energy-flux density, the greater the potential of the process-heat to accomplish work.

To appreciate the importance of this, including the important question of maintaining forests, we must consider another important kind of figure. This figure has a name which may appear frightening to the layman at first glance; we shall show that it is easily understood. This datum is named potential relative population-density. We explain the meaning of this figure, and then show its relationship to the business of maintaining forests.

Given a population inhabiting a certain territory, and let that territory be measured in square kilometers of habitable area. By developing and using the natural resources available in that area, how many people can be maintained through the work of the population’s labor force? On the average, the answer is given as the average number of persons per average square-kilometer. Persons per square-kilometer is population-density.

That figure is not an adequate measurement. Land varies in quality, so that one square-kilometer is not of the same quality for human habitation as another square-kilometer. Those desirable qualities of land, which express such differences, are variable qualities. Man may improve the land, or deplete it. The quality of land is the net result of combined depletions and improvements of its qualities. Therefore, we say that the value of all square-kilometers are not the same; they are different, and they are variable. Therefore, we must measure population-density in terms of relative qualities of the land inhabited: relative population-density.

The present level of population is not necessarily a measurement of what the population level could be. We must determine what that population could become, as a maximum, given the kinds of production technologies presently in use. What is the potential level of population, given those technologies? That is the general meaning of potential relative population-density.

We have already indicated that the potential relative population-density of primitive society is about 0.06 to 0.10/square-kilometer: about 10 millions maximum population. There exist today approximately 4.5 billions individuals, more than 100 times the levels of primitive man. Since a factor of “10” is called one order of magnitude, this means that mankind has raised its potential relative population-density by two orders of magnitude. With full use of existing levels of technology, combined with the thermonuclear, directed-beam, and bio-technology coming into existence now, our planet could sustain a population of tens of billions of persons, and at an average standard of living higher than that for the United States during the early 1970s: a rise above primitive society by three orders of magnitude!

Potential Relative Population-Density

No beast, or any other lower form of life could willfully increase in potential relative population-density by even one order of magnitude. Man is fundamentally different from the beasts. Man is not merely a creature of instinctive potentialities, a mere creature of animal-like perceptions of pleasure and pain. Man is somehow very different. Man has the potential of Reason, the power to make creative discoveries which advance his scientific knowledge, and to convert such scientific advances into advances in technology. We are able to uncover, with increasing perfection, the lawful, universal principles which order universal creation, and to master nature with increasing power, through guiding ourselves to change our ways of behavior in accordance with universal laws.

The successive technological advances accumulated by human culture since the level of Herr Bahro’s utopia, have increased man’s potential relative population-density by between two and three orders of magnitude.

This technological progress, this increase in human potential, has been accomplished by an increasing command over energy. Beginning with the agricultural revolution, and ocean fishing in boats earlier, mankind has increased the amount of useful energy available to the average individual, and has increased the number of kilowatt-hours’ value of the amount of usable energy obtained by society per square-kilometer. Today, we can roughly measure the fertility of agricultural land by the amount of “artificial energy” used per hectare by the farmer: chemical energy of fertilizers, trace-element additions, pesticides, and electrical and other industrially-produced energy forms used for irrigation, powered machinery, and so forth. Similarly, in industry and transportation, the productive powers of the average member of the labor force are measured in first approximation by the amount of industrially-produced energy used per capita.

This technological progress is not merely an available option. The authors of The Limits to Growth are right on one point, although perhaps this was an unintentional feature of their book. If, at any point, we halt technological progress, the society foolish enough to do such a thing condemns itself to die.

Any level of productive technology requires a certain array of raw materials produced by agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining, and so forth. This is what we work up from the Earth around us into primary materials of production and other consumption. For any level of technology and human consumption, the amount of each such kind of raw material approximates an average requirement per capita.

