Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 13, March 27, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL URGENT: Zepp-LaRouche Calls for Short-Term Halt of the Markets to Reorganize

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 13, March 27, 2020

- I. Lessons from the Time of Crisis

- The Lesson of Pearl Harbor Day by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., December 7, 2008

- ‘On Our National Economic Policy’ by Franklin Roosevelt, April 28, 1942

- II. The Presidency and the Crisis

- A Presidency-Led Mobilization-in-Depth To Defeat Two Viruses by Dennis Speed

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Shut Down the Hopelessly Bankrupt, Neo-Liberal Casino Economy

- III. Manhattan Town Hall Meeting, March 21, 2020

- Build a New World from the Ashes of the Old: Sovereign Nations, Common Future Introductory Remarks by Dennis Speed

- Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The Strategic Solution

- What Has To Be Built—USA, Worldwide by David Christie

- Beauty Is the Food of the Soul by Diane Sare

- EDITORIAL America and the World Go to War Against the Common Foe by Bruce Director

The Lessons of the Crisis

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Richard Black, Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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EDITORIAL

URGENT

Zepp-LaRouche Calls for Short-Term Halt of the Markets to Reorganize

The following is the edited transcript of a statement released by Mrs. LaRouche on March 18. It is being circulated internationally in translation. The reader can listen to her statement here.

wikimedia

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March18—This is Helga Zepp-LaRouche speaking. I am the founder and president of the Schiller Institute.

It is absolutely clear, that after the dramatic, rollercoaster losses of the financial markets in recent days, the systemic crisis is spinning out of control.

The only remedy to prevent a further devastation of the real economy, a dramatic increase of mass unemployment and the loss of lives of the poor and vulnerable segments of the population, is to close down the financial markets.

This is the necessary first step, to then use this temporary pause to implement the reorganization of the financial system, starting with a global Glass-Steagall separation of the banks, exactly as Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1933.

The measures that have been taken by the European governments and the United States, such as credits for enterprises, delays in tax payments, and even possible direct handouts of money—the so-called helicopter money—while intended to keep the functions of industry, institutions, and the workforce going, will not be sufficient, because the system is hopelessly bankrupt.

Most of the enormous amounts of liquidity that have been injected into this bankrupt monetary system since 2008, and in an escalated way after September 17, 2019, have only increased the activity of the casino economy and the frenzy of the speculators. The efforts by central banks to maintain that speculative sector can only lead to a hyperinflationary blowout as in Germany in 1923.

The closing of the financial markets must be accompanied by an immediate emergency summit of the most important governments of the world—the United States, China, Russia, and India—supported by others, to determine the urgent reorganization of the financial system and the establishment of a New Bretton Woods system, as it was intended by Franklin D. Roosevelt and called for by Lyndon LaRouche, to restart the physical economy worldwide.

Such immediate steps are indispensable, since the coronavirus pandemic can only be brought under control if the spread of the virus is stopped and an adequate health system is established in every country.

This is a test, to determine if humanity has the moral fitness to survive.

—hz.zepp@schiller-institut.de

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 13, March 27, 2020

Cover This Week

Left: U.S. Embassy in Senegal; right: Creative Commons 2.0/Pat Arnow

President Trump and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York State.

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THE LESSONS OF THE CRISIS

2 EDITORIAL

Urgent: Zepp-LaRouche Calls for Short-Term Halt of the Markets to Reorganize

I. LESSONS FROM THE TIME OF CRISIS

4 The Lesson of Pearl Harbor Day

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

December 7, 2008

9 ‘On Our National Economic Policy’

by Franklin Roosevelt

April 28, 1942

II. THE PRESIDENCY AND THE CRISIS

15 A Presidency-Led Mobilization-in-Depth to Defeat Two Viruses

by Dennis Speed

19 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Shut Down the Hopelessly Bankrupt, Neo-Liberal Casino Economy

III. MANHATTAN TOWN HALL MEETING, MARCH 21, 2020

26 Build a New World from the Ashes of the Old: Sovereign Nations, Common Future

by Dennis Speed

27 Helga Zepp-LaRouche: The Strategic Solution

33 What Has To Be Built—USA, Worldwide

by David Christie

35 Beauty Is the Food of the Soul

by Diane Sare

37 EDITORIAL

America and the World Go to War Against the Common Foe

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. Lessons from the Time of Crisis

December 7, 2008

The Lesson of Pearl Harbor Day

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in EIR Vol. 35, No. 49, December 19, 2008, pages 68-71 .

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, which propelled the United States into the war. LaRouche writes that something like a whiff of Pearl Harbor is in the air today, “a prescience of an imminent awakening.”

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Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. writes that something like a whiff of Pearl Harbor is in the air today, “a prescience of an imminent awakening.”

Dec. 7—I was nineteen at the time, that Sunday morning, sixty-seven years ago, when the news of the Japan attack on Pearl Harbor reached the streets of New York City. Suddenly, the Hitler sympathizers of a London-allied Wall Street, such as the grandfather of President George W. Bush, Jr., Prescott Bush, could no longer hold U.S. public opinion in check. So, the inevitable defeat of the Hitler gang was set into motion.

That should remind certain foreign powers today, and also certain of our own political figures, that there is a point in a process at which the disposition of a majority of our citizens will no longer submit to an orchestrated leading political opinion, whether that be the opinion in the Executive Branch, the U.S. Congress, our so-called mass media, some foreign power, or, even, all combined.

Those preceding words of mine on that subject, could be accepted, rather readily, among most of our thoughtful and seasoned patriots of today. Yet, often, as at this present moment of world crisis, a widely accepted opinion on such a subject-matter as this, while fairly truthful as a broad observation, tends, for that very reason, to conceal an even far more important conception.

The question which needs to be asked pertains to the subject of sudden, seemingly revolutionary changes in mass opinion, especially sudden mass changes which overturn what had appeared to have been in a solid position of a reigning authority. In the case of the Pearl Harbor syndrome of December 7th, 1941, it had appeared, despite President Roosevelt’s musters, that right-wing political opposition to a U.S. engagement against Hitler was rather solidly in place, especially in Wall Street, even after the leading circles in the United Kingdom had abandoned that view of the Hitler menace.

That is not something buried in the past; the same London-oriented, right-wing, sometimes frankly fascist Wall Street-linked circles, often disguised by cautiously adopted different choices of labels, are, in character, the same right-wing-linked U.S. circles opposed to any return to a Franklin Roosevelt approach to the world’s economic and related strategic crises of today.

Reflections on that piece of historical strategic ironies, should command uppermost attention among seriously thinking political circles still today. The question for today’s crisis is: what is the nature of those lawful social processes by which such sudden eruptions of the popular opinion, contrary to apparently entrenched power, come about? How did the U.S. Pearl Harbor reflex develop? In part, the answer might appear obvious; but, there are deeper implications of importance for the reality of today.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Yalta, Feb. 4, 1945. Their wartime partnership was an alliance of two adversaries-in-principle, thrust together for an urgent common course of the moment. Churchill was devoted to empire; Roosevelt to the eradication of all empires.

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A Matter of Dynamics

There is a certain fundamental difference in the underlying political philosophy, and sociology of the United States and that widely shared in western and central Europe. It is a difference expressed explicitly in the essentials of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution, but its origins date from the earlier 1620-1688/89 interval of the founding of the English-speaking colony in New England, the Massachusetts Bay Colony most specifically. The cases of the Winthrops and Mathers, especially what Cotton Mather wrote later on the post-1689 change, is most typical.

Essentially, since that 1620-1689 interval, the essential difference between the political philosophies of Europe’s parliamentary traditions and the United States, has been typified by the leading American patriots’ adoption of the standpoint expressed by Gottfried Leibniz, as in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution, against that pro-slavery Liberalism of John Locke which the Confederacy puppets of Britain’s Lord Palmerston represented.

The differences between these two opposing, English-speaking currents have become, to that degree, axiomatic, defining those two sets of English-speakers as divided by use of a common language. Between the death of England’s Queen Anne and that subsequent 1763 Peace of Paris which established the British East India Company as a privately owned empire, the axiomatic quality of cultural divergence between the two cultures, American versus British, deepened in ways which came temporarily to the fore during the 1941-1944 interval of general warfare.

The World War II partnership between President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill was an alliance of two adversaries-in-principle thrust together for an urgent common cause of the moment. Churchill was devoted to the empire; Roosevelt was devoted to the eradication of all empires from the planet. President Truman betrayed our republic on this account, and we have never regained fully what Truman ruined, to the present day.

Take my own experience: my earliest American ancestors came into North America (New England and Quebec, respectively) during the mid-1660s. My own family tradition, dating to the grandparents of my grandparents, reaches back into the late 1770s. While there have been differences in currents of opinion within what amounts to a very extensive family grouping in North America since the 1660s, and even then known to me personally in the way I have indicated, the underlying, quasi-axiomatic characteristics of the Americans differ in systematic ways from the English in particular, and also the Scottish current. The most significant characteristic of the relevant difference echoes the opposition of Leibniz to Locke.

Left: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in a portrait by Johann Friedrich Wentzel; right: John Locke, in a portrait by Godfrey Kneller.

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Despite the antiquity of much of my own family background, most of those families which came into the U.S. later, adapted their European or Asian cultural heritages to the axiomatics of the American System of political-economy. We were, in fact, enriched by these immigrants, the Germans most readily (until Confederacy heir Theodore Roosevelt’s German-hating, British-loving Presidency).

The significance of the sampling of facts to which I have just pointed, would be missed by most otherwise familiar with the facts I have just listed, unless they were familiar with the principles of dynamics. There are important similarities between Americans and Europeans, but there are also differences, principally differences of the type associated with the crucially advantageous distinction of an American Presidential system from the follies of philosophical Liberalism inherent in a European parliamentary system; but, the significance of these differences is not made clear until they, as facts of the matter, are examined from the standpoint of the principle of dynamics.

Human Dynamics

The root of the inability of most people of Europe and the Americas to understand how social processes actually work, is chiefly a result of the influence of the Liberalism of Paolo Sarpi on the Atlantic maritime cultures of the Sixteenth Century onward. The point should be registered, that the specific characteristic of cultures influenced by what became the Anglo-Dutch Liberalism of Sarpi’s principal followers was, in one sense, the removal of the obstacle to progress represented by the modern Aristotelean legacy; but, while Sarpi licensed some practical innovations which the Aristoteleans abhorred, Sarpi was vicious in his determination to prevent innovation from leading to the recognition of actual universal principles, of physical science, or otherwise.

Hence, we have had the typical distinction of mathematical formalism from physical science, and the consequent substitution of mathematical formulations for physical principles. For the same reason, the United Kingdom has no actual constitution worthy of the name: the mere principle of the authority to reign is taken as a British substitute for a constitution, while the rest is left to what current trends in convention will tolerate.

Scene at the Signing of the Constitutional Convention, painted by Howard Chandler Christy (1940).

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The conception of a Constitution such as that intentionally crafted for the U.S.A., is an anathema to the British system in particular, and to the practice of western and central European liberalism generally. Nothing typifies this typically European fault of governments as much as the adoption of the monetarist ideology of the once-avowed pro-fascist, John Maynard Keynes.

The exemplary and crucial issue so posed at the present instant, is that any efforts to negotiate urgently needed monetary reforms within the confines of so-called Keynesian assumptions, would ensure the early delivery of the entire planet into a prolonged new dark age more severe in effects than that suffered in mid-Fourteenth-Century Europe. Thus, I have warned, unless a suitable, clearly anti-monetarist agreement is struck among the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India, excluding British influence at the start, the entirety of present global civilization is condemned to an assured, early delivery into a planet-wide new dark age. A population of more than six billions individuals could not be sustained under any agreement based on Keynesian considerations; a population reduced to Prince Philip’s stated goal for his World Wildlife Fund, of much less than two billions, were more likely, and soon. Only an agreement based on the American System model could provide a remedy under presently urgent circumstances.

U.S. Social Dynamics

A society actually based on a single principle is one whose actual constitution mimics the Leibniz principle at the center of the U.S. 1776 Declaration of Independence, as elaborated in the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution. Despite all amendments, for better, or for worse, which have been added to the body of that Constitution as a whole since, the central principle of that Constitution remains unchanged, and will threaten to assert itself in any crisis, as it did under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Courtesy of the Mount Washington Hotel

A population of more than six billions individuals could not be sustained under any agreement based on Keynesian considerations. John Maynard Keynes at the podium, at the Bretton Woods Conference, July 1944.

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The effect of that Preamble on the evolution of the hereditary mind-set of the U.S. population as a dynamic process, as in Leibniz’s sense of dynamics, or Bernhard Riemann’s later, is a deeply embedded feature of the U.S. social process. It is a nerve which, when touched on the matter of its essential features, will rise up to strike down the offender, that in a fashion described with great precision by a great English poet who understood this matter, Percy B. Shelley, in the closing paragraph of his “A Defence of Poetry.”

