Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 14, April 3, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- EDITORIAL Dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Apollo Mission to Save Mankind

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 14, April 3, 2020

- I. How Lyndon LaRouche Foresaw this Pandemic

- LaRouche Task Force Warned Zero-Growth, Speculation and Austerity Cause Pandemics

- The Galactic Science of Human Progress: Defending Humanity from Pandemics by Megan Beets

- II. The Health Silk Road

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Stark Reality: Act in Solidarity, Or Face Hell on Earth

- China Unleashes the Health Silk Road Against Corona Pandemic by Hussein Askary, board member of BRIX, the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden

- COVID-19 Eruption Challenges Take-Down of U.S. Healthcare System by Richard Freeman and Mary Jane Freeman

- G20 Teleconference May Be Precursor to Economic and Scientific Joint Action by Paul Gallagher

How Lyndon Larouche

Foresaw this Pandemic

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

ON THE WEB

e-mail: eirns@larouchepub.com

www.larouchepub.com

www.executiveintelligencereview.com

www.larouchepub.com/eiw

Webmaster: John Sigerson

Assistant Webmaster: George Hollis

Editor, Arabic-language edition: Hussein Askary

EIR (ISSN 0273-6314) is published weekly

(50 issues), by EIR News Service, Inc.,

P.O. Box 17390, Washington, D.C. 20041-0390.

(571) 293-0935

European Headquarters: E.I.R. GmbH,

Bahnstrasse 4, 65205, Wiesbaden, Germany

Tel: 49-611-73650

Homepage: http://www.eir.de

e-mail: info@eir.de

Director: Georg Neudecker

Montreal, Canada: 514-461-1557

eir@eircanada.ca

Denmark: EIR - Danmark, Sankt Knuds Vej 11, basement left, DK-1903 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Tel.: +45 35 43 60 40, Fax: +45 35 43 87 57. e-mail: eirdk@hotmail.com.

Mexico City: EIR, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 242-2

Col. Agricultura C.P. 11360

Delegación M. Hidalgo, México D.F.

Tel. (5525) 5318-2301

eirmexico@gmail.com

Copyright: ©2020 EIR News Service. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited.

Canada Post Publication Sales Agreement #40683579

Postmaster: Send all address changes to EIR, P.O. Box 17390, Washington, D.C. 20041-0390.

Signed articles in EIR represent the views of the authors, and not necessarily those of the Editorial Board.

EDITORIAL

Dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche:

Apollo Mission to Save Mankind

On March 28, 2020 a Town Hall Meeting on the subject of “An Apollo Mission to Save Mankind—Building the Health Silk Road,” featuring Helga Zepp-LaRouche, was held over the Internet. Joining Mrs. LaRouche were speakers from New Jersey, Houston, Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area, all of whom reported conditions in their locations. A video of the meeting can be found here.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche began her opening presentation by referencing the March 25 conference call of the leaders of the G20 nations and the subsequent private discussion between President Trump and President Xi of China. She cited the results of these calls as very positive initiatives in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular she named “four very constructive proposals” put forward by China’s President Xi Jinping, namely (1) that the G20 should jointly help countries which have weak public health systems, (2) the creation of a global network of control and treatment for the virus crisis, (3) supporting the WHO (World Health Organization) to keep treatment and protocols of that treatment enforced, and (4) the development of a macro-economic and policy coordination of all countries.

Later, in the private call with President Trump, Xi urged a stop to all confrontation worldwide. This latter proposal was reiterated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said this is a crisis where you cannot have every man for himself. He called for a special fund under the IMF which would give credits for this support of the health systems of all participating countries. He also proposed to establish so-called “green corridors,” which has not so much to do with ecology Green, rather the idea is to have open corridors without sanctions, without tariffs, to bring humanitarian help to all the countries that need it.

Mrs. LaRouche praised these developments. At the same time, she stressed that the only effective and permanent solution to this crisis is for nations to adopt “the full program envisioned by my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche: the Four Laws, a New Bretton Woods system, an immediate end to the casino economy, and a credit system that will finance a World Health Silk Road, meaning that every single country in the world must be supported to build up an adequate health system, no less than it used to be with the Hill-Burton standard in the United States.”

