Schiller Institute New Paradigm Webcast With Helga Zepp-LaRouche
May 24, 2018
The Worm Has Turned: Will Obama Administration Join Leading Brits On Trial as the Real “Collusion” Is Exposed?
HARLEY SCHLANGER: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to this week’s international webcast featuring our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
We are in the midst of a series of unfolding developments, and we’ll address them in the context of the discussion today. There are a number of things happening, each of which is very significant and we don’t full readings yet. But we want to start with what I think is something that most people are not aware of: And that is the coming earthquake that is hitting Europe, in this case from the Italian election. The new government is being put together, and there’s a complete freakout from the European Union, for good reason. Helga, what is the significance of these Italian developments, in the context of the overall strategic situation?
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: We have now, a new prime minister, who is a politically unknown law professor, but the real freakout is because of the mooted new Finance Minister Paolo Savona, who is a well-established economist. He was completely for the euro in the beginning, but then, when he saw what the consequences were for Italy of the single currency, he became completely anti-euro, and he has demanded a “Plan B” for Italy, meaning leaving the euro; and also he has called the euro a German prison for Italy, and he has given it some worse names.
So the freakout is quite incredible. All kinds of people, politicians, media have threatened Italy with financial warfare. One guy said the markets will teach Italy a lesson and bring it back to the path of virtue. One of the key anchors of the 2nd channel in Germany, Claus Kleber, who is a real specimen of his profession, to put it very diplomatically, he basically said one should use the gag bit — this is a torturous bit for horses which no honest horseman would ever use, because it’s really torturing horses — so he said one should use that for Italy to basically discipline them.
This is incredible. Here are people who are all the time making the hugest complaint about lacking democracy in China and whatnot, and they’re openly calling for regime change and using warfare techniques against one of the European Union members.
Now, I think if Savona indeed becomes finance minister, people are in for some surprises, because this is an experienced person, he’s not a lightweight, as the media were saying about Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. And given the fact that this all occurs — this is not an isolated phenomenon. It’s not Italy causing the financial crisis. This is a long arc of revolt against the neo-liberal policies which were expressed in the Brexit, in the election of Donald Trump, in the “no” to the Italian referendum changing the Constitution last year, in the Austrian election, and now in the Italian election — these are all the results that the populations do not want to submit any longer to these completely unjust austerity regimes, which only benefit the banks, the speculators and the rich, at the expense of the masses of the population.
So this is a very important moment, and rather than being completely shocked about it, and having hysterical tantrums. I think the chance should be used to take the positive elements of the new coalition in Italy — they have, after all, both of them in their party platform and now also in the coalition contract, two of the basic laws of Lyndon LaRouche: Namely, the implementation of Glass-Steagall, and secondly, the creation of National Bank for investments in the real economy. So, rather than being hysterical about, one should take this as a golden opportunity to get rid of the kind extremely dangerous speculative excesses, and go for a unified Glass-Steagall separation of the banks as a first step, and start to save the system in this way.
In one sense, this crisis around Italy can be a real chance to make the urgent change in this direction.
SCHLANGER: Helga, I would just like to make a point of something you brought up, which is that the people who are arguing against these policies are essentially saying that the voters have no right to express an opinion if it goes against the policies of the bankers. And this is really important, because the line from the media is that we’re in the midst of a robust recovery, things are improving, the European economy is improving. But the voters are voting to show that they don’t believe that. And there are some important developments; there are some continuing problems with the Macron government in France; Deutsche Bank continues to be at the front end of this list of most dangerous banks. I’d like you to just emphasize this point that the real economy is what’s behind the revolt, and that’s why the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche are so crucial.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: There is an economic website which warns of the consequences of the corporate debt bubble, which is much, much worse than in 2008, and they’re warning of a new financial crisis of “biblical dimensions.” Now, I don’t know — “biblical dimensions,” that’s the Deluge, or some other fundamental crises like that. And then you have the ongoing crisis around Argentina, the currency of Turkey is falling, forcing the central banks to reverse their interest rate policies, so this is all extremely fragile.