Every new-born human mind is endowed from birth with a potential expressed as a quality of creativity not existing in any lower form of life. No matter how bestialized a population may become, the potential lurks on, like a leopard disposed to pounce, when a certain kind of prompting occurs. The quality of creativity, until it were virtually crushed out of existence by bestialization, is a more or less resonant quality within a population, varying in degree and choices of thresholds for its eruption, according to the culture and to the development of the individual within that culture. Thus, according to a certain kind of principle of resonance, it is awakened despite any want of such intention a moment before. It comes awake as a sleeping man does when alarmed to wakefulness; it recognizes the object which has disturbed its slumbers, and acts more or less accordingly.

This sort of awakening of the formerly mostly sleeping power of creativity, varies according to cultures and their development of the capability to respond appropriately. The habit of a true constitutional principle gives a people a greater capability for responding appropriately than a people which lacks the cultural experience of such a principle as a principle of human right.

From the start of the colonization of North America, the abhorrence of European oligarchical cultures, and the desire for scientific and related progress encouraged the development of the U.S. republic in itself, and in its capacity and appetite for assimilating other cultures into itself, that on the basis of a common American principle. We of the United States have reached the point of desperation that the very existence of civilized life anywhere on this planet is now immediately in doubt. We are put, thus, to the test: will we hear the call of our principle, and be aroused to rescue our nation from the follies of incumbent recent habits, in time?

Something like a whiff of Pearl Harbor is in the air; there is a stirring in the population, a prescience of an imminent awakening. Let the fools who would rob and torment this republic’s people beware. We are, when aroused, a capable people, who will defend our Constitution as we have in great times of crisis before. We are the republic of Benjamin Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, which has been aroused in the past, when others had thought us almost counted out before.

In the emerging composition of the incoming new Presidency one senses that awakening in the air, we may expect great blows for justice throughout this planet as a whole, to be struck soon, again.

‘On Our National Economic Policy’

by Franklin Roosevelt, April 28, 1942

Wikipedia

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

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Editors’ Introduction

We are now at war. More than 140 nations are joined in combat, as allies, to defeat the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. The world has changed, and the change is profound and irreversible. Everything which previously existed, in terms of economic policy, strategic matters and day-to-day life is now replaced by the single-minded mission to win this war. As President Trump recently stated at a press briefing, when asked about the danger of an economic recession, “My concern is not to stop a recession, but to save lives.”

Printed here is the full text of President Franklin Roosevelt’s April 28, 1942 radio address to the American people on the subject of Total War and Total Effort. It is titled “On Our National Economic Policy.” As you will see, the President delineates a series of specific measures, many of them unprecedented, intended to secure the success of the war mobilization. But more than that, he insists that all matters of policy—be they wages, food costs, rents, savings, banking policy, government borrowing or tax policy—will henceforth be decided based on the requirements to win the war.

This is the kind of war we are now in. The battles of yesterday are not the battles of today. The thinking of yesterday is not the thinking of today. The economy, the people, the nation, the world,—all are now on a war footing. Institutions, political factions and policies which impede this mobilization will be swept aside.

Radio Address of

President Franklin Roosevelt

My Fellow Americans:

It is nearly five months since we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. For the two years prior to that attack, this country had been gearing itself up to a high level of production of munitions. And yet our war efforts had done little to dislocate the normal lives of most of us.

Since then, we have dispatched strong forces of our Army and Navy, several hundred thousand of them, to bases and battlefronts thousands of miles from home. We have stepped up our war production on a scale that is testing our industrial power, our engineering genius, and our economic structure to the utmost. We have had no illusions about the fact that this is a tough job—and a long one.

American warships are now in combat in the North and South Atlantic, in the Arctic, in the Mediterranean, in the Indian Ocean, and in the North and South Pacific. American troops have taken stations in South America, Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, the Near East, the Middle East and the Far East, the continent of Australia, and many islands of the Pacific. American war planes, manned by Americans, are flying in actual combat over all the continents and all the oceans.

On the European front, the most important development of the past year, has been without question the crushing counter-offensive on the part of the great armies of Russia, against the powerful German army. These Russian forces have destroyed, and are destroying, more armed power of our enemies—troops, planes, tanks and guns—than all the other United Nations put together.

In the Mediterranean area, matters remain on the surface much as they were. But the situation there is receiving very careful attention.

Recently we’ve received news of a change in government, in what we used to know as the Republic of France—a name dear to the hearts of all lovers of liberty—a name, and an institution which we hope will soon be restored to full dignity.

Throughout the Nazi occupation of France, we have hoped for the maintenance of a French Government which would strive to regain independence, to reestablish the principles of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” and to restore the historic culture of France. Our policy has been consistent from the very beginning. However, we are now greatly concerned, lest those who have recently come to power may seek to force the brave French people, into submission to Nazi despotism.

The United Nations will take measures, if necessary, to prevent the use of French territory in any part of the world for military purposes by the Axis powers. The good people of France will readily understand, that such action is essential for the United Nations to prevent assistance to the armies or navies or air forces of Germany, or Italy or Japan. The overwhelming majority of the French people understand that the fight of the United Nations is fundamentally their fight, that our victory means the restoration of a free and independent France—and the saving of France from the slavery which would be imposed upon her by her external enemies and by her internal traitors.

We know how the French people really feel. We know that a deep-seated determination to obstruct every step in the Axis plan extends from occupied France, through Vichy France, all the way to the people of their colonies, in every ocean and on every continent.

Our planes are helping in the defense of French colonies today, and soon, American Flying Fortresses will be fighting for the liberation of the darkened continent of Europe itself.

In all the occupied countries, there are men and women, and even little children who have never stopped fighting, never stopped resisting, never stopped proving to the Nazis that their so-called “New Order” can never be enforced upon free peoples.

In the German and Italian peoples themselves, there is a growing conviction that the cause of Nazi-ism and Fascism is hopeless—that their political and military leaders have led them along the bitter road, which leads not to world conquest, but to final defeat. They cannot fail to contrast the present frantic speeches of these leaders with their arrogant boastings of a year ago, and two years ago.

And, on the other side of the world, in the Far East, we have passed through a phase of serious losses.

We have inevitably lost control of a large portion of the Philippine Islands. But this whole nation pays tribute to the Filipino and American officers and men, who held out so long on Bataan Peninsula, to those grim and gallant fighters who still hold Corregidor, where the flag flies, and to the forces that are still striking effectively at the enemy on Mindanao, and other islands.

The Malayan Peninsula and Singapore are in the hands of the enemy; the Netherlands East Indies are almost entirely occupied, though resistance there continues. Many other islands are in the possession of the Japanese. But there is good reason to believe that their southward advance has been checked. Australia, New Zealand, and much other territory, will be bases for offensive action—and we are determined that the territory that has been lost, will be regained.

The Japanese are pressing their northward advance against Burma with considerable power, driving toward India and China. They have been opposed with great bravery, by small British and Chinese forces, aided by American fliers.

The news in Burma tonight is not good. The Japanese may cut the Burma Road; but I want to say to the gallant people of China that no matter what advances the Japanese may make, ways will be found to deliver airplanes, and munitions of war to the armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

We remember that the Chinese people were the first to stand up and fight against the aggressors in this war; and in the future, a still unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity, not only in Eastern Asia, but in the whole world.

For every advance that the Japanese have made since they started their frenzied career of conquest, they have had to pay a very heavy toll in warships, in transports, in planes, and in men. They are feeling the effects of those losses.

It is even reported from Japan, that somebody has dropped bombs on Tokyo, and on other principal centers of Japanese war industries. If this be true, it is the first time in history that Japan has suffered such indignities.

Although the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor was the immediate cause of our entry into the war, that event found the American people spiritually prepared for war on a world-wide scale. We went into this war fighting. We know what we are fighting for. We realize that the war has become what Hitler originally proclaimed it to be—a total war.

Not all of us can have the privilege of fighting our enemies in distant parts of the world.

Not all of us can have the privilege of working in a munitions factory or a shipyard, or on the farms or in oil fields or mines, producing the weapons or the raw materials that are needed by our armed forces.

But there is one front, and one battle, where everyone in the United States—every man, woman, and child—is in action, and will be privileged to remain in action throughout this war. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives, in our daily tasks. Here at home, everyone will have the privilege of making whatever self-denial is necessary, not only to supply our fighting men, but to keep the economic structure of our country fortified and secure during the war, and after the war.

This will require, of course, the abandonment not only of luxuries but of many other creature comforts.

Every loyal American is aware of his individual responsibility. Whenever I hear anyone saying “The American people are complacent—they need to be aroused,” I feel like asking him to come to Washington, to read the mail that floods into the White House, and into all departments of this government. The one question that recurs, through all these thousands of letters and messages is, “What more can I do to help my country, in winning this war”?

To build the factories, to buy the materials, to pay the labor, to provide the transportation, to equip and feed and house the soldiers, sailors and marines, to do all the thousands of things necessary in a war—all cost a lot of money, more money than has ever been spent, by any nation at any time in the long history of the world.

We are now spending, solely for war purposes, the sum of about one hundred million dollars every day in the week. But, before this year is over, that almost unbelievable rate of expenditure will be doubled.

All of this money has to be spent—and spent quickly—if we are to produce within the time now available, the enormous quantities of weapons of war which we need. But the spending of these tremendous sums presents grave danger of disaster to our national economy.

When your government continues to spend these unprecedented sums for munitions, month by month and year by year, that money goes into the pocketbooks and bank accounts of the people of the United States. At the same time, raw materials and many manufactured goods, are necessarily taken away from civilian use, and machinery and factories are being converted to war production.

You do not have to be a professor of mathematics or economics, to see that if people with plenty of cash start bidding against each other for scarce goods, the price of those goods goes up.

Yesterday I submitted to the Congress of the United States a seven-point program, a program of general principles, which taken together could be called the national economic policy for attaining the great objective of keeping the cost of living down. I repeat them now to you in substance:

First. We must, through heavier taxes, keep personal and corporate profits at a low reasonable rate.

Second. We must fix ceilings on prices and rents.

Third. We must stabilize wages.

Fourth. We must stabilize farm prices.

Fifth. We must put more billions into War Bonds.

Sixth. We must ration all essential commodities, which are scarce.

Seventh. We must discourage installment buying, and encourage paying off debts and mortgages.

I do not think it is necessary to repeat what I said yesterday to the Congress in discussing these general principles. The important thing to remember is that each one of these points is dependent on the others, if the whole program is to work.

Some people are already taking the position that every one of the seven points is correct, except the one point which steps on their own individual toes. A few seem very willing to approve self-denial—on the part of their neighbors. The only effective course of action is a simultaneous attack on all of the factors which increase the cost of living, in one comprehensive, all-embracing program covering prices, and profits, and wages, and taxes and debts.

The blunt fact is that every single person in the United States is going to be affected by this program. Some of you will be affected more directly by one or two of these restrictive measures, but all of you will be affected indirectly by all of them.

Are you a business man, or do you own stock in a business corporation? Well, your profits are going to be cut down to a reasonably low level, by taxation. Your income will be subject to higher taxes. Indeed in these days, when every available dollar should go to the war effort, I do not think that any American citizen should have a net income in excess of $25,000 per year, after payment of taxes.

Are you a retailer, or a wholesaler, or a manufacturer, or a farmer, or a landlord? Ceilings are being placed on the prices at which you can sell your goods or rent your property.

Do you work for wages? You will have to forego higher wages for your particular job for the duration of the war.

All of us are used to spending money for things that we want, things, however, which are not absolutely essential. We will all have to forego that kind of spending. Because we must put every dime and every dollar we can possibly spare out of our earnings into War Bonds and Stamps. Because the demands of the war effort require the rationing of goods, of which there is not enough to go around. Because the stopping of purchases of non-essentials will release thousands of workers who are needed in the war effort.

As I told the Congress yesterday, “sacrifice” is not exactly the proper word with which to describe this program of self-denial. When, at the end of this great struggle, we shall have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no “sacrifice.”

The price for civilization must be paid in hard work, and sorrow, and blood. The price is not too high. If you doubt it, ask those millions who live today under the tyranny of Hitlerism.

Ask the workers of France, and Norway, and the Netherlands—whipped to labor by the lash—whether the stabilization of wages is too great a “sacrifice.”

Ask the farmers of Poland and Denmark, and Czechoslovakia and France, looted of their livestock, starving while their own crops are stolen from their land, ask them whether “parity” prices are too great a “sacrifice.”

Ask the businessmen of Europe, whose enterprises have been stolen from their owners, whether the limitation of profits and personal incomes is too great a “sacrifice.”

Ask the women and children whom Hitler is starving, whether the rationing of tires, and gasoline, and sugar, is too great a “sacrifice.”

We do not have to ask them. They have already given us their agonized answers.

This great war effort must be carried through to its victorious conclusion, by the indomitable will and determination of the people as one great whole.

It must not be impeded by the faint of heart.

It must not be impeded by those who put their own selfish interests, above the interests of the nation.

It must not be impeded by those who pervert honest criticism, into falsification of fact.

It must not be impeded by self-styled experts either in economics or military problems who know neither true figures, nor geography itself.