Speaking of the need for a Health Silk Road, she stated,

This is the strongest point I want to make. We must understand that we have to have a global health system, hospitals in every country. We have to have the same kind of treatment that fortunately is now starting to be implemented in hotspots in the United States such as New York and other areas. But you need that same approach in every country, otherwise it will come back. This is a virus that is a pandemic. It does not respect borders or the idea of each nation for itself.

Dialogue with America

Following Mrs. LaRouche’s presentation to the Internet Town Hall Meeting, there was extensive discussion. Dennis Speed (New York/New Jersey), Susan Kokinda (Detroit), Kesha Rogers (Houston) and Michael Steger (San Francisco Bay Area) all gave reports on current developments in their own locales, as well as insights into the background and the solution to the crisis.

In response to a question from Dennis Speed, Mrs. LaRouche described the twin oligarchical evils that have been unleashed on the world since 1971. On the one hand, since Richard Nixon’s abolition of the Bretton Woods System in August of that year, we have seen the near-global triumph of monetarist financial methods and unchecked financial speculation—all at the expense of needed investments in science, industry and the physical economy.

This same period also witnessed the beginnings of an oligarchical drive for a new cultural paradigm which sought to end scientific progress and impose Malthusianism. In that regard, Mrs. LaRouche mentioned her intervention against John D. Rockefeller III at the 1974 UN Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, the issuance of NSSM [National Security Study Memorandum] 200 by Henry Kissinger, calling for world-wide population reduction, and the issuance by the oligarchical Club of Rome of its completely fraudulent book, Limits to Growth.

In response to a question from Michael Steger, Zepp-LaRouche stated that her husband had already forecast the type of crisis we are in today, when he established a Biological Holocaust Taskforce, which led to the publishing of six large reports in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s about the danger of pandemics and what must be done about it. She stated,

We are now paying the price for the world not having listened to his warnings. I don’t think that the world, after this crisis, will ever go back to the idea of only maximizing financial profit and sacrificing taxpayers’ money to bail out banks over and over again. I think that is already a question of the past. I think this system is finished; it will not come back....

Everything will now depend on the whole world not going under, with this collapsed monetary and financial system. This is why we need a mass mobilization of a lot of people, preferably also a lot of young people, taking to heart the immoral conditions of the world, who will start mobilizing to remedy it.... I think the system is gone; it cannot be revived.

The question now is, can we bring the solutions into the consciousness of enough people in time, so that we don’t end up in a huge Dark Age collapse and chaos? The mechanisms for the solutions exist. There now is a good connection between Trump and Xi Jinping—this is very important; I would say, this is the most important, actually. Putin is demanding a UN General Assembly initiative in the same direction.

Bringing Back Progress

Susan Kokinda provided a graphic picture of the decades-long destruction of the productive power of the city of Detroit and asked, “How can we revive and harness that machine-tool spirit?”

In reply, Mrs. LaRouche pointed to the cultural change already visibly underway:

I think the crisis will lead to people saying we need to have production in our own country. The machine-tool principle means that you introduce the most modern, most innovative, scientific and technological results into agricultural and industrial production ... And that will mean that we will have to apply the principles of physical science to economics and to politics. And that is essentially the reform that will be absolutely necessary. People will start to like to learn again, to like to study again.

LPAC-TV

Kesha Rogers, longtime LaRouche PAC spokesperson on issues of space travel and colonization, addresses the town hall meeting from an astronaut cardboard cutout prop.

---------------------------------------------

The remarks of Kesha Rogers continued on this subject. She provided a sweeping overview of the advances in space technologies and asked Helga to “address the future of mankind from the standpoint of these advancements in technologies that LaRouche forecast, and why it is that we can leap forward into that beautiful future.”