The production of such primary materials therefore requires some definite percentile of the entire labor force of the society. Only the remainder of the labor force, after deducting this percentile, is available for other forms of labor. As a society uses up some of the richest and most accessible natural sources of raw materials-production, the amount of labor a society must expend to produce a constant per capita amount of raw materials rises. This rise in cost lowers the productivity of labor on the average. Fewer individuals can be sustained, on the average, by the output produced by an average member of the labor force. In other words, the potential relative population-density falls. If the technology of production remains constant, the rise in costs caused by depletion of critical kinds of natural resources is a rise which continues without limit. Therefore, for this reason, the potential relative population-density would fall without limit under those conditions.

The Necessity for Technological Progress

At the point the society’s potential relative population-density falls below the population-density of the existing population, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse enter. Famine promotes desperate strife. War and bloody civil commotions worsen the conditions of famine. The famine-stricken population becomes a breeder of diseases, spiraling into epidemics and pandemics, as was the case during the early fourteenth century Europe. The breakdown of agriculture and hygienic institutions promotes the eruptions of pestilences. The society is conquered, collapses, or changes its ways abruptly.

Technological progress prevents such catastrophes in two related ways. First, simply by increasing the productive powers of labor, technological progress overcomes the rising costs of production of essential raw materials. Second, technological revolutions redefine the range of usable natural resources, and introduce new kinds of raw materials to the bill of requirements, just as the industrial revolution’s use of coal overcame the threatened collapse of Europe caused by exhaustion of forests.

Technological progress is indispensable even to maintain a constant level of potential relative population-density. Therefore, constantly rising levels of energy supplies, both per square-kilometer and per capita are indispensable to the survival of society. [Box: Development of the Earth’s Population] These growing energy supplies must become relatively cheaper: The cost of producing the average amount of increased energy per capita must tend to be significantly less than the old cost of producing less energy per capita. The energy-flux density of energy supplies must also increase, at least in a general way. There must also be periodic revolutions in the definition of the term “natural resources,” even under conditions of a constant potential relative population-density.

Agriculture and Forestry

In connection with matters of agriculture and forestry, there exists today the widespread, but false opinion that the fertility of the soil for agriculture lies essentially with an assumedly natural fertility of land. This was, more or less exactly, the argument submitted by the radically feudalist faction of eighteenth-century France, the so-called Physiocrats.

The history of agriculture in the United States, since it began during the seventeenth century, is perhaps the best case with aid of which to demonstrate the absurdity of the Physiocratic opinion. Notable, of course, is the case of California’s Imperial Valley, today the most valuable agricultural land on Earth, which was, but a few decades ago, a desert. This case is exceptional in degree, but not in matters of principle. Virtually the entirety of the richness of agriculture in the United States and the earlier settlements was created out of an infertile, stubborn wilderness by means of processes of man-imposed improvements in land, improvements analogous to the investment and improvement of industrial capital.

CC/Samboy

An aerial view of California’s Salton Sea and Imperial Valley, “the most valuable agricultural land on Earth, which was, but a few decades ago, a desert.”

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In Europe, where a longer occupation of the land by agriculture is the case, the same demonstration is immediately clear to all who know agriculture, but is less dramatically demonstrated than in the relatively brief history of agriculture in the United States.

Otherwise, one of the clearest demonstrations of the same principle is the case of the forests of Germany, which are, with the rarest exceptions, man-made creations, not natural occurrences. They are not forests, but better described as tree-farms, a point immediately clear to any visitor to those pleasant parks (called forests) who has firsthand recollections of struggling through a primitive jungle or temperate zone forest.

Yet, these “artificial” German forests are not to be despised because they are not “natural,” any more than one would despise the produce of agriculture on our tables, on grounds that the tropical melons are not poisonous, like the ancestors of our melons in their “natural” occurrence. These “artificial forests” are better than those naturally occurring, on many important points; if they are not, it is because the tree-farmer is not meeting his responsibilities as a farmer. To the point, a good forest must be weeded, like a farmer’s field, to the effect of producing a healthier forest than would occur “naturally.”