It must not be impeded by a few bogus patriots, who use the sacred freedom of the press, to echo the sentiments of the propagandists in Tokyo and Berlin.

And, above all, it shall not be imperiled by the handful of noisy traitors—betrayers of America, betrayers of Christianity itself—would-be dictators who in their hearts and souls have yielded to Hitlerism, and would have this Republic do likewise.

I shall use all of the executive power that I have, to carry out the policy laid down. If it becomes necessary to ask for any additional legislation, in order to attain our objective of preventing a spiral in the cost of living, I shall do so.

I know the American farmer, the American workman, and the American businessman. I know that they will gladly embrace this economy and equality of sacrifice, satisfied that it is necessary for the most vital and compelling motive in all their lives—winning through to victory.

Never in the memory of man has there been a war in which the courage, the endurance and the loyalty of civilians played so vital a part.

Many thousands of civilians all over the world, have been and are being killed, or maimed by enemy action. Indeed, it was the fortitude of the common people of Britain, under fire, which enabled that island to stand, and prevented Hitler from winning the war in 1940. The ruins of London and Coventry, and other cities, are today the proudest monuments to British heroism.

Our own American civilian population is now relatively safe from such disasters. And, to an ever-increasing extent, our soldiers, sailors and marines are fighting with great bravery and great skill, on far distant fronts to make sure that we shall remain safe.

I should like to tell you one or two stories about the men we have in our armed forces:

There is, for example, Dr. Corydon M. Wassell. He was a missionary, well known for his good works in China. He is a simple, modest, retiring man, nearly sixty years old, but he entered the service of his country and was commissioned a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy.

Dr. Wassell was assigned to duty in Java, caring for wounded officers and men of the cruisers Houston and Marblehead, which had been in heavy action in the Java seas.

When the Japanese advanced across the island, it was decided to evacuate as many as possible of the wounded to Australia. But about twelve of the men were so badly wounded that they couldn’t be moved. Dr. Wassell remained with them, knowing that he would be captured by the enemy. But he decided to make a last, desperate attempt to get the men out of Java. He asked each of them if he wished to take the chance, and everyone agreed.

He first had to get the twelve men to the sea coast—fifty miles away. To do this, he had to improvise stretchers for the hazardous journey. The men were suffering severely, but Dr. Wassell kept them alive by his skill, and inspired them by his own courage.

And as the official report said, Dr. Wassell was “almost like a Christ-like shepherd devoted to his flock.”

On the sea coast, he embarked the men on a little Dutch ship. They were bombed, they were machine-gunned by waves of Japanese planes. Dr. Wassell took virtual command of the ship, and by great skill avoided destruction, hiding in little bays and little inlets.

A few days later, Dr. Wassell and his small flock of wounded men reached Australia safely.

And today, Dr. Wassell wears the Navy Cross.

Another story concerns a ship, a ship rather than an individual man.

You may remember the tragic sinking of the submarine, the United States Ship Squalus off the New England coast in the summer of 1939. Some of the crew were lost, but others were saved by the speed and the efficiency of the surface rescue crews. The Squalus itself was tediously raised from the bottom of the sea.

She was repaired and put back into commission, and eventually she sailed again under a new name, the United States Ship Sailfish. Today, she is a potent, and effective unit of our submarine fleet in the Southwest Pacific.

The Sailfish has covered many thousands of miles in operations in those far waters.

She has sunk a Japanese destroyer.

She has torpedoed a Japanese cruiser.

She has made torpedo hits—two of them—on a Japanese aircraft carrier.

Three of the enlisted men of our Navy who went down with the Squalus in 1939 and were rescued, are today serving on the same ship, the United States Ship Sailfish, in this war.

It seems to me that it is heartening to know that the Squalus, once given up as lost, rose from the depths to fight for our country, in time of peril.

One more story, that I heard only this morning:

This is a story of one of our Army Flying Fortresses, operating in the Western Pacific. The pilot of this plane is a modest young man, proud of his crew for one of the toughest fights a bomber has yet experienced.

The bomber departed from its base, as part of a flight of five bombers, to attack Japanese transports that were landing troops against us in the Philippines. When they had gone about halfway to their destination, one of the motors of this bomber went out of commission. The young pilot lost contact with the other bombers. The crew, however, got the motor working, got it going again and the plane proceeded on its mission alone.

By the time it arrived at its target, the other four Flying Fortresses had already passed over, had dropped their bombs, and had stirred up the hornets’ nest of Japanese “Zero” planes. Eighteen of these “Zero” fighters attacked our one Flying Fortress. Despite this mass attack, our plane proceeded on its mission, and dropped all of its bombs on six Japanese transports, which were lined up along the docks.

As it turned back on its homeward journey, a running fight between the bomber and the eighteen Japanese pursuit planes continued for seventy-five miles. Four pursuit planes of the Japs attacked simultaneously at each side; four were shot down with the side guns. During this fight, the bomber’s radio operator was killed, the engineer’s right hand was shot off, and one gunner was crippled, leaving only one man available to operate both side guns. Although wounded in one hand, this gunner alternately manned both side guns, bringing down three more Japanese “Zero” planes. While this was going on, one engine on the American bomber was shot out, one gas tank was hit, the radio was shot off, and the oxygen system was entirely destroyed. Out of eleven control cables, all but four were shot away. The rear landing wheel was blown off entirely, and the two front wheels were both shot flat.

The fight continued until the remaining Japanese pursuit ships exhausted their ammunition, and turned back. With two engines gone, and the plane practically out of control, the American bomber returned to its base after dark, and made an emergency landing. The mission had been accomplished.

The name of that pilot is Captain Hewitt T. Wheless, of the United States Army. He comes from a place called Menard, Texas—with a population of 2,375. He has been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. And I hope that he is listening.

These stories I have told you are not exceptional. They are typical examples of individual heroism and skill.

As we here at home contemplate our own duties, our own responsibilities, let us think, and think hard of the example which is being set for us, by our fighting men.

Our soldiers and sailors are members of well-disciplined units. But they are still and forever individuals—free individuals. They are farmers, and workers, businessmen, professional men, artists, clerks.

They are the United States of America.

That is why they fight.

We too, are the United States of America.

That is why we must work and sacrifice.

It is for them. It is for us. It is for victory.

II. The Presidency and the Crisis

A Presidency-Led Mobilization-in-Depth

To Defeat Two Viruses

by Dennis Speed

March 23—In a time of great fear, such as has gripped the world in its sudden recognition of the lethality of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is essential to understand and discuss the role of the American Presidential System in its relation to the American people.

On the March 19 weekly LaRouche PAC webcast featuring health experts and a member of the LaRouche Science Team, in live discussion with hundreds of persons around the nation, that discussion was begun. The “two viruses,” the coronavirus, and the even more virulent epidemic of speculation carried out by the City of London and Wall Street, are manifestations of the same thing. Lyndon LaRouche had warned as early as the 1960s that the physical degradation of a U.S. and world economy wracked by the virus of monetarism, financial speculation, and “zero-growth” ideology would bring about a sudden moment in which actual pandemics would spread throughout the world, threatening all humanity. Such a moment has now come.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former United States Surgeon General under President Bill Clinton, joined the call, along with Jason Ross of the LaRouche Science Team and Dr. Debra Hanania-Freeman, a public health specialist and former spokesman for Lyndon LaRouche. In her opening remarks, Dr. Elders emphasized the “pulling together of the world for the purpose of defeating this challenge.” She said:

I think the thing that we all are aware of, is that COVID-19 has made us all realize that we’ve got a problem. It’s not in one community or one city, one state; it’s worldwide. We have a pandemic going on. We have many countries working on different aspects of this disease. First of all, we’ve worked hard to try and develop a test. How do we diagnose it? We’ve got to know. If we don’t know what we’ve got going on, there is no way that we will know how to prevent how much it’s spreading. We are doing some things, and other countries have done some things, that’s because they had the test to know where it was, how much they had, and what was going on.

So, I think this is something that has really been helpful. But we’ve not really been able to find out exactly where the disease is here in the United States and where it’s spreading.

But all the nations, all over, are working very hard. We’ve all found, we’ve all learned that once it gets out there and starts, one person with the disease will probably infect two to three more, or maybe even more than that.

So, the first big thing we’ve got to do is find out where it is, and do the real epidemiology of finding out where it is, so we can find out when we’ve been able to slow it down and stop it. That’s what we’re really trying very hard to do. Of course, we’ve got to be able to find a good treatment for it. There are certainly many people, many drug companies, and the pharmaceutical companies, major industries have gotten involved to try and find one. But before we do all of that, we’ve got to stop the spread. So the big push today, I think we found out, we’re trying find out how do we get simple things like masks. Number one, I think we have to educate our people; everybody has got to be involved.

All of our citizens have got to do everything they can to protect themselves. We talk about hand-washing for at least 20 seconds with soap and water, which everybody can do. But we’ve got to make people know they can and should do it, and to get them involved in making sure they do do it. We’ve got to stop our handshaking; cough into our elbows, which we’ve not done.

Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former United States Surgeon General.

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With Us All Working Together

Dr. Elders continued,

I think with the help of all us—we’ve closed our schools; we’ve closed our churches. We’re doing all the things now. We’re doing almost too little too late, but it’s not too late. We’ve got to do what we can. We can’t let this disease keep going. We know it’s spreading; it’s a viral disease, and it does spread. It’s contagious; we know that, and we’ve got to do everything we can to stop the transmission. We thought at first it was primarily more in our senior citizens, but today we’re talking about five-year-olds and very young people, even younger than that. But we’re talking about the people that we know about.

We know that as we get older, our senior citizens have many other diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, chronic pulmonary disease, which are all far more prevalent in our over-60-year-olds. And if we get this virus, we’re far more likely to get in real trouble and die. Especially, to me, those ventilators that we’re talking about. Whereas very young people might be able to make the antibodies, fight it out, and survive.

But I think we’ve got to have all hands on deck; everybody contributing and doing their share. We’ve got to listen to what every country has to offer, and we’ve got to share the knowledge and whatever we have, all over the world. We’ve got to have every company that can make a difference, and if they change over and began to make the things we need. We can’t have our nurses, our doctors, our primary responders out there without the proper equipment to do the best job they can; because we don’t want to lose all of them trying to save lives, because they didn’t have what they needed to protect themselves.

Question from a High School Teacher

A retired New York City high school teacher made a statement and asked a question:

Dr. Elders, I think you’ve very eloquently answered, in terms of the medical part of it.... This is the perfect storm. There’s been the deliberate deindustrialization, willful prohibition of any development in supposedly developing countries, caused by a fraudulent, destructive financial system, which is now fully collapsing, and which is causing a massive pandemic. So it seems like the perfect storm lawfully demands the perfect solution....

My question is, given the time constraints, and given the speed in which we need to do this, how can we effectively organize a population which in many respects does not recognize the interconnections that you have gone through and has been conditioned, of course not—precisely not—to think precisely in the rigorous manner that is essential to making these global changes, and also are the victims of mass brainwashing, in which they see China as the enemy, in which they see people as the virus which needs to be eliminated, as antithetical to survival. So, given the amount of time we have, how can we effectively organize significant portions of the population, in time to triumph over this? The question is for anyone who wants to answer.

Debra Freeman responded:

You raised a question about what we have to change, cognitively. I think the principal thing that has to be changed, is a certain ideology that has emerged, and was reinforced most recently at several meetings, notably at the Davos World Economic Forum conference [in Switzerland] by Michael Bloomberg and others, who are proposing a bankers’ dictatorship. What we have to challenge cognitively, is a basic hatred for humanity, the idea that somehow, the basic problem facing this planet is caused by human beings, when in fact the only solution to the problems facing this planet, and the only progress here on Earth and in the galaxy as a whole will be generated by human beings. That’s a cognitive issue, and it has to be addressed.

Dr. Elders added:

We have a major problem and we’ve a crisis. Usually in a crisis, we work to try to come out of it. We have a lot of education to do. We have to have some real, strong, firm leadership, leadership that our people believe in.

Real Self Government

An in-depth mobilization of the American people, through the American Presidential System, depends as much upon the initiative of “private citizens” to deploy their power of self-government, through the office of the Presidency and on behalf of the General Welfare, as it does on the President himself. The famous example of the 1861 New York (later, the United States) Sanitary Commission comes to mind. Then, Henry Whitney Bellows, the pastor of All Souls Church, and Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmstead were the founders of that indispensable private agency which cared for Union Troops as a support for Lincoln’s America in the 1961-65 war, establishing modern battlefield medicine and saving literally tens of thousands of lives. All Souls congregant Louisa Schuyler, for example, established America’s first nursing hospital, Bellevue Hospital of New York City. This was created and staffed by persons, mostly women, with little or no medical background.

