WE HAVE TO SAY NO TO THE EUROFASCISM. THE EURO-AMERICAN AXIS IS THE AXIS THAT LEADS TO THE WW III. AMPHIKTYON E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER Volume 28, No. 27 - July 3, 2014 Trans-Atlantic Alliance Pushes Chaos, As Alternative Emerges in Eurasia Barack Obama, David Cameron and other EU leaders continue to threaten to impose new and far more crippling sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, despite the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken significant steps in the past days to de-escalate the crisis. He not only completed the withdrawal of Russian forces from the border area, but also asked the Regional Council to rescind the law authorizing the use of Russian military force in Ukraine. There has also been a series of conference calls between Vladimir Putin, Petro Poroshenko, Angela Merkel and François Hollande aimed at reaching a coordinated ceasefire and negotiated solution. But the threats continue, with Ukraine being in fact a pretext to “punish” Russia. Those Western leaders, however, do have to contend with significant opposition from business leaders in their respective countries (cf. below). Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf is again a tinderbox for regional and global war. Saudi-backed jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are moving on the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, having already taken key cities and towns and major transportation routes throughout northern and western Iraq, with the temporary help of Sunni tribes and former Iraqi Army officers and troops. The ISIS is now coming close to establishing a territory on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border under its control. Iran is considering direct intervention on behalf of the Maliki government, but such action could be a trigger for a new “Hundred Years War” inside the Islamic world between Sunnis and Shiites. This is exactly the policy pursued by the Anglo- Americans since the initial launching of their regime-change projects in Syria, Egypt, Libya and Iraq. Two things have this faction gravely alarmed. First, the entire trans-Atlantic financial system is on the edge of collapse. Recent data from the Bank for International Settlements shows a massive increase in derivatives speculation at the same time that investment in the physical economy has broken down. Since Jan. 2013, derivatives exposure by the trans-Atlantic too-big-to-fail banks and allied hedge funds has skyrocketed by 19%, putting the global derivatives total at an estimated $1.7 quadrillion. Secondly, a growing Eurasian-centered alliance is emerging for serious economic investment in a New Silk Road/Eurasian Landbridge program. China is aggressively promoting a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB – cf. SAS 25/14), to be initially capitalized at $500 billion, largely Chinese reserves. Several dozen nations have already indicated interest in participating. Russia and China have also advanced discussions about managing their historic 30-year $400 billion gas deal in rubles and yuans, not in the traditional dollar system. These talks are expected to move forward and expand in scope when the BRICS countries meet in Brazil July 15-16. Under President Modi, India has expanded its own commitments to participate in the Eurasian development corridors. This is what is driving the powers of the dying trans-Atlantic system to provoke permanent chaos and war to preserve their power. Argentina Won’t Capitulate to the Empire’s Financial Predators Faced with the onslaught of predatory vulture funds and their backers in the U.S. judiciary, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her government are following Lyndon LaRouche’s advice, and refusing to surrender the nation’s sovereignty and to kill the population. As we reported last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling of a lower court ordering Argentina not to make the scheduled payment to holders of restructured sovereign debt without also paying $1.5 billion to two holdout hedge funds which had refused the debt restructuring in 2005 (cf. SAS 26/14). In talks with the LaRouchePAC Policy Committee June 23, LaRouche warned that efforts by the NML Capital and Aurelius Capital Management funds to seize Argentine assets as payment for defaulted bonds, means that the “bailout/bail-in policy is in full play now, and the attack on Argentina set this into motion.” The situation is ripe to “explode or implode” immediately he warned, so “we’re headed for a world war.” In this life or death battle, LaRouche said, Argentina “cannot capitulate….it would go extinct.” While it has not taken the optimal path of openly embracing LaRouche’s four programmatic points (cf. SAS 25/14), Argentina has gone on the offensive, reasserting the nation’s sovereign right to reject the IMF’s conditionalities of austerity that were always attached to debt restructurings in the past, insisting on economic growth instead. That message was put out in a full page ad published June 22 in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and published in several leading European dailies two days later. Finance Minister Axel