Mrs. LaRouche responded:

I think the concentration on space travel and space research is what can spark the optimism of people. It makes clear that we’re not living in a closed system. The entire green ecology movement, the Malthusian movement, all based on the axioms that the Earth is finite ...

We have to make new discoveries, discoveries of physical principles, to better find out how our universe actually works.

And that instills optimism in people: Remember, it’s been less than year since we had the 50th anniversary of the Apollo manned landing on the Moon, and just think! What absolute joy existed around the globe, how optimistic people were, and that was thoroughly justified. I find it quite interesting that some Chinese scientists said that they will try to stick to their next lunar missions, despite the coronavirus crisis. I think this is extremely important....

We should not go back to the old paradigm in this crisis, but we should do exactly the opposite: We should focus on the next steps of the infrastructural development of our planet, so that soon we will have fully developed every continent. And then the next phase of infrastructure development will be putting villages on the Moon as a necessary step toward building a city on Mars.

There were many other questions, including from audience members, and as this remarkable dialogue proceeded, many different aspects of the crisis and the challenge before us were addressed.

Mrs. LaRouche’s message is summed up in a comment she made near the close of the meeting:

Values will have to change. This crisis has one hopeful benefit. It will force people to think about what is important in life, what are the things that last. What is it that you leave behind as a result of your life once you are no longer here? Have you contributed something to the universal development to mankind? And if you had a majority of people thinking that way, no empire could exist, because empire depends on people not thinking. So the best antidote is to become a thinking human being and generate that quality among as many of your colleagues and friends as you can. And hopefully, we can come out as a true republic, and true republics in many parts of the world, and empires will be buried with the remnants of this crisis.

EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 14, April 3, 2020

Cover This Week

EIRNS/Philip Ulanowsky

Lyndon LaRouche speaks at a conference of his movement in January 1983.

---------------------------------------------

HOW LYNDON LAROUCHE FORESAW THIS PANDEMIC

2 EDITORIAL

Dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche:

Apollo Mission to Save Mankind

I. HOW LYNDON LAROUCHE FORESAW THIS PANDEMIC

6 LAROUCHE TASK FORCE WARNED

Zero-Growth, Speculation and Austerity Cause Pandemics

10 The Galactic Science of Human Progress: Defending Humanity from Pandemics

by Megan Beets

II. THE HEALTH SILK ROAD

14 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Stark Reality: Act in Solidarity, Or Face Hell on Earth

22 China Unleashes the Health Silk Road Against Corona Pandemic

by Hussein Askary

27 COVID-19 Eruption Challenges Take-Down of U.S. Healthcare System

by Richard Freeman and Mary Jane Freeman

33 G20 Teleconference May Be Precursor to Economic and Scientific Joint Action

by Paul Gallagher

Schiller Institute Conference on the Internet

April 25-26, 2020

Mankind’s Existence Now Depends on

the Establishment of a New Paradigm!

PANEL 1 The Urgent Need to Replace Geopolitics with a New Paradigm in International Relations

PANEL 2 Creativity as the Distinctive Characteristic of Human Culture: The Need for a Classical Renaissance

PANEL 3 For a Better Understanding of How Our Universe Functions

PANEL 4 The Science of Physical Economy

More information is available here.

I. How Lyndon LaRouche Foresaw this Pandemic

LaRouche Task Force Warned

Zero-Growth, Speculation and Austerity Cause Pandemics

We present here edited excerpts from the findings of the Biological Holocaust Task Force and from the EIR Special Report, Economic Breakdown and the Threat of Global Pandemics, dated July 1, 1985. The Task Force was established by Lyndon LaRouche in the summer of 1974, to investigate the threat of global pandemics, and worked through the autumn of that year, presenting its findings at the founding meeting of the Fusion Energy Foundation, in New York City in December 1974. This material first appeared in EIR on Oct. 24, 2014, pp. 13-16. Most of quotes from that 1974 Task Force can be found in the editors’ introduction to Lyndon LaRouche’s 2001 book, The Economics of the Noosphere.