Today, it will probably be essential to involve at least hundreds of thousands of young Americans in a kind of national health extension service, acting as adjuncts to trained medical personnel who would otherwise be overwhelmed either now or later, by the onset of the present epidemic. Far more than this, however, is needed by our citizens in the short term. An “emergency alert system,” covering all areas of intellectual life, is instantaneously required. To that end, EIR, as well as the LaRouche Political Action Committee, will create such a system, involving expanded print, video and audio content. The Schiller Institute will conduct conferences, classes and interactive readings and discussions. Conference calls and other discussions of a weekly nature will be expanded.

A “psychological warfare inoculation bureau” will attempt to defuse and neutralize rumor, hysteria and prejudice, through a daily briefing. This will be pursued so that the American people can most effectively carry out their Presidential mobilization and function. It is not merely the activity of the occupant of the office, but of the citizenry as a whole, in defense of the General Welfare, that characterizes the Republican Presidential System that Washington and Hamilton founded.

Both the coronavirus and the Wall Street/City of London virus of speculation must be defeated now. To do so, requires not merely an adoption of the LaRouche Four Laws as a “program.” It requires grasping the fundamentals of the analytical method developed by LaRouche from 1946 to 1952, a method that runs directly counter to the systems analysis and economic modeling methods so popular today. LaRouche incorporated, through his 1952 breakthrough, the work of physicists Bernard Riemann and Albert Einstein into economic forecasting and policy making, as well as into military and diplomatic policy design, especially through his proposal of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983. It was this method that LaRouche’s colleagues used in 1974 to forecast the “inevitable” rise of pandemics as a result of the failed systems-analytical methods that has continued to be dominant in the trans-Atlantic world since the 1970s.

Now We End the Madness

Though it has yet to be acknowledged, soon it will be shown that the madness of five decades of City of London-led Malthusian monetary and financial policies has, over the past half-century, unleashed the greatest global physical breakdown in 700 years. Executive Intelligence Review, from its inception in 1974, has not only uniquely “owned” that story; its founder, Lyndon LaRouche, employed and taught the investigative method that allowed him and his associates to discover British-directed policy initiatives, kept secret at the time, that have resulted in the present, now unfolding “coronavirus” catastrophe, a catastrophe that was completely avoidable.

In 1974, a LaRouche-commissioned report, “The Potential Threat of Biological Holocaust,” discussed how, “at the current moment, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are waging extensive biological warfare in depth against the populations of Africa and other areas of the planet that they have arbitrarily chosen to ‘triage’ as so-called ‘Fourth World’ regions.” These actions reflected a policy, secret until its declassification in 1990 but adopted in December of 1974, called National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests. That document, also known at the time as “The Kissinger Report,” asked questions based on then- and now-discredited new-Malthusian premises. “Would food be considered an instrument of national power? ... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/won’t control their population growth?”

The LaRouche investigative method used to expose these then-denied policies—policies that this magazine forecast would, intentionally or not, result in what was referred to then as “biological holocaust”—was identical to that deployed by American intelligence officer Edgar Poe—often cited as the inventor of the “detective story”—in such writings as The Purloined Letter.

Exposure of the policy-content of the neo-Malthusian National Security Study Memorandum 200, did not require EIR to engage in any break-in, or leaking of classified material. Today, to understand the truth behind what people are intentionally now misled to refer to as the “coronavirus disaster,” it is not enough to merely consult the unique cumulative record of this publication. It is necessary to rapidly construct an Emergency Alert System, to anticipate and therefore pre-empt the evolving anti-American-policy, and anti-human disasters that will certainly result from any continued existence of the U.S.-London—better called the Wall Street-City of London—“special relationship.”

Buy 'Global Warming' Scare Is Population Reduction, Not Science from the LaRouche Publications Store

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ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Shut Down the Hopelessly Bankrupt, Neo-Liberal Casino Economy

CGTN

The New York Stock Exchange, one scene of the casino economy.

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This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s March 19 webcast featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche. The video is available here.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. This is our weekly webcast with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, our founder and president. It’s March 19, 2020.

We had intended to do this webcast yesterday, but the sheer volume of activity on the internet had made it questionable. Hopefully, we will be able to get through the briefing and discussion today, but please bear with us if there’s some shakiness or jumpiness in the picture. These are extraordinary times, and it does require a certain amount of patience and concentration.

We’re facing a situation which is a worldwide emergency, and Helga, we’ll start with your call yesterday. You issued an emergency call that addresses the problem of the corona virus and the financial crash simultaneously. So, why don’t we start with what you said yesterday?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: I think the need to address the fact that we don’t only have the coronavirus crisis, which is a pandemic, but we also have clear signs that the financial system is collapsing. So, that is why I issued the call to close the markets for a few days, in order to take the absolutely necessary reforms of the financial system, which has to start with the immediate implementation of a Glass-Steagall banking separation. Followed then by the other measures that we have been demanding, namely; a national bank in every country; a New Bretton Woods credit system in order to restart the economy, and to concentrate on the physical economy. Finally, after a quite significant delay, all the governments of the trans-Atlantic sector are clearly taking some of the necessary measures.

For example, the European Union has suspended the rules of the stability pact, Trump has invoked the National Defense Act. There are many measures being taken. Various “bazookas” have been taken out, giving credit to firms to delay tax payments, even talking about directly handing out money to everybody who needs it. All of these things are necessary steps to just keep the economy going, and necessary to calm down the population, which is really in a difficult state of mind. And physically, many people have existential worries about their livelihoods.

But this is all missing one essential point. That is, the reason why we are in this crisis has to be addressed. That is something which absolutely only we can bring to the agenda. So, the very first step would be to close the financial markets in order to implement Glass-Steagall. Now, that is something which requires a different kind of approach. It requires the intervention of the most powerful governments in the world working together. And that is the need to have the summit of the United States, Russia, China, and India; then other countries can support that. But you need a decision on the level of the heads of government to end the casino economy, to go in the direction of a world credit system which enables a world health system.

It should be very clear that this pandemic will not be fought in one country, but you need a health system in every single country of the world, and that is absolutely not possible under the present circumstances. So therefore, the shutting down of the financial markets is the absolute necessary first step, but it must be followed by the whole package.

Lyndon LaRouche Warned of Pandemics

Schlanger: In saying that, and looking at the importance of taking emergency measures, I think it’s really important that people step back and recognize what you just said. This is something that’s been in the making for many years, and your expertise in this comes from your long working relationship with your husband, who forecast this back in 1971. It was clear to him back then that this is what we were facing; and yet, governments missed these warnings. Why don’t you just review for a moment his forecasting on this, and how we missed the boat.

Zepp-LaRouche: My late husband, in 1971, was probably the only economist who with absolute clarity recognized the significance of Nixon abandoning the fixed exchange-rate system and abandoning the coupling of the dollar to the gold standard, and going in the direction of unregulated monetarism. He said in August 1971 that if the world would stay on this course, it would absolutely necessarily lead to a new depression and the danger of a new fascism, or you would replace the system with a completely different one; namely, a just, new world economic order.

At every step of the way, whenever the financial oligarchy moved in the direction of further deregulation, he pointed to the consequences of that. He predicted the crash of 1987, he absolutely recognized the significance of the 1997 so-called Asia crisis as being really the eruption of a global crisis. And he made this famous video on the 25th of July in 2007, saying this is the end of the system, and all which we see right now will be coming to the surface of the total bankruptcy of the system.

The measures that were taken by the central banks and the G-20 after the 2008 collapse, just amplified the problem by pumping more liquidity into the system. Now we are at the absolute end phase of that process.

Lyndon LaRouche warned, and this is on the record, that the physical economic consequences of this monetarism would lead to the eruption of pandemics. It would lead to the re-emergence of old diseases, and the emergence of new epidemics, pandemics; because you cannot lower the living standard of entire continents over a long period of time without causing such breakdowns of the health system, the immune system. That is exactly the point we are at right now, and that is why we are saying that you cannot remedy it by just controlling this pandemic. Because if you don’t remove the causes, the danger is that new viruses, new diseases will emerge. So, we are at an absolute fundamental point that we have to change the whole system.

A Global Shift in Thinking

Schlanger: I think we’re seeing some governments beginning to recognize that this is more than just a simple crisis. Macron, for example, announced the suspension of the so-called reforms he was pushing. Macron and others are saying we need to look into what caused the failures of the system. But up to this point, Helga, have you seen anyone addressing the need to reject the whole casino economy and go back to the measures that would feed the physical economy?

Zepp-LaRouche: No. I think that the measures that have been taken by, for example, Germany—Merkel yesterday gave a TV speech in which she really didn’t say anything significant. All she said was, “It’s up to you to flatten the curve of the spread of the pandemic.” Now, I don’t think that is the way to go about it at all. The Western governments are now confronted with the fact that the takedown of the health system over the last decades, the privatization, the shutting down hospitals, shutting down other facilities for the sake of profit, is now haunting everybody, because we have a severe shortage of such facilities.

China’s approach has been completely different. They did not talk about flattening the curve. In Wuhan and Hubei province, China took very decisive measures. They closed down the entire area of 60 million people and acted in solidarity in the whole country; all of China was supporting that. They were successful in reducing the number of new cases erupting. So, they basically have it under control for the situation in China. That is a successful model. Also, Singapore and South Korea took a similar approach. There is no reason one cannot replicate what China did, if there is solidarity.

CGTN

Widespread testing of the population was done by China as a crucial first step in attacking the Coronavirus. A medical worker in PPE gear shown here with a patient.

CGTN

The rapid, around the clock construction of hospitals to create sufficient beds to treat the sick was a clear factor in stopping the spread of the disease.

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In the EU, that has obviously been lacking so far. There has been no solidarity. This just shows you the deficiency in the neo-liberal and liberal model of everything—the markets, the health system, the cooperation among countries. I think that the situation now is very severe. You can see it in Italy, which was the country which, because of its positive relations with China, did apply the Chinese model to a very large degree. But in northern Italy, in Bergamo, in Lombardy, they are now faced with the situation that the capacity simply is not sufficient. So there has been de facto triage, not because they intended it, because the doctors and nurses have been working around the clock and are near the point of breakdown; but they simply don’t have enough facilities, so they cannot treat every patient. It is a total catastrophe.

But China, which not only totally successfully contained the virus, is now worried that it may come back from abroad, because other governments did not apply the same rigorous methods. But the Chinese are providing help. They have sent medical experts to Iran, to Iraq, to Spain, and to Italy. They have offered help to any country which wants to take it. They are sending massive supplies to Italy, Spain, and France, who they regard as having shown to have been friends with China. I think the only thing to draw as a conclusion is to stop this anti-China bashing. First of all, it’s completely insane; it is not justified. Cooperate. I think this is the moment in which you have to work together as a human species. China has provided the way to go.

You need to learn the Chinese lesson from Wuhan, and that is the best thing the Europeans and others like the United States can do right now.

One Planet, One Health System

Schlanger: On the question of the takedown of the public health system and replacing it with totally for-profit health care, which has obviously failed, even the New York Times admitted this today. I just want to read a couple of quotes from an article, in which they said that it’s now the EU austerity which has left the health care systems unprepared. We’re talking about Europe, but the same thing can be said about the United States. They said, in the southern European countries, they’re ill-prepared for a pandemic. They describe the countries as “tragically vulnerable.”

Now, we had in the United States, a standard, set with the Hill-Burton system, of 4.5 hospital beds per 1000 people. This was taken down starting in 1974. Helga, you were talking about a world health standard. What would it take to get a Hill-Burton standard for the whole world now?

CGTN

Leishenshan Hospital was built in Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei Province, in only two weeks to treat patients infected with the Coronavirus, COVID-19.

China’s approach of shutting down Wuhan and all of Hubei Province, testing, and providing hospital beds for treatment, is the model for the world to defeat this pandemic.

CGTN

First patients are admitted to a newly-built purpose built hopital in Wuhan.

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Zepp-LaRouche: First of all, you would need a crash program approach, in which, obviously, those countries which have the capability would have to help those which don’t. But all together, it would mean to build 35 million new hospital beds worldwide. It would require having the necessary electricity, which would mean the creation of 358 gigawatts of new electricity, most of which would also have to be built in a crash program. You would need the increase of clean water supplies by 40% of the existing capabilities. So this is a completely different approach and will require a completely different approach in terms of real industrialization of the Southern Hemisphere. That brings you to the absolute point where this went wrong. We are now at the point where we have to make a fundamental decision.

Do we want to continue in the direction of a Malthusian world order, which indeed would mean what the British system has been pushing? Jeremy Warner wrote in the Daily Telegraph, a couple of weeks ago, that the coronavirus has a benefit, namely culling older people. That notion of culling, that you treat the human species, as a herd of animals which must be culled, has been the hallmark of the British Malthusian genocide approach for a very long time. We have attacked that danger for many, many years. This is now what is coming to the fore.

We have to make a fundamental decision, that we absolutely reject this idea that there are useless people, which is behind some of the thinking, because the danger is that we come out of this with a Green approach, with a Malthusian approach. We have to absolutely go in the opposite direction, and go for the full industrialization of the world economy. We have to have the industrialization of Africa, and of Southwest Asia. That is the key moral decision which the whole human race has to make at this point.

