SCHILLER INSTITUTE WEBCAST

A Moment of Optimism for Humanity, As the Old System Collapses

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s February 5 weekly webcast, featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello. I’m Harley Schlanger with the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President, Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is February 5th, 2020.

We’ve been going through weeks of intense political activity and strategic developments. Let’s start with the State of the Union Address which was delivered last night by President Trump. Helga, what were your impressions from hearing the President speak?

Trump’s State of the Union Address

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The State of the Union address by President Trump expressed an overwhelming optimism. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ripping up her copy of Trump’s speech, was more telling about the state of the Democratic Party than Trump’s speech.

Trump mentioned a couple of extremely important things: the Artemis [Moon mission], for which he wants to have full funding; that he wants to put a lot of emphasis in science education. Very good was the young black student, who wants to be an astronaut, who does not want to look up to the stars but look down at the Earth from there. There were some very strong elements in the speech. Consider that together with the expected acquittal today in the Senate—it’s too early to be sure, but I think one can assume it—that means that Trump will be freed from all the nasty maneuvers of Russiagate, Ukrainegate, and the impeachment process.

It’s now important that people, especially the American people, give him the support to address those things which absolutely need to be addressed now, because we are still in a strategically very difficult moment. We still have the financial crash pending, expressed, among other things, by the fact that the Federal Reserve has increased the repo credit from $80 billion some time ago to $120-$125 billion per day, and that underlines the urgency to really have a new financial architecture, before it is too late.

Call for a Great Nations Summit

On January 3, I proposed a summit among the Presidents of the United States, Russian and China, and I think the coronavirus crisis emphasizes that it would be extremely necessary that this summit also include India’s Prime Minister Modi. This summit should address the global questions, the need for a New Bretton Woods system, and to have all kinds of other problems be jointly gotten out of the way.

The moment we are in right now is really an optimistic one. We can, and must, use this opportunity to move forward with the LaRouche program: the Four Laws—Glass-Steagall, a national bank, New Bretton Woods, and a crash program for fusion and international space cooperation—and mobilize full funding for Artemis from the Congress. That is the basis to move the world away from a very dangerous moment and get into safer waters. But it’s not yet done, so I think it’s just that the moment is ripe to really put in a new paradigm, to go back to the American System of economy, rather than being the dependency of the City of London and Wall Street. It’s a good moment, but momentum is extremely important to move this all forward.

Schlanger: You mentioned the freeing of Trump, which will likely come with the acquittal. I noticed he did mention the coming 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. This would be an ideal opportunity, wouldn’t it, for him to sit down with Putin as part of your proposal for a three-party summit. Given that the attack on him was initially started around Russia, this does give him that opening, doesn’t it?

Zepp-LaRouche: That’s a very good moment. Even so, that’s the end of April, still two months away, and in those two months a lot can happen. But I think if that is seriously put on the agenda as part of the April 26 anniversary of the meeting [of Soviet and U.S. troops] on the Elbe River, or at the latest on May 9 in Moscow, celebrating the end of World War II, I think this would be indeed something that everybody in the United States, and internationally, should support. Because we need to get out of this geopolitical confrontation, we need to stop making Russia and China the enemy. Because it should be clear that all the major problems of this world can be worked on and solved, only if the major powers work together.

I therefore call on people to absolutely have this idea in mind and support the idea that President Trump should accept Putin’s offer and go to these two meetings.

Coup Plotters Defeated in Senate Vote
—What Next?

Schlanger: Even with today’s vote in the Senate, Adam Schiff and others are still insisting that they are going to continue investigations, and maybe will even bring up new articles of impeachment. But on the other side, it does open the door to Senate investigations into where this came from, who’s behind it. Are you expecting that this will be followed up by Senate Republicans and also the Attorney General?