LaRouche’s 1974 Warning

Two fundamental points in that 1974 study stand out: First, this was not a forecast about Mother Nature. The enemy then, as today, was the financier oligarchy, and the policies they were attempting to impose, genocidal policies on an immense scale.

Second, it focused on the ecological system as a whole, for reasons that were explained at the outset of the study.

The way the ecology as a whole operates is from two fundamental principles. First of all, it is a global phenomenon. It is impossible to view it as the zero-growthers view it, as a mere collection of individual organisms, a mere collection of 3 billion human beings, X million of cattle, sheep, and so on, of many other species. It is a single global system. Second of all, it is a global system that has to evolve to higher and higher levels of energy flows, and of rates of development of these energy flows.

The study emphasized that the axiomatic assumptions of the zero-growth advocates were scientifically wrong, dead wrong! The authors of the forecast, as reported in the introduction to Lyndon LaRouche’s 2001 book, The Economics of the Noosphere, explained this point at the outset.

What we are faced with is not a return to an earlier mode of functioning, not a return to the way things were a hundred years ago.... In this zero-growth view, we have an equilibrium that we can lower the level of society to ... and stabilize the situation at that level. That is the zero-growth view.... That is completely and fundamentally wrong in an epistemological sense because there is no such equilibrium. There is no such development of the ecology except in the existence of such evolutionary or degenerative processes. There is no balance point between the two. The actual realization and practice, therefore, of zero-growth ideas is the ecological holocaust, which is now beginning, and which it is our task to halt.

CGTN

“Disease attacks the weakest, least-resistant area, when that area is surrounded by relatively low levels of resistance, even though the resistance is higher in surrounding areas than in the ‘weak-link’ area.” Here, South Sudanese refugees in Sudan, December 2016.

---------------------------------------------

The 1974 LaRouche forecast prefigured the emergence of previously unknown pathogens:

To the extent that disease organisms have an increasing chance to mutate, as the resistance of the human population is lowered, given mutations are less likely to die out because of an unfavorable situation for the development of pathogens, because the population has become so ill-resistant, that practically any mutation will survive, then you have an increase in the mutation rate of pathogens. An increase in the total disease population leads to the possibility of an increase in evolution of any given disease, and the cycle continues.

The forecast next took up the question of “weak links.”

To understand this entire process of ecological collapse, it is critical to understand it as a process of the ecology, not of individuals. The history of epidemics demonstrates that epidemic disease occurs only when a “weak link” exists in the human species as a whole. Disease attacks the weakest, least-resistant area, when that area is surrounded by relatively low levels of resistance, even though the resistance is higher in surrounding areas than in the “weak-link” area. Therefore, new diseases are produced in the areas of lowest standard of living, and then begin to spread. For example, at the beginning of the 19th Century, cholera was unknown throughout the world. As the British Raj lowered the standard of living in India in approximately 1816, a pandemic started to spread outward from India, throughout the entire world.

The task force then warned:

If we look at the situation today, if we do not reverse this process in the next two years, devolution will accelerate because of the vastly more integrated global attacks on the human race which the British imperial system is carrying out. When you have, as you do in India and Bangladesh today, the spread of total breakdown of nutrition, absolute starvation, then a second phase of disease occurs. Diseases like influenza, pneumonia, etc., are replaced by diseases characteristic of the total collapse of resistance, of which the milder [form] is epidemic measles, and the most characteristic is the Black Death. The Black Plague, bubonic plague, and pneumonic plague recur precisely at those times in human history when resistance is the lowest, and in precisely the “weak links” in human society....

Bubonic plague, the familiar type during the collapse of feudalism, spread by rats and mice, has approximately a 30% rate of death in an untreated, healthy population, and up to 80% in an untreated, unhealthy population. At the height of such a plague, rats are no longer necessary to spread the disease: Pneumonic plague begins to spread directly man-to-man through coughing. Pneumonic plague in untreated forms or in forms resistant to antibiotics is invariably fatal.

The forecast projected a geometric increase in the rates of death as the ecological holocaust progressed.