International Leadership, National Sovereignty

Schlanger: As you said, this would require international solidarity. I think there is still the proposal that you made, and was somewhat adopted by others, that there be an emergency summit of the great powers. How could they act to bring about not just this new world health standard, but a new financial system?

Zepp-LaRouche: I made this proposal for an emergency summit of the United States, Russia, China, and India, following the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani on the third of January this year, because there was the immediate danger of an escalation which could have gone into a superpower conflict. Subsequently, President Putin called for a summit of the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council to establish the principles for the continued collaboration and survival of the human species. Now in the meantime, all the governments of the Permanent Five have said—the U.S., China, Russia, France, and Great Britain—that they would agree to this. I still think that the absolutely necessary combination is the United States, Russia, China, and India, being representative for the whole world, and then other countries should cooperate.

Geopolitics must be absolutely put aside forever. We have to define the common aims of mankind; we have to agree on those principles which constitute the one humanity. That would first of all mean, to establish a system of new international relations of countries respecting the sovereignty of everyone, of non-interference, of accepting the different social system of the other one. And then agree on joint economic development programs to overcome poverty, to overcome underdevelopment.

The only realistic proposal on the table is what China proposed with the New Silk Road, the Belt and Road Initiative, in which 157 countries are already participating. The Schiller Institute, several years ago, started to publish reports on the possibilities of the New Silk Road, starting with The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, which is a comprehensive economic study of how to bring industrial development to every continent on this planet. Some of these projects are in different degrees of realization, but that would be the kind of platform which has to be agreed upon by the top governments in the world. That way you could start a real economic development plan following such a summit right away. It would mean you completely change the orientation.

In a certain sense, it’s like the end of the Thirty Years’ War, in which people recognized that if they continued the warfare, there would be nobody left to enjoy the so-called victory. That is the point humanity has reached right now.

We have reached a point where we either become rational and cooperate, or we may not only face a Dark Age, but we may actually face a real holocaust for the whole human race.

The Job of the Summit Meeting

Schlanger: I think a lot of people would like to get your assessment of the so-called financial measures that are being taken, beyond those that are emergency funds to provide care, or funds for people who are losing jobs, a moratorium on foreclosures—at least for a month or two. But what we see from the Federal Reserve in the United States, as an example, is a bail-out of the speculators with an extraordinary level of so-called credit, basically, funny money. What’s your assessment of that? Obviously, this goes against what you’re talking about in terms of the financial bankruptcy reorganization.

Zepp-LaRouche: That just reflects the intention of Wall Street to keep the casino economy going. They bring out what they call the “big bazooka,” I think the Federal Reserve put in $1.2 trillion in various support actions, buying up bonds, buying up all kinds of debt to keep the derivative bubble going. The European Central Bank has announced 750 billion, and that is not the end of it. If they keep doing that, and there is right now the clear intention to do so, it will lead to a hyperinflationary blow-out of the whole system.

I’m not referring to these temporary measures to keep individual families and firms going, by giving all kinds of support measures, that may be useful in the short-term. But you need to end the casino economy. You absolutely have to have Glass-Steagall, because this would shut down the casino economy for good. You put the commercial banks under state protection, you put a firewall between the commercial banks and the investment banks and all the other operators and players.

If the speculators have no more access to the savings of the commercial banks, and do not get bail-outs from the taxpayers any more, they will have to bring their books in order on their own, and if they can’t do it, they have to be closed down. That is the kind of intervention which now absolutely needs to exist. If this thing is continuing, you will end up in a hyperinflationary blow-out like what happened in Germany in 1923. That means the complete expropriation of the life savings of the population, and that would lead to a social explosion such as I don’t even want to imagine.

Left to right: Shealah Craighead; www.quirinale.it; kremlin.ru

International solidarity and collaboration is necessary if the world is to defeat the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. must lift all sanctions against China, Russia, Iran and other countries to this end. Left to right President Trump, President Xi, President Putin.

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So, I call upon all rational people to support our approach—that you need a summit of the most important governments of the world, and they have to end the casino economy, and they have to adopt a system of integrated cooperation for world development. If there is sufficient support for that, it can be done, because there is already motion in this direction. So, I’m calling upon you, that you sign this appeal which will be posted below this webcast, and that you help us to circulate this idea. Because there is a lot of confusion right now, a lot of panic, a lot of chaos. But you have to elevate the whole discussion on a much higher level, and that has to be one of unity of the entire world. Then we can solve it.

Geopolitics is a Satanic Killer

Schlanger: You mentioned ending the casino economy, I found it somewhat interesting that yesterday the state of Nevada shut down the casinos in Las Vegas. That’s a good step in the right direction.

Helga, come back to this question of international solidarity, and why that’s necessary. Unfortunately, we have someone who hasn’t gotten that message, namely, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who continues to rant against China, talking about escalating sanctions against Iran, which is one of the countries that has been badly affected by the coronavirus. What can you say about that? Obviously, this is the opposite of solidarity.

Zepp-LaRouche: I think President Trump has been capable of getting rid of some of his bad advisors in the past, like Bolton. And I think he would be very well advised to get rid of Pompeo. What Pompeo is doing right now in his anti-China campaign is really dangerous. The relationship between the United States and China has been deteriorating. It’s very difficult to assess all of this, because there is a lot of fake news being circulated right now, and one has to be very careful in assessing this.

Let me bring in another element of this. There is a geopolitical dimension in a lot of things that are happening right now. There was, for example, a scenario played out in October 2019, in which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the CIA, the UN, and a couple of other institutions had a scenario acting out a new pandemic hitting the world with a coronavirus, and they basically came to the conclusion that this would cause 65 million deaths. Now that was the very same day the military games were conducted in New York, on the very same day in Wuhan that the military games started, and subsequently the Chinese Foreign Ministry raised the question, whether the virus had not originated in Wuhan, but possibly came from U.S. soldiers participating in these war games.

I’m not in a position now to assess the validity of all of this. And as I said, there is a lot of psywar fake news, disinformation. But this whole question has now led to a brawl. Pompeo is continuously talking about the China virus. The Chinese government correctly refuted that as a racist policy. This is going back and forth, and unfortunately, President Trump has repeatedly also used that language of the China virus.

This is very dangerous, and naturally, there is also this question of Iran. The oil price right now is at $20/barrel for Brent crude [North Sea], and that means the entire shale-gas industry at this point is completely bankrupt. So, there is absolutely the danger that on top of this present crisis, you could have a war in the Middle East, with the intention to drive up the price of oil. I’m just saying that if this present situation is not brought under control in the way I said before, that we could really end up in a complete strategic disaster. This is why I think President Trump is doing a lot of positive things. He has started a very useful cooperation, for example, with Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York state. There are more and more examples of people overcoming partisanship. But there is also this other tendency. So, I think the absolute necessity right now is to go for an international cooperation and address the common aims of mankind as an absolute necessity of surviving for all of us.

Beautiful Souls, an Ecumenical Idea

Schlanger: You mentioned earlier the period of the Thirty Years’ War and the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which led to the Peace of Westphalia. This actually does give us an opportunity to reflect on the actual nature of man, as opposed to being totally focused on material wealth, greed, and making money. You actually have an opportunity to sit back and reflect on why we’re here. And I think it would be very useful, Helga, at this moment of great anxiety and stress, for you to reiterate points to what is that nature of man? And how do we regain this concept of the cooperation among beautiful souls?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think that the medical team of doctors who worked in Wuhan,— they just issued a very beautiful video and message, in which the incredible strain one goes through in such a period was discussed. But then there emerged the idea that what was really needed was love. That each individual human being is mortal, but what is immortal, is love. Love for your loved ones, your family, your nation; love for mankind. And that that is the kind of spirit which needs to be evoked. I think this is really the true tendency you can clearly see.

Those people work for all of humanity. Look at the unbelievable work being done by the many doctors and nurses around the world, and other people who help to make this situation function. And people who grow, who show a humanity which goes beyond anything which was there before. But then you also have the people who are displaying their evil nature. I think in a certain sense, we are now at the point in which we have to shed all the axioms which led to this situation; geopolitics, monetarism, Darwinism, the liberal system that everything is allowed. And we have to replace it with the idea that the human species is the only creative species known in the universe so far. That we have to employ these creative capacities to relate to each other from that standpoint to respect the creative mind of the other; to show the kind of solidarity which has been demonstrated, especially by such doctors in China in Wuhan. That should be an inspiration of how we get out of this crisis.

Schlanger: I would encourage all of our viewers to take the time now, especially if you are off work or you have limited hours, instead of sitting there worrying, or wasting your time watching CNN or MSNBC, go to the Schiller Institute website, go to the LaRouche PAC website, and familiarize yourself with the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, particularly related to the Four Laws of Economics, and also the Four Power Agreement.

So, Helga, do you have anything else to add?

Zepp-LaRouche: I can only add that a lot of people in Italy are now going to their balconies and singing. You have opera houses playing for free to be transmitted on the internet. Since we are in the year of Beethoven, I can only say that the best thing to get the inspiration is to listen to a lot of Beethoven. Otherwise, I really think that if you go into the archives of our website and study the works of Lyndon LaRouche, that is actually very good advice. Because we have to come out of this present crisis with a completely different approach. I think between Beethoven and LaRouche, you will find a lot of the inspiration needed. So, we will come back with other programs as the situation unfolds. So, stay tuned, and help us to change this paradigm.

Schlanger: OK, Helga. Thank you very much.

Zepp-LaRouche: Till soon.

Schlanger: Till soon.

III. Manhattan Town Hall Meeting, March 21, 2020

Build a New World from the Ashes of the Old:

Sovereign Nations, Common Future

The edited transcript of the opening presentations to the LaRouche PAC Manhattan Project meeting on March 21, 2020, keynoted by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president and founder of the Schiller Institute. The video of the full two-hour meeting is available here.

Introductory Remarks

by Dennis Speed

Schiller Institute

Dennis Speed

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My name is Dennis Speed, and on behalf of the LaRouche Political Action Committee, I want to welcome everybody to today’s Dialogue with Lyndon LaRouche. As we’ve done for nearly five years with our Manhattan Project meetings, we continue today in a slightly altered format due to circumstances that I think everyone is well aware of, all over the United States, and all over the world.

I want to welcome you to this great and awful moment, and we want to, as we always like to do, begin by talking about Lyndon LaRouche and his importance to you and to this time. The statesman, Lyndon LaRouche, the founder of this organization, warned that the physical degradation of the United States and world economy, wracked by the virus of financial speculation, would bring about a sudden moment where actual pandemics would spread throughout the world, threatening all humanity. Such a moment has now come. Both the coronavirus and the Wall Street-City of London virus of speculation must be defeated now. In his Triple Curve function in 1995, LaRouche illustrated the war between physical productivity—the real economy—and the speculative economy of financial aggregates and also of hyperinflation such as we are seeing occur in the world system now.

Ten years earlier in 1985, Lyndon LaRouche and his organization had issued the EIR Special Report titled, Economic Breakdown and the Threat of Global Pandemics. This report appeared in July 1985 and forecast that because of the persistent degradation of the world’s physical economy as a result of Wall Street and City of London policy, new pandemics would threaten humanity, and could even wipe out the entire human race.

This week, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder of the international Schiller Institute, called for closing the financial markets to halt the inevitable collapse of the casino economy and reorganize it; to shut down the speculative financial operations that have been preying on humanity as a whole. She’s going to talk with us about that in just a moment. I just want to quote from the beginning of that statement, where she says:

It is absolutely clear, that after the roller coaster, dramatic losses of the financial markets in the recent days, the systemic crisis is spinning out of control. The only remedy to prevent a further devastation of the real economy, a dramatic increase of mass unemployment, and the loss of lives of the poor and vulnerable segments of the population is to close down the financial markets.

In the book entitled, Think Like Beethoven, which features several of the writings of Lyndon LaRouche on music, LaRouche wrote:

The 20th Century, from the very beginning, was a process of degeneration of humanity. If you were in the 20th Century every day of the week, you were becoming worse and worse and worse. That was the general tendency of society. Look at it. Look at in terms of physics, of physical science. The exact year, the year 1900, defined degeneration and the increasing degeneration of everything in terms of music, science, culture, and everything else.

It was this degeneration that LaRouche devoted his life to fighting against. He created organizations to fight against it. But in 1984, another organization was created; it was the Schiller Institute. This was the means by which the remedy for the illness of the 20th and 21st centuries was provided 36 years ago. The epidemic that we’re seeing in the form of the coronavirus, was actually spawned by a cultural epidemic. And that epidemic of degeneration that LaRouche spoke about, and the attempt to remedy that, has been the life’s work of our primary speaker today. She joins us from Germany, and she is Helga Zepp-LaRouche. We’re going to hear from her now.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche:

The Strategic Solution

Schiller Institute

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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Let me talk about the coronavirus pandemic. What has to be expected, what can be done, and what a real solution for all mankind can look like.

It is an extremely grave moment, and many people have woken up and recognized that after this pandemic, nothing will be like it was before, because some of the basic axioms of thinking are shattering right now. A lot of questions are unanswered, and naturally, a remedy is not yet in sight.

