Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 12, March 20, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL COVID-19 Pandemic Forces Rethinking: International Cooperation Indispensable! by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- URGENT The Physical-Economic Requirements For Defeating COVID-19

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 12, March 20, 2020

- I. The True Origin of the Threat

- The Role of Economic Science in Projecting Pandemics as a Feature of Advanced Stages of Economic Breakdown by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1985)

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Will Ongoing Shocks Provoke a New Kind of Thinking Necessary to Overcome a New Dark Age?

- MISSION FOR AMERICA China’s Mission Can Also Be America’s: Inspiring Young People for the Future by Connie Carr

- Swedish Government Won’t Fight Spread of the Coronavirus by Ulf Sandmark and Hussein Askary, Schiller Institute, Sweden

- II. Unleashing the American System

- HOW MIKE BLOOMBERG THINKS Bloomberg’s Disastrous ‘Educational Reform’ in New York City by Barbara Boyd

- Economic Paralysis Threatens: Time for ‘100 Days of Lyndon LaRouche’ by Paul Gallagher

- How to Defeat the Coronavirus: Quarantine Wall Street

- EDITORIAL The American System Impulse Emerges by Bruce Director

A Time to Overturn Failed Axioms

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EDITORIAL

COVID-19 Pandemic Forces Rethinking:

International Cooperation Indispensable!

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

March 14—We are now experiencing the worst international health crisis of the past hundred years. This crisis is so extremely dangerous, because the coronavirus pandemic now coincides with the systemic global financial crisis that was already near explosion before the medical crisis broke out. The pandemic was merely the trigger. A solution exists—but only if western societies are prepared to replace all the axioms of the neoliberal model with an economic policy, which is not guided by monetarist considerations, i.e., to speculators’ profits, but guided instead by the absolute value of human life, the principles of science, and solidarity with the entire family of mankind.

Even President Macron of France has recently mentioned what can no longer be overlooked: The liberal democratic political system is ill-suited to react adequately to existential threats. The sooner Europe and the U.S.A. grasp the fact that we must take exactly the same public health measures that China took in January in the city of Wuhan and Hubei Province, the more human lives will be saved. Rather than making use of the time gained for the world by the Chinese government’s decisive actions—correctly characterized by the WHO as absolutely exemplary—the western governments have wasted priceless weeks. As a result, Europe has now become the epicenter of the pandemic and the situation in the United States is quite unclear due to the lack of testing up to this point.

But the necessary reorganization can’t be limited to the area of human health. We need a completely new paradigm in politics and economics if we are to prevent a collapse of civilization like that of the 14th Century. Many scientists in a number of nations are assuming that about 70% of the population will be infected within the next one to two years, at least until a vaccine can be developed and produced. Prof. Christian Drosten of the Berlin Charité Hospital cites a new study that says we can no longer count on a slower spread of the virus in the Spring and Summer. At the same time, it has to be assumed that the pandemic will spread further throughout the Southern Hemisphere during its Winter, and then come back to the Northern Hemisphere in the Autumn, strengthened and possibly in a mutated form.

This means that we not only have to correct the consequences of the takedown of our national public health system in the recent decades, and equip it in the shortest possible time to treat the expected number of patients. We also have to create the conditions for a global healthcare system in the short term.

Not Unexpected

The current crisis is in no way unexpected. In 1974, Lyndon LaRouche initiated what he called a “biological holocaust taskforce,” tasked to investigate the impact—above all, on the developing nations—of the austerity policy and conditionalities of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. LaRouche and his colleagues presented the results of these studies in a series of reports that warned that the decline in living standards on several continents, which these institutions would be unleashing over the coming years, would lead to the resurgence of old plagues and the occurrence of new diseases and pandemics.

When one considers the conditions in many nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and even in the poorer regions of Europe and the United States today, it becomes very clear that only a global change of policy can remedy this. About two billion people currently have no clean drinking water and most so-called developing countries have nothing close to a modern healthcare system. Famine exists at the present time in several southern African countries. A locust plague, against which the international community did not act in a timely way, threatens to lay waste dozens of nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As a result of the so-called “wars of humanitarian intervention” and the underdevelopment already referred to, millions of refugees have fled toward Europe and America to escape danger to life and limb.

Therefore, if we want to prevent the coronavirus pandemic from spreading in waves and migrating from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere and back—thus potentially creating the breeding grounds for additional similar and worse viruses—we must initiate radical changes.

Systemwide Changes Required

Hospitals with isolation wards must be built throughout the world, following the example of the city of Wuhan and Hubei Province, which built a total of 14 temporary hospitals, including the necessary intensive care beds. World Health Organization standards must be observed in doing so. China, for example, built facilities with 16,000 new hospital beds in just one month.

International scientific research centers must be established for research on the COVID-19 virus and other viral and bacterial pathogens. Vaccines must be developed and tested. The results of research in biophysics, nuclear biology and space medicine must be made available immediately to all nations. The point of reference for this is the conception of a Strategic Defense of Earth (SDE) developed by Lyndon LaRouche, in which the protection of human life from pandemics is one focal point.

These worldwide measures require investments that cannot be made under the conditions of the present, collapsing financial system. The current actions of the central banks in injecting liquidity into this financial system by the trillions of dollars, and even the allocation of budget funds by governments, is due to a hyperinflationary monetary explosion, and is unsustainable.

If we are to fight the coronavirus pandemic successfully, and build and equip the necessary hospitals, we need the total package of actions proposed by Lyndon LaRouche a number of years ago:

1. A system of bank separation must be introduced immediately on a worldwide scale, based exactly on the model of the Glass-Steagall Act signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on June 16, 1933. Commercial banks must be put under Federal protection under this system and completely separated by a firewall from speculative investment banking firms and units, which will no longer have any access to the assets of the commercial banks, nor have the privilege of being saved by taxpayers’ money. The toxic paper of these banks, including their outstanding financial derivatives contracts, must be written off. Legitimate receivables that are connected with the real economy or with pensions and other assets of working people should be classified as valid in the new system as well. Some types of claims for payment must be provisionally frozen and reviewed for validity by Federal institutions.

2. A national bank must be founded in each country, in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton or on the model of the German Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Reconstruction Finance Corporation) after World War II. Their purpose is to supply Federal credit for productive investments that will provide the physical economy with the necessary funds. The issuance of these credits must be guided by the principles of high energy-flux density and an optimal increase of the productivity of productive capacities and the powers of labor, through an emphasis on scientific and technological progress.

3. Among the participating countries, a system of fixed parities must be established, and cooperation treaties must be established among sovereign states for the purpose of well-defined infrastructure and development projects. These treaties together represent in fact a New Bretton Woods system as it was intended by Roosevelt, with the explicit intention of providing credit for the industrial development of the developing sector.

4. An urgent increase in the productivity of the world economy—to accommodate a world population of presently almost eight billion people —must be facilitated through an international crash program for the realization of thermonuclear fusion power and other advanced technologies, in such fields as optical biophysics and life sciences, in order to find solutions for challenges such as the coronavirus. This increase in productivity must also be enabled through international cooperation in space technology and travel, which can establish the necessary next higher economic platform for the world economy, as this concept has been developed by the economist Lyndon LaRouche.

The only institutions which can carry out such a worldwide program are the leading governments of the planet, which must be representative of the entire world’s population in their composition. Therefore it is in no way sufficient that the governments of the G7 should agree among themselves; these solutions can be implemented only with the involvement of Russia, China and India.

That also means that geopolitics must finally be overcome and replaced by the idea of the common future and goals of mankind. If we do not want to fall into a new dark age, we have to replace neo-Malthusian ideas, the anti-scientific “Green New Deal,” monetarism and Eurocentrism with the ideas of physical economy, guided exclusively by the scientifically provable principles of the laws of the universe.

And finally, perhaps the most important change which we must make in our thinking: We need a new humanist Renaissance, a renaissance of classical culture. For the world has been brought to this point not least by the unbounded hedonism which went along with liberal and neoliberal democracy. The moment has arrived when the ideology of “anything goes” must be put aside. We will overcome this crisis only if we are inner-directed in accord with the love of humanity. But it is for that, after all, that we are human beings!

zepp-larouche@eir.de

URGENT

The Physical-Economic Requirements For Defeating COVID-19

March 13—Just as the outbreak of the global coronavirus pandemic is a direct consequence of a half-century of destruction of the global physical economy, which has reduced the planet’s Potential Relative Population-Density in precisely the manner foreseen by Lyndon LaRouche, the war-plan for defeating COVID-19 requires a global alliance of forces to immediately reverse those suicidal policies, rebuild the economy, and launch a crash program to produce the necessary “weapons” to do battle against the disease.

Every competent medical expert has stressed that the battles must be waged on a continuum of fronts, in order to win the war—from early detection kits, to quarantine and other protective measures and gear, to advanced hospital facilities with necessary equipment, to the qualified medical personnel with adequate training for these wartime conditions.

The United States, and almost every country on the planet, is woefully deficient and unprepared in all these areas—a deficiency that is not solved by lowering the standards of care, as has been demanded of the CDC, but by gearing up production massively to address the problem. It’s what President Franklin Roosevelt did to turn the U.S. into the “arsenal of democracy” to defeat fascism in concert with the Allies; it is what must be done today.

President Donald Trump has to take action, and drag the Congress along with him if need be, to forge a New Bretton Woods credit system agreement with China, Russia, India and other nations. Such a working alliance would act as follows:

• The big Wall Street- and London-centered banks must be put through bankruptcy reorganization, not bailed out. Bailouts to these banks and their holding companies would again, as in 2008, only be passed along to their thousands of speculative units, client hedge funds, investment banking units, and so on. The big banks’ deposit base would also be looted to keep the speculative bubble—all $2 quadrillion of it—afloat. Instead, restoring the Glass-Steagall Act will put these speculative units out in the cold, while protecting useful commercial banking activity. The large banks will have to sell off their speculative units quickly, stop lending to them, and let them fail. Retirement funds will have that short time to get out of these speculative investments.

• Create a capital budget for new infrastructure construction, including building new hospitals and other public health facilities, and the additional electricity capacity and clean water supplies they need. There is plenty of other new infrastructure needed as well. New Federal bonds, construction bonds, have to be issued for this capital budget, whether by an emergency nationalization of the Federal Reserve or simply by creating a Reconstruction Finance Corporation backed by the Treasury. This infrastructure credit corporation or national bank will cooperate with those of the other founding powers in the New Bretton Woods system, to fund critical projects worldwide and capital goods exports.

The projects directly related to COVID-19 include these:

• Test kits must be produced on a massive scale internationally, and advanced testing stations must be established—including using drive-through testing facilities such as those employed successfully in South Korea and elsewhere. There is also a grave shortage of RNA extraction kits needed for performing the tests, as CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has warned.

• There are insufficient N95 respirator masks for health care workers internationally, let alone the public. Other components of the required PPE (personal protective equipment), such as gowns, goggles and other protection, are also not available in the necessary quantities. Production must be increased by orders of magnitude, with the government charting the course for the private sector.

• New hospitals must be built, with isolation and intensive care capacity, both in the U.S and all over the world. The COVID-19 virus is extremely infectious and has much worse mortality rate than influenza. Moreover, virology experts forecast its return over 2020-2021. Modern care ratios of beds per thousand residents must be observed to determine the total number of regular, intensive care and isolation (negative pressure) beds to be built. Similarly, advanced treatment capabilities, such as ventilator units, must also be produced and provided. Consider: China has 60% more hospital beds per inhabitant than the United States. Most other countries are in much worse shape, and have only minimal capacities. China added 16,000 beds in the city of Wuhan in just one month. Remember that the United States Army Corps of Engineers did the same thing, just as fast, in Liberia in the Ebola epidemic in 2014.

New hospitals with millions of beds can be built by 2020-2021 if a summit of the major industrial and scientific powers determines to do so.

• Build sufficient electric power supply for the new hospitals. Based on electricity use in American hospitals, for 1 million new hospital beds about 6 gigawatts of new electrical power would be needed around the world, in about 100 new electric generating units, each the size of a gas turbine plant or, as soon as possible, a modular nuclear reactor.

• Provide the scientific research needed in the coronavirus pandemic: Scientists have to know much more about COVID-19, even as vaccines are being tested. This demands a cooperative effort of many countries using frontier biophysics, nuclear biology, and space medicine from major spacefaring nations. Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) proposes 12 research centers around the world.

Saving human life, and improving human life, is the most important economic mission.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 12, March 20, 2020

Cover This Week

FDR Presidential Library and Museum

President Franklin Roosevelt examines a world globe presented to him by the U.S. Army, December 25, 1942.

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A TIME TO OVERTURN FAILED AXIOMS

2 EDITORIAL

COVID-19 Pandemic Forces Rethinking: International Cooperation Indispensable!

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

4 URGENT

The Physical-Economic Requirements for Defeating COVID-19

I. THE TRUE ORIGIN OF THE THREAT

7 The Role of Economic Science in Projecting Pandemics as a Feature of Advanced Stages of Economic Breakdown

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

1985

14 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Will Ongoing Shocks Provoke a New Kind of Thinking Necessary to Overcome a New Dark Age?

21 MISSION FOR AMERICA

China’s Mission Can Also Be America’s: Inspiring Young People for the Future

by Connie Carr

23 Swedish Government Won’t Fight Spread of the Coronavirus

by Ulf Sandmark and Hussein Askary

II. UNLEASHING THE AMERICAN SYSTEM

27 HOW MIKE BLOOMBERG THINKS, PART 2

Bloomberg’s Disastrous ‘Educational Reform’ in New York City

by Barbara Boyd

35 Economic Paralysis Threatens: Time for ‘100 Days of Lyndon LaRouche’

by Paul Gallagher

38 How to Defeat the Coronavirus: Quarantine Wall Street

by Dennis Small

46 EDITORIAL

The American System Impulse Emerges

by Bruce Director

The Jan. 27, 1989 Jailing of Lyndon LaRouche

Defined an Era, Which Now Must End

Watch The LaRouche Case video

Watch the LaRoucheMemorial video

Sign the Petition to Exonerate LaRouche

at lpac.co/exonerate

I. The True Origin of the Threat

1985

The Role of Economic Science in Projecting Pandemics as a Feature of Advanced Stages of Economic Breakdown

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in EIR Vol. 12, No. 18, May 7, 1985, pages 22-29.

. . . and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

—Genesis. Chapter 1, Verse 28

The eruption of potentially pandemic cholera epidemics, under conditions of worsening famine in black Africa, conforms to a general forecast presented by a research team, during a Dec. 28-29, 1974 conference of the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), held in New York City. (See charts published in New Solidarity. Vol. 6, No. 1, Jan. 23, 1975; reprinted in EIR on April 30, 1985, pp. 22-26.) This forecast was based on calculations which assumed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank policies then in force, might be extrapolated into the middle-to-late 1980s.

There is no coincidence in the fact, that the present eruption of pandemics has occurred in the place, during the time-period, and under the conditions forecast, as projected in 1974. The published details of that 1974 study, reviewed today, include an elaborated analytical argument, which eliminates any possibility of mere coincidence.

There is no coincidence in the choice of methods of analysis adopted by the task-force which produced that 1974 study.

That task-force, was among the outgrowths of a broader project designed by this reporter, as specified in an internal NCLC memorandum of March 1973. In that 1973 memorandum, this reporter summarized points of congruity and interaction of economic and biological processes.

The method presented is what is otherwise known today as “The LaRouche-Riemann Method.” That “LaRouche-Riemann Method,” treats economic processes as implicitly a special form of living organism, employing conceptions for defining living processes, conceptions developed through the nineteenth century on the basis of initial discoveries by Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci, at the close of the fifteenth century. The economist employing that method, if given a bare handful of the most crucial parameters on per-capita energy-throughput requirements, immunological requirements, and evidence from historical epidemiology, can readily elaborate reasonable estimates of the relevant effects of economic devolution.

This report summarizes the most relevant features of that indicated correlation.

Mathematically Speaking, What Is Life?