Biological Systems are Negentropic

A forest, like agriculture generally, is a biological system. All biological systems, except dying ones, are characterized by a property called negentropy. Over successful cycles of their growth, they embody greater energy than earlier, and such systems are ranked by the equivalent of energy-flux density per unit of mass-weight. Their potentialities of growth, of quality of growth, and powers of resistance to various injuries, vary with the nourishment provided by their environment. Above all, they require relatively abundant energy, energy organized in those forms they can assimilate it.

A striking illustration of the point was accomplished in Wales, Britain, by experimenters working with flax plants. It was demonstrated repeatedly, that by affording young flax plants the proper environment of temperature and nourishment, a change occurred in these plants. This change proved to be fully hereditable, although no genetic change had occurred. This heredity persisted in daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter, and so forth, plants, even though those later generations had been reproduced under normal conditions, without the special conditions of temperature and nourishment employed to produce the original change.

Otherwise, in cases in which no environment-directed hereditable change occurs in plants, superior strains of plants usually require enhanced environments, especially nutrition. This enhancement takes the included forms of water-management and soil- treatment, and sometimes “hothouse” preparation of the seedlings before transplanting. All of this requires industrially-produced “artificial energy,” and all of this translates into increased supplies of such “artificial energy” per hectare, whether for forest or farm. In Germany, therefore, one of the best friends of the field and forest is, traditionally, the BASF chemical plant.

It is most helpful to think about developing a forest under an artificial, bubble-covered, Earthlike environment on Mars. It is the proper point of view for thinking about problems of maintaining and improving the environment on Earth. Forcing ourselves to solve the problems associated with growing a forest on Mars, has the added benefit of forcing us to develop techniques which will be of considerable benefit to maintaining the forests on Earth.

On Mars or Earth, we require the benefits of technological progress for such undertakings. We require not only new technology for treating problems of the biosphere. We require the energy supplies such work implies. It is also indispensable that we cheapen the social cost of doing such work, through increasing the productive powers of society.

In general principles, this is not new. The principles have been known to Europe, in particular, for centuries. We must ask how and why people and institutions of considerable prestige, wealth, and influence, would have produced a doctrine as dangerously absurd as the neo-Malthusianism of the Club of Rome?

At the first stage of human development, that of hunting and gathering, at most one human being per square kilometer could be supported under ideal conditions, so that no more than approximately 10 million human beings could survive on earth. The transition to animal husbandry and nomadic pastoral economy increased population density to around 8 human beings per square kilometer; agriculture in its primitive form brought the level to approximately 20 human beings per square kilometer.

CC/JMGRACIA100

A hunter-gatherer in the Central African Republic.

CC/Nathan Freitas

Plowing in Tibet using yaks.

Canadian Wheat Board

Modern wheat harvesting in Canada.

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Industrial society brought tremendous progress. Modern energy-intensive agriculture increased population density to around 100 human beings per square kilometer. The relative potential population density of the earth thus increased to some 10 billion human beings. [back to text]

Buy The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge from the LaRouche Publications Store

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IV. An Optimistic Science and Culture

Chang’e-5: Bringing

A Bit of the Moon to Earth

by Marsha Freeman

CNSA

An artist’s representation of the Chang’e-5 lander. On the top is the ascender, or ascent stage, which has now lifted off from the lander to deliver soil samples to the orbiter. This is the first time a lunar orbit rendezvous and docking has been done automatically.

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Dec. 5—The perfect execution of China’s Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission completes the first set of China’s exploration missions to the Moon. The first group of missions, laid out 20 years ago, were to orbit the Moon (Chang’e-1 and 2), land on the Moon (Chang’e-3 and 4) and return samples from the Moon (Chang’e-5). The sample return mission lays the basis for the next tranche of missions, which will concentrate on intensive studies of the minerals and materials on both the near and far sides of the Moon. Of particular interest are potential materials that can be used to build and operate stations and laboratories on the Moon, first to operate robotically, and later to support people. And one particular resource on the Moon—helium-3—is of particular interest, as fuel for fusion power, with the potential to create virtually unlimited energy.

• Chang’e-6 will conduct a very challenging South Pole sample return. Whether it will be conducted on the near or far side of the Moon depends upon the results of the sampling mission of Chang’e-5.