But, let me start with an actual reference to what I was just reading in the Washington Post. They were reporting that now health officials from New York and California are calling for restricting the testing of the coronavirus to healthcare workers and affected people who are hospitalized in an effort to conserve the too-few medical devices such as masks, ventilators, ICU beds, and so forth. Because basically, according to these officials, the battle to contain the virus has been lost, and the whole thing has now moved into a new phase.

Now, I don’t think that should be the final word on it, because Friday a week ago, when President Trump gave a press conference in front of the White House (where he had CEOs of the major drugstores), he announced that there would be mass production of test kits, and the parking lots of these stores would be rearranged for drive-through testing. I thought that this was a very important step, and absolutely going in the right direction. If you look at what happened with the coronavirus in China, for example, in Wuhan where the outbreak started, they have successfully stopped the transmission.

Two thousand people in China died between January and now, and now for three days, there were zero new cases. Dr. Tedros, who is the president of the World Health Organization, gave advice to all health officials around the world, saying the best way to combat this virus is test, test, test. Many other health officials have come to the conclusion that the best way to approach it is a proactive sampling to identify potentially positive people with the virus, isolate them, and quarantine them. Not sending them home, not self-isolation, but actual quarantine.

Wuhan, China and Vo, Italy

I think this lesson is important, because it proves that an outbreak can be stopped.

This was not only done in Wuhan, but it was also done in a little town in Italy, the city of Vo, which has 3,300 inhabitants, where the first deaths occurred in Italy. Immediately, they started to test everybody, retesting, finding the infected people, tracking down with whom they had been in contact, putting them in quarantine. Now also in the city of Vo, the transmission has been stopped. So, I think this is really something very important.

The reason why there is not the same kind of approach everywhere, is because there are not enough test kits. The WHO just announced that they have already distributed 1.5 million test kits worldwide, but that actually 100 million more would be needed. This goes along with many other steps; everybody is in a crash program to develop vaccines and so forth. I will speak about this a little later.

There is this incredible anti-China campaign going on in the United States and elsewhere, but especially in the United States, where people are talking about the Wuhan virus, the China virus. I don’t even want to repeat all the nasty things which have been said against China.

But I want you to pause for a moment, and just think. China may have made some mistakes in not recognizing it quickly and lost a few weeks due to some mistakes. But once the central government in China recognized the dimensions of the problem, it implemented the most draconian measures possible. They shut down the city of Wuhan and the province of Hubei, quarantining about 60 million people. They had the strictest of all rules.

Families were only allowed to go shopping every third day—only one family member; they were absolutely not allowed to move around. They closed down all the production, and they built I think all together 22 hospitals, several intensive care unit hospitals in a week. Some of them they have taken down already because they are no longer needed, because they were temporary hospitals. But with that approach, they succeeded.

If you remember, the initial press coverage and what politicians said, that China is taking away your human rights, what a dictatorship. There was a complete frenzy about that.

Now, two months later, after China really gained for the world a precious two months, you look around and what do you see? You see that the governments in Europe and in the United States did not really use these two months to prepare, to go into a crash program production for test kits, for ventilators, for protective masks, protective clothes, ICU beds. But they started very slowly. As a matter of fact, German Health Minister Spahn, at the beginning of the pandemic said, “Oh, this virus will not come to Germany.” In January he said the German health system is completely prepared, there is nothing to worry about. Now, people are scrambling because they have not used the time to really go into a full mobilization.

The Price of Failure

However, if you look at Italy right now, which already has now more people dead than China [from COVID-19]. You have a completely overwhelmed health system in the north of Italy in the Lombardy region, in Bergamo. Maybe you have seen these horrendous pictures where the army is now helping to bring away the corpses because they are just overwhelmed and can’t deal with it anymore. These are scenes from the 14th century; this is what happened during the Black Death. Boccaccio described that in the Decameron. We have some members in the north of Italy, and they are reporting the deep desperation of people now, because the deaths are just becoming too many.

But what is the result? Now, the governments are doing more or less exactly what China did in January. They have imposed a lockdown in Italy, in Spain, in France. In Germany: in Bavaria, in Saarland, in the city of Dresden, and yesterday on the TV, they as much as said that people have to expect that there will be a lockdown by the beginning of the week in all of Germany.

Obviously, China did do something right, and nobody talks about violations of human rights now in these European countries, because everybody knows that the quicker you act, the better. The trade union of health care workers in France, and the organization of young doctors have just sued the French government for not imposing strict enough measures. They say the only way to contain this problem is by doing exactly that.

This requires a whole set of different measures. I think the testing, testing as widely as possible, retesting, that is obviously the very first condition. You have to shut down almost all economic activity. You have to close it for a certain period of time. But obviously, this brings a whole a bunch of problems. One has to expect that this pandemic, because it is a worldwide phenomenon, has to be answered with a complete change in the world system. Because you cannot deal with it in the current circumstances.

It is now the agreed opinion of many of the top experts, like Professor Drosten, who is the virologist of the Charité Hospital in Berlin, an expert, he said they had to revise the idea that the virus would slow down during the spring and the summer because of the summer temperatures, because there would be waves of the virus mutations. And in that period, which is the winter period for the Southern Hemisphere, the virus would spread more quickly in continents like Africa or Latin America, Asian countries, and that is really something one absolutely has to take into account.

The Pandemic in the Southern Hemisphere

Look at the situation in Africa. Professor Drosten said that this pandemic is now developing in parallel in all countries in the world. It just has arrived in Southwest Asia, which has a high connectivity to Africa. These countries have no chance of social isolation. They may be able to wash their hands, but let us not forget, there are two billion people on the planet who do not have access to clean water. Professor Drosten said we will see pictures between June and August, which we only know so far from the movies. We will see scenes which we cannot even imagine, and he is not sure what this will do to us.

Now obviously, in Africa, in South Africa alone, you have several million people who are HIV-infected, 60% of those have tuberculosis in addition. Now, these are people who are in high-risk categories. In Africa alone, you have 60 million children who are malnourished, and then you have the locust plague spreading. You have now a hunger catastrophe in many African countries. So, you can imagine what devastation this will cause in Africa, and the reports we are getting from Latin America are pretty much going in the same direction.

This pandemic will come back; it will not never go away, but it will come back reinforced in the fall; and since it is very unlikely that we will have a vaccine by then—maybe we will have some therapeutic medications which will give some relief to the milder cases—but this thing will stay with us.

One of the big problems is that in the initial phase, you have to shut down the economy, because you have to minimize, under the present circumstances, the contact among people. The more you close down, the better chances you have to contain it. But then when these measures hopefully have success, like they have now in China, you have to reopen the economy, and to the degree you do that, the absolute danger exists that there is a resurgence of the pandemic. So, this will not go away easily, but this will probably remain; as of now, that’s what the experts say, probably until the summer of 2021; because it is expected that it will take that long to develop a vaccine.

Vaccines

There are about 20 different vaccines being worked on now worldwide, but you cannot just shorten that process for the very reason that was expressed by Dr. Mike Ryan from the WHO. He said there’s only one thing more dangerous than a bad virus, and that is a bad vaccine, and that we have to be very careful not to use something on a mass basis, when we do not yet know all the effects of the new vaccine.

Now obviously, to work on a vaccine is a high priority, and that vaccine, once it has been properly tested, must be made available to everybody. It must be available to the whole world. A very important component of this right now is China. They have some new cases, but mostly from people who have come back from other countries. They have activated what Dr. Tedros—in his speech at the World Belt and Road Forum in 2017 in Beijing—talked about, a Health Silk Road. He said there must be international cooperation among the countries cooperating with the Belt and Road Initiative, to set up health systems in every country, and China is doing exactly that.

They have sent now medical teams to Iran, Iraq, Italy, Spain. They have sent large amounts of masks, test kits, protective clothes, to Italy, to Spain, to France; even Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, said that the EU has to thank China for sending all of these things.

My deep conviction is that the United States should stop the anti-China campaign and take up the offer by President Xi Jinping to cooperate. There was some cooperation, and President Trump vacillates; sometimes he talks about the China virus, then he talks about his good friend Xi Jinping.

I think that latter approach should be taken, and I think President Trump should talk to President Xi, and they should just say, we are in a health emergency; you have to send millions of test kits so that we can do everything possible to get this under control. While naturally, the United States gears up its own production with the National Defense Production Act now being activated, with many firms being called on by the government. That should all be done, but time is of the essence.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has just announced that they are now helping both in terms of medical supplies, as well as in sending experts to 82 countries in the world. The Chinese equivalent of the CDC just had an emergency conference with representatives of 24 African countries, promising that they would help in this situation.

We’re in a race against time, but I think that the steps which need to be taken, in addition to these, are really in the field of finance and economics. There are many signs that the financial system was already bankrupt before this crisis erupted. We know that nothing was done since 2008 to remedy the underlying causes of the casino economy and why it crashed in 2008.

The Deeper Causes

Lyndon LaRouche was absolutely correct in saying this was a global breakdown crisis. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to save that system; it’s bankrupt and you have to replace it through his Four Laws. Through a new credit system, the New Bretton Woods system, and nothing else will help the situation; this has remained true in all of these years since 2008.

We also know that the Federal Reserve, since September 17, 2019, went into these incredible money-pumping operations, the so-called “repo overnight credits” which supposedly are being taken out of the system again every morning. But, if you look at the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, it is very clear that they have added several hundred billion dollars to this balance sheet, and that the situation is one of hyperinflationary money pumping.

One has to differentiate; I’m not saying that the measures that were taken by the EU—the ECB for example, that is providing $750 billion in various means, buying bonds, that governments are helping firms to stay afloat, they delay tax payments—that these measures are inappropriate. There are many measures which are very useful, and the Federal Reserve has done similar things. I think all together at one point, $1.2 trillion and more to come.

But there is the point that, while I’m not saying that these measures should not be given—including giving money directly to individuals to stay afloat, because what is the situation of unemployed and homeless people? All of that has to be really be taken care of, but that does not solve the problem. If you keep the casino economy, and if you keep this totally financially bankrupt system and just keep adding liquidity, it may be a supposed solution in the short term. But it is going to have a hyperinflationary effect not in the long term, not in the medium term, but relatively in the short term.

That is exactly what will happen worldwide. If you look at what happened in Germany in 1923 when hyperinflation destroyed the life savings of everybody, because money became increasingly worthless, that is the big danger. That is why I have called, as of a couple of days ago—in a short statement which was referenced by Dennis at the beginning—that you have to shut down the financial markets. If you keep this casino economy going, it will lead exactly to hyperinflation. I think that this must be done; you have to shut down the markets. There are many economists in the meantime who have called for similar measures. Also, the military analyst Pat Lang basically said the same thing, because of these wild fluctuations in the stock market; this is a holocaust that will not stop.

Then, you have to go for Glass-Steagall; now! Don’t wait! Don’t put it on the back burner. President Trump promised in the 2016 election campaign many times, that he would implement Glass-Steagall, and now is exactly the moment to do it.

Positive Lessons from History

What that means, is the exact measures of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, must be implemented exactly as before. My late husband always stressed, “Don’t change a thing.” The arguments that the markets today are “more complicated,” and they “need derivatives”—he always categorically rejected that.

You must put a firewall between the commercial banks and the investment banks; put the commercial banks under state protection so that they can continue to provide credit to the real economy: the small- and medium-sized firms, trade, retail; all these things which are essential for the real economy. But, you separate the investment banks completely. That means the investment banks should no longer have access to the savings of the commercial banks, and they should not be bailed out through taxpayer money.

Some of these products are complicated, because the pension funds and other valid things which belong to the life savings of the people, in the meantime, are interwoven with the derivatives and the whole casino aspect of the financial system. This is why you have to have a pause; you have to freeze everything and then a state commission has to investigate what is valid in those assets, and they have to be protected and separated. That may be complicated, but it has to be done. Then, obviously, if you eliminate the investment bank part of the financial system, you don’t have enough liquidity.

And this is why Mr. LaRouche said [this is the moment] when you have to re-establish Hamiltonian banking; you have to establish a national bank—not only in one country, but practically in all countries—and then you have to connect those national banks through fixed exchange rates. You have to make long-term reconstruction; reconstruction of the health sector, protecting and rebuilding sovereignty in the agricultural area to reconstruct war-torn regions, like Southwest Asia. Remedy for good the reasons why the African continent and other countries from the Southern Hemisphere are so vulnerable; which means you have to, in earnest, start industrializing these countries, the countries of Africa and countries of Latin America and Asia, and you have to help them to build infrastructure as the precondition for industrial production and the development of agriculture. And that way, you create the conditions to create a sufficient health system in every country.

Not One Simple Fix

All of that has to be done simultaneously, and obviously it will not go smoothly, but if you don’t go in this direction, the danger is that not only the coronavirus will come back with a vengeance, but there is absolutely nothing which will prevent the outbreak of new viruses and new diseases. And therefore, this is an absolute must that we correct the mistakes of the last several decades, especially the last 30 years of deregulation of the markets, of giving every right to the speculators and cutting down on the common good. Why is it that the United States and European health systems are in such poor condition?