The first known mathematical discovery, respecting the essential difference between living and non-living processes, was accomplished toward the close of the fifteenth century, by the collaborators Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci. They demonstrated, by extensive and careful observation, that the harmonic patterns of growth and morphology of function, of living processes, were congruent with harmonic series determined by the Golden Section, whereas non-living processes are not so characterized. If we exclude processes on the scale of astrophysics, and smaller than approximately one Angstrom Unit on the microphysical scale, this discovery by Pacioli and Leonardo remains valid to the present day.

There is nothing intrinsically mystical about the Golden Section. It appears in elementary geometry, as the central feature of constructing what are known as the Five Platonic Solids. These are the only five kinds of regular polyhedra which can be constructed within the limits of “Euclidean space.” Of these five, four are simply constructed from the starting-point of the fifth. That fifth, the dodecahedron whose sides are each regular pentagons, is constructed by constructing first the so-called Golden Section of the circle. The Golden Section is nothing more mysterious, than being the limiting condition for commensurable constructability in “Euclidean space.” [box: The Geometry of Life]

Since the work of the great nineteenth-century scientist, Carl Gauss, and his immediate collaborators, we recognize that the harmonic relations determined by the Golden Section, are the infallible projection of conic self-similar-spiral action in what is properly termed “the Gaussian manifold.” Physical processes (lying between the astrophysical and microphysical extremes) which are congruent with Golden Section harmonics, are either living processes themselves, or of a special class of non-living processes, such as skeletons of dead animals, organized by a living process.

These definitions just listed, supply the proper definition for the term “negentropy,” as opposed to a different definition of that term in statistical mechanics.

Any society whose economy approximates an ideal model of economic growth, is negentropic in the same sense as a living organism. The ideal model, is a society undergoing an approximately constant rate of technological progress under conditions of relative increase of energy-intensity and capital-intensity.

Sustainable economic (and population) growth, is measured as an (ideally) constant rate of increase of the potential relative population-density of that society. This is the measure of the average potential for growth of the society as a whole, and is also the absolute measure of per-capita productivity of labor in that society. Recognizing that “energy-intensity” and “capital-intensity,” include even the simplest kinds of useful improvement of land and maintenance of such improvements, and that increase of the productivity of average labor requires technological progress in some sense, we have the general picture. The most general facts from the history of mankind, are, first, that the upper limit of primitive mankind’s potential population is approximately 10 million individuals, second, that the population today is approaching 5 billion, and, third, that most of this increase has occurred since modern science was set into motion in Italy, during the fifteenth century. The rough “model” of increase of potential relative population-density, accounts for that process of increase of population, through technological progress.

“Ideal” economies, like healthy living organisms, are negentropic processes. The healthy economy has the same congruence with the Golden Section, which Pacioli and Leonardo discovered to be the case for living organisms. The difference between living organisms and societies, is that the scientific and technological progress, which causes the increase of potential relative population-density, is itself a product of the developed creative-scientific potentials of the individual human mind; in this respect, the negentropy of the economic process is supplied in a different form than biological processes generally. Yet, at the same time, this negentropic mental activity, which is the proper name for “human intelligence,” is the activity of living organisms, persons, whose capacity to generate and employ the fruits of human intelligence is biologically delimited.

For reasons elaborated in published locations, the varieties of negentropic processes so indicated, can be comprehended mathematically, only along the lines of further, if uncompleted, development of Gaussian physics accomplished by Bernhard Riemann.

Economy and Health

In both economies and living processes, analysis proceeds, by analyzing the total energy-throughput (or equivalent) of the process, between two broadly defined categories of consumption of that energy-throughput. The first of these two categories is roughly described as “the energy of the system”: the portion of the energy-throughput which must be consumed or wasted by the process, merely to maintain the process at its existing level of state. If any portion of the energy-throughput remains, after deducting the “energy of the system” requirement, this remainder is roughly described as the “free energy” of the process.

On the condition, that the required consumption of “energy of the system” is satisfied, an increase of the ratio of “free energy” to “energy of the system” represents, potentially, negentropy. Whereas, a constant or decreasing value of this ratio, represents “entropy.”

That is merely a crude, if broadly accurate, beginning.

It is the thermodynamic characteristic, of negentropic processes, that in a continuous negentropic function, the energy-flux-density increases with time. (“Energy-flux-density” signifies a measurement consistent with kilowatts per square meter, of throughput.) So, the “energy of the system” per square meter, increases. So, the margin of “free energy” required to maintain a constant ratio of “free energy” to “energy of the system,” must increase accordingly.

In economic processes, the “energy of the system” is represented by the interdependency among three “market-baskets” of consumption. Each of these “market-baskets,” corresponds to a minimum value, required to maintain the economic process at a constant level of negentropic potential. These three are:

1) The “market-basket” of households’ consumption, per-capita;

2) The “market-basket” of producers’ goods;

3) The “market-basket” of “basic economic infrastructure: energy production and distribution, water management, transportation, etc.: improvements in the quality of inhabited area, necessary to maintain at least a constant level of potential relative population-density.

The latter two, combined, represent the basis for measuring the increase of the per-capita “capital-intensity”:

(2 + 3)/1 reflects “capital-intensity.”

In general, increases in capital-intensity do not increase productivity, unless the amount of usable energy per-capita is increased sufficiently.

The increases in the indicated “energy of the system” “market-baskets,” must be supplied by increases in per capita output of the components of these “market-baskets.” It is, broadly speaking, in this fashion, that “free energy” margins of output are converted into increase of “energy of the system.”

UNHCR/S. Modola

“The notion that a collapse of potential relative population-density should transform populations into breeding cultures for eruption of pandemics, is a possibility implicit in the proper choice of mathematics for living processes.” Shown: Somali women waiting for UNHCR aid supplies at a settlement for the displaced in Mogadishu.

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If the level of technology were constant, then, the per-capita output of society would proceed to the point that no further increase in output per-capita would result from increases in capital-intensity. At that point, further increases in capital-intensity, would merely increase the per-capita “energy of the system,” without increasing the total energy-equivalent throughput: the ratio of “free energy” to “energy of the system” would fall; the economy would become “entropic.” Only technological progress can sustain negentropy, can permit the durable survival of an economy, a society.

Such “entropy,” signifies a fall in the potential relative population-density. The “ideal” case, at which economies are to be examined for economically-determined eruption of pandemics, is the case for which the potential relative population-density falls below the level of the existing population.

The conditions for economically-determined pandemics, may be either the instance in which the average consumption is determined by a fall of potential relative population-density, below the level of requirements for the existing population, and the special case, that the differential rates of distribution of the households’ goods “market-basket” falls below the level of “energy of the system” for a large part of the population. We are most concerned with the effects on health, as the nutritional throughput per-capita falls below some relative biological minimum, and also the effect of collapse of sanitation and other relevant aspects of basic economic infrastructure upon the conditions of an undernourished population.

The first assumption, that the death-rates would be increased by malnutrition, requires no special inquiry in the language of economic science as such. It is the second alternative, that the undernourished population might become a breeding-culture for eruption of epidemic and pandemic disease, which requires special attention.

Descent to Lower Forms of Life

The notion, that a collapse of potential relative population-density, should transform populations into breeding cultures for eruption of pandemics, is a possibility implicit in the proper choice of mathematics for living processes.

Geometry provides an elementary basis for examining the latter alternative.

The unique axiom of a proper form of elementary synthetic geometry, is that the only form of action which exists self-evidently in physical space-time, is the discovery, first by Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa, that only circular action is self-evidently existent as a form in physical space-time: the so-called isoperimetric principle. For reasons elaborated in other locations, this can not be merely simply circular action. It must be triply-self-reflexive circular action, as symbolized by three moments of concurrent circular action, each at right angles to the other two in Euclidean space: that is the indivisible, unique axiom of elementary, indivisible action in physical space-time.

In elementary synthetic geometry, of the constructability of forms in Euclidean space, such triply-self-reflexive circular action, produces what are called “singularities”: points, lines, surfaces, and solids. However, this, while correct as far as it goes, is not adequate for the construction of a physics.

Human perception is such, that we can not experience the perception of an instantaneous object. Perception is possible only as the experiencing of some change (transformation) during a finite displacement of physical space-time; a finite amount of time has elapsed between the beginning and conclusion of the smallest possible act of perception. Therefore, if circular action is uniquely axiomatic, we can never perceive circular action in physical space-time, except as spiral action.

If this spiral action is generated at a constant rate, what we perceive is a cylindrical helix. If the action is generated at either a constantly increasing, or constantly decreasing rate, we perceive a conical self-similar-spiral action. The latter, conical self-similar-spiral action, is the correct choice for a generalized physics; this defines the rudimentary form of a Gaussian (constructive) geometry, a Gaussian manifold, or Gaussian continuum.

However, in extending circular action in time, as a spiral action, we must not forget that our circular action, so extended, is triply-self-reflexive circular action. Even a doubly-self-reflexive conic-spiral action, generates a special kind of singularities, ultimately somewhat analogous to, but qualitatively different than, such elementary singularities as points, lines, surfaces, and solids.

In the simplest “ideal” case for a growing economy, the notion of merely doubly-self-reflexive conic-spiral action, presents us with this classic problem.

Given, a growing economy, developing at a constant rate of technological progress, in an energy-intensive, capital-intensive mode. In such an “ideal” case, the growth of the economy is not described merely by an ordinary sort of conic self-similar-spiral action. Conic-spiral action upon conic spiral action, is typified in effect, by the case in which the ratio of arithmetic to geometric mean-values of spiral-action is increased harmonically over successive cycles. Instead of a simple cone, the locus of the action is a horn with a bell-shaped mouth. In one such case, a side-view of the horn describes a hyperbolic curve, seeming to shoot off into “infinity” in a Cartesian plotting. This apparent “shooting off into infinity,” is a singularity, or, in other words, a mathematical “discontinuity” in the continuous development of the economic process.

However, the economic process does not come to a stop, while the hyperbolic arc seems to “shoot off into infinity.” Let the central axis of the horn represent the time-scale. The economy as a physical process continues quite efficiently through the interval at which the mouth of the horn appears to zoom off “in search of Cartesian infinity.” What happens, as Riemann supplies preliminary indication of this, in his 1854 “On the Hypotheses Which Underlie Geometry,” is that as a physical process generates a singularity of this kind, the metrical characteristics of action in the affected region of physical space-time are altered. As the horn appears to zoom off in search of infinity, the process continues, operating now on a modified metrical basis.

A new hyperbolic, or kindred, curve, is described, with the same general result; and, after that, a third; and, so on. On the time-scale (for the indicated “ideal” case), the intervals between the singularities become shorter, and these successively shorter intervals describe a harmonic series.

This indicates, that another way of measuring negentropy, is to measure it in terms of the increasing density of Gaussian-topological discontinuities (singularities) per arbitrarily small interval of time. The point to be stressed now, is that a decreasing density of singularities, is a measure of the relative entropy of a process.

This is a useful vantage-point from which to ask, “What happens, when a biological system, such as a society, falls entropically, to a lower level of existence?”

The negentropic ranking of relative higher and relatively lower orders of living species, may be estimated in terms of the relative density of singularities of the living processes examined. From this vantage-point, it is not necessarily the case that the human population simply dies of effects of malnutrition.

Society is an integral part of the biosphere, both the biosphere as a whole, and regionally. Rather than measuring the level of relative negentropy of society as such, let us consider the effect of society’s development upon the average level of the biosphere which contains that society. This was the crucial feature of the March 1973 memorandum referenced. Rather than viewing a deep fall of the potential relative population-density, as merely a fall in the relative value for the society as such; let us examine this as a fall in the relative level of the biosphere including that society.

Lacounty.gov

“Instead of simply assuming that man collapses within a constant level of the surrounding biosphere, assume that it is the biosphere which is directly affected by the collapse of the human population-potential, and that it is the biosphere which must adjust to the impact of the drop in its own potential caused by the collapse of the included human potential.” Shown: Tents of the homeless crowd a sidewalk in Los Angeles.

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For convenience, let us say that a collapse of society obviously requires the affected portion of the biosphere to function at a reduced level of relative negentropy. In other words, this must tend to be adjusted, by increasing the role of relatively lower forms of life. That was the proposition subsumed by the cited March 1973 memorandum. Lower forms of life “consume” human and other higher-level forms of life as “fuel” for their own proliferation. The attempted thermodynamic analysis of cancerous development, by Chicago’s Dr. Nicholas Rashevsky, was referenced as a model for such a transformation within the biosphere.

Instead of simply assuming, that man collapses within a constant level of the surrounding biosphere, assume that it is the biosphere which is directly affected by a collapse of the human population-potential, and that it is the biosphere which must adjust to the impact of the drop in its own potential caused by the collapse of the included human potential. In that variant, human and animal pandemics, and sylvatics, must tend to resurge, and evolve, under certain kinds of “shock” to the biosphere caused by extreme concentration of fall of population-potential. Instead of simply dying of effects of malnutrition, the population generates a pandemic which becomes the biosphere’s adaptation to its own reduced state, and this pandemic then attacks the concentration of fall of potential which has caused the lowering of the potential for the biosphere generally.

During 1974, this was the hypothesis examined against the available array of evidence respecting historic eruptions of pandemics. The evidence correlated significantly with the hypothesis. On the basis of this correlation, the published estimates were projected.

The levels at which falls in the essential components of the “market-basket” of nutrition correspond to preconditions for eruptions of pandemics in widespread concentrations of population, are broadly supplied by medical specialists. It was merely necessary to estimate the rate of fall of population potential toward such threshold-levels, and to take into account the duration of such conditions historically indicated as consistent with brewing of a. new upsurge of pandemics, to foresee when, how, and where a continuation of 1974 trends in monetary and economic policy would probably generate such eruptions.

Supplementary Observations

One of the hideous, classic cases considered broadly, in conducting these forecast-studies, was the manner in which the Nazis caused the mass-deaths in the war-time concentration-camps. Contrary to popularized legend, the core of the method of mass-murder, was not the gas chambers. If I supply slave-labor with, for example, 1,000 calories of nourishment a day, and exact 2,000 to 3,000 calories of output, within an estimable number of weeks of hard labor under these constraints, a healthy slave is transformed into a near-corpse. The cheapest method for “cost-reduction;” in the camps to which the worn-out slaves are returned, is to place these worn-out slaves in a crowded, filthy barracks, with assorted other “unusables,” and to allow the spread of disease among the sickened starvelings to decimate their ranks, and then, to use other “useless” slaves to assist in disposing of the dead. This was the essence of the Nazi death-camp system; contrary versions are, to a very large degree, merely legends, at least insofar as the majority of deaths is concerned.

The legend, that it was the Nazis’ gas chambers, rather than the logic of slave-labor economy, which decimated the Nazis’ concentration-camp captives, serves today as a convenient way of overlooking the fact, that the same methods actually used to cause the deaths of the majority among those victims, are the methods imposed upon entire, increasingly numerous regions of the world today, by the Schachtian policies of the International Monetary Fund’s “surveillance.”

As for those who console themselves, that the death of as many as 300 million black Africans, through chain-reaction effects of IMF “conditionalities,” over the coming period, is a far-away catastrophe, not to intrude upon an evening’s escapism into TV soap-opera, we have inside the United States already, no fewer than 30 million Americans in a ripe condition for assimilation and spread of pandemic infection, should such infection leak across our borders; otherwise, the fall in animal-protein consumption within spreading portions of the general population, represents a population increasingly weakened in its potential resistance to pandemics.

Unless IMF “surveillance” is nullified and reversed, the entire world, including Western Europe and North America, is becoming increasingly ripe for effects like those which decimated the population of Europe during the middle decades of the fourteenth century. When we continue to tolerate IMF policies already unleashing genocide against black Africa, and other “third world” regions, we exhibit in ourselves a lack of the moral fitness to survive. If we do not reverse this toleration we have exhibited to date, the unleashing of pandemics from Africa and elsewhere, will sweep into the depression-weakened portions of our own population, and our lack of moral fitness to survive may become indeed the cause of our own destruction.

By continuing to tolerate IMF “conditionalities,” we are close to unleashing upon this planet such a combination of revived and new pandemics, that general thermonuclear war would be preferable to the biological holocaust, which IMF policies will have unleashed upon this planet.