• Chang’e-7 will conduct comprehensive exploration of the South Pole, including its land forms, material composition, and environment.

• Chang’e-8 will test key advanced technologies on the far side. Companies will be invited to industrialize the technologies developed for the mission.

The goal of China’s lunar missions was stated very clearly by the then director of the China National Space Administration, Luan Enjie, in a March 3, 2003 interview with People’s Daily. He provided an overview of the lunar exploration program that was soon to be made public. “The exploration of the Moon can become the incubator of scie volutionary nature.” Mankind must “leave the Earth homeland, establish permanent research stations, develop products and industries in space, and set up a self-sufficient extraterrestrial homeland,” he said.

The Chang’e-5 mission was an important step in reaching that goal.

CNSA

Panoramic photo from a foot of the Chang’e-5 lander to the horizon, soon after landing on the Moon.

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A Complex Mission, Never Done Before

Chang’e-5 was launched on November 24, and 112 hours later, arrived at the Ocean of Storms on the near side of the Moon. The spacecraft consists of four distinct vehicles: an orbiter, the largest of the four, which transports all of the rest; a lander, which carries out the drilling and scooping of the lunar soil; an ascender, or ascent stage, which will blast off from the surface of the Moon, with the samples; and, a returner, which carries the soil samples through the Earth’s atmosphere.

Mission designers operated under stringent constraints. Pei Zhaoyu, Deputy Director of the National Space Administration Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, explained that to return 2 kilograms of lunar soil, the weight of the probe reached 8.2 tons. “If we want to increase the amount of samples,” he said, it will increase the weight of the rocket and “exceed the carrying capacity of the rocket.”

A second constraint was time. The entire mission had to be carried out during one lunar day or 14 Earth days. To save weight, the lander uses solar energy. It landed during the lunar day, but had a limited amount of time to complete its task.

On Thursday, December 3, after less than a week on the Moon, the probe had completed its tasks, drilling underground and scooping loose soil on the surface. It easily met the goal of 2 kilograms of sample material.

The scientists explain that there are two reasons why Chang’e-5 did two different kinds of sample collection. Naturally, if one method should fail, such as a broken drill, you would want a back-up. But more importantly, each reveals something different about the history of the Moon, the Sun, and the Solar System. The samples from underground reveal the Moon without the influence of the Sun. The soil on the surface is just the opposite.

CNSA

This photo of the Chang’e-5 landing site in the Ocean of Storms may indicate a young surface, if indeed the relative absence of craters is a reliable measure.

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Close examination of the samples may also shed light on one of the basic measurements used in lunar science to determine the age of various features on the Moon, which has come into question—the number of craters. It has been assumed that a region with few craters is a younger surface, with older craters disappearing, for example by volcanic eruptions. But previous samples have contradicted this traditional crater-counting method.

On December 3, its mission complete, the ascent vehicle sitting on top of the lander, holding the precious lunar samples, blasted off from the Ocean of Storms. Six minutes later it was in lunar orbit, to start an orbital chase to catch up to dock with the orbiter, which had been waiting patiently for its arrival. This is a delicate maneuver with a window of 3-5 hours to perform it perfectly.

Today, December 5, two days after the ascent module had lifted off, the two spacecraft began final approach, and three and a half hours later the docking was completed. The extremely delicate rendezvous and docking took place automatically, without any human intervention, due to the time delay in communication. Now the sealed container with the samples will be transferred to the reentry capsule.

But as China space expert Andrew Jones explains, “The lunar samples won’t be coming home immediately.” It will take a few days for the spacecraft in lunar orbit to have an opening for a pathway to send the sample module to Earth. If the timing is precise, the orbiter will release the module with the soil samples, to land in Inner Mongolia, where Chinese astronauts land after space flights. The trip back to Earth from the Moon takes 112 hours; the same amount of time it took to get there.