A Chilling Look into the Future

The concluding section of the 1974 LaRouche forecast was titled “The Consequences Unless We Stop the Collapse.” It provided a look into the future, as events have indeed more or less played out, over the past 25 years.

Taking the process of ecological holocaust as a whole, we see a series of interrelated cycles: the fall of soil fertility leading to a fall in food supply; leading to a fall in nutrition of both human beings and animals; leading to lower efficiency of human metabolism and further drops in nutrition; leading to increase in the disease population, further fall in human nutrition, and further susceptibility to disease. The cycle as a whole leads to a general collapse of the cognitive abilities of the population, to mass psychosis, collapse of industry, destruction of wealth, and therefore, an increase in the driving force behind the rate of primitive accumulation.

Knowing these cycles, we can outline what the inevitable consequences of this process would be overall in the next few years.

The study projected an intensification of famine and disease in the “weak link” areas, particularly the Indian Subcontinent and Africa. Famine would lead to the spread of cholera in these “weak-link” zones, “intensification of famine and epizootics in the underdeveloped countries, and the potential for pandemics of influenza, superimposed on existing diseases.”

Next, focusing on the “Fourth World” areas most heavily targetted for rape and pillage by the financier oligarchy, the report warned that by the 1980s:

With the spread of famine, the potential for pandemics of bubonic plague would already be present and would actually be realized.... To the extent that a general financial collapse was occurring simultaneously, areas of the advanced world, especially those dependent on imported food, such as Japan, would be vulnerable to plague, especially to the extent that sanitation, anti-rat measures, etc., are at the primitive level, as in Italy now.... At this point, the process of ecological collapse would be unstoppable.

To the extent that the British imperial system responds according to its normal behavior to the ecological holocaust, the holocaust would accelerate. Enough hospital beds, even in the most developed countries, if millions are diseased, don’t exist! The British imperial response can easily be imagined. You would have people lining up for antibiotic shots outside of the hospitals. “This treatment” is precisely what would most rapidly produce plague and other diseases, which are invulnerable or immune to antibiotics, and humanity would be left without that weapon.

And then,

The general, obviously schematic structure of the death rate would look like this: rising from the presently low (approximately 3%) level, to a high of an annual death rate worldwide in the area of 20 to 25%, which is typical of ecological holocaust type plagues in previous historical periods.

WHO/Paul Garwood

“Historically, certain killer diseases, such as plague, mutant ‘killer influenzas,’ or cholera . . . have demonstrated ‘breakout’ capabilities. Such diseases have the capacity in a very short time, of traveling large distances and killing millions.” Here, staff from Médecins Sans Frontières treat cholera patients at Budiriro cholera treatment centre in Harare, Zimbabwe.

---------------------------------------------

Economic Breakdown and Global Pandemics

From the EIR Special Report, Economic Breakdown and the Threat of Global Pandemics, dated July 1, 1985:

There are three principal pathways through which a full-scale global pandemic on a scale far worse than that of the 14th-Century Black Death could erupt within the coming years. The nature of the specific pandemic is determined by the diseases endemic, or mutations thereof, in the “weak link” areas of the human species; namely, those very areas in the developing sector deliberately weakened by the IMF and World Bank. The character of the coming period could most probably be determined by isolated outbreaks or localized “flare-ups” of one or a variety of such diseases. At a certain point the process would reach sufficient energy density for a “take-off” into a full-scale global pandemic:

I. A pandemic originating in one place and then “taking off” around the world. Historically, certain killer diseases, such as plague, mutant “killer influenzas” or cholera, for example, mostly endemic in India, China, and Africa have demonstrated “breakout” capabilities. Such diseases have the capacity in a very short time, of traveling large distances and killing millions. Under conditions of overall economic and health collapse, such as already have matured in Asia, China and Africa, those regions could readily “donate” a killer pandemic to any portion of the globe virtually overnight in this age of jet travel.