If the indicated economic causes for pandemics are as our hypothesis suggests new pandemics to be generated, it must be the case that diseases are created not by chance mutation of pathogenic organisms, but are rather created within weakened cell-tissue of the infected bodies. The disease, penetrating and interacting otherwise with cell-tissue’s processes, becomes a part of that cell’s functioning, such that more than the pathogen’s feeding upon the cell’s material must be considered to define the true character of the disease. If that is so, as much suggests this to be the case, then the collapse of the reproductive function of the cell, to a lowered state of relative negentropy, must directly affect the reproduction of the pathogen, such that the pathogen’s reproduction adapts to the pathological condition of the cell’s own reproductive processes. In other words, something much more than a mere lowering of the victim’s resistance to the pathogen, must be taken into account.

If this is the case, as the indicated line of mathematical argument strongly implies might be true, then, the effect of a rapid collapse of levels of global population, as proposed by the Club of Rome and President Jimmy Carter’s “Global 2000,” and as implemented by worsening IMF “conditionalities,” is breeding a new dimension of biological holocaust of such horror that we would welcome general thermonuclear warfare as a more merciful alternative.

The Geometry of Life

Public domain

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Pictured are anatomical studies by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), dating from the 1480s-90s, the time of his collaboration with the mathematician Luca Pacioli in creating a new scientific academy in the city of Milan. This collaboration produced the book Divina Proportione, which elaborated the conception that the harmonic patterns of growth and morphology of function of living processes are congruent with the Golden Section (called by Pacioli “divine proportion,” or proportion of self-similar growth).

It is noteworthy that during this same period, Leonardo was designing new cities which would be “plague proof” because of advanced sanitation and fresh water supply systems. Leonardo da Vinci’s attitude toward his studies of anatomy is expressed in the statement inscribed on this drawing:

And you, O Man, who will discern in this work of mine the wonderful works of Nature, if you think it would be a criminal thing to destroy it, reflect how much more criminal it is to take the life of a man; and if this, his external form, appears to thee marvelously constructed, remember that is nothing as compared with the soul that dwells in that structure; for that indeed, be it what it may, is a thing divine. Leave it then to dwell in His work at His good will and pleasure, and let not your rage or malice destroy a life—for indeed, he who does not value it, does not himself deserve it.

The model of the dodecahedron (inset), made up of 12 faces, each of which is a pentagon, was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci for Pacioli’ s book. The pentagons can only be constructed by use of the “golden” self-similar ratio. [back to text]

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Will Ongoing Shocks Provoke a New Kind of Thinking Necessary to Overcome a New Dark Age?

CGTN

China set a new standard in its response to the outbreak of COVID-19. One of two 1,000-bed hospitals, built in just two weeks, is shown here under construction in Wuhan.

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This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s March 11, weekly webcast, featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche. A video is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. It’s March 11, 2020, and we’re very deep into a process now which has been unfolding rapidly with the COVID-19 coronavirus—the emergence of a pandemic worldwide. Helga, this is something that people in the West have been trying to wish away, but it’s not something that’s going to be wished away: It requires a total change in thinking. Why don’t you start with your thoughts on that? You have been very out front with your emergency call to reject this old paradigm, and move to the new,

COVID-19 in Europe

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I think the situation is very serious. It probably will not be possible without a lot of casualties, but nevertheless, if decisive measures are taken now, combined with a complete change in attitude, the damage can be minimized. Otherwise, it will be catastrophic.

I think it is useful to listen to the experts from Germany who are making regular podcasts, Christian Drosten, for example, the virologist from Berlin Charité Hospital, and Professor Lothar Wieler from the Robert Koch Institute, have put out very drastic warnings. Drosten said that there will be no lessening in the rate of infections in the spring and summer period—which some people temporarily assumed—because we will face a virus wave. During the summer period in the northern latitudes, the virus will continue to spread to the Southern Hemisphere, where it will be winter, and then in all likelihood will return to the Northern Hemisphere countries with an even greater intensity, and with the possibIDility of mutations in the fall. As of now, a vaccine cannot be expected before a year or so.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced what is now commonplace among many leaders of countries, that COVID-19 will probably infect 70% of the population. Unfortunately, it is absolutely not true what Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn still thought in January—which is really incredible—that the COVID-19 didn’t represent a danger for Germany, and that the mortality rate of COVID-19 would be lower than of the common flu. That’s what he said in January!

That that was not the case should have been clear even then if people only looked to China, which in the month of January was waging an incredible battle against the COVID-19. Only by closing down the entire city of Wuhan and Hubei province, effecting a lockdown for 60 million people, implementing it and also enforcing it, and having a population which was very cooperative in doing so, did China set a new standard in dealing with such pandemics, according to the World Health Organization. The Western countries could have taken that as an example, but people in the West have been too arrogant, too Euro-centric, or too Western-centric.

CGTN

All of Italy has been placed in quarantine. Shown: what is now a common city street scene.

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Many thought they could ignore the virus, or even that this is affecting China and will not come to Europe or the United States. Three valuable months to prepare were largely lost. A completely different attitude would have been necessary.

And now, COVID-19 is spreading and changing by the hour, so people are completely aware of the fact that it is out of control. And I do not want to add to any panic, but it is very clear that the numbers being announced right now are not accurate.

In speaking with my colleagues in France today, they told me only a little bit more than 1,000 tests have been done in France so far! Therefore the number of reported cases is not an accurate figure. And we have some cases in which people clearly have symptoms, and they tried to get tests, but were told, there are no tests in France right now. France doesn’t have the production capability and all the tests have been bought up; there simply are no tests. The fact that in Germany, there are only two deaths so far, as of this webcast [midday in Germany March 11] is being attributed to broad testing. We have to see.

All of Italy has been placed in quarantine after some very irrational behavior on the part of many citizens in the north of Italy, who violated government recommendations and traveled to the south of Italy, thus spreading COVID-19 basically to the whole of the country. It’s quite an advanced situation there now. I think the lesson to be learned from all of that is that we have to learn from China. We have to get rid of our Western arrogance, and simply look at the way that China effectively mobilized, and then the only conclusion is, that isolation measures once announced must be enforced to avoid a mass of cases.

That means that if you have many cases anywhere—a region, for example, like some cities or areas in North Rhine-Westphalia—the Wuhan model should be applied immediately. The area should be closed down, there should be a quarantine for a certain number of weeks, and these measures must be taken early in the spread of the disease. Speed counts in taking preemptive measures before the virus spreads completely out of control.

So I think we are in a very serious situation, but there is no reason to completely panic. There are clear ways forward, and I think the efficiency with which China dealt with this, should be a lesson for everybody.

The Murderous Arrogance of Geopoliticians

Schlanger: When you speak of the arrogance, I think you’re referring, in particular, to the continued adherence to geopolitics, to the neo-liberal model, the idea that the West is superior, that the West has solved all the problems. Isn’t this what hampers the thinking of people at the European Union and many of the people in the U.S. Congress, and think tanks in the United States?

Zepp-LaRouche: The European finance ministers, for example—the so-called Eurogroup—have a meeting scheduled for March 16. The first item on their agenda is the European Stability Mechanism, and then something else, and then only third, is the COVID-19 attack. The reason the reaction was so late—they didn’t want to use the word pandemic—was because they were more concerned about the stock market, the profits coming from the so-called “pandemic bonds,” which is an absurdity all by itself. These are bonds floated to supposedly finance the cost of dealing with pandemics, in which people will make a profit only if there is no call for the use of the funds before the maturity of the bond.

I think the thinking is still very much dominated by the geopolitical idea: For example, yesterday, I was listening—and one should actually stop doing this!—I was listening to the ZDF news and the moderator was reporting on the COVID-19 crisis, but then, instead of praising what the Chinese accomplished in Wuhan, he took the occasion to blast China and attack it. Continuing to attack Russia and China has to stop!

Left: DoS ; right: CC/Democracy International

Wang Yi, Foreign Minister of China (left), telephoned Luigi Di Maio, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy (right), offering to share China’s COVID-19 experience, send experts, and donate masks, protective suits and test kits to Italy.

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The only way humanity will get out of the crisis, is with international cooperation. Wang Yi, the Chinese Foreign Minister, has just telephoned the Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, offering to share China’s experience, to send their experts; they’re donating masks, protective suits, and tests to Italy. This is a completely different approach. And I think the West has much to learn about how to respond to challenges which all of humanity is facing. And this geopolitical thinking is really the thinking of troglodytes and should be eliminated completely.

Schlanger: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continues to attack China, calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus”—this kind of attitude, when in fact, the number of new cases in China has dropped significantly. And you mentioned earlier the importance of President Xi Jinping going to Wuhan to talk to the people on the front lines. I think it’s important to report this, Helga. It’s not being covered in the Western press.

Call for a Great Power Summit

Zepp-LaRouche: I have proposed something, which may look impossible to some people, but the situation will soon come to the point in which more and more people will recognize that what I’m saying is the only way to address this problem. I have reiterated my call to for an emergency summit of Xi Jinping, Putin, Trump, and Modi, as a minimum combination, to address all these problems. It’s very clear that we need international cooperation concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.

This virus is already threatening the international financial system: In the last several weeks, there have been several plunges, as large as in the 2008 systemic collapse, and after the September 11, 2001 attack. And the central banks have now decided to flood the markets, to lower the interest rates—the Bank of England lowered the interest rate by a half-percent, 50 basis points, today—as if the simple injection of liquidity would remedy any of the real, physical causes for the system collapsing.

So, I want to have a mobilization of the population to demand that the leaders of the most important governments—of the United States, Russia, China, and India—discuss the four points proposed by my late husband Lyndon LaRouche, in June 2014, because you need to have an immediate end of the global casino economy, by implementing a Glass-Steagall system. We have discussed this many times on this program. LaRouche’s approach is the only combination of measures that will address the problem. Then, you need a national bank in every country; in Germany, we could extend the functions of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau; have an international cooperation among these national banks, reinstate fixed exchange rates, and then have agreements for industrial development projects, like the industrial development of Southwest Asia, of Africa, and this will become then, a New Bretton Woods system.

There must be cooperation with the Chinese New Silk Road to have these kinds of development plans. And we need a crash program to go into a new platform of higher productivity of the economy, joint cooperation in advanced technologies, like fusion, like biophysics, like space research cooperation. And then, such a summit could implement these measures, and then could lead to a series of such summits, and that way change the geopolitics, and move towards an international cooperation, a shared future of humanity.

That shift has to occur. I’m predicting, and I think I’m on the safe side in doing so, that the crisis will accelerate, that there will be many more unfortunate consequences, and that people will recognize that to establish a completely different level of thinking will be the only way out for all of mankind.

If you agree with that, you should help this mobilization. Please sign the resolution and share it with your friends and colleagues, and get more people to sign it. We need a public discussion about this, and public demand that the whole world should move into a completely new way of cooperating and solving these kinds of problems.

LaRouche’s Biological Holocaust Task Force

Schlanger: I’ve received a few emails from people who have asked, why do we focus on “neo-liberalism” as the problem? “What does that have to do with the virus?” they ask. I think it’s important to look at what Dr. Robert Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had to say about the need to rebuild the system: That the so-called “just-in-time” system, which has been accepted as an economic model, doesn’t work. We need redundancy. Helga, I think it would be very useful for you to just review again, why this neo-liberal system is the cause, or sets humanity up for these kinds of crises. This is what your husband was warning against, going back to 1971, and then he set up the Biological Holocaust Task Force in 1974.

Zepp-LaRouche: On Aug.15, 1971, when Nixon dissolved the Bretton Woods system by going to floating exchange rates, by decoupling the dollar from the gold-reserve standard, and in that way, opening the deregulation of the markets—which has escalated ever since—my husband made the prognosis that if the West continued on this road of liberalizing the markets, of going with neo-liberal, monetarist policies, that it would end up in a new depression and the danger of a new fascism; or, the world could go to a completely new economic system.

That prognosis has proven to be absolutely on the mark. The Biological-Ecological Holocaust Task Force you just mentioned, he set up in 1974, and it was to study the effects of the policies of the IMF and World Bank on the economic system, especially in the developing sector.

Since then we have produced many studies, which you can all see in our archives, that if policies of austerity or zero growth are imposed, especially on the developing countries, that inevitably causes the emergence of old diseases and new diseases, because you cannot consistently lower the living standard of entire continents, as the IMF and World Bank have done in the last 50 years, without creating conditions of breakdown. And that is exactly what we see right now: Not only do we have the COVID-19 crisis, but also a locust situation getting completely out of control in many African states in the Horn of Africa, and in the Arabian Peninsula and Pakistan-India, even threatening to go into China.

As part of this geopolitical, liberal scheme of the West, there is also the refugee crisis: It’s not a natural phenomenon; it is the result of the interventionist wars conducted by the Bush Administrations and, Obama, with the idea that the West has to spread “democracy” and “human rights,” and that it’s legitimate to make interventionist wars against Iraq—it doesn’t matter if such interventions are based on lies of there being weapons of mass destruction—in Iraq, for example—which Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has since admitted that they all knew all along was a lie and they did it anyway. Iraq, Afghanistan—these are all the reasons why there is a refugee crisis. The underdevelopment of Africa is a result of these policies.

CGTN

The Ceylanpinar tent camp in the Turkish border town of Suruç, where more than 12,000 Syrian refugees have been sitting for years.

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That is why I am saying, we must get rid of this paradigm, which has many elements—it has geopolitics, it has neo-liberal economic policies; but it also has a Malthusian dimension to it: The Green axiom, which says that nature, or some spiders or some ants somewhere are more important than human beings. On COVID-19, do you think that most African countries or Asian and Latin American countries that do not have the health systems we have, do you think they are testing their people? I don’t think so. The figures are in all likelihood completely off, and the ability of these countries to mitigate or stop the virus is much, much less.

I’m absolutely convinced that there are some people who say, “Oh, there are too many people anyway,” like Bertrand Russell, who said, in his 1952 book, The Impact of Science on Society, that you need a pandemic or a “Black Death” in every generation to control population levels. We have published these quotes many times! And the absolutely disgusting way in which the European Union (EU) is dealing with the refugee crisis, now again erupting at the Turkish-Greek border, that is a mindset which is disgusting! And it is the reflection of geopolitics, of the Malthusian idea that there are too many people anyway.

Stop the Regime-Change Interventions!

Now, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is playing his own terrible games. Innocent people who have nothing, who have been sitting in camps for years on end, and have begun speaking Turkish, are now being instrumentalized by Erdoğan. That’s what the Greeks are saying, and that may all be true—but what’s the solution? You have to stop insisting that there must be regime change in Syria; that has to stop. There has to be recognition that the only legitimate government in Syria is the one the Syrian people themselves elect. There was a constitutional process under way, which is now stopped again; that has to be resumed. There has to be an end to the war.

Left: DoS/Ron Przysucha ; right: MSC/Kuhlmann

While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is playing dangerous geopolitical games, James Jeffrey, U.S. Special Representative for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, is demanding that NATO should back Turkey against Syria.

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Turkey should not be backed by NATO—that is an insane idea. The U.S. Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, James Jeffrey, just demanded that NATO should fully back up Turkey against Syria. Now, that is complete insanity! What needs to be done is, you have to have peace with Syria, and then there needs to be an orderly negotiation between the Assad government and the opposition, to arrange for the return of the Syrian refugees to their own country, which is what most people want to do, anyway.

So I think all of these assumptions, that we just continue with policies proven to be a failure, has to absolutely stop. I don’t see a sign that the European establishment is capable of doing it. That just means we need a mobilization of citizens. This is becoming a serious existential crisis for all of us, and we have to take responsibility to put in a new paradigm—a paradigm of cooperation—and then we can solve most problems; at least over time, we can find solutions to such problems as COVID-19. But we need to change the view of the West towards China and Russia. The idea that regime change is allowed under the pretext of spreading democracy and human rights, is one of those imperialist, colonialist ideas, which have to go.

Schlanger: Another perfect example of that is the expansion of sanctions against Iran and Venezuela to foster regime change there, in the face of this growing pandemic.

Quarantine Wall Street and the City of London!