And very indicative that there is an understanding that some changes must be made, is what just happened at Deutsche Bank. Two years ago, my husband Mr. LaRouche, when the Deutsche Bank was already in a severe crisis, demanded that Deutsche Bank should change its entire policy since ’89, since the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen, and go back to the Herrhausen model of industrial banking. At that point, many people thought that this would never happen, that Deutsche Bank is a hopeless case. But while I don’t want to make a final judgment on it, it is a fact that last month, the leadership of Deutsche Bank kicked out its CEO John Cryan. And then, in Handelsblatt, the chief economist of Deutsche Bank, David Folkerts-Landau gave a long interview where he described how it was a big mistake for the last two decades, to have shifted the entire profile of Deutsche Bank into a complete investment bank, going into the derivatives trading. And while he makes some correct points, namely that Merrill Lynch was brought in, and a team which basically allowed a reverse takeover of Deutsche Bank so that it became completely foreign controlled and directed to high-risk speculation — I think they still have a portfolio of something like $42 trillion in derivatives outstanding; that’s the largest derivatives bank in the world.
What just happened, is today there was a shareholder meeting, and they apparently tried to kick out also Paul Achleitner, the supervisory board chairman of Deutsche Bank. The only thing I can comment on this Folkerts-Landau is that as several insiders told us, he was one of them, who changed the bank’s profile into the direction of this investment banking only. So he was not criticizing that for the last two decades, and Spiegel Online even says that it was the last effort by Achleitner to have some kind of show so that he would not be kicked out by making this mea culpla self-criticism.
I think that that is true, and the new chief executive is a person called Christian Sewing, who has been in the bank since ’89, and it is being said that he will totally concentrate and put the priority on investments in the real economy inside Germany — so, turning the Deutsche Bank back into a commercial bank at the service of industry. So one has to see if that actually happens, but I think the shares were already below EU10, and that is the red line when Deutsche Bank is danger to go bankrupt.
Anyway, I’m just saying this: We are on the verge of new financial crisis. We are sitting on a volcano. The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith put out a couple of weeks ago a paper where they said that derivatives are a ticking timebomb and they condemned derivatives trading as morally and economically completely unacceptable, because it just makes the rich richer and at the losses of everybody else. So, between these warnings — also Thomas Hoenig, the former FDIC vice chairman, Sheila Bair, — there are many people warning of this. And the Italian developments, as I said, indeed, mean the absolute opportunity to get rid of the excesses of the derivatives trading, go for banking separation, and the more it is being done in a coordinated fashion, the better, and it must occur really quickly.
SCHLANGER: And Helga, speaking of Germany, the Chancellor of Germany is in China. Any chance that the weakened and beleaguered Angela Merkel will come back with a New Silk Road Spirit?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well — [laughs] I don’t think so. I think what she will come back with is, you know, the Chinese, as they did with the Trump administration, they promised more opening up for finance, for cooperation concerning e-cars and similar things, automatic cars; so I think they will come back with some kind of a package. But as long as Merkel has this attitude — she made this statement which is quoted everywhere, that she regards the rise of China as the biggest challenge for the remaining years of her being in the office of Chancellor. Now, she is typical of the people who on the one side naturally see that without China nothing functions any more in the world. But she is also a really hard-core geopolitician in her attitude towards Russia, and she always regards China at the same time as a rival, so it’s a mixed situation. I would be very happy if she comes back brimming with the New Silk Road Spirit, but I have my doubts.
SCHLANGER: Now we come to probably the most complex of the situations, which is that in the United States, where it was just announced this afternoon by President Trump that he is cancelling the summit with Kim Jong-un. But this is occurring at a very interesting time, where the whole British role in Russiagate, in the attacks on Trump, is in the open. Why don’t we start with that? Because this is something that we have been fighting for: We’re going back to the dossier that we put out on Robert Mueller, going back to the investigations that we launched, and we insisted that you have to look at not just Christopher Steele as an isolated case, but as a British-directed assault against the United States: This is moving fairly quickly, isn’t it, Helga?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. As a matter of fact, if you look at the recent tweets by President Trump, they are quite to the point, namely that he said the “Russiagate” turned into “Spygate,” that there was absolutely no proof of a collusion with Russia, but that all the people involved in the coup, basically, that they created a spiderweb of collusion between the heads of the intelligence agencies of the Obama administration with British intelligence, and that there was ongoing effort, even before any investigation officially started, by British intelligence figures to connect with all kinds of persons in the Trump election team, to try to somehow involve them in some kind of a connection with some Russians. And all of this is coming out now.