But It’s Been Done Before …

Cynics will object that there is no reason to bring back samples from the Moon. The Soviet Union did it 40-odd years ago, they will argue, and the Moon doesn’t change much in 40-odd years. (This is not even true on the face of it, since without an atmosphere or magnetic field, the Moon is constantly bombarded by the flotsam and jetsam of the Solar System.) But what has changed dramatically is the science.

Most of the samples brought back by the Apollo astronauts have been well-studied. But NASA, with advances in science in mind, made the decision to keep some samples completely untouched as an investment in the future, allowing them to be analyzed with more advanced technologies as they are developed.

CNSA

This photo of the technical personnel needed to monitor the rendezvous and docking of the ascender with the orbiter indicates the complexity of the mission.

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In order to prepare for the return to the Moon in the Artemis program, NASA has created the Apollo Next-Generation Sample Analysis (ANGSA) initiative, which is leveraging advanced technologies to study Apollo samples, using new tools that were not available when the samples were originally returned to Earth. Dr. Sarah Noble, ANGSA program scientist at NASA headquarters, explained, “The analysis of these samples will maximize the science return from Apollo, as well as enable a new generation of scientists and curators to refine their technique and help prepare future explorers for lunar missions anticipated in the 2020s and beyond.” Dr. Noble continued, “We are able to make measurements today that were just not possible during the years of the Apollo program.”

NASA

NASA technicians in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division extrude lunar core samples obtained by an Apollo mission. Advanced tools not available in the 1970s will reveal more about the Moon today as they analyze the Chang’e-5 samples.

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Examples of advances in technology that have been developed over the last 50 years include non-destructive 3D-imaging, mass spectrometry, and ultra-high resolution microtomy. Other new tools include X-ray computed tomography (XCT) and X-ray computed microtomography. Studies of the Apollo samples using these capabilities were done before the samples were removed from their containers. This helped scientists understand the samples’ structure and provided detailed images of individual grains and smaller samples, known as rocklets.

Charles Shearer, science co-lead for ANGSA, explained, “The findings from these samples will provide NASA new insights into the Moon, including the history of impacts on the lunar surface, how landslides occur on the lunar surface, and how the Moon’s crust has evolved over time.”

The teams that will be studying the samples include members who have long NASA experience, some of whom were part of the original teams to first study Apollo samples. Apollo-17 astronaut, geologist Harrison Schmitt is actively involved in a science team.

Lunar Fuel for Fusion: Helium-3

The scientist most responsible for the creation of China’s lunar program is Ouyang Ziyuan. His studies were focused on geology and mineral resources, and in 1958 he conducted a study of a meteorite, creating the field of Cosmo-chemistry. He became dedicated to the proposition that China should have a space science plan that would begin with the exploration of the Moon. Starting with an increasingly complex series of robotic missions, the lunar program would culminate with science laboratories, and people living and working on the Moon.

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Ouyang Ziyuan, the scientist most responsible for China’s lunar program: “The mineral resources of the Moon, its energy resources and its specific environment, will open up a new source of development for mankind.”

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Ouyang spent the next four decades writing scholarly reports for the Academy of Sciences, explaining the importance of the science to be learned. Concrete proposals were presented to the political leadership of China.

On January 24, 2004, the State Council and Premier Wen Jiabao approved the report laying out the lunar exploration program. This ratified the development of the lunar probes, inaugurating the multi-phase China Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP). The lunar missions were officially named Chang’e, drawing on the legend of the goddess who flew to the Moon with her jade rabbit (Yutu), having been banished from Earth, for having angered the gods by drinking the elixir of immortality.

From the beginning of China’s lunar program, Ouyang lobbied for the development of the resources on the Moon: “… the mineral resources of the Moon, its energy resources and its specific environment, will open up a new source of development for mankind in the future,” states the 1994 report, ”The Necessity and Feasibility of China’s Development of a Lunar Probe,” as quoted by Ouyang’s biographer, He Ping.

For years, discussions about resources on the Moon referred mainly to the presence of water ice. But in the 1970s, scientists, closely examining the rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts and the unmanned Soviet Luna probes, also found helium-3. It has been estimated that just at the Sea of Tranquility, where the Apollo 11 astronauts landed, there are 8,000 tons of helium-3.