I’d like to come back to one other point, which I think you alluded to earlier, which is the financial crisis: If anything ought to be quarantined, it ought to be Wall Street and the Bank of England. The idea that lower interest rates will solve everything, the repo lending, the incredible demand for liquidity without any concern for solvency. This is the other aspect of Mr. LaRouche’s warnings over many years.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. I don’t know how long this will continue. What the central banks are proposing is completely irresponsible. The continuous flooding of the markets with money, and the idea to go even to negative interest rates, all of this is already eating up the savings and life’s earnings of the population, and is threatening at some point to go into a hyperinflation. Derivatives must be absolutely written off. This is why Glass-Steagall is so crucial.

The whole EU Green program as it was announced by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, in the presence of this deplorable Greta Thunberg, that has to go, too! We will not continue to be an industrial state, if we implement these policies. If you want to have hospitals, if you want to have enough intensive care units to deal with such a situation, you have to have a productive society. And that Green policy of von der Leyen has to go. We need the full package that I talked about before: Glass-Steagall, and the return to Hamiltonian banking which, every time there was a successful economic system in history—whether it was the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, whether it was the reconstruction of Germany in the postwar period—these were the principles that were applied, and that is what is urgently required now.

Schlanger: And while this is all going on, we have the incredible soap opera in U.S. politics around the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating process. I think it would be very useful, as we come toward the end of this webcast, for you to emphasize again what people should do to make sure we can change the paradigm. There’s a hunger for change, people are still extremely unhappy, and now, very nervous, both because of the financial crisis and COVID-19. What should people do? How should they respond?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think the U.S. is a big problem, because unfortunately, Trump said he had a hunch that the mortality rate of COVID-19 is much less than what the World Health Organization was saying. I think that he probably said that because of the election campaign. But I think reality will assert itself very quickly: This will come as fast as it came in Europe, maybe even faster, and the U.S. right now is really unprepared! The health delivery system was taken down even more than in Europe.

We Are Now in a Dark Age

The Democrats now have Joe Biden as a leading candidate in the race for the Democratic Party nomination for the 2020 presidential election. There is a very interesting collection of videos published by Consortium News. The author, Caitlin Johnstone, has collected about twenty or so videos of Biden’s speeches, in which you can clearly see that he doesn’t have it anymore—he’s lost it. So the idea that somebody who has clear signs of aging (to put it mildly), to think he can be put through the Democratic Convention and the election campaign, and then win the election in November against Trump, is also a sign of extreme mental deterioration of the people who think they can do that and get away with it.

So if you look at all of these things, we need a completely new thinking: We are in a dark age, a dark age absolutely comparable to the 14th century when the Black Death killed one-third of the European population and people just went crazy! You see signs of this insanity, already now, so we need, therefore, a completely different approach, like what came in the 15th century with the Golden Renaissance in Italy. We can talk about that some other time, but I think people have to really recognize, we are in a dark age, and we have to reject all the assumptions that have led to this present situation.

I would like to make one other point: I think COVID-19 will force lockdowns, it will force measures; schools and universities are already closed for several weeks in several countries; you don’t know yet what will be the effect of all of this on the financial system, on the real economy. Merkel is talking about 70% of the population becoming infected. If you assume worldwide perhaps100 million people will be infected, and then, if you take the present mortality rate, 2-4 million people will die—under these circumstances, we should not have war games.

U.S. Army

NATO Exercise Defender-Europe 20 involves the deployment of a division-size combat force up against Russia’s western borders. Shown: Battle tanks moving across the theater of operations.

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Therefore, we need to stop the present NATO maneuver in Eastern Europe, the Defender-Europe 20. The virus does not stop in front of the military, and to have these kinds of things going on, when there is an immediate health threat to the population, doesn’t make any sense. So this NATO maneuver should stop. The highest commander of the U.S. forces in Germany, Lt. Gen. Christopher Cavoli, is now himself a victim of COVID-19 and is in quarantine in Wiesbaden. That should cause people to reflect on the fact that COVID-19 doesn’t stop in the face of the military.

I think we should go in the direction of mobilizing for the summit: I know people think that this is too big, but sometimes, when you are in a real crisis, only if you reach a completely new level of thinking, namely the idea that the leaders of all the major countries of the world should meet—the United States, Russia, China, and India, as a minimum, and then other countries can come together—only by changing the level of thinking, and the level of approach, can a solution be found.

So if you agree with that, then help us in this mobilization. We will do other things, as well: We will call for the rebuilding of the health delivery system, and there are other things we can do. But I think because of the complexity of the world situation, the interaction of all of the elements of the breakdown, that we will not solve any of these problems unless we go to a completely new paradigm, a new system of international relations, and you should help us in this mobilization; that’s the very best thing you can do for your own life and your own future.

Schlanger: And I recommend, toward that end, that people circulate this webcast, get this webcast around, so people can hear the extent of the crisis and the solutions; secondly, you should circulate the call for the emergency summit by Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Take that to your city council, to your trade union group. At least you can certainly use the internet to get it around and get people signing and supporting it.

So, Helga, anything else you want to add?

Zepp-LaRouche: No. I think this is a moment in which people will be freaked out and it’s understandable: But sometimes a shock is also healthy if it helps you to get out of a wrong idea, and to think things through and then move ahead and find a solution. So, I would urge people to overcome your present fears and be confident that if we work together as one humanity, we can solve this.

Schlanger: OK, well, with that, we’ll see you again, next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Till next week!

MISSION FOR AMERICA

China’s Mission Can Also Be America’s:

Inspiring Young People for the Future

by Connie Carr

Pixabay/Jason Goh

A Chinese student.

CGTN

Working day and night in three shifts, over 3,000 workers in Wuhan, China built two large hospitals in just two weeks. Here, prefab panels are put in place at the hospital site.

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March 15—As the American people move forward, under conditions of a now-declared National Emergency, into the unknown of the rapidly escalating coronavirus epidemic, it is urgent to pause and to consider the outlook required to meet this challenge, to counter any tendency toward panic or despair, to grasp the actual profound potential which now exists. I offer here observations from my own recent experiences.

I talk to kids in China every day, teaching them English over the internet. I’ve been teaching them through the entire period of the coronavirus epidemic. My observation is that there has been absolutely zero sense of panic, angst, anxiety or anything of the kind on the part of these kids and their families. Instead, what I notice is a huge sense of mission. The kids of this generation are going to grow up with extremely fond memories of this crisis, because they can reflect on the fact that they went through a mission, they fought against all the odds, and they won.

The kids talk to me about having to stay inside, and not being able to visit their relatives. But they’re not freaked out, even though this happened during the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival, the biggest holiday and travel season in China. In fact, they’re very proud, especially proud of the fact that China built two hospitals in ten days. The names of the hospitals are Huoshenshan, or fire mountain, and Leishenshan, or thunder mountain. The doctors, nurses, and medical personnel are known as “angels in white.” They are the heroes of China. Everyone pulled together, from the top officials, to the food delivery drivers, and everyone in between. “Stay Strong China”—Jia Yao—became a rallying cry throughout the nation. You can find videos of people in Wuhan shouting it from their apartment balconies.

CGTN

In Wuhan, a lack of building materials and deficiencies in transportation for those materials had to be overcome to complete the hospital construction.

Pixabay/kian2018

Young Chinese students in traditional uniforms.

CGTN

One of two large hospitals, purpose-built to treat patients with COVID-19, under construction in Wuhan, China.

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Igniting Passion for Mankind

This reminds me of how Americans came together for a common purpose during World War II and during the 1960s space program. We were proud of sending a man to walk on the surface of the Moon, and it was a bright promise to the young people of that generation. We had a common mission, we worked together, and sacrificed for the greater good.

It’s that sense of operating as one nation, pulling together as a people, which characterizes China’s accomplishment in combatting the coronavirus, and this is precisely what we can revive today in America. President Trump’s initiatives and the initial signs of bipartisan cooperation to defeat the virus must be supported and furthered. The British-directed attacks against Trump that began from his first day in office must be put to rest, and the job of safe-guarding the American people and rebuilding the nation be given the highest priority by all. The exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche would go a long way toward reviving the real mission of America. The young people of America deserve and should be given the same bright future as the young people of China.

Great change for the better can be born from this crisis, if we embrace the mission before us.

Swedish Government Won’t Fight Spread of the Coronavirus

by Ulf Sandmark and Hussein Askary, Schiller Institute, Sweden

March 15—Warnings from Italy, and from domestic independent experts, on the necessity of taking drastic measures to control the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19, have been ignored by the Swedish government and Swedish expert authorities with arguments that led to a sharp reaction from the Italian Ambassador to Sweden (see below). The Swedish system—with independent authorities wielding the executive power instead of the government, and a healthcare system that is decentralized and has been victimized over the past three decades by waves of neo-liberal austerity—has created a situation in which the measures are not coordinated and threaten to make Sweden a new epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a recent development, Denmark closed its borders to Sweden at noon on March 14 to prevent the spread of contagion. The same day, China’s Global Times ran an editorial criticizing Sweden for “giving up” in response to the virus and becoming “a black hole” where the virus can grow.

Left: CC/Mohammad Ali Marizad; right: WHO

Left: Stefan Löfven, Prime Minister of Sweden; right: Johan Giesecke, Swedish advisor to WHO.

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Many among the Swedish people, including healthcare workers, are totally shocked by the passivity of the Swedish government and authorities in the face of what even Prime Minister Stefan Löfven described as the worst health crisis in a century. But beyond the dramatic expressions, Löfven and his ministers offered nothing in their press conference held on March 11. Besides, they insisted that no lockdown was necessary and that testing people (even with symptoms) and tracking should be halted except for patients and staff in hospitals. They also admitted that there are acute capacity problems and shortages of materials in the Swedish healthcare system. For example, the serious lack of basic protection gear for the healthcare employees in most hospitals, even though the crisis has not yet reached any dramatic level.

The government also decided to keep schools open and there will be no restrictions on movements of people. The only restriction is on gatherings of more than 500 people. Otherwise, all other precautionary procedures are taken either by local governments or by private businesses that have decided to shut down their activities for the time being.

Swedes Want Action Against COVID-19

The population is reacting sanely despite the government, and is responding by starting to stay out of public places and avoid meetings, restaurant visits and public transport.

What is worrying the population is an attitude that “there is nothing to do really” to stop the epidemic, and that that will lead to some sort of advocacy of “a natural selection process.” This was expressed in a shocking interview on TV4 prime-time news broadcast on the evening of March 12 with the Swedish WHO advisor Johan Giesecke who bluntly said “Yes” on the question of whether the government made the right decision in not closing schools. Then, he cynically lied that, “in the studies made, it has never shown to have any effect on the spreading of the infection.”

He also defended the decision, made the day before, to stop the testing and tracking of single cases among the population. He said, “such testing is useless when we are in this new phase where the contagion is already in the country.”

When asked about what to do when there will be no closing of schools and no testing, he said, “it is the elderly who are at risk and they should be taken care of and protected as much as possible.” They should also be isolated with the aim “to spread out the peak pressure on the healthcare system, so the hospital resources will have a greater chance to cope with it.” He continued to alarm viewers in saying that “it will get worse as many in the population become infected.” And he interjected, “but most people will not become very ill. You don’t need to worry about that. If you are young and healthy, you will just get a substantial cold or flu, but not much worse.”

Afterwards, he argued, “the young will be immune and can go back to work in a month or so in a best-case scenario.” Asked why other nations are doing things differently, he responded by defending the Swedish expert-oriented decision-making system, adding that, in other nations, “the politicians want to show that they are enacting stronger measures than their neighbors.”

The Karolinska Institutet, a research-led medical university in Stockholm, ranks among the top universities in the world.

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This WHO advisor was followed by another Swedish WHO expert, Professor Johan von Schreeb, the Professor of Global Disaster Medicine at the most prominent Swedish School of Medicine, the Karolinska Institute. Professor von Schreeb stressed that the healthcare system will come under enormous pressure if everyone gets sick at the same time. However, if we are able to implement certain measures, such as social distancing, in particular with respect to the elderly, frequent handwashing, and avoiding handshaking, we would be able to avoid the dramatic peak, and we could stretch the infection rates over a longer time, thereby reducing the pressure on the Swedish healthcare system. He expected the epidemic to be over shortly, “only after 3-6 months.”

Both he and Giesecke ignored the fact that without massive state intervention, the healthcare workers can also be infected, as it has become a fact that they will not have enough protective equipment. To ignore this fact, that nurses and doctors are not superhuman, although they will fight courageously, the rate of infection among them will be greater than anywhere else. As soon as that happens, the healthcare system will completely disintegrate, and the death rates will skyrocket.

Moving one step from insanity to criminal negligence, these two “experts” clearly do not advocate decreasing the rate of contagion by active measures of social isolation and lockdown. Instead, von Schreeb made the final horrifying statement about the “tough decisions” that doctors “would soon have to make about putting everyone on respirators, and that, due to the lack of them, they would have to decide if it were dignified to put a 90 year old on a respirator.”

Von Schreeb is a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) surgeon with international experience from the Ebola epidemic and is also an expert coauthoring the WHO classification and standards for care in sudden disasters.

Experts Unprepared, Behind the Times

State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, the official in charge of Communicable Disease Control at the Public Health Agency of Sweden, is on TV every day to soothe the population with “calming” statements such as, “We should not close down more than is necessary.”

The head of the doctors’ association in Rimini, Italy, Mauricio Grosso, warned Sweden over being slow in taking measures against the virus. He appeared on March 11, on the main TV2 public news program Aktuellt that showed closed schools, shops, and supermarkets in Italy, and he strongly advised Sweden to “immediately follow their example.” He said in the beginning, with few cases, Italy was also slow, but now it was like what he had heard from his parents about the World War II mobilization. In an arrogant response to Dr. Grosso, Tegnell stated that there is no proven, positive effect of such large-scale quarantine measures, a mantra that has been repeated in many statements from “responsible” officials at the many Swedish state authorities involved.

Italian Embassy in Sweden

Mario Cospito, Ambassador of Italy to Sweden.

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Tegnell also said that “We [Sweden] have much better preconditions both to handle it and work with it, so we will avoid getting into such a situation” like Northern Italy. This type of criticism against Italy was sharply refuted by the Ambassador of Italy to Sweden, Mario Cospito, in an official press statement. The Ambassador “wanted to inform” Tegnell that Italian health authorities in this situation worked intensively to take care of infected patients with “efficiency, professionalism and maximal dedication.” “No one has put in question the Italian health system,” the Ambassador wrote, and pointed to both WHO and ECDC, the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

The Ambassador ended by saying, “The struggle against the spread of COVID-19 is no football game where you see opposite sides cheering their players: It is about a global and common challenge to guarantee health for all, where the ‘winners’ are the thousands of doctors, nurses and employees in the Health Service who in Italy work around the clock, 7 days a Week.”

BRIX/ Xuefei Chen Axelsson

Swedish Schiller Institute Chairman Ulf Sandmark speaking before a BRIX seminar in Stockholm.

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Chinese Healthcare Model Essential for Sweden

This lack of action was put in question by Swedish Schiller Institute Chairman Ulf Sandmark, in a call-in intervention into a program broadcast on the national public radio on the morning of March 13. Sandmark confronted the coronavirus expert panel demanding that Sweden now, when the numbers of infected in Sweden are going straight up in a geometric expansion mode, use the Chinese government model implemented in Hubei province and also by Italy, enforcing an immediate lockdown to contain the virus. The answers partly acknowledged the problem, and also pointed to the unused Swedish law allowing the same strong measures as in China.

That same day, the Political Editor of the leading daily Dagens Nyheter, Peter Wolodarski, published his editorial, “Close down Sweden to protect Sweden,” in which he strongly attacked the slow decision-making by the authorities and also demanded immediate, very strong quarantine measures to contain the pandemic.

It is an open secret that the Swedish healthcare system was a disaster even before the COVID-19 crisis came. Therefore, it can be easily estimated that a total collapse of the healthcare system is to be expected. Then, natural selection will take care of the situation. This is what has worried the population.

As for the utter lack of materials and equipment, the Swedish daily Aftonbladet reported, March 13, that many regions and hospitals have already reported a serious shortage of protection gear and even disinfectants. This is based, according to the paper, on a survey conducted on February 27 in 77 hospitals. The paper cited Dr. Agnes Wold, a clinical bacteriologist, who wrote on Twitter that “an emergency situation has taken over hospitals where the shortage is acute, especially in protection equipment, masks and disinfection materials.” The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare also warned in a report issued recently that there is going to be both a major long-term and short-term risk for the regions and that there is enormous pressure on the infection protection clinics especially with the lack of testing and detection kits.