Because there was a takedown; hospitals were shut down, everything was privatized, essential production was outsourced in cheap labor production, and warehouses where you would have stockpiles of testing kits, protective gear, that has all been abandoned. Hospitals were closed, and production was outsourced to China and India, which is why we in the so-called advanced countries now don’t have these kinds of resources. So that all has to be corrected.

I think this necessity to go back to the idea of the common good as the center of the economy is absolutely the question of the time. And I think we also have to reflect on what were the mistakes which were made, and we have one unavoidable measurement, and that is what Mr. LaRouche has said over the last 50 years, starting in 1971 when he pointed to the danger of a new depression, a new fascism, when Nixon decoupled the dollar from the gold standard and abandoned the fixed exchange rates. He said at that time, if you continue on that road, you will end up in a catastrophe, the danger of a depression, the danger of a new fascism.

In 1974, he established the Biological Holocaust Taskforce, which had the aim to study what would be the effect of the policies of the World Bank and the IMF in not allowing Third World countries to develop infrastructure, a health system, and of having the conditionalities which forced them to pay back their debt to these institutions and debt to the western banks before they would be allowed to invest in their own economies. That is the reason that Africa is still in that condition. That has to be faced.

IMF Worse Than Hitler

We said at the time, the policies of the IMF are worse than those of Hitler, and there was a big freak-out; I remember this very well, but it was absolutely on the mark. If you look at the millions of people who have died for no good reason but the lack of development, then that is justified.

This organization has produced in the following years, all together six major studies, which you can find either on the internet or find them by contacting us, where we developed what would be the result of these policies. Now, we have to really re-think what went wrong with the liberal system. There were a lot of attacks on China because it is a dictatorship, and well, I mean if you have a benevolent dictatorship, a benign dictatorship which is good for its citizens, which uplifts 850 million people out of poverty and now is helping 82 countries in the world to fight the pandemic, maybe this dictatorship is not so bad, and maybe it’s just a wrong way of naming it. Maybe it’s a Confucian state which is more concerned with the common good of the people.

Rather than huffing and puffing, people should really consider why China is successful, and why is it the West which is having these problems right now. China is not demonstrating schadenfreude, joy over the misery of others; to the contrary, and I think the most important lesson which we have to draw from this whole experience is, we have to learn to cooperate. There is no way that a geopolitical confrontation will win against the coronavirus or any other disease.

On January 3, I called for an emergency summit between President Trump, Putin, and Xi. This was because of the developments around [the assassination of Iranian General] Soleimani. In the meantime, President Putin has made a similar proposal by demanding a summit of the Permanent Five members of the UN Security Council to address urgent matters of all of humanity, and the other countries have already agreed that they will cooperate in such a summit.

And I think that the only way that we can get out of this present crisis, is that you have such an emergency summit which, as Mr. LaRouche specified many years ago, must include the United States, Russia, China, and India; because these four countries are representative of the whole world. And that is not an exclusive idea; other countries and governments can participate and support this, but you need that kind of power combination to really establish a different world system.

The Four Power Summit

I think that the first question is an emergency cooperation to fight the pandemic. I think China gave the code of the genome immediately after they established it, to all laboratories, and that was a first positive step in the right direction. There is already a lot of cooperation among many institutions such as that between Chinese scientific institutes and the Pasteur Institute of France. That must be strengthened, and all the laboratories and all the scientists must work together and not fight each other, because this is too big of a problem to be solved by any one country.

And then, naturally, the kinds of measures I just mentioned with the Four Laws of Mr. LaRouche: Glass-Steagall, a global Glass-Steagall system; a national bank in every country; and then cooperation in a New Bretton Woods System as Franklin D. Roosevelt intended; not the Bretton Woods system which was established by Truman and Churchill, which more or less excluded the credits to the developing sector. Mr. LaRouche said emphatically that the New Bretton Woods must provide credit for the industrialization of the developing countries.

I think that such a summit is possible. I think that is the way to go. We have to reach a New Paradigm in the cooperation of mankind, and I think if we go in this direction and also pick up on the expression of the true humanity we have seen—as for example the leading doctor of the medical team from Wuhan, who said what has really gotten these doctors and nurses through this very difficult period was a sense of love, of love for your family, love for your nation, but especially love for mankind, and that an individual person is mortal, but love is immortal.

Another example is, the many expressions where people in the beginning in Italy were singing Classical songs from their balconies, giving each other courage. Now, I have been told by our members that has stopped, because they are all in mourning, because the crisis is so big. Other places have offered—since orchestras can no longer perform in theaters because they are shut down—they are now performing Classical music to be aired on the internet for free.

There is a clear understanding that in a crisis like that you need the inspiration of beauty, you need the inspiration of the highest expression of Classical culture because you must give people the inner strength to get through such very, very difficult times.

The Power of Beauty

That brings me to my final point, that we must come out of this crisis by throwing out all this garbage which has dominated our culture in the last decades. All the ugliness of so-called modern culture, the ugliness of the youth culture, most of the popular culture just should absolutely go on the garbage heap, and we have to have a renaissance of Classical music.

And the beauty of it is that this year is the Beethoven year. And while it is very, very horrible that most or all of the events of the Beethoven year in Germany have been closed down because of the pandemic, that does not mean you cannot listen to many good performances from previous times. And you can really listen to Beethoven every day to get the inspiration and the strength to think like Beethoven, as Mr. LaRouche wrote or titled one of his articles, and elevate yourself to the kind of thinking where you think like Beethoven or Schiller. “All men become brethren,” that’s the text from the Ninth Symphony, “This kiss for the whole world.”

And that beauty of the chorus of the fourth part of the Ninth Symphony is the spirit with which we should come out of these crises as one humanity. If we do that, if we unite as one human species, through an incredible joint effort in love for all of humanity, I think we can, if we get over this period, really enter a new era of history, of mankind, where we can actually, truly say that this is a human world and we will do things completely differently from here on.

What Has To Be Built—

USA, Worldwide

by David Christie

EIRNS

David Christie

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I will give a brief sense of what needs to be done here in Seattle, one of the first North American COVID-19 hot spots, and nationally and internationally. We have to consider this as a global crisis, and the solution from a global standpoint.

As we know, the most effective way to deal with this from the beginning, is the “shelter in place” or quarantine, that we saw was so effective in Wuhan, and now other nations like Italy are being forced to go into. It should be noted that, still here in Washington state, as of this morning at least, there has been no “shelter in place” directive that has been ordered. California, as well as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and other states are following suit in imposing that.

But it is odd to me that in the state which has the most deaths—I think we have about 40% of the national deaths, about 83 at last count—there is no such directive; you see the numbers go up by the hour. You have to wonder if this is— [Washington State Governor] Jay Inslee ran on a campaign of climate change and certainly the Green infliction, the Green genocide is alive and well on the West Coast. So, either that, or maybe it’s the marijuana in terms of not being able to get a grip on reality. But whatever it is, this is certainly a problem.

Another key aspect of combatting the virus and its effects, is our medical response, and we see the terrible situation of the woeful destruction of our healthcare delivery system over the decades. The closing down of hospitals. In 1975, the U.S. had about 1.5 million hospital beds available. The number presently is somewhere around 925,000. We have about 575,000 fewer hospital beds than we did in 1975, with a third more people. So, obviously that’s a significant decline.

Look at the declines we saw under Obama—I think there were about 160 hospitals lost under the Obama Administration. And last year—2019, there were 47 hospitals closed in the United States. What this shows is the consequences of accepting the neo-liberal, British imperial economic policy. You get the collapse of your physical economy, and degradation and disregard for human life.

Just to give a sense of what we need to do, let’s just follow through on the question of proper levels of provision of hospital infrastructure, either for emergency or routine medical services. In California, while it does have the needed shelter-in-place policy enacted, Gov. Newsome is calling for the provision of hospital beds, in numbers woefully inadequate for the need. He said, that according to his projections, 22.5 million people could be infected in California: that’s out of a population of about 40 million. That’s if the virus is left unchecked, so maybe those numbers may be off, and hopefully they are. But even just with those numbers, 15-20% of those people are going to require hospitalization. And the levels of California’s hospital beds per capita are as bad as everywhere else around the country; it’s about 2 beds per 1000 people.

Just to give a sense of perspective, before the crisis set in in China, in Wuhan, the per capita hospital beds were about 4.3 beds per 1000 people. So, we’re obviously starting out far behind the curve. In Wuhan alone, they added some 10,000 hospital beds in a relatively short period of time. We saw one hospital was built in six days.

Emergency Measures, Hospital Construction

We need an emergency mobilization. I’m going to present just a sense of the long-term arc of what would be required to get to a Hill-Burton standard, just to give a sense of both the way in which we’re going to get hit by this thing in terms of overwhelming the health care delivery system at present, as well as what has to be the long-term perspective.

Hill-Burton refers to the 1946 U.S. Hospital Survey and Construction Act—named for its bi-partisan co-sponsors, Senators Lister Hill (D) and Harold Burton (R)—which mandated all 3,000+ counties to have hospital beds on a ratio in the range of 5 (rural) and 4.5 (urban) per 1000. This is the standard Wuhan had as baseline, when COVID-19 broke out, and they added to the number of beds. But the U.S. nationally is down to an average of about 2.5 beds per 1000, with many counties having no beds at all. Washington and Oregon have 1.5 to 1.9 beds, among the lowest in the nation. Many counties—especially in the Farmbelt, have no hospital beds at all.

Well, we should be building emergency hospital services, and proper hospitals as quickly as possible, and obviously taking all kinds of contingency emergency measures.

We do have the Navy’s two hospital ships that are being deployed. USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort. The Comfort to New York, and the Mercy to Los Angeles. They won’t have infection-isolation capacity, but will help the surge capacity by freeing up scarce on-shore beds for surge. There are obviously emergency needs for things like MASH-style hospitals that can be popped up, and Army-style hospitals that can be popped up in parking lots and so forth. The deployment of the National Guard for these types of missions, plus FEMA medical disaster response, the Army Corps of Engineers, and so on, is now in discussion.

But from the standpoint of understanding where we are in terms of the longer future, or where China was, but also where we need to be going to get to Hill-Burton standards, we would have to add about another 575,000 hospital beds in the nation. This seems to be a daunting task, but it would just be getting us back to the level we were in 1975 of about 1.5 million beds. That would get us more or less near the Hill-Burton standard, which is significant. Those 575,000 hospital beds would mean about 2,000 large hospitals, based on historically lower population figures. Obviously, that’s a lot of work, a lot of bricks, a lot of material that’s going to be required to do that.

The other side of this task, is to meet the demand for the infrastructure it takes to support this scale of hospital-centered health care delivery, meaning, at baseline, the energy and water requirements. Hospitals are intensive in terms of energy requirements. It is estimated that at present levels of the 925,000 hospital beds, just to operate them requires 458 trillion BTUs. We would actually have to add to the grid. We have to add about 9600 MW to our electricity grid. That’s about 1.5 times the output of the Grand Coulee Dam; that’s about 10 of the Westinghouse pressure water nuclear reactors. That’s obviously a huge task in its own right, apart from the simple construction job of building the hospital structures.

We would also have to add about 85 billion gallons of water a year for the water requirements for these added hospitals. That’s a lot of water.

Deploy to Build Capacity, Productivity

From a long-term perspective, we should take this crisis as an opportunity to go back to the approach of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps and such programs. Get the young people deployed, who have been working until now in mostly worthless things.

Mr. LaRouche had been very vocal about this: an FDR-style mobilization is certainly at the core of his Four Laws. Younger people should be employed for the longer-term perspective of building what we need in this nation. They can be deployed internationally to help in Africa, to help in South America, to help in these places that are going to get overwhelmed; and to give them a much larger sense of mission.

To get to Hill-Burton standards internationally, would require perhaps 35 million hospital beds! That’s total; that’s not adding an additional 35 million, but I don’t know what the existing totals are. From place to place, there is great variation, and too often, complete absence of facilities. This is woefully the case in Africa, large parts of South and Central America, and some other locations. For these 35 million beds, it means about 116,000 total hospitals.

Again, understanding that there’s obviously tens of thousands of beds in existence already, but for rough appreciation of the gear-up necessary to support 35 million beds, let us consider that they might require on the order of 358 more gigawatts: that’s more than 50 Grand Coulee Dams, or 360 Westinghouse reactors.

This is an amazing amount of energy to be added to the system. I think we should deploy these small modular reactors, now in the works. I think we should go the frontiers of what our grid should be, and certainly the question of nuclear power, as we move towards fusion, is obviously going to give the highest skill level to the economy overall.

NuScale Power and some other companies have new 60 MW reactors that can literally be put on the back of semi-trailer trucks and shipped where they need to be sent. Also, they can be rolled out in a factory-style manufacturing process.

