Stephan Ossenkopp

Panel 3 Opening Remarks

Good afternoon from Berlin, Germany. Good morning in the Western Hemisphere, good evening in Asia.

Thank you for joining us for the second day of the Schiller Institute’s two-day international virtual conference entitled, “There Can Be No Peace Without the Bankruptcy Reorganization of the Dying Trans-Atlantic Financial System.”

My name is Stephan Ossenkopp. I will be moderating Panel 3 and the discussion that will follow.

The panel you are about to hear from consists of some outstanding scientists, experts in their fields, who will speak on the topic of “Principles of Science for Durable Economic Progress.” I will introduce them as soon as they take the virtual podium.

The purpose of this series of worldwide events is to ensure a rational approach to today’s existential crisis of mankind, many aspects of which have been discussed in the previous two panels, which you should definitely watch if you have not already done so.

Please participate actively in this process. First, you can email your questions to the panelists at questions@schillerinstitute.org. They will be taken up by me in the extensive Q&A session after the presentations. And second, you can become a member of the Schiller Institute. We are an open network that welcomes members from all over the world and from all walks of life.

Before we begin, I would like to address you with a few of my own remarks.

The news this morning was that Germany, nominally one of the most advanced industrialized countries, will soon be rationing natural gas, according to the Ministry of Economics. Households and industry will receive instructions on when to heat and when to produce. This is a novelty, and will be a shock to people, not only in Germany. So while people are encouraged to put their money into the markets and trade stocks with their cell phones, they are supposed to sit at home, be unemployed, and freeze for the “greater good” of punishing Russia and saving “democracy”? This is a system at a dead end.

Speaking of financial markets, most so-called “economic news” today consists of some reporter standing in a trading floor trying to find explanations for why the charts behind him are moving in one direction or another and why traders are happy or unhappy.

I would like to illustrate this point a bit further with an example from a very popular movie from some years ago, The Wolf of Wall Street. In one scene, a cocaine-sniffing, martini-sipping stockbroker says:

Rule number one on Wall Street: nobody, not even Warren Buffett, knows whether a stock is going up, down, sideways, or is going in circles, least of all us stockbrokers. It’s all a fugazi, you know what fugazi is? It’s a fake, it’s fairy dust, it doesn’t exist. It’s not matter, it’s not in the elemental chart. It’s not real!

What passes for economics today—or any science at all—is often fugazi and fairy dust. The numbers are distorted to fit the political purpose and narrative. What is this narrative? That humans are destroying a mythical “balance of nature,” that humans’ use of resources to improve their standard of living would amount to a crime against nature, a nature that is deified and made untouchable.

So, now we are supposed to trade our hard-earned income for fairy dust, while at the same time our outdated bridges are collapsing under our feet, fuel and health care are scarce and unaffordable, and we are supposed to feel guilty about heating our homes or eating steak? This is absurd!

Of course, this has a long history going back to the British Empire’s willing stooge, Thomas Robert Malthus, and his idea that resources are fixed, and the human population must be adjusted to them in numbers. Not only in number, but also in class. The British eugenics societies long held the pseudoscientific view that the lower classes and non-white races, as they said, were essentially worthless and could basically be treated as disposable. They even put a price tag on babies! This is real. Did you know that John Maynard Keynes was the treasurer of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society?

Today, that role is assigned to climate alarmist activists and their fugazi science, who merely cite and repeat catchphrases, intimidate the public with fears and doubts, and threaten them by declaring that people are the problem, and diverting attention from their own atrocities by depriving people of basic economic goods, such as adequate and affordable energy, drinking water, housing, meaningful education, and other things that make it possible to live with dignity.

Current events clearly show that this is not a distant phenomenon or an abstract threat to our lives. It is suddenly very real! And this is our system. It has nothing to do with the developments in Ukraine in particular.

The current Western elites want to maintain their fairy dust system that has brought them status, wealth and influence, instead of moving to a science-based economic system that operates according to physical laws and the laws of technological progress.

The eminent economist Lyndon LaRouche, from whom we have heard many excerpts in recent panels, is a pioneer for a national as well as a global economic system based on physical laws whose cause and effect can be demonstrated. Based on these laws, real projections and forecasts can be made of what means will improve a population’s standard of living, how, and over what period of time.

Mr. LaRouche has left a remarkable number of studies, now being compiled in volumes of his collected works. If you have not already done so, I can only recommend strongly that you get a copy of Volume I now and study it for yourself. Large-scale intellectual improvement is the best weapon we have against neo-Malthusian oligarchs.

I would like to give an example of a country that has worked its way from an almost impossible situation, up to a lasting improvement and prosperity: China.

Now, China is working consistently to increase the share of nuclear fission energy and to master thermonuclear fusion in a widely applicable way by 2035.

Incidentally, the same is true in Russia, where the state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom has pledged to meet 85% of national energy consumption through nuclear power by the end of this century. President Putin has rightly criticized the West’s “green” agenda and “green” financing, which deliberately diverts investment away from fossil fuels, creating artificial shortages and price inflation.

How did China manage to do that? In a speech on August 8, 1977, the great reformer Deng Xiaoping said:

Our country wants to catch up with the most developed countries in the world. What should we do first? I believe we must first deal with science and education. The progress of scientific research in our country depends on the availability of skilled workers. We must do a good job in education, because scientific research depends on this field for its supply of young professionals.

Back then, 45 years ago, in a very poor China, it was bold to imagine such a future. At the time, the odds were stacked against China. In 1977, there were 1.2 million scientific researchers in the United States, about 900,000 to 1 million in the Soviet Union, but only about 200,000 in China. But China could harness these forces “in a unified and rational manner,” Deng said.

Today, China operates about half of the world’s high-speed rail fleets domestically. The entire European continent has just over a third. The mighty U.S. is absurdly at the bottom of the table, with countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia. In China, a systematically built high-speed network of over 40,000 km now links hundreds of modern cities. China also recently unveiled a Chinese prototype maglev train that is expected to reach speeds of up to 620 km/h. It uses high-temperature superconductors in the vehicle, and permanent magnets in the track.

In January of this year, China’s State Council published a paper titled, “China’s Space Program: A 2021 Perspective,” which states:

The mission of China’s space program is to explore outer space to expand humanity’s understanding of the Earth and the cosmos ... to meet the requirements of economic, scientific and technological development, national security, and social progress; and raise the scientific and cultural level of the Chinese people....

Spacelab modules Wentian and Mengtian will dock with the Chinese space station this year. Wentian will focus on research in life sciences: growth, development, genetics and aging of various types of plants, animals, and microorganisms under space conditions. Mentian will focus on research in fluid physics, materials science, combustion science, basic physics, and space technology.

Furthermore, a roadmap for construction of the lunar base by 2035 was presented recently. A guidance document was issued jointly by Chinese and Russian space agencies. According to the document, the physics, chemistry, and geology of the Moon will be studied to the point that resources can be made available for the long-term survival of humans who would form the first human “extra-terrestrial” colony with a lunar economy.

The West, instead of freezing for human rights, should cooperate with this amazing perspective. We have to blow away the fairy dust economy and fugazi science, and get back to the real scientific base which once made possible our industrialization and advances in health care, our food self-sufficiency, and our excitement about the accomplishments of the creative human mind.

This is the genuinely “natural” way of doing things in a human way.