Social Minister Lena Hallengren, who is in charge of healthcare affairs, tried to explain the lack of materials, in the March 13 press conference with the Prime Minister, as a result of international factors. She said that deliveries of materials from foreign suppliers were disrupted. She also blamed European countries for their lack of cooperation. The government is now meeting with local producers for a crash program for producing such materials, but how much they can deliver is not known.

CC/Arlid Vagen

The Stockholm headquarters of the Swedish Central Bank.

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A leading Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, published an op-ed on March 13 by medical doctor and intensive care specialist Kajsa Giesecke, in which she pointed to the lack of centralized authority in the Swedish health system capable of taking necessary decisions to expand the number of intensive care beds. The military system for emergency care in war (with 50 field and war hospitals) was dismantled in the 1990s. “Sweden, in healthcare terms, is a federal nation where the counties are deciding on their own, which is detrimental now when national resources and strategies are needed,” she wrote.

The state authorities “have no mandate to push through the draconian measures needed,” and “private health care runs itself.” She continued by describing the collapse of a system where neoliberal privatization and austerity have disorganized the old, strong state authorities who had had executive power. Without a presidential system in Sweden, the government is only running the budgeting, and is furthermore very weak politically, with a fragile coalition. The COVID-19 crisis exposes an actual constitutional crisis with a dysfunctional decision-making system.

However, the Swedish system to protect the banks is very efficient in this crisis. On March 13 the central bank decided to put a whopping 500 billion crowns ($52 billion) at the service of the banks in the biggest quantitative easing in its history. Without the constraints of a necessary bank separation, it is put at the disposal of the Swedish banks to help fund and protect the business sector from the short-term effects of the coronavirus epidemic. Here the central bank functions as the executive authority, although not so much influenced by the people and its parliament, as by corporatist interests. It remains to be seen if any similar amount will be provided for the medical fight against COVID-19, in a Sweden that is in deep trouble.

The rest of the world is right to worry about the Swedish decision to promote, domestically and internationally, the same policy as the British government of not stopping the general spread of the virus and wait, especially for the younger population, to acquire a “herd immunity” sufficient to halt he contagion. It risks leaving a big gap in the international defense lines against the COVID-19 pandemic especially in the weaker developing nations.

II. Unleashing the American System

HOW MIKE BLOOMBERG THINKS

Bloomberg’s Disastrous ‘Educational Reform’ in New York City

SECOND OF A SERIES.

by Barbara Boyd

His thinking, rooted in systems analysis and cybernetics of de-mentors Norbert Wiener (left) and John von Neumann (right), Michael Bloomberg’s approach as mayor led to the destruction of New York City and its public school system.

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March 16—In the first article in this series, we discussed Michael Bloomberg’s mode of thinking, a disease he shares with the elites worldwide. It is more deadly than any virus could ever be. As Lyndon LaRouche first wrote back in 1981, the application of Bloomberg’s systems analysis approach to whole economies and societal problems in the large, over extended periods of time, inevitably results in “white collar”-created genocides against human populations.

In fact, LaRouche thought this mode of thinking was so dangerous that he decided, when first encountering the works of John Von Neumann and, particularly, Norbert Wiener, that he would dedicate the rest of his life to eradicating it and the axiomatic assumptions about the nature of human beings and the universe which underlie it. LaRouche superseded it by positing human creativity as the driving force for sustained economic development and then proving that only creativity per se was consistent with the divine nature of human beings, the laws of the universe, and fundamental economic progress.

Linear descriptions of whole economies are only capable of describing sick and doomed economies. Underlying the systems analysis approach is the axiomatic assumption that human beings are mere animals to be manipulated according to the bestial impulses of pleasure and plain, that resources are fixed and, in such an entropic and closed system, the population must be periodically crushed and culled in order to allow the continued prosperity of the elites.

Here is LaRouche in 2000:

Many among what had been formerly successful enterprises, including national economies, which later eventually failed, had been led to that latter calamity by continuing the very policies which had ruined them, by such presumptions as the delusion, that pleasing shareholders gains, as shown on the “bottom line,” showed that recent trends in policy making in force should be continued. In such cases, the root of ultimate disaster is . . . the fallacy of assuming that what might appear to be true in reading of nominal cost-price ratios in the short term, or in the small, measures the physical result of the present policies in the long term, and in the large. . . . In short, a frequent cause of the bankruptcy which occurred in some such cases, was the cumulative impulse of decadent ownership . . . to increase short term profits, by curtailing those investments, and curtailing those elements of incurred cost on which the long-term future of that enterprise had actually depended. Such were the self-doomed navigators who charted a long journey on the presumption that estimates made for small areas, showed, in effect, that the earth is flat.

In this second article of our series, we discuss Michael Bloomberg’s educational reform in New York City, an actual disaster fully employing systems analysis as its modality, for which Bloomberg has been celebrated, both by himself and his fellow elites internationally. What we describe here is a form of menticide, implemented widely in New York City under Michael Bloomberg, but also widely utilized throughout the nation. We counterpose Lyndon LaRouche’s proposals concerning an actually human education to be provided to all, in order to point the way to an actual educational policy suitable for those planning to colonize space pursuant to President Trump’s Artemis program.

The Backdrop to Bloomberg’s Reforms

Education, the preparation of the next generation for their missions on this planet, is an essential element of physical-economic infrastructure. Since the end of World War II, the end of the war mobilization, U.S. educational standards and achievement have declined, drastically. The first ratchet down was the emergence of John Dewey and his fellow British positivist and behaviorist philosophers as the hegemonic school of thought among educators. There was a brief resurgence with the celebration of actual science, creativity, and the mobilization of the popular imagination and will, which occurred with the space program. But, following the destruction of the Bretton Woods monetary system on August 15, 1971, the overall direction has been a steep and uninterrupted decline.

Accompanying the birth of the present casino economy in 1971, a globalist economy controlled top-down by the financiers and oligarchs of the City of London and Wall Street, the U.S. economy was treated to a series of deliberate shocks, beginning with the “oil shock” of 1973. These shocks vastly contracted the U.S. science and industrial base, and the infrastructure required for its continuing, progressive development.

New York City’s Anglophilic elites, the Rockefellers, Morgan bankers, the Ford Foundation, led the charge, detailing their current and planned actions in Project 1980s, a series of studies published by the New York Council on Foreign Relations in 1975-1976. Emerging from these dictates was the idea of “controlled disintegration” of the world’s advanced industrial economies, with outsourcing of production to cheap labor havens in the developing sector. Paul Volcker, through his reign as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the Carter Administration, administered the blows to the real economy which implemented these policies.

World Telegram & Sun/Walter Albertin

The financial oligarchy began New York City’s devolution during the administration of Mayor John Lindsay.

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In New York City, the same financial oligarchy had begun mapping and staging the city’s devolution during the administration of Mayor John Lindsay. The 1968 teachers’ strike, pitting the United Federation of Teachers against the black and Latino residents of Ocean Hill-Brownsville calling for community control of the schools, destroyed the coalition of the Democratic Party, labor, and civil rights organizations that had previously and successfully resisted some of the worst plans of the financiers running the city. Now, the New York public schools’ largely minority population was turned against the public school teachers on the basis of identity politics, a rift which has never really healed.

In 1974-75, a municipal financial crisis was manufactured by the same financial interests. It resulted in the imposition of a financial dictatorship over all of the city’s finances under the auspices of the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB), chaired by Lazard Frères banker Felix Rohatyn. Historically, Lazard Frères had played a critical role in the installation of the fascist regimes in Europe that resulted in World War II. More recently, Rohatyn and his associates at the Partnership for the City of New York, were responsible for crowning Michael Bloomberg for three terms as Mayor of New York.

EIRNS/Chris Jadatz

Under the brutal dictatorship of the Emergency Financial Control Board, chaired by Lazard Frères banker-hitman Felix Rohatyn, health care and education were rationalized and cut, creating “dead zones.”

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Roger Starr, Rohatyn’s New York Times publicist, writing in the New York Times Magazine on November 14, 1976, openly declared what was in store: New York City had to be shrunk, its population drastically reduced by one-third, its services, including education and healthcare, rationalized and cut.

Starr’s piece described whole portions of the city as dead zones. Under Rohatyn’s EFCB they were financially starved by the EFCB and strategic arsons burned them down as fire and police services to them were stopped. The industrial workforce, along with industry itself, fled. Low-wage service jobs became the fare for immigrants and the minority poor. Financial services and entertainment became the economic drivers of the City, creating the drastic wealth disparities which continue to this day. Between 1975-1981, 53 schools were closed, 10,000 teachers were lost.

While this was occurring, national trends in education were made appropriate to the deindustrialization policy; the population was to be dumbed down. Teaching colleges and universities educating the new generation of teachers became obsessed with supporting students based on race or sexual orientation; self-esteem rather than accomplishment became the measure of educational progress. Rigorous curricula in the sciences, classics, history, and art were abandoned as “authoritarian,” the thoughts and ideas of “dead white men.”

PBS Publicity Photo

Quack economist Milton Friedman, foremost proponent of British free trade, pushed the idea of school vouchers and school choice (free market) on New York City as a hammer against compulsory public education.

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In purported reaction to the “progressive” educational policies now dominating the public sector, quack economist Milton Friedman, the foremost proponent of the British free trade and globalist policies which deindustrialized the United States, wrote Free to Choose. In this 1980 book, highly influential in the Reagan Administration, Friedman argued that vouchers and school choice should be used as a hammer against compulsory public education, which he opposed as needlessly inefficient, bureaucratic, and now, being based on the progressives, almost subversive. He proclaimed that “entrepreneurial” private schools, supported by vouchers, would allow for a Darwinian competition between public schools and private schools and end achievement gaps between white and minority populations. Standardized tests, Friedman said, would objectively determine whether public or private schools were doing a better job of educating students.

As the result of all of these developments, education, like healthcare—former essential professions which operated just fine, as such, in the formerly expanding industrial economy—were financialized as part of the new “service” economy. Instead of actually educating students, or providing healthcare to individual patients, these new service industries, dotted with publicly listed companies, primarily filled the coffers of Wall Street and the City of London by cannibalizing the former public sector, while, incidentally, providing mass packaged educational and health services to the population based on efficiencies wrung from systems analysis modeling.

The current coronavirus pandemic is demonstrating the genocidal nature of our just-in-time healthcare system, lacking any surge capacity, or necessary surplus of hospital rooms, life-saving drugs, and equipment. The complete lack of an actual education in science, history, classical arts, and languages manifests itself in whole sections of the population enslaved to our national security state’s propagandists, who regularly torture and manipulate them with fake news and drive popular hysterias on both the right and the left.

So, when New York City shrank, based on the shock tactics of Felix Rohatyn and Roger Starr, so did its public education system. There were pockets of the city in which the affluent could receive a passing education in private or magnet schools set up to service them. That, after all, was the plan: a devolution of the nation’s educational system into something like the old British imperial system. One to two percent were to be trained to rule, a few more were tracked as middle management, and the vast majority were trained to know their place as unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Schools in impoverished neighborhoods languished: There was no investment in buildings; crime and violence were rampant, teachers fled. This is the backdrop to Michael Bloomberg’s educational “reforms.”

Bloomberg’s Axioms

In a speech at Oxford University on December 8, 2016, Michael Bloomberg provided a startling demonstration of the axioms that control how and what he thinks. This speech, widely circulated on the internet, is credited as contributing to the collapse of his Presidential campaign, along with his robotic, and plain mean-old-man persona on display in the Democratic debates.

Answering a student’s question about the income inequality which, the student posited, led to Donald Trump’s election, Bloomberg says you can “fix the inequality” by taxing the rich and giving the money to the poor. You do this for various reasons, he says, including altruism and the fact “that you don’t want the poor on your doorstep.”

But, he says, what the lower strata really want is the dignity of a job. He then launched into his version of economic history, pointing out that, “We can teach processes,” saying that he could teach anyone in the room to be a farmer because of the simple steps of putting the seed in the ground and watering it—follow the set of instructions and you’re a farmer. Similarly, in the industrial age, all that was required was following the instructions for the process, the skill involved figuring out which way the arrow pointed on a machine and turning the crank.

But, in the “information age,” Bloomberg says, something more is required, since we are replacing men with machines and the requirement is the ability to think and analyze, using a lot more “gray matter.” It is unclear whether the teachers can teach this or the students can learn, but the problem has to be solved, he says, lest “they start setting up guillotines someday.”

Since business has no responsibility for this, because it exists solely to create products which people like, and to maximize the profits of its shareholders, the forum for solving this is government. And, the only solution Bloomberg thinks government can provide is in the creation of no-show or meaningless and “inefficient” jobs for people who don’t fit into the green “information society,” like former industrial workers and coal miners. It would be better to do this, he says, than to have them without jobs and being out there acting to destabilize society.

It is difficult to understate the level of arrogant ignorance represented by Bloomberg’s class-based and utopian remarks. He has obviously never been to the science- and engineering- based factory, which is the modern farm, nor does he have any relationship to actual productive processes—after all, the computer terminal he invented which made him rich simply facilitates better card-counting in Wall Street’s gambling casino. He knows nothing about machine tools and the inventiveness of workers on modern manufacturing platforms. He lives in the world of his “data” and in the utopian fantasies of the information age.

And, as he freely admits, after spending billions of dollars warring with and breaking the teachers’ union and privatizing New York City’s schools, he has no idea whether his methods and ideas can educate human beings. As we detail here, his quest was a disaster, a form of actual menticide against an entire generation of New York City kids, for which he and his ilk should rightfully be prosecuted.

Bloomberg intended to claim that his success in doing what he claimed was unthinkable, raising reading and math scores in New York City, entitled him to be President of the United States, his life-long ambition. Instead, Joe Biden has apparently promised Bloomberg that he will be made President of the World Bank, also a life-long ambition, provided Bloomberg proves capable in buying the presidency for Joe Biden.

The First Phase of the Plan

The first phase of Bloomberg’s plan for New York City’s schools involved establishing the Mayor’s Office, rather that the moribund and failing Board of Education, as the sole authority for all educational policy. The State Legislature gave him this control soon after his election in 2002.

At the time Bloomberg took over, 42 percent of New York City school kids were considered proficient in reading, 31 percent were considered proficient in math, less than 50% of students would graduate in four years. Sixteen percent of the teachers were uncertified, and a full ten percent of the math teachers had flunked math testing at least four times. All of the teachers themselves had been educated using the new age progressive norms dominant in the nation’s teaching curricula throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to the vast majority of students belonging to poor minority families, there was also a huge immigrant population which spoke English only as a second language.

CC/Ruben Diaz, Jr.

Principals, and teachers were accountable for progress on test scores: bonuses if scores went up; if scores went down they would be fired or their schools closed.

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Bloomberg proposed to conquer this problem by employing modern utopian systems analysis management techniques, and, ultimately, privatizing the entire system under the Darwinian free market axioms first propounded by Milton Friedman. Teachers were to be rewarded for progress on test scores. Principals were sent to a special leadership training academy featuring classes from such Wall Street titans as former GE President Jack Welch. They were being educated to become “change agents.” Schools, principals, and teachers were all to be held accountable based on progress on test scores. Allegedly, if the scores went up, they received bonuses, if the scores went down they would be fired or their schools closed. In reality, in this first stage, teachers, principals, and students were being profiled as to whether or not they would comply with Bloomberg’s system or resist it. Those resisting were simply dumped.

The Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations, all giants in the school privatization movement, were brought in to fund and supervise dismantling of neighborhood schools and the radical substitution of a “small schools” movement, aimed at pitting small public schools and private charter schools, often housed in the same building, in a competition for better test scores.

Publicolor

Under Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s plan, each student was centrally profiled; teaching was reduced to performance on standardized tests. Shown: Mayor Bloomberg (left) and Joel Klein (right).

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Testing data and algorithms would govern everything. McKinsey Consulting was brought in with a multi-million dollar contract to analyze and profile each aspect of the schools, from ethnic composition to the education and performance levels of teachers in teaching what amounted to standardized tests. Under a system, put into place by Chancellor Joel Klein, each student in the system was ultimately profiled centrally, concerning whether they were making progress or not, requiring remedial help to up their test scores. Private schoolers and consultants were then brought in to schools or students deemed failing, with multi-million dollar contracts attached.