The water requirement for this modern scale of hospital services worldwide is 5 trillion gallons of water a year for its operation. You’re looking at about half of the full capacity of Lake Meade; that’s a lot of water. It should be an international mobilization to build these hospitals, so through collaboration we become capable of dealing with something huge like this.

Improving the physical economy and engaging in this physical economic mobilization, require all these—medical facilities, energy, water—and other aspects of infrastructure which uplift the potential relative population density. This puts mankind and the biosphere in a position such that lower life forms that are now plaguing us, are not going to have the ability to thrive at the expense of our species. We are taking dominion over nature. LaRouche has certainly always had that perspective; that’s why he highlighted Vernadsky in his Four Laws.

This gives the larger perspective. We have to think about this as an international mission; this is for humanity as a whole. I think that will give us, as Helga said, the understanding of the importance of this agapic mission. We will have the proper passion that will be required to deal with this mobilization.

Beauty Is the Food of the Soul

by Diane Sare

Schiller Institute

Diane Sare

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I can report on the Schiller Institute NYC chorus, which finally restarted—of course, it’s taken everyone some time to get their feet on the ground with all of the very dramatic changes in our lives with the quarantine and the restrictions on activities, which I will underscore, are very necessary right now until we know the magnitude of this disease, and until we actually defeat it.

We did finally have our first online rehearsal of the Missa Solemnis. Beethoven is extremely important, not only because he was, up to the present time, the greatest Classical composer that has existed, and he was the greatest composer because of his extraordinary love of mankind. It’s not the case that you can be a great artist and not have a passionate commitment to the fate of mankind as a whole.

I think music, particularly Classical music, in this moment is going to be extremely important to the population. Because what is about to happen to us is something which is really hard to imagine, but as I think Helga may have mentioned already, in Spain, in Italy, in Peru, they are now calling out the military to help remove the corpses, because the morgues have overflowed.

How does one deal with a situation like that emotionally? How do you find the strength to remain human, to not be jaded or cynical or flippant?

We know from studying the Middle Ages and the plague that people had peculiar ways of responding to it; either by becoming completely hedonistic and saying, “Oh well, I’m going to be dead in a few days anyway, I’m going to do whatever I want.” Or, by running around beating themselves and saying, “We’ve all sinned, and this is our punishment,” and continuing to spread the plague in that way. Neither of those is an appropriate response. What we also see by the nature of this disease, is that there is really no such thing as being isolated.

And for younger people who thought that they were immune to this, we’re finding now in Italy and the United States, that many younger people—people under the age of 50, who don’t have pre-existing conditions—are becoming severely ill. So, everything that we think we know, we have to throw out the next day.

Beethoven Speaks To Us All

When Beethoven composed the Missa Solemnis, it was supposed to be for his patron, who had been consecrated as the Archbishop. Beethoven was really committed to making sure that the meaning of the words in the mass was conveyed in the music. So, it ended up taking him four years to compose the Missa Solemnis; and the piece ended up being an hour and a half long. I think after this composition, many people were quite hesitant to compose another mass, because it was thought, “Who could deal with this more profoundly, more thoroughly?” And I think this mass is going to be something absolutely crucial to be performed, once we have come to the other side of this, which we are going to do.

The rehearsal went very well. I was very pleased with responses from members of the chorus. If you’ve sung in a chorus, it’s a really delightful social process. You may not really know a whole lot about what the members do outside of the chorus, but because each of you is singing your voice part, there is a very deep appreciation for what everyone brings to the whole. So, it’s a wonderful social process, and a lot of us were missing it terribly.

When I sent out the email that said we were going to be doing this online, people were emailing back smiley faces and five exclamation points. I can report that the attendance at our first online rehearsal was absolutely excellent. I think we’re going to be able to accomplish a great deal.

Also, for people watching who want to participate in the Schiller Institute NYC chorus, now that we’re holding rehearsals online, I think many of you can join and start learning the Missa Solemnis with us. When we get through this, we’ll be very impressed with what we have learned, and how big the chorus is.

So my commitment, as I think everyone’s is, is not only that we defeat this virus, but that when we come to the other side of what is going to be a horrific crisis, each one of us is a much better person than we were when the crisis began.

Zepp-LaRouche: I think that is the spirit which we have to have.

I would hope that the weakness of the present breakdown crisis turns into a cultural renaissance. I really think Leibniz was right: a great evil always evokes in people the desire for a greater good. So, join with the New York chorus and learn to sing the Missa Solemnis.

EDITORIAL

America and the World Go to War Against the Common Foe

by Bruce Director

March 20—For the first time since 1945, the United States is in a real war. Not the endless, imperial geopolitical wars that the U.S. was roped into by the post-World War II remnants of the British Empire, but a real war against a real enemy. Not a human enemy, but an invisible enemy: a virus that is threatening the health and well-being of all mankind. It is being fought in alliance with over 170 nations that are also fighting the disease. The international collaboration now emerging among the nations out of necessity, creates the basis for reversing the failed policy of sanctions. Expanded cooperation with Russia and China in the area of scientific development is especially urgent.

President Trump has assumed the mantle of a war-time President. The World War II economic and political mobilization has been invoked by political and business leaders from across the American economic and political spectrum.

Rapid changes are emerging in the axiomatic assumptions underlying American economic policy. The monetarist-debt system that started its long unraveling more than 50 years ago, is collapsed. Its proponents, discredited but not disregarded since the 2007-2008 financial crash, are now revealed to be the fools they always were. A return to the policies that made the United States the science-oriented industrial powerhouse that won the last war, is now understood to be a matter of survival. How to get there, is the only real question worth discussing.

The dramatic collapse of financial markets has led many to focus on the need for emergency financial reforms. Certainly, the financial turmoil has been exacerbated by the over-ripe rottenness of the system that existed long before the emergence of COVID-19. It was made worse by the Obama administration’s decision to bail out Wall Street and the City of London instead of rebuilding the physical economy. But, unlike 2008, the crisis at hand is not primarily a financial crisis. It is a wartime crisis. Physical economic measures are required to meet the emergency, as well as a long-term perspective to rebuild and reorganize the American economy on the basis of scientific and technological progress.

During World War II, the nation could rely on the massive infrastructure development that FDR had implemented previously. Today, the decades of globalization and monetarism have devastated the U.S. physical economy and scattered vital supply chains throughout the world in pursuit of cheap labor, which, in addition to being morally wrong, created a now evident national security crisis. Those who ridiculed Trump’s efforts to reverse the effects of globalization and his insistence on bypassing the World Trade Organization and other multilateralist arrangements, in favor of direct, nation-to-nation trade deals, look very short-sighted in retrospect.

Nothing less than a return to a full-set industrial economy in the United States, and all other countries, is sufficient to both meet the current crisis, and secure the long-term future. Already there are calls for a new national industrial policy, and the creation of new government-directed funding mechanisms to gear up production of needed goods. Financial reforms that would otherwise be unthinkable, can be implemented as wartime measures. To implement this requires a shift in the underlying axioms of today’s generations. Tinkering with financial markets, even the implementation of urgently needed changes, will not restart the physical economy. A wartime mobilization will. Under such conditions, urgently needed financial reforms, specifically the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche, can be forced through as a necessity.

LaRouche often said that only those who lived through the World War II experience as adults had any sense of what a functioning physical economy really is. Although the number of those with such experience has now dwindled, the principles on which the war mobilization was based, are embedded in the American culture, waiting to be called forth, provided today’s generation can recognize that axiomatic change is what is required.

He set forth in his voluminous legacy the axiomatic shift that must now take place. In his post-war study of physical economy, he focused on the causal relationship between creative scientific and artistic discoveries and physical economic progress, the which must be the basis for economic policy.

In a 1994 essay, “The Coming Disintegration of the Financial Markets,” LaRouche reflected on his post-war studies:

The sum total of the lessons for statecraft from history and pre-history, is that creative, revolutionary progress in scientific and analogous knowledge is not an occurrence on the periphery of man’s vision: It is the essence of human existence, it is what distinguishes us as the Mosaic heritage specifies, as in the image of God the Creator by virtue of our developable individual potential for creative reason.

The anomalous aspect of the mathematical picture of a growing economy is that the essence of the economy is not the production and consumption of objects, but rather the upward transformation of the cycle of consumption for production of the means of improved human existence. The creative powers of reason are the source, the cause for that growth upon which the avoidance of social collapse depends absolutely. The anomalous aspect of the economic process is that the characteristic feature of a viable economic policy of performance is human creative reason, that principle of reason which the economic doctrine of the late John von Neumann and the contemporary “Chaos” theorists implicitly deny to exist.

Earlier in the same piece, LaRouche said:

During the late 1940s, after the 1930s depression, and following the war, experiencing the recession of 1947-48, and the 1949 economic recovery sparked by the Cold War revival of the Korea conflict, all we veterans who were reasonably sentient were aware of the anomalous fact that, during the twentieth century to date, the only prosperous periods had been those associated with relatively larger expenditures for the costs of war. During those days, the U.S. and other governments were frequently charged with seeking warfare as a way of organizing an economic recovery! Thinking about the story behind that apparent economic anomaly did not make warfare less wasteful of life and material; tracing out a few economic facts made clear the reasons for the anomalous appearances.

The characteristic of modern regular warfare is exceptionally high rates of technological attrition. Technologies are developed during a few years of forced-draft, which would have required decades otherwise. As some of the Manhattan Project’s veterans described this to me in some detail, the intensity of scientific collaboration in that undertaking packed decades into about five years of research and development …

The top of the mountain is fundamental (axiomatic-revolutionary) progress in science. Slightly down the slope, there is the elaboration of these most crucial discoveries at the summit of the mountain into subsidiary discoveries. At both levels, the new discovery prompts the design of demonstration-of-principle experiments. As these experiments are refined, the lessons of the successful experimental designs are taken to a place a short distance down the slope from the two levels of scientific work: Here we encounter the transformation of the successful experimental designs into machine-tool or equivalent principles. Downstream from the advanced machine-tool-design sector, we have the new machine-tools revolutionizing product designs and productive powers of labor at the base of the mountain, where production occurs.

This is the process that is beginning to take shape. A huge effort to develop therapeutics and vaccines is underway, in private and government laboratories, in the U.S. and elsewhere. Previously unheard-of rates of progress are being reported. A vaccine is already being tested on humans after only a few weeks. Bio-technologies that have been under development over the recent decades are being pushed into overdrive to develop therapeutics to treat the virus. Exemplary is the work of the U.S. pharma company, Regeneron, which had already developed a unique method of using genetically engineered mice to produce human anti-bodies, which are then harvested and mass produced for use in the development of medicines.

This process has already led to the development of successful treatments for several chronic diseases, but even Regeneron’s accelerated process usually takes years from development to final product. In the fight to develop a treatment for COVID-19, Regeneron expects to have a candidate available for mass production and trial by early summer, a period of mere months. A panoply of new scientific developments is being employed in the fight, in the U.S., China and Europe, which will undoubtedly have applications far beyond the immediate emergency.

Further down the economic mountain is the rapid retooling of existing industries to manufacture the goods needed for the effort. In his March 20 press conference, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, once an intense Democrat opponent of Trump, invoked the World War II mobilization to announce his efforts to get New York-based manufacturers to retool their factories to make much-needed ventilators, protective equipment and supplies. Displaying the famous image of Rosie the Riveter, Cuomo said, “Ventilators in this fight are like the missiles of World War II.”

President Trump also stressed the ability of American industries to retool their production capabilities to produce the goods needed for the fight. This has always been a feature of the U.S. economy, as witnessed in the World War II mobilization. During the 2008 financial crisis, and elsewhere, LaRouche repeatedly called for the retooling of the U.S. automobile and aerospace industries to meet the urgent need to rebuild American infrastructure. Obama ignored LaRouche’s recommendation, and instead, decided to downsize the production facilities and bail out the investors.

This time it can be different. Many U.S. companies have already begun the process of retooling to make ventilators, personal protective equipment and other needed supplies. Companies that may need temporary government backing, such as the airlines, will only receive it on condition that the support be used to back the employees and not the executives and investors.

These measures are, of course, small relative to the size of what must be rebuilt as the virus is conquered, but they represent a shift in thinking, that, if understood and nurtured, could portend a paradigm shift. Under these conditions, financial reforms of the type demanded by LaRouche, such as a return to Glass-Steagall banking, national banking, a credit system and a New Bretton Woods system, are ripe for implementation, either de facto or de jure, as war-time measures.

Similarly, a four-power agreement among the U.S., Russia, China and India to establish a new set of international relations is an immediate prospect. The original Bretton Woods agreement was the result of a wartime conference convened to lay the foundation for the post-war recovery. A New Bretton Woods agreement to lay the foundation for this post-war recovery can grow out of the international collaboration now emerging to fight the virus.

LaRouche often spoke of the sudden change in thinking that occurred in the U.S. on the morning of—and days immediately following—the attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the axioms that had seemed to be so solid in the past, were no longer valid. People were forced to look toward the future, instead of clinging to the past. Citizens and their leaders became instruments of a higher mission. This must happen again today.