Kicillof delivered the same message to UN ambassadors of EIR STRATEGIC ALERT 2 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n°27 / 2014 the G-77 + China in New York on June 25, detailing how the foreign debt had served only to loot Argentina (cf. below). Of signal importance is President Fernández’s direct challenge to Barack Obama, at a time when his own future is highly uncertain. In a June 26 statement entitled “Argentine Pays,” Fernández forcefully warned that the U.S. government -- Barack Obama -- bears “international responsibility for the decisions of its judiciary…” In that same statement, the government announced it had taken steps to effect payment to those bondholders who had accepted restructuring, depositing funds in the Central Bank account of its trustee Bank of New York- Mellon (BoNY) while paying nothing to the vultures. The expected hysteria from the vultures and their legal allies ensued. At the same time, Fernández is pursuing other options, including alliances with the surging Asia-Pacific nations of Russia and China, and with the broader BRICS grouping. Calling Argentina a “key partner” in Ibero-America, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he would be visiting Argentina in July, in the context of the BRICS summit in Brazil, to which he had personally invited Fernández. In Buenos Aires, he said, he and Fernández will discuss “the full range of current bilateral and international issues, and outline mutually advantageous joint projects in the energy sector, including nuclear energy, heavy machinery and technical-military cooperation.” Impressive International Support Lines up Behind Argentina in Debt Battle The above-mentioned decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has provoked widespread international support for Argentina, including from the Vatican and Argentina’s own Catholic Bishops Conference, but has also unleashed a brawl among institutional, U.S. establishment and other international forces, panicked over the implications of the ruling for the stability of the global financial system, at a time when the trans-Atlantic system is blowing apart. The Group of 77 + China offered its “unanimous support” to Argentina on June 25, following a hard-hitting presentation by Finance Minister Axel Kicillof. “Argentina’s cause is the cause of the G-77,” said the group’s president, Bolivian Ambassador Sacha Llorenti Solís. Seeing Argentina as a test case for how other governments can expect to be treated -- or have already been treated -- one ambassador after another stood up to offer their wholehearted support, many openly denouncing the immorality, irrationality and even genocide implied by the Court’s decision. Other regional Ibero-American organizations such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) have offered similar support. Russia has also fully supported Argentina’s efforts to come to some agreement with the holdout creditors. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) issued a June 25 statement warning “Argentina’s ‘Vulture Fund’ Crisis threatens profound consequences for international financial system,” the focus is less on Argentina per se, than on the dangerous legal precedent the Supreme Court ruling might set in terms of overturning present and future debt restructurings. While Financial Times’ columnist Martin Wolf and Foreign Affairs analyst Felix Salmon both penned more polemical, and useful, articles in defense of Argentina, questioning the violation of sovereign immunity and even the undermining of national sovereignty, their ultimate concern is finding a means to resolve such conflicts within the confines of the current system. Revelations on Benghazi Attacks Mean Obama Must Be Impeached Immediately! Lyndon LaRouche demanded June 24 that, on the basis of revelations concerning Hillary Clinton, the U.S. House of Representatives launch immediate impeachment proceedings against President Barack Obama for his lies and cover-up of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012. During that attack, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American officials were killed by the Ansar al-Sharia terrorist organization. The just-released book Blood Feud by Edward Klein (Regnery Publishing, Washington, D.C., 2014) reports what happened on that fateful day in 2012, as told by a close collaborator of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. According to this person, at 10 PM on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, after Clinton had received detailed accounts of the terror attack in Benghazi and knew that the Al Qaeda affiliated Ansar al-Sharia had launched a heavily-armed premeditated assault, on the anniversary of the original 9/11 attacks, she received a personal telephone call from President Obama, who ordered her to release a false statement claiming that the attack had been a spontaneous demonstration protesting a video that slandered the Prophet Mohammed. Both Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill Clinton concluded that Obama feared that his re-election two months later would be jeopardized if the truth came out about the Benghazi attack. At 10:30 PM, Secretary Clinton issued