Centralization in the first phase of this plan went so far that Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, Joel Klein, and his lieutenants, literally dictated to teachers how to arrange the chairs, the desks, the rugs, and even the bulletin boards in their classrooms.

These changes were accompanied by a huge public relations juggernaut, similar to Bloomberg’s half billion in ads during his failed Presidential campaign. The Department of Education sprouted a 29-person strong PR staff, augmented by Mayor Bloomberg’s own PR staff, further augmented by the Fund for Public Schools. The Fund, ostensibly an independent not-for-profit organization, was chaired by Chancellor Klein.

White House/Eric Draper

President George W. Bush promotes his “No Child Left Behind” program during a visit to Harlem Village Academy Charter School.

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As described by David Bloomfield, President of the Citywide Council for High Schools (CCHS), the Education Department’s website was representative of pervasive spin.

The website should be transformed from a mayoral campaign vehicle to something useful . . . it’s all buttercups-and-roses, smoke and mirrors. Why is there never any bad news? Just press releases on the home page taking credit for the sun rising. . . . The website is a perfect example of what makes everyone so mad about the way the Mayor has handled the schools: data manipulation, grandiose claims, and almost no way to find out that a third (or is it more?) of our schools are failing under No Child Left Behind.

As might be anticipated in this plan, test scores were endlessly manipulated to show progress under Bloomberg’s plan. Educators Diane Ravitch and Sol Stern have demonstrated this in numerous published books and essays, despite being early fans of Bloomberg, privatization, and the national educational reform movement under the Bush and Obama Administrations. Similar test score cheating scenarios were documented in other school systems implementing the “data driven” systems analysis programs, particularly the Washington, D.C. public school system under Bloomberg protégé Chancellor Michele Rhee.

CC/Center for American Progress

British import, Sir Michael Barber (center) was brought in by Bloomberg to construct what was to become the new decentralized free market educational system.

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Phase II—The British Come Out from Behind the Curtain

Having culled the system of students, teachers, principals, and schools deemed “failing,” Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein moved on to the full implementation of Milton Friedman’s “market” model for the New York City public school system. Sir Michael Barber, the satanic Tony Blair’s education minister, was brought in to construct what was to become the new decentralized free market New York City educational system. Barber’s pronounced goal is putting every child in the world under his educational model. Every country “should have exactly the same definition of what it means ‘to be good at math.’” Every child in 2050 must know “E(K+T+L), (Knowledge + Thinking + Leadership) multiplied by the ‘ethical underpinnings’ of environmentalism.” In other words, every child is to be systematically brainwashed into accepting the zero growth and genocidal assumptions of the Green New Deal.

As documented by Sol Stern, Barber’s new decentralized model involved creation of a new office in the Department of Education, the “Market Maker.” From operating “like a regulated, command-and-control economy, the system would go almost overnight to something that, on paper at least, would work like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. “Shock therapy” like that applied to the complete looting and devolution of the former Soviet economy, was to be applied to the New York public school system. Principals would become “entrepreneurs” under decentralized control. They could seek both public and private funding. If they succeeded in raising math and reading scores, they would be rewarded. If they failed, they would be fired.

At an event sponsored by the “Market Maker” office in 2007, principals were treated to a video featuring New York public school alumni Henry Kissinger, Spike Lee, and Joan Rivers, with Spike Lee touting the new role of principals in the reorganization. As reported by Stern, “the soon-to-be empowered principals” then got to wander the luxury hotel’s exhibition halls, transformed into a supermarket of private education service providers. In turn, the 14 pre-selected private providers competed against one another to sign up the principals, now in control of their own budgets, as customers.

CC/Rubenstein

Chancellor Joel Klein once admitted that neither what was being taught nor the pedagogy to teach it were ever considered in Bloomberg’s “reforms.”

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Missing in Action: Curriculum and Pedagogy

In a remarkable admission, Bloomberg’s selected chancellor, Joel Klein, says that what was being taught and its pedagogy were never really seriously considered in Bloomberg’s “reforms.” Klein, a former Justice Department anti-trust attorney, got his job through Bloomberg’s self-identified network of friends which Bloomberg dubs this nation’s “intelligentsia.” In Klein’s case, journalist Margaret Carlson, a Bloomberg friend through her mentor, Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson, made the recommendation.

Klein also admits in his book, Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools, that a second axiomatic assumption governing Bloomberg’s efforts was that the marketplace privatized educational system would overcome the impacts of pervasive poverty and income inequality in New York City and the degraded and decadent violent video game entertainment culture in which the impoverished lived. Since Bloomberg and friends flourish off the present imperial model of economy, they have no intention of actually addressing wage inequality or decadent culture, since these are control mechanisms within their economic model. But, as Bloomberg points out in his Oxford address, unless they can sell the population on the idea that education and job access are improving, the guillotines might be at the door.

In the current educational landscape, attention to curriculum and pedagogy is dubbed the “knowledge acquisition” model as compared to Bloomberg’s approach which is dubbed the “incentive” model.

Klein suddenly realized the importance of curriculum and “knowledge acquisition” when visiting a school allegedly teaching the history of the civil war. When a student was asked what caused the civil war, his answer, was “racism.” The entire class then shifted to discussing their personal experience of racism. The idea of actually discussing one of the most significant moments in the nation’s history was completely lost, never to be regained.

Despite billions of dollars being spent under Bloomberg’s regime, test scores only briefly moved up in math and science by a few percentage points and then quickly retreated in subsequent years. However, the New York City school system is now very heavily privatized for profit, a central goal of the entire escapade.

Lyndon LaRouche’s Educational Idea

Lyndon LaRouche wrote extensively about education with the idea that every child should have the gift of the rigorous intellectual background necessary to achieve full citizenship in our Republic. His idea differs in all respects from the fascist system, designed to foster obedience, which Michael Bloomberg foisted on New York City.

Instead, LaRouche says that education should foster the creativity of every individual child through the re-experiencing of the fundamental discoveries of the universal laws of nature as they progressed in human history. He also advocated the re-introduction of the Humboldt curriculum which once governed both subjects taught and pedagogy in the United States. His emphasis was on fundamental science education, classical art, universal history, and languages.

In a speech in 1998, “How the Top 1% of Americans Think,” LaRouche succinctly summarized how educational systems could foster the creativity of students. In a classroom of 15-17 students, a teacher presents the opportunity for the children to re-enact a fundamental discovery of, “say some Greek, 2,000 years ago or more.” Such fundamental discoveries invariably involve paradoxes, the contrast between a present state of human knowledge which provably does not cohere with the laws of nature, and a new principle to be discovered, which does. For example, the principles involved in discovering that the Earth is not flat or Kepler’s numerous discoveries about the planetary orbits.

EIRNS

Lyndon LaRouche often said that education should foster the creativity of every child through re-experiencing the fundamental discoveries of the universal laws of nature.

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In an appropriate social process while re-enacting the discovery, several students come upon an as yet unarticulated hypothesis and then, in excitement, try to figure out how to prove whether what they are thinking is right. The experiment proving this is then designed in what science calls a crucial experiment. Working through and solving just such problems is at the center of school pedagogy and curriculum:

These little kiddies, [LaRouche said.] The trick is, when they make a discovery, is what comes over their faces, is happiness. The light turns on. . . . It’s the great joy of people who like to teach children, is to turn that light of happiness on in that little mind when it makes a discovery, has an insight, a human insight or a scientific insight, or the equivalent. . . .

Classical art, LaRouche says, is placed above even science in his curriculum.

Because Classical art deals with the question of how human minds interrelate in the process of discovery, including scientific discovery and artistic discovery. It’s through art, and Classical forms of art, which deal with this question, with mankind’s morality. . . . You see the struggle of mankind to do this, in which he always finds a metaphor, or the equivalent of a metaphor, poses it, and develops an idea. Not a sense perception, not “just the facts, ma’am.” . . . And man then has an understanding of how you can bring together people, around ideas; because society, man’s ability to act together, is based on acting on ideas, not on suggestions, not on formulas, not on programs, not on recipes. . . .

And you have people who say, “Well, we don’t want to educate people above their station. We want to educate people for practical purposes. We want to know what they’re going to do in life, and then we’ll give them that kind of education. We don’t want to educate them to be human beings. We don’t want to educate them to know what it is to be a human being, in the sense of understanding science, of understanding art; to understand man’s relationship to man, man’s relationship to the universe.”

Instead, LaRouche says:

Give me people who understand that, up to the level of art and science as we’ve known it so far, and you’ve got everything. You’ve got an educated person, you’ve got a civilized person who can do all kinds of things; which we don’t have any more. We’re destroying them in our education system.

Economic Paralysis Threatens:

Time for ‘100 Days of Lyndon LaRouche’

by Paul Gallagher

Everett

President Franklin Roosevelt signing the Glass-Steagall Act on June 16, 1933.

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March 14—The coronavirus pandemic has set off an economic slide into a worldwide recession, with a large number of industries and countries suddenly hit by simultaneous “demand shock” (loss of demand for production and services of all kinds) and, to a lesser degree, disruption of production and supply chains. Unlike the coronavirus itself, this recession can be turned around fast, if leading nations now mobilize to enact the policies—economic laws—Lyndon LaRouche put forward for decades.

The United States now needs President Trump—with whom Congress appears finally ready to negotiate—to lead the country in a new “Franklin Roosevelt 100 days” that turns the coronavirus attack into a rapid rebuilding of the U.S. economy’s power, capacity and productivity. The needed actions were already indicated in LaRouche’s “Four New Laws to Save the U.S.A. Now!” proposal six years ago.

This complete economic policy turn must occur quickly. The world’s leading economies are threatened by the even worse danger of a complete financial meltdown. Fifty years of a monetary system that incentivized financial speculation over productive investment, capped by the past thirteen years of central banks constantly feeding masses of new-printed money into speculative financial institutions, meant the mere beginnings of the coronavirus recession were able to cause wild market panics.

EIR has reported for several years now that whereas the 2008 financial crash caused a deep recession, the next step would be that a recession would cause an even larger financial crash. The central banks created huge corporate debt bubbles “with no risk” because of continual money printing. Now the reality of physical economic shutdowns has intervened, and the financial system cannot take it. It must be reorganized, just as President Franklin Roosevelt started his “100 days” with a bank holiday and bankruptcy reorganization of financial institutions. We spell it out further below.

About midday on March 12, authorities at the Treasury and Federal Reserve, now in constant crisis communication, realized that the Treasury’s auction of 30-year bonds was failing. Either the primary dealer banks were not going to buy the issue, or the interest rate was going to shoot skyward. The last time this failure to sell long-term U.S. government securities occurred, to our knowledge, was in 1861 just after the start of the Civil War; the event necessitated starting the issuance of Greenback currency by the Treasury.

The Federal Reserve responded today with an avalanche of “liquidity,” provided and promised to interbank markets, which amounted, in effect, to the Fed directly buying and committing to buy $1.5 trillion in Treasury securities of all kinds. The quick pass through banks and hedge funds does not hide the fact that the Fed is effectively buying the securities. That is, it is issuing helicopter money to the Treasury for spending, which the Treasury otherwise would not—in this case, could not, raise.

The Federal Reserve’s announcement on the morning of March 12 that it was flooding the markets trading in Treasury securities, said it was addressing credit and Treasury market stress. That was the flare which should have been seen for miles: Trading in U.S. government debt has been assumed for more than a century to be the one market in the world that is never stressed, always deeply liquid, with Treasuries always in great demand.

Federal Reserve Bank

Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.

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On March 12 the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s limit on the one-day repurchase loan operation, to inject liquidity into the interbank loan market, was raised for the second time this week, now to $175 billion. In three simultaneous repo operations the demand was $270 billion, of which the Fed loaned $200 billion. This means the Fed substituted for a full 20% of the interbank lending market Thursday, which was missing, and another 5-6% of that market was demanded but remained missing. This is because investment banks and hedge funds speculating in interest-rate derivatives and corporate debt indexes are losing their bets, and reverse leverage—betting with debt and losing—is making their losses worse. So the biggest banks will not lend them 24-hour money and they must get it from the Fed.

And this was all before the Fed launched its helicopter money at midday March 13.

The Federal Reserve’s actions, going on full speed again this week, “promise” only a great inflation. It exposes today’s almost complete dependence of the U.S. government, in selling its debt instruments, on investment banks, hedge funds and other speculative financial firms which now suddenly find themselves illiquid in a galloping credit crisis, and unable to support the Treasury market. It is a sign of the futility of this Fed helicopter money move, that it accomplished nothing but the day’s 30-year bond sale. The Treasury interest rates remained higher, while the stock market remained far down again—a conjunction which, by the way, is “not supposed to happen.” Only President Trump’s press conference the following day, announcing a national emergency, produced a respite for stocks that afternoon.

The website Zero Hedge reported on March 12:

Today’s total liquidity injection, . . . the Fed has injected a total of $276.5 billion in liquidity. [But] what is ailing the market is not access to the Fed’s balance sheet, but an overall recession that will collapse revenues, profits and cash flow, and which the Fed’s liquidity injections are powerless to prevent. . . . Absent another emergency bailout attempt, we may very soon have a market—and bank—holiday.

Coronavirus Is a Fuse, Not the Bomb

Because of the immense bubble of corporate debt built since the 2008 crash, the coronavirus global slowdown/rolling shutdown of economic activity is triggering a credit crisis through the threat of bad-debt losses. Loan credit is now getting very difficult for many American, European and Japanese corporations to obtain, not to speak of developing nations’ economies. This is not limited to small companies, and not only shale oil/gas basin operators like Halliburton (a very large company) and many smaller ones, but also, for example, Boeing, which is fully drawing down a large, long-term revolving credit line of $14 billion because it does not think it can borrow otherwise at this point.

Many corporations have lost a significant part of their markets due to suddenly decreased demand for consumer products and services of many kinds. And in the “bankruptcy basins” of oil shale, the decline in demand for oil, due to less economic activity overall, is keeping the price of oil drastically low where it was sent by the Saudi assault on oil prices.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) guessed in a report March 13 that $2 trillion could be knocked off global production in 2020; shale oil producers, aircraft manufacturers, and large machine producers like Caterpillar are experiencing dramatic drops in sales; port volumes at the biggest European ports are far below normal reflecting shrunken trade with China—where domestic demand is also very far from recovering.

Layoffs are growing in the United States in service industries and among port and longshore employees, but are not large scale as yet. It is worth noting that there was an increase in new job creation, and average real weekly wages rose unusually by 0.5% in February. The latter was due to the CPI-U’s dramatic undercount of inflation, which was compiled for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However these figures do show actual income strength for some in the labor force.

The lack of credit quickly makes BBB-rated (just above junk) companies into “fallen angels” whose debt becomes junk, and makes the large number of “zombie companies” (those without enough operating net income even to pay interest on their debts) into bankrupts. American Banker magazine warned March 11 of bad-debt problems for the oil-field servicing lenders. The article didn’t name any Wall Street giants, but rather mid-size regional banks like Comerica, Cadence Bancorp and other Texas banks.

Even financial economists now recognize that the U.S. non-financial corporate debt bubble is likely to blow up; see the “analysis” articles in the Washington Post on both March 10 and 11. It is variously estimated at from $11 trillion to $16 trillion in size, depending on what categories of debt are included; the “junk debt” part of it, about $4 trillion, is easily bigger than the subprime mortgage bubble which melted down in 2007-08. Stock market gyrations of thousands of points—and more often downward—are but a sidelight of this exacerbated credit crisis, which is actually capable of devastating the U.S. economy again as it did in 2008-10.

What Can, and What Should Not Be Done

In this situation, first, the big Wall Street and London-centered banks should not be bailed out; they must be broken up. If allowed, bailouts to these bank holding companies will, again, be passed along to their thousands of speculative units, client hedge funds, investment banking units, etc., along with loans from the big banks’ deposit base. Restoring the Glass-Steagall Act will put these speculative units out in the cold while protecting the large lending bank units from themselves—they will have to sell off their speculative units quickly, stop lending to them, and let them fail. Retirement funds will have that short time to get out of these speculative investments.