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. Some of them have already said so, such as Senators Chuck Grassley and Rand Paul. Grassley and Ron Johnson have demanded that all the documents pertaining to the 2016 election campaign, and what the Democrats did at that point with Ukraine, should all be published and made available to the American people. Then you have the Barr-Durham investigation, which now should take on full speed.

The Democrats, if they still can think—which is questionable at this point—are well-advised to reflect on why they lost so much, and whether they wish to be wiped out completely as a party, should they continue. The absolute debacle of the Iowa caucus election really demonstrates that they don’t have their act together. The population is clearly fed up with Russiagate, with the impeachment process, with the Democrats who are obsessed in not addressing the issues of livelihood, jobs, and so forth—what the population really cares about. When Nancy Pelosi ripped up Trump’s speech, I had the memory of the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin who, when outmaneuvered as he was trying to get the daughter of the queen, ripped himself into two pieces. That is the image I have of Nancy Pelosi—Nancy Rumpelstiltskin Pelosi, one should call her from now on.

The Democrats have proven themselves absolutely incapable of reflecting on why they lost in 2016. In a certain sense, this is an example of the Erinyes working. They condoned everything the Bush administrations did against my husband—they stole the delegates in Arkansas which my husband had won, in a complete violation of any kind of practice. Right now is the moment to really escalate also the campaign for the exoneration of my husband, because as I said, and as we have discussed many times, Americans urgently need to read in depth the works of my husband, to study the proposals of physical economy, to really look at the broad scope of scientific method my husband developed, which is absolutely what is needed at this moment.

And that is why his exoneration is so crucial, because people have to have an unbiased view of the works of Lyndon LaRouche, in this critical moment.

A Bloomberg in the Wings

The biggest danger right now is really that they will try after this Iowa debacle, to pull out Bloomberg, who is now gearing up; he’s doubling his spending as a billionaire trying to buy up the vote; he has just hired 2,000 more helpers for most of the states; it’s just something which is very dangerous.

Bloomberg, together with Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England, who has replaced Bloomberg as the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, are the two people who are right now the biggest threat to the world economy. If they succeed in any way in imposing their green financing schemes, this will create absolute havoc. Green financing, circular economy—this is really dangerous. And the Democratic Party changed the rules so that Bloomberg can come in at a late point [during the primaries]. He’s the one who is supposed to pick up the pieces from where the Iowa caucuses left them.

So, while the moment is good and Trump is out of the box, it is not yet in any way the time to become complacent. The most crucial battle is going to take place now, and the exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche is an absolute centerpiece to get the full-fledged new paradigm program realized, hopefully at one of these summits, either at the meeting on the Elbe or following that very soon, as quickly as possible.

Schlanger: The Democrats have not yet learned from the failure to defend Lyndon LaRouche. In fact they were part of the attack on him and have embraced the very green fascist policies he was warning about. The voter turnout in Iowa was a much lower than expected, because the Democratic Party is anti-growth, anti-science, and the jokes are, the facts are, that they couldn’t even count the number of votes in a gymnasium. How would anyone, therefore want to give them control over the world’s largest economy? The Iowa election proves you don’t need Putin to meddle, in order to screw up the Democratic Party!

Coronavirus and Racism Against China

Helga, I think we should turn now to what’s going on with China and this coronavirus outbreak, how serious it is, the reaction to it from around the world, and the absolutely insane opportunism of the anti-China McCarthyite mob, using this moment to attack China. What’s your assessment?

Zepp-LaRouche: For objective reasons, it has to be stated, that when the World Health Organization (WHO) Director General said that China has established a new standard of how to deal with such pandemics or epidemics, that is absolutely true. The Chinese government has demonstrated an unprecedented degree of efficiency. They quarantined 60 million people, two major cities; they have established an incredibly fast system to erect three hospitals of more 1,000 beds each, in Wuhan; and they have published the genome for other scientists in other countries to study, because of the urgency of a vaccine.