II. Pandemic originating from different endemic diseases specific to different areas simultaneously flourishing. As [LaRouche medical advisor] Dr. John Grauerholz’s “Handbook of Human Epidemic and Potentially Epidemic Diseases” documents, such conditions are already “bubbling kettles” in Mexico, Brazil, and throughout Asia, Africa, and Ibero-America, with diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and, potentially, yellow fever.

III. New, deadly emerging diseases such as AIDS. The most likely scientific hypothesis is that the virus for AIDS has most probably been around for centuries, perhaps longer, in a less virulent form in monkeys or humans or other animals. At a recent medical conference in Senegal, researchers hypothesized that the AIDS virus HTLV III may have only recently emerged in virulent form due to the “collapse in socio-economic conditions” in Africa, and may be followed by “conversions” to virulence of other relatively harmless viruses. It was discussed that the AIDS virus was probably converted from a virus in green monkeys to its current form—a lethal, rapidly mutable virus.

The distribution of the disease into the United States followed an initial entry from Africa into industrialized society through the immunological “weak link” of the homosexual community, but at this point, the virus is moving outward into the general population.

In short, a most lethal viral weapon attacking people with no real defenses can wreak severe damage in a very short period. Then, at a certain moment, the disease “takes off” from the restricted “high risk” populations to the general human population as a whole. All available evidence suggests that the virus has continued to undergo a series of mutations toward ever more virulent strains. The outbreak here and there of different diseases is a function of what organism is in the area. The existence of “reservoirs” of plague, malaria, and other diseases determines the raw material for epidemic and pandemic propagation.

The specific case of plague is instructive to look at. Plague is currently endemic in the Western part of the United States, Vietnam, Zaire, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Madagascar. Two-thirds of all cases in the U.S. occur in the state of New Mexico. According to a leading epidemiologist on the scene in New Mexico, the situation is currently close to the threshold for epidemic take-off. Ten years ago there was a sudden increase in plague from 1-2 cases/year to 20 cases/year. In 1983, there were 40 cases, and last year 31. In this epidemiologist’s assessment, were the number of cases to continue to jump to the 30-50 cases per year range, that might constitute the threshold for an uncontrolled epidemic.

Under conditions of severe drought, desert-dwelling rodents converge on inhabited areas seeking water and food from garbage. Already, the conditions exist in the United States which are most favorable for the migration of rodents to towns and cities. Cities such as Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are experiencing uncontrolled rat population growth. In the assessment of various plague experts, there is a definite potential, under sustained conditions of general economic and health collapse, for the threshold into an uncontrolled plague epidemic to be crossed.

Dynamics of Pandemic Generation

What are the main dynamics of the convergence upon the pandemic threshold?

a. Diseases such as AIDS and herpes are indicators of the collapsed status of man’s immunological system. The doubling rate of AIDS is now six months.

b. Decaying central cities where populations are concentrated are suffering gross cutbacks in sanitation and water management.

c. The food supply and quality of diet of populations have been severely curtailed.

d. Infant mortality in cities such as Detroit and New York has long since surpassed the threshold of normalcy, reaching 25-30/1,000 as compared with a previous maximum “normal” amount of 9-10/1,000.

e. The proliferation of plant and animal diseases directly affects the food supply as well as creating the conditions favorable for the proliferation of insect pests. It has been estimated that out of the slightly less than 1 billion known animal species on Earth, approximately 740,000,000 of these are insects.

Under conditions of further collapse of the human economy, the biosphere will favor the proliferation of parasites at the expense of hosts. In short, the dynamic of evolution will be shifted into “reverse.” Simultaneously, severe perturbations in weather patterns and the geo-surface are already occurring—drought, uncharacteristically huge (sizewise) tornadoes, cyclones and tidal waves, deforestation, and breakdowns in “natural” and human water management.

We highly recommend the following articles by Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche:

1. Lyndon LaRouche’s “National Defense Against Germ Warfare,” originally published in EIR, Vol. 28, No. 43, Nov. 9, 2001, pp. 58-59.

2. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Threat of Pandemic Requires Crash Bio-Defense Initiative,” reprinted in EIR, Vol. 33, No. 9, March 3, 2006, pp. 68-69.

The Galactic Science of Human Progress:

Defending Humanity from Pandemics

by Megan Beets

This is an edited version of prepared remarks delivered to the LaRouche PAC’s weekly Fireside Chat webcast of March 26, 2020. Subheads, graphics and links have been added.

As you read the quotation below, imagine when it might have been said:

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter…. It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a life span far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.

If you thought to yourself: “This sounds like the optimism of a bygone age,” you are only partly right. Lewis K. Strauss delivered those remarks in 1954, while head of the Atomic Energy Commission, at a time when the U.S. was gearing up Project Sherwood, a program to develop controlled nuclear fusion.

This natural optimism about mankind’s rightful place in and mastery over the universe has since been largely supplanted by the “green disease” of radical environmentalism, and the even more prevalent, overarching disease, Malthusianism; however, Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, and the movement they built, never accepted that.

In 1983, Lyndon LaRouche authored a book called There Are No Limits to Growth, in which he demolished the idea that the world is overpopulated. In that book, after asking the reader to imagine the forests we will grow and the cities we will build on Mars, he locates the value of each individual human life in its belonging to a creative being, unlike any other species on Earth, which has the potential to make a contribution to the progress of mankind and the universe as a whole.

Defense of All Humanity

In 2011, as tensions between the U.S. and Russia were dangerously escalating, the Russian government proposed to the U.S. a revival of Lyndon LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which in 1983 had been offered by then-President Reagan to the Soviets. This time, Russia, which renamed the policy the Strategic Defense of Earth, proposed not only joint work on missile defense systems as in 1983, but also cooperation to defend the planet as a whole from threats from space, namely asteroids and comets. Though then-President Obama never responded (or if he did, he rejected the offer), Lyndon LaRouche did.

LaRouche recognized that humanity has reached a point where, in an age of nuclear weapons, warfare is no longer a viable option for resolving conflicts between nations—unless one wishes to risk elimination of the entire species. Therefore, we must develop a new, higher-order notion of defense. Conflicts among peoples can and must be worked out on the diplomatic stage, and so the notion of defense must be redefined as the common defense of all humanity, as our species exists on the planet, in the solar system, and in the galactic system.

For example, humanity is not only threatened by the possibility of an asteroid impact—which, depending on the size of the body, could wipe out a city, a continent, or even affect life over the entire Earth—but also faces threats from earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, major weather events, and disease. The only viable defense against these and other yet unknown perils is progress: scientific progress, increasing mastery over the causes of these phenomena, and the ability to deal with the levels of power wielded by them.

FIGURE 1

Graphical representation of the two theorized orbital cycles of our solar system through our galaxy—above/below the galactic disc and in/out of the spiral arms—and the corresponding cycles in biodiversity and geophysical/climate activity. The acronym MYA stands for “millions of years ago.”

---------------------------------------------

This is coherent with LaRouche’s discoveries in the science of physical economy, which show that human progress, the long-term survival of humanity, depends on our wielding more and more powerful physical principles, and higher and higher densities of applied power. For example, with the powers of modern chemistry, unavailable to mankind prior to the 18th century, we can create new materials with new and useful characteristics, such as resistance to heat or corrosion, and we can lift a rocket off the planet and send it to the Moon.

The strategic defense of Earth, of humanity, must be seen from that standpoint. Begin by imagining the Earth from a vantage point in space, where you can observe the planet and its development over time as a unified whole. That planet isn’t floating alone in empty space—it is a captive, a subsumed feature, of a solar system which is run by our Sun. That solar system itself is a captured, subsumed element of the galactic system.

This becomes important in taking a look back at the history of processes on our planet, which are characterized by cycles.