Although the helium-3 on the Moon was not considered a resource in the 1970s, in the 1980s, when fusion experiments using helium-3 were making progress, the scientists soon needed more helium-3 than is available on Earth. Now helium-3 on the Moon became a resource, and mining it became a major objective of China’s lunar plan. From the time that it was discovered that there was a potentially large quantity of helium-3 on the Moon, Ouyang became a strong and vocal promoter of developing this new resource as a fusion fuel.

Due to the dispersed nature of the helium-3 in the lunar soil (regolith), where the very limited measurements so far indicate a concentration in parts per billion, it will be from further samples brought back to laboratories on Earth that scientists will be able to determine accurately the contents of the soil, including the concentration of helium-3. The samples that Chang’e-5 is bringing back are from the Earth-facing, near side of the Moon. It has been proposed that the far side could contain a higher concentration of helium-3 than the near side, since it is more exposed to the solar wind, lacking any protection from Earth..

The existence of vast reserves of helium-3 on the Moon that could power the economy of every nation on Earth for thousands of years, is one of the best kept secrets from the American public. Why should people accept the austerity that is in their future, if with a space program that is the engine of scientific breakthroughs and the source of a constant stream of new technology, every nation could have unprecedented economic growth?

Ouyang Ziyuan, now 85 years of age, attends the Chang’e launches, and is looking beyond the Moon. He told Xinhua on November 23, 2012: “I hope Chinese people can set their ‘footprints’ all over the Solar System.”

A Fight for Culture During the Pandemic

by Jen Pearl

Soprano Jen Pearl is a founder of the Boston Schiller Institute Chorus. She is a Conductor of, and serves as the Chair of the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus.

Courtesy of Jen Pearl

Jen Pearl conducts a joint performance with the Jena Jubilee Singers from Jena, Germany in Quincy, Massachusetts in October 2019.

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Dec. 6—On Thursday, December 17 at 7:30 pm, the Schiller Institute NYC (SINYC) Chorus will present a live-streamed concert to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday, which will feature both recorded and live performances. This concert will serve as a culmination, reminder, and reflection of the chorus members’ relentless determination to continue a mission of working on and spreading beautiful, uplifting music to a nation and a world that is desperately in need of a response to the tumultuous and difficult condition of our nation, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and economic and social breakdown. The chorus has continued to work on and perform (virtually) Classical music’s greatest choral work, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, a mission taken up before the March 2020 lockdown.

In a recently released 14-minute documentary on the Schiller Chorus, Diane Sare, founder, Conductor, and Chair Emeritus of the SINYC Chorus, encapsulated this idea:

People want to do something beautiful for mankind. I think one of the things that compels people to join our chorus is that they have a sense that they need sanctuary, something beautiful in this crazy world of ours, but also, what a great gift to be part of something beautiful, to be part of something where the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts.

The Founding and Mission of the Schiller Chorus

In 2014, Lyndon LaRouche launched the Manhattan Project, with the conception that a political and cultural breakthrough in the United States and the world could not come from the stultified and controlled dynamic of the Washington, D.C. beltway bureaucracy, but had to be spear-headed instead from the culturally rich, wildly diverse City of New York. A big part of that intervention was the creation and founding of a community chorus, which LaRouche tasked to have 1,500 singers!

On December 20, 2014 at a sing-along performance of excerpts of Handel’s Messiah, the Schiller Institute NYC chorus was born. The concert had been organized in answer to the outrage over the Staten Island Grand Jury decision on the death-by-suffocation of Eric Garner, which had come in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri riots that followed the killing of an unarmed African-American teenager, and which threatened to create dangerous divisions and violence in the City of New York. The concert was dedicated to “The Sanctity of Every Human Life.”

Shortly after that concert, the Manhattan Chorus began holding weekly rehearsals in whatever space could be found. In March 2016, the SINYC Chorus, joined by friends from New Jersey, Boston, and Virginia, was able to perform the entire Easter section of the Messiah with a chorus of over 80 members, and a professional orchestra and soloists. Thereafter, Schiller Institute choruses in Boston, Virginia, and New York grew, giving concerts, hosting lectures on the principles of music, and participating in important musical interventions around the country.