China has done a magnificent job, and it’s also important that the leading health organizations such as the WHO and also the World Association for Infectious Diseases and Immunological Disorders—WAIDID, as it’s called—have reported that there is no need to exaggerate measures; they advised against a travel ban—I think now twenty-two countries, nevertheless, have banned Chinese people from entering, or others who have been in China in the last two weeks. WAIDID has said that such practices are exaggerated and not advisable.

On the other side, along with WAIDID, the Chinese media and Chinese government spokesmen have expressed an understanding that other countries have to take measures to protect their own citizens. So, it’s one thing that President Trump has said that he wants to give support to China, but unfortunately you have such really unbelievable statements by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, for example, who said, that the coronavirus now hitting China is good for the United States, because it brings back jobs to the United States. It is unbelievable that he was not ashamed to say a thing like that!

Then, you have a barrage of racism breaking out. Der Spiegel magazine in Germany outdid everybody by having a cover photo showing a supposedly Chinese person with a face mask, with goggles, with earphones, with a hoodie—looking like a monster. The headline is “Coronavirus Made in China.” There are many reports that Chinese people or even Asian-looking people are being stopped from entering restaurants or other facilities in the United States, for example. This is really bad—the anti-China, “yellow peril” hysteria being peddled by some people. People who say this should be blasted for their racism.

This is exactly the kind of thing expressed by the former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, Kiron Skinner, who warned that China constituted the first non-Caucasian threat to the United States. It’s really time to overcome this kind of racist bias. People should work together on such great challenges. This is one moment in which you need to put the common aims of mankind into focus. It’s the great divide, where the people who are racists reveal themselves. They should be disrespected and ostracized for their disgusting views.

Locust Plague in East Africa: A Moral Test

Schlanger: Speaking of racism as it’s related to disease, we have also the need for cooperation to deal with the plague of locusts that is hitting East Africa. Again, this is potentially very devastating. What’s your sense of potential for cooperation there? And what does it say about the effects of green policy that made these large volumes of insects possible?

Zepp-LaRouche: This is the biggest locust threat in, I think, seventy years. The swarm is threatening to move from Kenya and Ethiopia into Sudan and Eritrea. It could increase 500 times between now and the summer. Every day, these locusts are consuming the equivalent amount of food necessary to nourish 2,000 people—even at this early stage. You can see that a large number of people are now threatened with death if this is not contained, and Africa has nowhere near the kind of robust measures or systems to conduct effective area spraying—they’ve done a little bit, but nowhere near the level needed.

This locust plague is something for which we should call on the international community to act. The United Nations has said $76 million is needed immediately to widen the spraying across East Africa—which is really absolutely peanuts—it’s about half of what Mike Bloomberg has spent since December on advertisements to promote his green fascist agenda; it gives you a sense of proportion.

We are therefore calling on the international community to step in and provide airplanes and spray of the type and in the amounts needed. This is a test case. Will the world community act and support a continent clearly on the verge of developing, or allow Africa to be set back quite a bit? It’s really a test of the morality of the rest of the world, how we react to this danger. This should be brought up; all the governments that have the means—the United States, the Europeans, Japan, India, Russia, China, and others—they should all work together to help the African continent defeat this danger and start a real industrialization program instead.

Potential Relative Population-Density

Schlanger: This goes back to one of the central points that your husband always made in terms of these fights, that what we’re dealing with, is the legacy of colonialism. You had the ugly specter of Prince Charles at Davos lecturing the world on how we have to deal with overpopulation and climate. You had George Soros there, doing something similar.

It’s important, Helga, when we talk about the LaRouche economic perspective, that people really understand the meaning of potential relative population-density, to get over this green fascism. Why don’t you just say a couple things about that, because it is one of the crucial points that you’ve always intervened with, in fighting against the depopulation policy.

