“Imitation is the best form of flattery,” it is said. It helps, however, to have, at the least, an actual idea of what you are attempting to imitate. A word to the wise, and a warning to the unwise: The creatures of Prometheus cannot be cloned. The Anglo-Americans, having flunked “LaRouche Physical Economy” several times over the past decades; having, as their erstwhile leadership, if only temporarily, and nominally, Joe Biden, a fulsome, well-documented plagiarist; and having his even-more-inept State Department minions represent to other nations a United States policy-posture that is self-contradicting at best, and self-destructive at worst, have now, been forced to “come up with something we can sell,” getting themselves into “a fine mess” which they will probably refuse to understand.
The White House September 9 official memorandum reads, “the Governments of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the European Union, the Republic of India, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), the French Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Italian Republic, and the United States of America (the “Participants") commit to work together to establish the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The IMEC is expected to stimulate economic development through enhanced connectivity and economic integration between Asia, the Arabian Gulf, and Europe. “The IMEC will be comprised of two separate corridors, the east corridor connecting India to the Arabian Gulf and the northern corridor connecting the Arabian Gulf to Europe. It will include a railway that, upon completion, will provide a reliable and cost-effective cross-border ship-to-rail transit network to supplement existing maritime and road transport routes—enabling goods and services to transit to, from, and between India, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, and Europe.”
In an initial reaction from EIR’s Hussein Askary, it is observed that “China is already running the Piraeus Port with great success (plus building railways to Serbia and Hungary), Haifa Port, and is involved in the Saudi Land-Bridge project, Emirates’ rail project, and ports in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. So, if there are new American and European investments, they would benefit China…. In any case, why would anyone who is sane think this is an alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative?”
The sane path forward for the United States was well-detailed on Saturday, September 9, contained in the very title of the Schiller Institute Conference: “Let Us Join Hands with the Global Majority To Create a New Chapter in World History!” You can’t just plagiarize something like the Belt and Road, “take it out for a spin,” and expect serious people to take you seriously. Ten years of the September 2013 “Belt and Road Initiative,” replete with subsequent bilateral and multinational discussions, agreements and treaties, were preceded by twenty years of dialogue, mostly designed and led by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, on behalf of her then-incarcerated husband, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., the world’s leading physical economist. You would think somebody in Washington might ask us about this!
Russia’s leading economist, Sergey Glazyev, the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics in the Eurasian Economic Commission, the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), has a real regard for the worth of the ideas of LaRouche. He notes in his recent blog, that “another interesting digest, founded by the legendary thinker Lyndon LaRouche … contains a very interesting article about another economic catastrophe in Argentina, caused by the same monetary policy pursued by the Bank of Russia under the methodological guidance of the IMF.”
The Saturday Schiller conference, in the assessment of various of its participants and those who attended, reached a new level of discussion, evaluation and conceptualization on matters pertaining to the creation of a new security and development architecture. (Speeches from Panel 2 of that conference, “A New Paradigm in the History of Mankind Is Taking Shape” appear in the body of today’s briefing. The transcript of all of Panel 1 appeared in yesterday’s briefing.) We are now inventing a new platform for a competent political deliberative process, in which the “system of conferences” originally designed by LaRouche as a new form of organization, a perpetual and ubiquitous international laboratory of ideas, fosters a characteristic daily habit and practice of self-government on the part of citizens throughout the planet as a whole. That, and not “party politics,” is the preferred form of political practice of the immediate future.
On Sunday, the Schiller Institute held its annual “Never Forget: 9/11 Memorial Concert.” That concert, performed by the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus, with Asiana Sinfonia & the Bergen Symphony Orchestra, was, in a sense, “the third panel” of the weekend. Hundreds of people gathered in a mood of commemoration and celebration. More will be reported about it tomorrow.
In the week before the opening of the United Nations session, the words of JFK’s 1963 speech to the General Assembly of the UN were quoted in remarks that opened the conference—that section in which he proposed that the two mortal, thermonuclear adversaries, the Soviet Union and the United States, would jointly go to the Moon: [https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-nations-19630920]
“Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries—indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending some day in this decade to the Moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.” The proposed BRICS joint committee on space discovery and mission coordination is a “first topic” of international deliberation, against the tide of thermonuclear war, in which all nations, and individuals in all nations, can participate, organize symposia, and strengthen the dialogue that the weekend conference has begun.