Interest rates should not be lowered further; they should be raised, effectively split into two tiers with lower rates for commercial, industrial and household lending by banks. Glass-Steagall will almost immediately cause interest rates for short-term speculative lending to rise sharply; they are already rising slowly. The Fed’s overnight lending rate to banks should stay low, but not as low as presently. The desperate hedge funds trying to borrow hundreds of billions every morning from the New York Fed have to be allowed to go dry.

At least equally important, the President and Congress have to cooperate to create a capital budget for new infrastructure construction. This should be particularly focused initially on building new hospitals and other public health facilities; bringing more high-tech companies into producing stockpiles of medical devices and protective equipment; and building the additional electricity capacity and clean water supplies this expanded hospital/public health system needs. There is plenty of other new infrastructure needed as well. NASA’s Moon-Mars mission should be accelerated and expanded to draw in more participating companies and universities, and space medicine research and development tapped for the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

These needs extend internationally, especially in developing countries, and so a summit of the leading industrial and technological nations is needed to launch this public health-building worldwide. That will add to U.S. capabilities in the area of providing small modular nuclear reactors, and should involve an international crash program for fusion power, as Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed last July.

New Federal bonds, construction bonds, have to be issued for this capital budget, whether by an emergency nationalization of the Federal Reserve, or—more quickly—simply by creating a Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) backed by the Treasury. These bonds should bear interest rates higher than current Treasury long-term rates, and include small denominations. This will attract investment by the public, prevent further collapse of Treasury interest rates, and encourage productive bank loans by having the RFC participate in them.

Neither companies’ nor American workers’ primary need is more money; they need new demand for their production, their construction, their invention. Without that, lots of small business loans won’t be used.

Some Federal taxes should be raised, not lowered, capital gains taxes, for example. Dedicated revenue will be needed to allow the Treasury to guarantee short-term interest on the construction bonds if those issues are initially in the range of $500 billion to $1 trillion. It should be remembered that the 1935-75 period of the most solid growth in U.S. labor productivity, real wages and income equality, along with the most rapid technological advances and new industries, was accomplished with Federal tax rates of nearly every type far higher than today, and with bank lending rates in the range of 3 to 6%.

As University of Minneapolis epidemiologist Michael Osterholm said March 11 in a podcast, “Start now, but we’re not going to fix it now.”

How to Defeat the Coronavirus: Quarantine Wall Street

Wikimedia Commons

Commodity speculation: Houston oil traders’ office.

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The following is adapted from remarks delivered by Dennis Small to the LaRouche PAC’s Manhattan Project meeting of March 7, 2020.

If you look at what’s being said around the COVID-19 crisis, the coronavirus crisis, you’ll find a lot of people in the United States and in Europe trying to blame China for it. They’re even calling it the “China virus,” and wagging their finger at the Chinese, saying: “Oh, my goodness, you missed the boat, you delayed by two weeks; you could have known three weeks ahead of time,” and so on. Or, much worse, you get people like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who say that China is responsible for infecting the world, and that they’ve got to pay the price for this.

Whether or not it’s the case that China could have known a couple of weeks earlier, how about the fact that the United States, Europe and so on, were informed about this, in all essential details, 35 or 40 years ago, and failed to act! Because Lyndon LaRouche warned, in some conceptual detail, that this is exactly what was going to happen if we did not change our ways, if we did not change our policies. How about missing the boat for 35 years? What about that? Why did that happen?

Back in 1985, in a document called “Economic Breakdown and the Threat of Global Pandemics,” Lyndon LaRouche warned:

The conditions for economically determined pandemics may be either the instance in which the average consumption is determined by a fall of potential relative population-density below the level of requirements for the existing population, or the special case, that the differential rates of the households’ goods “market-basket” falls below the level of energy of the system for a large part of the population. We are most concerned with the effects on health, as the nutritional throughput per-capita falls below some relative biological minimum, and also the effect of collapse of sanitation and other relevant aspects of basic economic infrastructure upon the conditions of an undernourished population.

These are precisely the conditions we’re seeing today, 35 years later. We’re seeing it in the dry tinder which exists in most of the population of the world, which permits problems such as the COVID-19 to spin out of control. It’s the same problem that exists with the locust plagues, which are totally destroying the Horn of Africa, and is threatening to spread to other parts of Africa, as well as elsewhere. There are locusts in Pakistan and India, in significant numbers; in South America, in Bolivia and elsewhere.

Through what we have done, or rather what we have not done, in terms of the physical economy of the planet, we are allowing more retrograde forms of the biosphere to prevail, under conditions in which the noösphere, man’s creative activity, should actually be dominant.

We’re looking at a situation which is actually far more profound than most people want to admit. In fact I think that the proper byword for our current circumstances is: “Don’t panic, things are actually far worse than you think.”

What has happened with COVID-19 is that it has simply brought to the fore a whole series of problems, which all have the same cause, and therefore the same solution. The crisis which is today exploding upon us with COVID-19; the related crisis of the blowout of the world financial system; and the more fundamental of all of these crises, which is the collapse of the physical economy of the planet in overall terms; all of this is actually a function of the same, underlying cause. And therefore, for that very reason—for the very reason that it is far more serious than most people are prepared to look at—it is susceptible of solution.

If it were merely the crisis that people are talking about today, there’s not a solution at hand. If it were merely a question of doing the arithmetic on the numbers of masks or hospital beds, as important as such calculations are to define the problem, if you try to extend such thinking linearly outward, you will not find a solution to the problem; it will blow up in your face.

The only way to deal with this is by thorough change in the axioms of the way we are thinking, and in particular in the way we are approaching the whole question of physical economy. And, what is most significant about Lyndon LaRouche, is not simply that he pointed to the nature of the problem, which he did, and he forecast it decades ago. But as with all of his forecasts, these are not predictions of what the future is going to be; these are forecasts of the course of action that we must take to make sure that these problems do not happen.

EIRNS

In 1995, LaRouche released his heuristic graph of the Triple Curve economic collapse function. As the rate of emission of monetary and financial aggregates increases exponentially, physical production is driven exponentially downward.

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The Venue for LaRouche’s Policy

Now, let’s look at the question of a summit of the four powers—the U.S., China, Russia and India—that LaRouche proposed. If it is the case, and it is, that only the ideas in physical economy that LaRouche presented in the modern period—harking back to Leibniz and to the implementation of some of those ideas by Alexander Hamilton and others—are adequate to address the crisis today, and if LaRouche’s exoneration is needed for just that reason, I ask you: What is the venue, the political venue, the institutional venue—what is the pathway, to actually getting those ideas of Lyndon LaRouche adopted?

Who’s going to do it? How’s it going to happen? Is it going to happen simply by the Congress of the United States voting legislation? I don’t think so. Is it going to happen by the parliaments in Europe adopting such policies? Not likely. Is it going to happen from trade unions? No. Is it going to happen from business associations? Absolutely not.

Is it going to come from mass demonstrations in the street? No—they may be very justified about what they’re protesting, but that is not a vehicle, that is not a venue, that is not an institution that is actually going to get the revolutionary policies associated with LaRouche adopted.

There’s only one pathway that actually could function: So we damned well better make sure that it works. And that is, a “sit-down-and-let’s-talk-about-these-issues-seriously” kind of summit, or series of summits, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for, among that combination of powers and institutions internationally that are capable of destroying the enemy that is sponsoring the Malthusian genocide threatening the human species today.

And that’s why, and not for any other reason, LaRouche’s proposal for a Four Powers summit is required. If you look at the world, the combination of the presidencies—and the prime ministry in the case of India—of the United States, China, Russia and India, is precisely the kind of unified force, which can and must sit down to make sure that policies such as LaRouche’s are adopted.

Is that going to happen automatically? Are they going to set an agenda tomorrow, where they sit down and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin says, “Hey Donald, let’s talk about Lyndon LaRouche?” No, it’s not going to happen that way—that’s not how the world works. Rather, because this crisis around the coronavirus is so deadly serious; because the locust crisis is so deadly serious; these crises provide an opportunity to actually change the fundamental axioms on which the world has worked, and messed things up over the last 50 years. For that reason, Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued an urgent call from the very first days of this year, on January 3, for such a summit to be convened, to address a series of issues—the security issue, the economic issue, the public health issue and so on—which are each reflections of an underlying civilizational breakdown crisis.

The COVID-19 Crisis

Let’s look at three of these crises: the COVID-19 pandemic; the question of the financial crisis as such; and then the issue of the underlying collapse of the physical economy. We will then draw some conclusions for action.

On the COVID-19 crisis, we do not have the necessary health infrastructure in the U.S. to address what’s coming. As things now stand, unless we change our policies, our system will be overwhelmed by what is barreling down the path at us.

Figure 1

Hospital Beds

(per thousand)

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Let’s look at the United States in comparison with other countries, on the question of hospital beds per thousand inhabitants. Figure 1 covers the period from 1970 through 2015, based on data from the World Bank. You can see from 1970 to the present, there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants in the U.S., down to the level of something like 2.3 today. The horizontal line is what the Hill-Burton legislation established as the necessary, physical-economic requirement to have basic public health infrastructure, which is about 4.5 hospital beds per 1,000. We crossed that threshold in 1993, heading south—and haven’t recovered since. Our hospitals have been taken down, as Wall Street speculation reigned supreme.

If you look at the trajectory in China’s case, and especially since the period of the late 1990s forward, you will see first a gradual growth, and then a very dramatic rise in this aspect of public health capabilities. Today, they have approximately 4.3 hospital beds per 1,000; and that’s pretty good when you’re talking about a population of 1.4 billion people.

Figure 2

Doctors

(per thousand)

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Not all such indicators point to the same thing: Figure 2 looks at the numbers of doctors per 1,000 inhabitants. In this case, the number of doctors per 1,000 in the United States has been rising, with some ups and downs, although in absolute terms it is still completely inadequate. Furthermore, large areas of the country have levels far below the national average. It’s interesting that this is still substantially higher than the level in China.

But this isn’t the main problem we are facing. The United States is not the problem. It’s certainly our problem, as Americans, but it is nowhere as serious as most of the planet. If you look at the planet, we are talking about a single, interconnected global population of some 7.8 billion people. We are seeing, under conditions of crisis, just how interconnected we are. So the problem isn’t the United States: the problem is Brazil; the problem is the refugee camps on the Turkish-Greek border; the problem is Nigeria; the problem is Haiti! The problem is places—including pockets inside the U.S. as well—that are going to be petri dishes of disease, nations that have absolutely no way of controlling the situation under current circumstances.

Figure 3

Health Care Comparison

(per thousand, 2015)

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Figure 3 shows a comparison in three categories: (1) hospital beds per 1,000 inhabitants; (2) doctors per 1,000; and then (3) nurses per 1,000.

In the case of hospital beds per 1,000, China is doing better than we are; on doctors, they’re not doing as well as we are. In the case of nurses, the U.S. seems to be doing quite well, one would think, at least compared to China.

But look at Nigeria, as one comparison among many, in terms of hospital beds per 1,000. Does this matter? Well, you bet it matters! Nigeria is the most populous nation on the continent of Africa, with just shy of 200 million people. There are cases of COVID-19 that have already surfaced in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, population 20 million. This disease is going to be completely out of control, if it isn’t already, in Nigeria, and in fact in most of the nations on the planet. So far, we haven’t heard much about it, because there’s no testing. Look at doctors, look at nurses in Nigeria: this is our problem! The planetary problem is our problem! And it has to be solved, in the only way that it can be, with a global reindustrialization strategy.

Now, lest you think that the U.S. is in good shape on the nurses front, consider what the National Nurses Union (NNU) has said—one of the largest and most politically active nurses’ associations in the United States: After a survey of various thousands of nurses all across the country, the NNU found the following: 71% of those interviewed said that the places where they work have no plan in place for COVID-19; 37% of those interviewed, said they do not have sufficient masks for the crisis they’re facing right now, let alone what they see coming; 70% say they don’t have adequate PPE (personal protection equipment), the gowns, gloves and so on that go along with the masks; 70% don’t have adequate supplies; 35% of those nurses have not received training in how you don and doff—put on and take off—that protective equipment, and unless you do that very carefully, you’re going to have all sorts of real problems.

Anyone who has visited a loved one in a hospital for a contagious disease like C. diff. [clostridium difficile] or things of this sort, knows what’s involved in this kind of protective operation. And mind you, C. diff. is not airborne. But COVID-19 is, which is why you have to have Airborne Infection Isolation Rooms (AIIRs), which have negative pressure. If you don’t have that, you don’t control this disease.

The Limits of Linear Thinking

The COVID-19 situation is leading people around the world to look at what the physical requirements are to deal with the problem. They are starting to ask: What do we have available? That’s positive; that’s productive. But it does not yet get to the underlying issue of what you have to do, what’s the underlying problem that caused this, and how do you go about solving it?

If you only look at the numbers, if you only extend to its logical conclusion where we stand today, based on the numbers as they exist, you can use the Method of Exhaustion to prove the absurdity of this approach, and show that it’s not going to function. And at that point, you look at how bad it is, and you either say: “Realistically speaking, we’re all gone bunnies,” or you say, “We’ve got to figure a way to kick over the chessboard. We have to think in a completely revolutionary way. This way is not going to work!”

Under these conditions of crisis, that transformation is beginning to happen. You will see that, increasingly, people will either act like total swine and say: “To hell with everybody else!” They’ll say, as happened with the Black Death in Europe: “I don’t care what happens tomorrow, we’re all dead tomorrow, let’s party tonight,” and you will have the crazy hedonism described by Boccaccio in The Decameron. Or you will have people like the Flagellants, who were the flip side of the same coin, who turned to mysticism and irrationalism and said: “Well, this is God’s punishment of man; we have sinned; we have no way of figuring this out, so why don’t we just flagellate ourselves, and travel all over Europe”—which they did, further spreading the plague.

You have the same kind of problem going on today. There’s a Belgian intensivist or critical care doctor, Dr. Philippe Devos, the head of the national trade union of doctors in Belgium, who wrote a very interesting article, taking this arithmetic approach to its logical conclusion to argue: Listen, we don’t have the beds to handle this thing. There are 30,000 hospital beds for 117,000 people who will have to be hospitalized, and 1,400 ICU beds for 52,000 people that will need ICU treatment. He said: “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that if we don’t do something, we’re going to have a problem!”

Well, that’s true. So, what does he then say? We’re going to have to start doubling up on hospital rooms, and other things. And then he says, we’re going to have to do something else: “We will have to apply the ethical principle of distributive justice: Between a young man of 40 with a heart attack, and an older person of 90 with coronavirus. The young man will get priority, and the senior citizen will be sent home. No other choice will be available.”

This gets you very, very quickly on the slippery slope, as was described in the Nuremberg Tribunals, where the Nazis, and modern Nazis like Obamacare and its exponents like Ezekiel Emanuel, decide that certain lives are too expensive to maintain, that the principle of life is not what’s involved here, but you’ve got to make “bitter choices.” And it will reach the extreme, as described by Boccaccio, in which he said, after looking at what was going on with the Black Death in the 14th century:

This scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women, that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases, wives deserted their husbands; but even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.

So, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to look at what is happening today, and see, among many of the responses around us, the kind of moral insanity that could take us to exactly these kinds of conclusions. And the answers have to be developed now, and developed rapidly, to preserve our morality, our humanity, and our species. And nothing less than that is actually at stake.

Quarantine $2 Quadrillion

Now let’s turn to the financial problem. Since the explosion of the coronavirus internationally, the financial system has gone into extreme shock, not because of the coronavirus, but because of underlying bankruptcy and the perception of where this thing is headed. Two weeks ago, we had the single largest fall in the stock market since 2008. This week, although there was not such a sharp drop in the stock market (it had wild ups and downs on a daily basis), something equally dramatic and reflective of the problem occurred in the form of the plummeting of the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond to less than 1%.

This is unheard of. And it has created a situation where people in the Federal Reserve are saying that the quantitative easing that “worked” in 2008, will no longer work. For example, Eric Rosengren, President and CEO of the Boston Fed, publicly called for the Fed’s charter to be changed to allow the Fed to not only purchase government, or government-backed securities, as occurs with quantitative easing, but also any old piece of garbage that they run across in the street! From an individual, from a corporation—anything! Bail the hell out of them!