So there was long before the Trump election victory, or even the nomination, the clear effort by British intelligence to lay leads, to create paper trails to manufacture and orchestrate the situation, whereby the so-called “collusion” with Russia was supposed to be hung on the Trump campaign, and Trump himself. And this is all now coming out.
This is now subject to public discussions, for example, on Monday, President Trump met with several intelligence heads — I think it was [FBI head] Wray and Rosenstein from the Department of Justice in the White House. And today, as a follow-up of that, Chief of Staff John Kelly is meeting with the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, together with congressmen — for example, Congressman Nunes, Senator Grassley — and they’re now having access to all the document, including the memorandum of Mueller, the memo defining the scope of Mueller’s investigation. This will all now be made available to the investigative committees in the Congress. And obviously, this is all criminal violations of law and the Constitution, so this is big!
I think Trump may absolutely be right when he says that this may become the biggest scandal in the history of America. And what is now clear, is that there was a task force involving an institutional group of people, who orchestrated all of this, in an election campaign, and Trump said, what was done against Bernie Sanders also was done on a much larger scale against him.
When all of this comes out, I think the world will really be a different place, and I think if President Trump is freed of this spiderweb, I think you will see, he will be in a much better position to carry through with his intentions than you have seen it so far.
SCHLANGER: What you’re describing is technically called “entrapment,” that the FBI — or, actually, John Brennan, Clapper, and then bringing Comey in later, were involved in created Russiagate as a collusion with the British intelligence services, the GCHQ, which is signals intelligence; the MI6, MI5. The key people that are being named now, like Stefan Halper, Mifsud, Downer, the current Australian High Commissioner to Great Britain — all of them are tied to MI6, MI5, private agencies. This was brought up by Sen. Rand Paul at the hearings, when he asked Gina Haspel whether or not the CIA was involved in getting evidence from Britain. So, a lot of this is coming out.
To what extent, Helga, is this then connected to the financial crisis? Make the connection for people, because there’s still some confusion about how the financial crisis is then intersecting this operation against Trump because of Trump’s willingness to work with Russia and China. I think it’d be very important for you to give people an understanding of that.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: You know, the big question is indeed the fact that China is rising and that China has a strategic partnership with Russia and that the New Silk Road is now involving 140 nations. And, as many statistics have proven, the New Silk Road dynamic is creating already a completely new paradigm: You have economic growth, you have a dynamic in science and technology, innovation. So the real momentum in many, many fields is with these alignments among Russia, China, now India, Japan, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BRICS, the China-Latin America CELAC connection; the Chinese investments in Africa, so this has created a completely different dynamic in the world.
And then you look at the condition of Wall Street, the condition in the City of London, and the absolute turmoil in the European Union, so the geopoliticians, basically, they see the rise of China and they are absolutely desperate to keep their model. But they’re incapable of recognizing what are the causes, and therefore, they will not be able to correct their policies.
As I said earlier, the attacks on Italy right now, they completely fail to even ask the question, why is it that the two euro-critic parties had the best results? It is the same reason, and I want to repeat this — it is the same reason, why the Brexit occurred, why the people in the Midwest voted for Trump and against Hillary Clinton; and there is an absolute, hysterical effort by the people who have made their gigantic, virtual fortunes — sometimes it’s not so virtual, but sometimes it’s, indeed, just virtual fortunes — with this highly speculative system, the neo-liberal system connected with wars based on lies, with so-called “humanitarian interventions,” regime change, color revolution. That whole model right now, is really what is not functioning any more.
President Trump won the election because he promised that he would not do these foreign wars any more, and you can see that there are all the time efforts by neo-con elements in his administration to lure him back. And therefore, I think also the cancellation or postponement of the summit with Kim Jong-un is really unfortunate, because it would have been really better to make one, clear step for peace, and obviously there were also difficulties, in terms of what are the procedures for the denuclearization. But, Kim Jong-un, he released the American hostages. Today the international press was invited to see the destruction of the nuclear test site. So there are clearly signs of goodwill, and therefore, I think it’s very regrettable that this meeting was postponed. But hopefully it will come back on the agenda.