Zepp-LaRouche: It’s very unfortunate that, for example, former German President Horst Köhler, who also used to be the head of the IMF, has recently come out with the need for a so-called “circular economy.” This is absolutely crazy. He calls for the de-carbonization of the world economy—the great transformation of the economy, and for a “circular economy”—meaning an economy that has no growth. It should be obvious that if you were to implement that in Germany, one of the countries with the best industrial potential in the world, a no-growth economy would guarantee that you would not be able to fight something like the coronavirus. You could not make breakthrough discoveries to fight new diseases, and you would leave the developing countries in whatever condition they are.

Such no-growth formulations are used by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the Director Emeritus of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who many years ago said that the so-called “carrying capacity” of the planet is only one billion people.

It is a fact, that if the world were to “exit” nuclear energy, which Germany stupidly has done (nobody in his right mind understands why Chancellor Angela Merkel ever did that; it was the biggest mistake in her entire time in office) and also stops using fossil fuels, and only goes with so-called alternative energy, such as solar and wind, then the energy-flux density available for use in what’s left of the economy will be sufficient for no more than one billion people.

Green Financing Is a Mass-Murderous Policy

So, when you hear people talking about “green financing,” or circular economy, you should be alarmed. What they really mean is “depopulation.” I know, from having been an opponent of this policy ever since the Club of Rome published its stupid lies about the limits to growth. Meadows and Forrester wrote their book on this in the early 1970s. The intention has always been to depopulate the world. They are ideologues; these are people who are in the tradition of Malthus, of the British East India Company. They have never really changed their outlook. These are people who believe the slave trade was okay, that the opium trade was okay. They’re the ones who presently could not care less about many people dying in Africa: Their outlook is, “Oh, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, this is a good thing. It helps to balance the planet.”

We have a real problem, in that people do not understand the connection between energy-flux density in the production process, and the potential relative population-density that can be maintained with a specific level of production. If you want to have the seven billion people alive today to have a decent life, you have to go to the fourth generation of nuclear energy production; you have to replace relatively unsafe nuclear plants with inherently safe nuclear plants, like the pebble-bed reactor, like the HTGR (high-temperature gas-cooled reactor), and also models based on the thorium fuel cycle. You have to join in a crash program for a fusion economy. Then, all of these problems can be managed.

Michael Bloomberg, Mark Carney and, unfortunately also Horst Köhler (who I had hoped would be a little bit better, but he has collapsed morally, really badly), all of these people are ideologues. They want to make money with green financing, but there is a much, much uglier and darker side to what they are proposing. They think that certain people should be protected, certain people who belong to the upper crust—the one percent of people who have the privileges of the “casino economy”—but that the large mass of the human population should be decimated, that the vast majority of people are “useless eaters” who should be gotten rid of.

Now, some people may think this sounds too harsh. But there is no need for Africa to be in this condition! People are freaked out about China developing Africa, but why did the West not industrialize Africa a long time ago? Why did the West not do what the Chinese are now doing, namely, to bring in infrastructure, industrial parks, energy, communications, thereby creating the infrastructure conditions for the continent to develop? Most European nations pursued colonial policies for hundreds of years. The IMF conditionalities were a continuation of that. The green financing is an effort to keep the industrial development of Africa, Latin America, and some Asian countries from occurring.

We are really looking at the end of a paradigm of oligarchism, colonialism, and imperialism—an ugly thing that must be urgently overcome. The optimism expressed by President Donald Trump in his State of the Union Address; the very important statements of Russian President Putin saying that Russia can play an important role in electrifying all of the African continent, to turn the lights on in Africa; and what China has promised in terms of overcoming poverty around the world, including Africa—that is the orientation with which the other major powers have to cooperate.

Those countries that want to stick with what is really a tradition of eugenics and genocide, should be outmaneuvered. A different agenda must now be put forward; it is a very serious matter.

The locust plague in Africa cannot be treated more lightly than the coronavirus epidemic. Even though it may not be same kind of threat, as far as spreading to other countries, addressing it is nevertheless a moral indicator of where the human species stands.