the false account. LaRouchePAC has confirmed from two highly qualified sources, including one with first-hand knowledge of the events of Sept. 11, 2012, that the Klein account of the telephone call between the President and Secretary Clinton is accurate. Therefore, Lyndon LaRouche demanded that the House of Representatives take action: “Obama lied to cover up the murders of four American officials and this makes him an accomplice after the fact to those murders. The President lied. He is unfit to be President and he must be immediately impeached.” In May, the House of Representatives set up a Select Committee to investigate the events at Benghazi and their cover-up, after an email surfaced from Presidential advisor Ben Rhodes who said explicitly to claim that the attack was only due to a video. Although the investigation has not yet begun, LaRouche demanded they now take up impeachment. Senators have asked for a similar committee to be set up in the Senate. History Is Closing in on the Current White House The scandal around the Benghazi attacks is not the only policy failure of the Obama Administration that is now under increasing fire. * On June 26, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that recess appointments made by President Obama in Jan. 2012 were in violation of the Constitution. Indeed, although the Senate was not in recess at the time, he went ahead and named three members to the National Labor Relations Board, without obtaining approval from the Senators, and later claimed that he had the authority to decide when the Senate was in recess or not! * On the same day as that ruling, House Speaker John Boehner announced he would submit a bill authorizing the House to file suit against the President for failing to “faithfully execute the laws of our country,” and thereby violating “his oath of office”. Indeed, Obama has made a habit of ignoring or selectively enforcing laws passed by the Congress, claiming executive privilege. EIR STRATEGIC ALERT n° 27/ 2014 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 3 * While Secretary of State John Kerry again asserted last week that there was no way the rapid surge of the ISIS in Iraq could have been anticipated, sources from the intelligence community have come forth to insist that their warnings of the growing terrorist threats to Iraq were suppressed by the Obama Administration. * Faced with Obama’s threats to unilaterally take military action in Iraq, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine and others have solemnly warned that failure to consult the Congress – which has the sole authority to declare war – is a clear violation of the Constitution. Despite that, in a letter sent to the heads of the House and Senate last week, Barack Obama stated clearly that the action he has taken, including deployment of more than 500 troops to Iraq, is within his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief. The Constitution says otherwise. As Lyndon LaRouche said in a live interview with Voice of Russia June 26, when asked about Boehner’s initiative, “particularly after the past two days, we can say that the likelihood is that Obama will be thrown out of office”. This bears out the thesis of LaRouche’s paper of May 9 entitled “History Is Closing in on Obama”. IMF Plan to Expropriate Savers Exposed “An International Monetary Fund plan provides that haircuts will be implemented more quickly and more radically in the future. This would mainly hit holders of life insurance and [pension] funds.” So reads the kicker to an article by Frank Stocker posted June 25 on welt.de, reporting on an IMF paper released June 22, in which the Fund again calls for taking the money of “savers” to pay off unpayable sovereign debts. There has been surprisingly little commentary of the paper in the media, given its explicit discussion of the bail-in. Stocker writes: “The IMF presents in this plan, the way debt crises will be handled in the future. Its fundamental assertion is that more flexible action will be taken. That sounds good at first. But a concrete consequence is that, in the future, creditors will be pulled in sooner and will be forced to waive claims. In Europe, however, these creditors are primarily holders of life insurance policies or other forms of retirement schemes.” The IMF paper addresses a member country that “has lost market access” and whose “debt is assessed to be sustainable but not with high probability”. What that means in plain words, Stocker explains, is: “If a country only gets investors’ money by offering horrendous interest rates, and its debt is hardly sustainable, then the initial creditors should be partially expropriated. “The method of choice here should be, first, a compulsory extension of maturities of the loans, whose principal, that is, the amount of the claim, as well as its interest rate, should ‘normally’ not be reduced. However, this cannot be ruled out. And only if that is done, will the IMF be ready to provide financial help in the future.” Another passage of the IMF paper that Stocker mentions, involves the argument that a haircut must be avoided to prevent contagion to other countries, which may no longer be considered valid. “The