Suddenly, in March of 2020, due to the pandemic, the New York City, Boston and Virginia choruses had to quickly shift all weekly sectionals and rehearsals online, and since that time we have produced six virtual chorus performances, three of which will be featured in the Thursday, December 17, 2020 Beethoven Celebration concert. (Click here for tickets and more information.)

In the recently released, 14-minute documentary, our Principal Conductor and Vice-Chair, John Sigerson, said:

The chorus is totally unique in the completely wide variety of people that are in it. It’s a very good reflection of the actual composition of the New York City area, which has every type of person: every age, young people, working people, professionals, some very skilled professionals, other people who come in and have absolutely no experience with singing whatsoever but are excited about the idea, because unlike many of the choruses in New York City, we do not have auditions for people. If someone wants to participate in this beautiful music, we work with them.

Boston chorus member Cher Jordan put it this way:

There are people who are professional, semi-professional, and then there were people like us who just needed to sing as a way of expression. And so we started attending and then all these new things that come to you, a lot of structure. [We are] given historical information about the music which is denied to people now if they are not on the track of being a professional musician.

The Missa Solemnis and the Rehearsal Process

The challenge and beauty of singing in a chorus, or the “choral principle” as developed by Lyndon LaRouche, is that every voice becomes part of something bigger than each individual’s self. Within each choral section, each singer, however experienced he or she may be, can both depend upon and tune the ear to the other singers and other sections.

The first roadblock that came up with having to shift to online rehearsals in March was that the singers are sitting in their own homes, singing completely by themselves! Furthermore, when it came time to put together a “performance,” each singer had to record his or her own voice singing the entire movement along with a digitally-produced, pre-recorded orchestral backtrack! This presented many challenges to our diverse group of singers, but people rose to the occasion, demonstrating an intense commitment to, and understanding of the mission of our chorus.

In the recently released documentary, SINYC chorus Alto Section member Yvonne May summed it up beautifully:

The thing I like about the Schiller Institute chorus is that here we do not only sing the great masterpieces of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, etc., we also sing African American Spiritual songs and also the special projects. We recently finished the “Defend the Yellow River” event. All these cultural activities reflect the Schiller Institute’s principle of promoting world peace and harmonization of the human society as one race. So, through the singing activity, it gives me a higher sense of purpose and brings me to a higher level of choral singing.

“Defend the Yellow River” is one movement of the Yellow River Cantata, written in 1939 to rally support across China for the war against the Japanese invasion, and is beloved of the Chinese people. The SINYC Chorus performed this piece, virtually, in Chinese, in celebration of the 75th Anniversary of V-J Day, 1945, dedicated to the Chinese sacrifices in that war.

Earlier, in celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the meeting of U.S. and Soviet Union troops at the Elbe River, and of V-E Day, 1945, the Chorus performed “Tri Tankista,” The Three Tankmen, written during the Russo-Japanese War, but sung across the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War (World War II). We sang it in Russian, and it was received with joy and appreciation in Russia, with hundreds of thousands of views.

The Missa Solemnis and the Future

Although there is much upheaval and uncertainty going into the New Year, the Schiller choruses are fully committed to continuing to work on the Missa Solemnis, with the tentative goal of performing it live for the twentieth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. No other choral work could be more appropriate, in that, according to Schiller chorus conductor John Sigerson:

Beethoven wrote this piece in the wake of the most brutal upheavals in European history, which was the period of the Napoleonic wars. It was a political intervention, but not from the standpoint of political parties, but from the standpoint of policy: What is the policy on which nations and human beings should base their relations? That was his concern. And that’s why the Missa Solemnis and the 9th Symphony—but I think the Missa Solemnis is a special work, because, although it brings back the past from the Catholic Mass, which goes back centuries, millennia, but it also looks toward the future.

Please join us on Thursday, December 17 at 7:30 pm, and join the chorus!