But the connection is really the fight between the old paradigm, which is not functioning, and the New Paradigm, which is focused on the common good of the people on economic growth. And just as an additional element, China just completely abandoned their two-children policy, by saying that there involved a change in the view about population: That in the past, when they adopted the one-child, and then two-child policy, thought that additional children are a burden in an economy with limited resources; but that now, they have changed their view and they see each new child, especially every young person, as a tremendous asset of creative power, of additional richness of the entire society.
So, look at the difference in the values, and then you can really see that this is a fundamental fight for, can mankind govern itself in a reasonable way? And the danger of a financial collapse hangs over the world, at least concerning the trans-Atlantic part very much. So I think, LaRouche’s Four Laws are the absolute urgent question of the hour.
SCHLANGER: It’s important to see, also, in terms of these two paradigms, you look at what just happened near by old hometown of Houston, Texas, where, in Santa Fe high school you had another one of these mass shootings. These are almost commonplace in the United States right now; whereas in China, you have this total emphasis on education, on science.
This goes back to one of the fundamental economic breakthroughs of your husband, this concept of potential relative population density. And of course, as opposed to what people like Prince Philip, the genocidal Consort of Queen Elizabeth (if he’s still breathing), has been committed to his whole life.
Helga, in this sense, I assume you see this change in China as an absolutely significant recognition of, again, the difference between the two paradigms, but also your husband’s view of this concept of potential relative population density.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes. The Chinese have clearly totally changed, starting with Deng Xiaoping and his reforms after the Cultural Revolution; but especially in the last five, six years with the leadership of Xi Jinping, there has been an absolute understanding about the fundamental issues of life — I mean, he has given the task to the Chinese scientists to find out how the human mind works, what is the origin and importance of life in the universe; what are the laws of the universe. And he has encouraged especially an emphasis on innovation, on creativity in the education as the source of wealth. And when they now see the connection between qualitative advances in the knowledge about physical laws and the ability to have more people, and more people, again, leading to more creativity, I think they are absolutely on the right track.
SCHLANGER: Well, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to talk before the program, so I want to make sure if there’s something else that you wanted to bring up, you have a chance. Is there anything else on your radar screen?
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes: there is actually a petition on the website of the White House. This was initiated by the President of the American University in Moscow, Professor Edward Lozansky, and Jim Jatras, and they call for an early summit between President Trump and President Putin, by making essentially the same point that we have been making for the last several months, that, given the fact that President Trump is still so much up against neo-cons in the Republican Party, he’s really done a remarkable job under the circumstances, where you have the entire intelligence apparatus not only of what they call the “deep state,” which is really an incorrect characterization, because the role of British intelligence is absolutely crucial to understand what makes this Empire tick.
So, in order to cut through that, and given the fact that the entire Russiagate operation was aimed to prevent a good relationship between Russia and the United States, which Trump all the time said would be a “good thing and not a bad thing,” and he tries to do it; so the way to cut through this whole thing would be to have this summit, which they talked about — Trump and Putin on the telephone a couple of weeks ago, and do this as quickly as possible.
So there is this petition, and I would call all of you who are listening, or watching, to sign this petition that such an early summit would take place. Because I think it is an absolutely important initiative, and if this petition has more than 100,000 by June 30, then the White House will have to respond to it, and will respond.
Otherwise, naturally, there are many, many things, and I would again invite you, join us, join the Schiller Institute. Make sure this webcast becomes more known and is being spread, because we are in an urgent need for a political discourse: Where should mankind go? And how can we organize the world so that it’s safe and beautiful for everybody to live in?
SCHLANGER: OK, that’s good advice, and I’ll just second that: Joining the Schiller Institute is absolutely crucial expression of your own human sentiments. Many of our listeners have joined, but we want to have a real membership drive, and expanding this webcast is one way to do it. So, I would urge everyone to think, over the next days, of what you can do to make sure this movement succeeds and advances, that the New Silk Road Spirit can be brought into every household throughout the Atlantic region, which otherwise is left with nothing but collapse and depression.
So, Helga, thanks for joining us, and we’ll be back next week.
ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Yes, good-bye.