argument that other countries could be contaminated prevented the Greek debt restructuring for a long time.” WikiLeaks Reveals Ultra-Secret Free-Trade Annex While the European Union and the United States are working out as secretly as possible the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, yet another, even more clandestine, freetrade agreement is also being negotiated. This one, the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), involves 50 countries, principally the U.S. and the EU, and Switzerland, and 68.2% of world trade in services. On June 19, WikiLeaks released the secret draft of the annex of the TISA dealing with financial services, which is all about taking down any remaining restrictions for the megabanks and funds. The James Bond cult of security surrounding the agreement is evidenced on the first page of the Financial Services Annex, which states that it “must be protected from unauthorized disclosure” and “stored in a locked or secured building, room or container”. Moreover, it may only be declassified “Five years from entry into force of the TISA agreement or, if no agreement enters into force, five years from the close of the negotiations.” The “trade in services” provides for shutting down or privatizing any form of “public sector” activity, including public health, public education, transport, etc., services vital for the citizens which should in no way be considered as “for profit commodities to be traded freely”. Even state pension funds would be banned, as they are considered monopolies. Public Services International (PSI), which federates some 669 trade-unions worldwide, put out an alarming report in April titled, TISA versus Public Services. It warns that TISA will hinder governments from delivering vital public services, such as those already mentioned, as well as postal services and utilities such as power and water. “TISA would lock in existing and any future privatization of public services. The proposed agreement could also make it impossible for future governments to restore public services to public control, even in cases where private service delivery has failed.” Moreover, it would restrict a government’s ability to regulate key sectors including financial, energy, telecommunications and its cross-border data flows. Another wave of financial deregulation is also at the center of TISA’s Financial Services Annex which aims to limit national supervision of financial operations to close to nothing. Each Party, it states, shall list any existing monopoly rights “and shall endeavor to eliminate them or reduce their scope”. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are not part of the negotiations. Austrian Government: We Need Russian Natural Gas Long before before the current conflict over Ukraine, the EU Commission systematically attempted to sabotage cooperation between European countries and Russia on natural gas deliveries. For years, for example, the Commission tried to promote the “Nabucco” pipeline project from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to Austria, as an alleged non-Russian alternative for gas supplies to Europe, but that failed for lack of alternate gas suppliers, on the one hand, and because British Petroleum pulled out in favor of new bilateral deals with Russia, on the other. The EU Commission then tried to sabotage Russia’s South Stream pipeline by pulling the Balkan countries out of that project, and most recently succeeded in “convincing” Bulgaria that its stretch of the project could not be built because it violated EU law on competition. Other countries, like Hungary and Serbia, however have resisted coercive attempts by the Commission, and they were joined last week by Austria -- the envisaged end point of South Stream. Defying the Commission’s criticism of South Stream as violating EU competition law, the Austrian government reaffirmed June 26 its determination to build its 50-km stretch of the pipeline, so that the first gas can be delivered in 2016. During a EIR STRATEGIC ALERT 4 WEEKLY NEWSLETTER n°27 / 2014 visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Vienna on that day, a new long-term agreement was signed between the Austrian gas firm OMV and Russia’s Gazprom. OMV CEO Gerhard Roiss stated that Europe needs Russian gas and will need even more in the future. For Austria, the first European country to sign a gas deal with then Soviet Russia in 1968, Gazprom “has proven to be a reliable supplier during the past 50 years, and it is important to have a long-term approach for the next 50 years,” Roiss said, adding that for Austria in particular, there is no alternative to gas. Austrian President Heinz Fischer, who met with Putin in Vienna, as the gas deal was signed, also repudiated criticism of the deal, saying: “No one can explain to me - and I can’t explain to the Austrian people - why a pipeline that crosses EU and NATO countries can’t go 50 km into Austria.” The end point of South Stream will be in Baumgarten, on the outskirts of Vienna, whence the gas will be distributed to other countries in western Europe and eventually in eastern Europe should the traditional gas transit via the grid in Ukraine be blocked by escalating