Schlanger: On the Schiller Institute website, you can find articles Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche has written on this topic over the years. I would urge people to not just read these, but to circulate them, and to join the Schiller Institute, and join our mobilization right now.

German Farmers Fighting for Survival

Helga, speaking of the mobilization, we had the opportunity to hear from a farmer who has been involved in the demonstrations in Germany, who spoke at the BüSo party conference over the weekend. Demonstrations are continuing in Europe, and now it looks as though we are beginning to pull together U.S. support for that. How does this fit in to the picture you’ve just described?

Zepp-LaRouche: The German farmers have been suffering for a very long time because the prices they get from the food chains, primarily, is maybe half of what they need. I think the different food chains have now lowered the milk price to EU9 cents per liter, when the dairy farmers need EU40 cents to break even—and that is not even a parity price.

These farmers in their flash-mob tractorcades—which they plan to continue—are fighting for their survival. The Yellow Vest movement in France and the protesting farmers in Germany are now beginning to reassess what they have to do. They are beginning to understand that they have to address the larger picture: For example, why would anybody wish to wipe out agriculture, to destroy that which is the basis for the nourishment of the entire population?

When some of our colleagues in the United States were briefing organizations there, like the Kansas Cattlemen’s Association, and others in North and South Dakota, Minnesota and Virginia, they discovered that those organizations did not know anything about the situation of the German farmers, or the situation in Europe in general. When they learned about it, they immediately said: “Look, we have to express our solidarity.” The U.S. farmers are facing a similar crisis. They sent messages of support.

Different social groupings in each country, but also groupings among different nations, must understand that this is a question that can be solved only at the highest level. There are no partial solutions. We need a new financial system, a credit system, a New Bretton Woods, according to the real intention of Franklin D. Roosevelt—which was much better than the Bretton Woods as it was implemented by people like Truman and Churchill after FDR’s death. Because Franklin D. Roosevelt was absolutely committed to providing massive credit for the industrialization of the developing countries. That is an additional component which needs to be added in such a New Bretton Woods agreement.

Be Optimistic—Join the Schiller Institute!

Once we decide to stop geopolitics, to stop thinking about profit for the few, but instead concern ourselves with the development of the whole human species, all the problems can be solved. We have Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, and Modi—and once these four have formed an alliance, then others can join; there are many other useful and decent leaders who can bring their countries into this alliance. We need to have a completely different system, a system that is devoted to the common good, and not to the speculators. This will mean a national bank in every country and connecting these national banks in the form of a credit system. With that we can solve all problems. But we have to think big. If we each only look at our own interests, we will miss the opportunity that is right in front of us.

So, join the Schiller Institute! Because we are spearheading this fight internationally. We will present more programs on what has to be done. This is our expertise. We published a very important study, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. There are already two volumes of that. We also published another, complementary study, Extending the New Silk Road to West Asia and Africa. These are the blueprints of how we can fix this world.

I can only appeal to you: Join the Schiller Institute! Let’s really end this sad period of history, in which some portions of the human species are condemned to poverty and backwardness. We have it in our hands to create a truly human world with a new paradigm of all nations, working together for the common good of all of us.

Schlanger: I’ll add one more thing. For those of you out there who are still pessimists—and I see it all the time with some of your responses on the YouTube page of the Schiller Institute website—all you have to do is look at this fight around Russiagate/Ukrainegate, and realize this is a fight that we won! It was Trump’s optimism, but it was also the fight of the Schiller Institute, going out to the public, bringing up the real battle, and as Helga was just saying, looking at the big strategic picture, rather than at your own misery—that’s how we get out of pessimism.

So, Helga, thanks for joining us. Anything else you want to add?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think it’s the time to become active: People should not sit on the fence. There are moments in history when you really can change things. These are the “star-hours of history.” Such moments don’t come every day, but I think the year 2020 is one of them. An old system is collapsing, and the potential exists to establish a new and better system. Be conscious of this great opportunity. Join us!

Schlanger: OK. We’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. Till next week.