This is what Milton Friedman, and later Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, promoted as “helicopter money”: just throw money out of helicopters, and hope that people will pick it up and bail out the financial system. That’s the point that we’re at today. We are at a blowout point, not simply because of the COVID-19—that’s kind of been a trigger—but because the system itself is absolutely bankrupt.

Figure 4

World Financial Aggregates

(quadrillions of dollars)

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Figure 4 shows the actual growth of world financial aggregates, with derivatives leading the way. As you can see, we’re on a rapid course towards hitting $2 quadrillion in global financial aggregates. This is completely unsustainable, it’s completely illiquid, completely bankrupt, and completely cancerous. If you want to start addressing the underlying problem of the COVID-19 virus, and everything that means in terms of reviving the physical economy, the first thing you’ve got to do is, you’ve got to quarantine this stuff!

The name for quarantining this speculative cancer is called the Glass-Steagall law. You simply put it all in quarantine, and you don’t let it out until it’s cured—and in the case of most of these derivatives contracts, it will never be cured, because it doesn’t represent any actual productive value.

Then, of course, other steps need to be taken related to the physical economy. Here we are guided by the concept that Lyndon LaRouche, and LaRouche alone, developed, of potential relative population-density. For 50 years, LaRouche explained that if you allow your society’s potential relative population-density to drop below the actual population, you are going to get a holocaust. Why? What does potential relative population-density mean? Well, it simply means the power of an economy over a society to maintain a growing population at an increasing standard of living, to permit the ongoing creative breakthroughs that are needed for that society. In other words: What is the power of a society to maintain its population? Not just a stagnant population at a stagnant longevity, but a growing population, an anti-entropic population. That’s what potential relative population-density means.

If it drops to a level under the actual population, what do you think happens? The only issue is which of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse takes over first.

Figure 5

Potential Relative Population Density

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Take a look at Figure 5. These are not actual numbers, but this is a diagram of LaRouche’s concept of potential relative population-density, with an approximation of when these things happened. The top curve is your potential relative population-density. If your economy’s potential continues to grow and have breakthroughs through science and technology, if you have technological leaps, if you develop new platforms, if you develop fusion power, if you colonize space, if you develop optical biophysics, then your potential relative population-density will allow for a continuous, unending increase of your population. There is no room for Malthus in an actual universe, where your potential relative population-density is growing, and your population did, in fact, grow, and was growing.

However, if, as has occurred over the last 50 years, the actual physical potential of our economy starts stagnating and then begins its descent, as it did begin approximately in 1970 (if you look at the rate of introduction of new technologies, which is what actually creates rising potential relative population-density), then at a certain point those two curves will cross: you will have a potential relative population-density insufficient to maintain the actual population. And what happens at a certain point, which is a politically determined point, the population crashes, whether it be through wars, whether it be through menticide and drugs, whether it be through viruses, whether it be through other forms of ecological holocaust.

And it must be said, that it is the intentional policy of the British Empire to produce that result. They do this knowingly. They are Malthusians, not because they think that theory describes what is happening scientifically. They are Malthusians because it is their intent to make sure this kind of demographic collapse occurs.

So when you see this occurring, this is not a policy failure. This is a policy success—for these oligarchs. And that’s the situation we’re in today. We are dealing with the kind of collapse which LaRouche forecast back in the ’70s: He said this would happen, if the potential relative population-density continued to collapse. And that is, of course, what happened, and now that is what we are looking at.

The 10¢ Cup of Coffee

Now let’s take a look at how this works internationally. There’s all this discussion these days about “value chains” and “production chains,” and people seem to have all of a sudden discovered that you can’t produce everything that you need to live by, in your own backyard or with your neighbors. That, lo and behold, there’s an interlocking international system.

Back in the old days, when LaRouche was first teaching his classes in the late ’60s and ’70s, he would talk about “the 10¢ cup of coffee”—and it did cost 10¢ then, I can tell you that. LaRouche would ask: Where does your cup of coffee come from? Where does the actual coffee come from? Where are the beans grown? Well, they came from Brazil. What does it take to produce coffee beans in Brazil? Well, you have to have a certain amount of fertilizer to produce it. What about the machinery? Well, yes, that came from Japan. What about processing equipment? What about the sales equipment?

When you actually trace back the bill of materials—forget “value chains”—from a simple industrial engineering standpoint, and you ask, where your 10¢ cup of coffee came from, you will find that you have gone around the planet two or three times, just to produce that 10¢ cup of coffee! That’s how the world economy actually functions.

So what does it mean, when you have a breakdown in different parts of the world? Everything that happens in any part of the planet, that is detrimental to our species’ potential relative population-density, is a personal attack on me, as an individual—and on you. Anyplace where that potential is increased or benefitted, that is a benefit to all of humanity. We do have a common interest. It’s not just because we want to think, and be moral, and we have souls. All of that is true. But it’s also scientific for the exact same reason that our species is characterized by our having an immortal soul. It is why it is the case that charity and love of humanity is the actual, scientific human emotion.

That is how our species functions! It’s not the case with any other species. And of course, we depend upon creative advances, to make sure that that happens.

Figure 6

Extreme Poverty: China and World

(millions, % of total)

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Now, what is the single most significant thing that has happened over the last 40-50 years in defense of the human species? Take a look at Figure 6. It’s what China did to eliminate poverty where, over the period from 1981 to 2017, over about a 35-40 year period, China lifted 850 million people out of poverty. Where previously, in ’81, they constituted 46% of all poor people in the world, they’re now less than 5%. And, they are going to eliminate poverty in China this year, Xi Jinping announced, despite the COVID-19 crisis (I would dare say, because of it), because of the way they’ve mobilized. And you can see, that the bulk of reduction in world poverty has come from the Chinese.

China lifted one-tenth of the human population out of poverty in a little over a generation. Think of what that does to mankind’s potential relative population-density. Or, think of the inverse: What would have happened with the spread of COVID-19, in China, and therefore in the entire world, had China not achieved this accomplishment over the last 40 years? What if China still had 80% of its population in poverty? What if, even had they adopted the same rigorous methods they adopted now against the virus, what would have happened? Today, we would have a global pandemic of proportions that would remind us, immediately, of the Black Death.

This is how the world actually works. Which is why I say: Don’t panic over COVID-19, the crisis is actually far worse than you think it is.

The Strategic Defense of the Noösphere

What is required? We have to have a change in the way people think about this, and therefore act on it. Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas of how to get mankind back on course of that rising curve of potential relative population-density, is the only thing we have at hand. Others are open to these ideas.

Look at what Trump said in his press conference a week ago, talking about COVID-19: He said, this is a terrible crisis, but this is really an opportunity for us to come together across the planet. We can do something to solve this, working together. Look at what Wang Yi, the foreign minister of China, said just a few days ago: The COVID-19 virus is the common enemy of mankind. We must unite against it. Look at what Michele Geraci, the former undersecretary of economic development in Italy, who is a good friend of the Schiller Institute, and has spoken at our conferences, said: This crisis which is upon us can lead us to the kind of infrastructure development and progress which we need, under the Belt and Road Initiative.

It is absolutely true: This is a moment which is both laced with enormous dangers and great potential. You can respond to it by denying the crisis exists; you can act like an ostrich and say: “Nah, it ain’t gonna happen here.” But I would remind you that when an ostrich sticks its head in the sand, it does leave another part of its anatomy exposed. So I don’t recommend political “ostrichism.” The ostrich is like the person who panics, and says: “Just do the math; it’s obvious you can’t do anything about this crisis.”

But arithmetic is not the solution. We need a situation where the noösphere reestablishes its dominion over the biosphere, when the biosphere goes haywire, as it is now doing.

Don’t blame the locusts for the problem. Locusts are locusts, they’re not going to change the way they behave. It’s up to us to deal with it! Don’t blame the virus, there are some viruses which are very good, and which we need. But it’s up to us, to do what we have always done where we have been successful. We need to use this crisis, just as LaRouche pointed out in the situation of the arms race and the danger of thermonuclear war. He came up with the global solution of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and he proposed turning the entire world strategic situation on its head, breaking out of the arithmetic bounds, with a revolutionary change based on a common policy between the Soviet Union and the United States.

LaRouche later refined and elaborated on this, with the Strategic Defense of Earth, pointing out that we have a common enemy, we have the danger of comets and asteroids striking the planet. We can develop the technology and the political collaboration necessary to deal with this.

Well, today we are facing an even greater crisis. We have to have a Strategic Defense of the Noösphere, so that we retake dominion through our creative reason, over lesser processes that will always go haywire without Man’s intervention. Over the last 50 years we have allowed things to go haywire.

We can solve this. We’ve done it before. We did it during the Black Plague, we did it with the Renaissance. Nothing less than a Renaissance will work today. The United States did it during World War II, with President Franklin Roosevelt’s mobilization. Back then, people said it couldn’t be done. But we did it! We mobilized! We did it under President John Kennedy. We said we were going to the Moon, that we could go to the Moon, and we did it! And we can do it again, today.

And we have in the institution of the U.S. Presidency, and in the occupant of the Presidency at this point, a vehicle, a person, a potential combination of forces internationally, which makes this doable. But the task has to be posed correctly: The ideas of LaRouche have to exonerated and rigorously fought for, as the only policy that will function. If we do that under these conditions, although there are no guarantees of victory, we will have a fighting chance to actually ensure, as during the period of the Black Death, that humanity does not destroy itself, but rather creates a new Renaissance. That is exactly what our potential is—

Today!

EDITORIAL

The American System Impulse Emerges

by Bruce Director

March 15—As the U.S. ramps up efforts to contain and mitigate the impact of the coronavirus, the long-simmering impulse of the American people to free their nation from the decades-long self-destruction of globalization and free trade, which ultimately drove the election of Donald Trump, is beginning to come to a boil.

Once-strong proponents of globalization are now agreeing to reforms that would return production of critical supply chains back to the U.S. Politicians who just weeks ago were trying to throw Trump out of office are now compelled to collaborate on emergency legislation to give the government the power to fight the contagion. Red tape and regulations are being cut. Companies are being pressed into collaborative efforts with each other and with government to marshal the capacity to meet the emergency. Calls for a national industrial policy and infrastructure program are increasing and being heard. The President has pledged to employ the full power of the federal government in coordination with the states, cities and counties, to take measures that have never been done before and to get them implemented on “Trump time.”

The process is reminiscent of President Franklin Roosevelt’s mobilization for World War II, in which he succeeded in mobilizing the entire government and the financial and industrial sectors of the U.S. economy to create the resources to win the war. Even FDR’s most bitter enemies were compelled to collaborate with him. People who were previously wedded to failing ideas, quickly changed. As FDR famously said, “New Deal is out. Win the War is in.”

As this crisis accelerates, the long-needed deconstruction of the globalized new world order—organized, dominated and controlled by the financial apparatus of the crumbling British Empire—is proceeding. New sets of financial and economic relationships based on national sovereignty will now have to come into being. International collaboration on the scientific/physical-economic level is growing, as typified by the collaboration of U.S. and Chinese scientists and companies on the development of treatments and vaccines. In sum, the crisis is bringing about a change in thinking that has been long in the making.

Some may think, or wish, that this is only a temporary shift in the face of the emergency, and globalization will reassert its dominance as soon as the crisis passes. But more astute students of human nature and its expression in the American experience will recognize that these developments reflect the underlying characteristic of the American idea.

Lyndon LaRouche, on ‘The American Idea’

The late Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly emphasized this characteristic of the American idea:

We in the United States, not merely because of the power of the United States, despite our wrecked condition today, but because of our tradition and heritage, have a unique responsibility, a moral responsibility on this planet. We’re the only nation-state thus far which was formed and founded and dedicated to this principle, that every man and woman is made in the image of God, and that we must have a system of social relations, and law, which is based upon that as the fundamental governing principle of the nation-state. That is what the nation-state properly exists to enable.

Despite the fact that we have turned rotten at many times in our history; as we saw as the case with Lincoln’s leadership during the middle of the last century, we see that, embedded in us, we have this heritage, this legacy, which we have found it possible to summon forth from within us, in certain times of crisis. It was decades from the time the United States had a patriotic government, until Lincoln was elected. From the time of the end of the administration of John Quincy Adams, we had no patriotic government of the United States. The Presidency was occupied by fools and traitors: Jackson and Van Buren; the worst of them, of course, were Pierce and Buchanan, and, of course, our dear friend, [Polk] who made the war with Mexico.

But, in Lincoln’s time, decades after that, after all this evil that occurred, Lincoln was able to call forth the principles upon which the republic was founded, in a time of crisis, to rebuild the nation.

Then we were corrupted again: We got Grover Cleveland. Grover Cleveland was a spawn of the Confederacy, a thoroughly evil man. And the fact that he could be elected, indicates that evil had taken over the country. Teddy Roosevelt was a spawn of the Confederacy. He was our first Jim Crow President, and he fully deserved that name. He was a filthy character, an evil man, who got his job by assassinating his predecessor, or having it done for him. Woodrow Wilson, who, while President of the United States in 1915, refounded the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, personally, from the White House. Calvin Coolidge, who was no better. Hoover wasn’t so bad, he was just a Republican, and that wasn’t too good.

Then you had [Franklin] Roosevelt, who, in a time of crisis, was able to call forth from those of my generation, that same dedication as from Lincoln’s time. As a matter of fact, you recall: If you studied in the northern states, in particular, how many of you of my age, or approximately that, say, in the eighth grade, learned the Gettysburg Address? How many of you went to war with the image of Lincoln in your mind? How many of you in that time looked at what we saw overseas, in the world around us, through the eyes of memory of Lincoln? How many of us identified our patriotism with Lincoln? And that began to end in about 1963, with the assassination of Kennedy.

The civil rights movement was energized—why? By my generation coming into the White House, in the form of Jack Kennedy. And Jack Kennedy, with whatever else he was, represented a revival of our commitment during the war, to deal with evil as we saw it in the world, the evil which Truman had allied us with, and the evil which Mr. Eisenhowever did not want to deal with, because he had two loyalties, the United States and the British, and he was always conflicted on those issues.

So, we have this within us still. And I would hope that those of you who sometimes feel weakened because you’re in your seventies, or sometimes older, realize that you are extremely important, and you have a resource in the fact that you have embedded in you, the ability to call forth that legacy.

Our Nation Is Organized by Principles

The phenomenon described by LaRouche fundamentally rests on the fact that the United States is organized by principles, not a set of rules, definitions, and regulations. Those principles, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, reflect the idea that the fundamental nature of human beings is their creative powers, and thus, the purpose of government is “to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The American practice of political economy developed from those principles through the leadership that emerged, especially during a time of crisis, as emphasized by LaRouche.

Those principles are now being called forth as the means to confront the crisis at hand. Many specific programs and policies will be proposed and implemented. As in all crises, some will work, and some will need to be refined or abandoned. The specifics are not the key. The key is the mobilization of the government and the people to act and think on that level.

This is a time to emphasize principles as expressed in LaRouche’s Four Laws: Glass-Steagall banking reform; national banking; a federal credit system to generate increases in physical-economic productivity; and a fusion-driver crash program of scientific/creative development. The first three principles are the necessary predicates for the development of the fourth. The scientific collaboration now underway to treat and eliminate the coronavirus, lays the basis for long-term scientific collaboration on the large scale demanded by LaRouche’s fourth law.

Thus, a voice for principle is what is urgently required. As LaRouche stated in his January 17,1998 keynote speech to an international Schiller Institute conference, quoted earlier in this article:

The key thing is: Have you introduced the proper axiomatic assumptions on which the people who are going to make the decisions, are going to operate? That’s what I’ve dealt with today. I’ve dealt with, in a preliminary fashion, identification of the axiomatic assumptions about the nature of man, the nature of ideas, the nature of economy, which govern the way that anybody who is going to run an economy or deal with an economy, is going to react.

In other words, if I wanted to create an army of people, who were going to go out there and take this economy over, and run it for the people: You want people who are going to respond to a situation, to make decisions that conform to certain axioms, or axiomatic beliefs. And they’re going to have to know how to change and improve those axiomatic beliefs.