frictions between Kiev and Moscow. EIR Publishes “On Eurofascism”, an Analysis by Russian Academician Glazyev A guest commentary from Sergei Glazyev, advisor to President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, is featured in the June 27 issue of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) with the title “On Eurofascism”. The article by economist Glazyev, who was closely involved in Russian diplomatic and economic cooperation efforts with Ukraine in recent years, provides a unique window onto Russian strategic thinking about recent months’ events in and around that country, viewed in terms of both the interests of Ukraine’s population and Russia’s own national security concerns. “Current events in Ukraine are guided by the evil spirit of fascism and Nazism,” Glazyev writes in this piece dated June 7, “though it seemed to have dissipated long ago, after World War II.” Washington, London and Brussels are inciting Right Sector, Svoboda and Ukrainian Nazis to go to war with Russia. Why, he asks, is the European Union “taking part in kindling a new war, as if suffering a total lapse of historical memory?” Glazyev dissects the Association Agreement (AA) between Ukraine and the European Union, which was subsequently signed on June 27. From the standpoint of law and of economic interests, he argues, the AA will end Ukraine’s sovereignty and subject it to “Euro-occupation.” Although this process has “occurred without an invasion by foreign armies,” “its coercive nature is beyond any doubt.” Today, “the modern junta and its American and European backers treat the opponents of Euro-integration as criminals, groundlessly accusing them of separatism and terrorism, imprisoning them, or even deploying Nazi guerrillas to shoot them.” Glazyev describes how the drive in recent years to induce Ukraine and other Central European countries to enter into Association Agreements with the EU was packaged as “the European choice,” as opposed to a Eurasian integration process dominated by an expansionist Russia, while Western governments and media spread “Russophobia”. At the same time, he says that the problem is not the American people, “but the organizers of a string of wars,” from Iraq to Ukraine. The group responsible, he writes, is “a handful of deranged radical extremists, the so-called Neocons, who ... are real misanthropes and Satanists, prepared even to drop the atomic bomb!” U.S. Manufacturers, Business Leaders Oppose Sanctions on Russia In an unusually overt political intervention, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce took out a joint full page in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal June 26, which we quote: “With escalating global tensions, some U.S. policymakers are considering a course of sanctions that history shows hurts American interests. We are concerned about actions that would harm American manufacturers and cost American jobs. The most effective long-term solution to increase Americas global influence is to strengthen our ability to provide goods and services to the world through pro-trade policies and multilateral diplomacy.... “U.S. workers and industries pay the cost of unilateral economic sanctions that have little hope of increasing the United States ability to achieve its foreign policy goals.” Exposed! NOAA Engaged in “Data Tampering” to Show Global Warming Yet another gross manipulation of data designed to prove that temperatures on Earth are rising has been exposed by Steven Goddard (a nom de plume) on the U.S. Blog Real Science. The culprit this time is the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In recent years, Goddard shows, the Historical Climatology Network of the NOAA (USHCN) has replaced actually the temperatures actually recorded in the United States in earlier years, with computer-generated estimates. As a result, earlier recorded temperatures appear lower and recent ones higher. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures actually measured at the time. On the basis of the real temperatures, the U.S. has been cooling since the 1930s, which was very hot. In contrast, the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it has been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century. Particularly vicious is that they overwrite the data in place and do not archive the older versions, Goddard writes. Moreover, they do not mention the changes on the web pages where the graphs are displayed. This manipulation was covered in the June 21 Daily Telegraph by Christopher Booker, author of a prominent book debunking the contrived scare over global warming, The Real Global Warming Disaster-- 2007. That coverage sparked a heated debate. E.I.R. STRATEGIC ALERT eir.de Published by: E.I.R.GmbH, Bahnstr. 9a, 65205 Wiesbaden Tel.: 0611/73650, Fax: 0611/7365101, Email: eirna@eirna Verantwortl. f. d. Inhalt: Dean Andromidas, Claudio Celani Subscription: EUR 3000/ ISSN 0936-7527 © E.I.R. GmbH Alle Rechte vorbehalten, auch die des Nachdrucks von Auszügen, derphotomechanischen Wiedergabe und der Übersetzung, Printed in Germany
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 07:06:21 +0000
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