For example, there are cycles of increasing and decreasing volcanic activity, cycles of continental uplift and subsidence, and cycles of extinction of species and creation of new species. All of these occur on a roughly 60-million-year time frame, which fits very nicely with what we know about our solar system’s travel through the galaxy. As it orbits the galactic center, the solar system also bobs up and down, perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, being sometimes above the disk of the galaxy and being sometimes below. It returns to the same relative position every 64 million years.

Similarly, cycles of climate, so-called icehouse Earth and warmer periods, fit very nicely with a roughly 140-million-year cycle of the solar system’s travel into and out of the very dense neighborhoods of the galaxy called spiral arms, in which there is a higher density of cosmic radiation. (See Figures 1 and 2.) With these two examples, you start to get a rough picture that phenomena that we think are Earth-bound, or Earth-generated, are actually very likely mediated by the Sun, or even by the activity of the galaxy.

FIGURE 2a

FIGURE 2b

Top: An artist’s depiction of the Milky Way galaxy with its spiral arms—the bright areas having a much higher density of stars than the surrounding regions. Bottom: A depiction of the solar system’s motion above and below the plane of the galactic disc, returning to the same relative position about every 60 million years.

---------------------------------------------

Mastering the Science of Life

So why is all of this important in the middle of a deadly pandemic? A greater mastery of the science of life, which very much includes cycles of pandemic disease and activity of viruses, will absolutely require international cooperation of the best scientific minds, given the vantage point just referenced.

Take viruses. Viruses are very interesting little critters. They are unlike anything else in the biosphere—existing on the boundary between life and non-life—and are rather new to science. They weren’t thought of as a separate entity from bacteria until the end of the 19th century, and their structure was unknown until the invention of the electron microscope in the 1930s.

We tend to think of viruses as horrible little things that make us sick—and some of them are! But they are also pervasive on the planet and are tightly bound up with the evolution of life. Consider the fact that anywhere from 5 to 10% of the human genome is of viral origin, meaning that through persistent infection by many forms of life over many millions of years, genetic material was inserted into our cells by viruses and became a permanent part of our genetic makeup. The ability of human beings to digest starch, a fact which pasta lovers will appreciate, is due to a gene which originally came from a virus!

The Elysia chlorotica sea slug gets its brilliant green hue from chloroplasts, originally ingested from Vaucheria litorea algae, and stored in its digestive system. The slug’s ability to use the stolen chloroplasts to photosynthesize comes from genetic material transferred to the slug by a viral infection. Mysteriously, the same virus seems to kill off the adult sea slugs, almost simultaneously, at the end of their life cycle.

---------------------------------------------

There are an estimated 10^30 (a nonillion, or a million trillion trillion) viruses in the oceans. Two hundred thousand different types have been identified, with millions of viruses in a single teaspoon of seawater. A somewhat flashy example of something viruses have done in the oceans, is that they infected a type of sea slug called Elysia chlorotica and donated genetic material which gives it the ability to use borrowed chloroplasts to photosynthesize, thus lending it its beautiful green hue.

Human beings have also begun to make use of viruses to fight disease. For example, in gene therapy, viruses are used to inject certain genetic material into cells to fight sickle-cell anemia. Modified polioviruses have been used to fight glioblastoma, a particularly virulent brain cancer, with some success.

Regarding epidemics and pandemics, interesting work has been done going back to the 1970s on the influenza A virus. As most people know all too well, the flu is a seasonal phenomenon and is always present as a seasonal epidemic somewhere on the Earth—in the northern and southern hemispheres during their respective winters, and in the tropics roughly twice a year. Some have compared its migratory movement to that of birds. During such a seasonal epidemic, the flu breaks out simultaneously across vast areas of land, faster than person-to-person transmission could carry it, and at a certain point, disappears, despite the fact that all possible “victims” were not infected.

FIGURE 3

The 1946, 1957, 1968, and 1977 influenza pandemics mapped against the 11-year solar cycle. Source: Tapping, Mathias, and Surkan, Canadian J. Infectious Diseases 2001.

---------------------------------------------

Influenza A also exhibits interesting cyclical activity, with new strains of the virus breaking out in a pandemic and taking over to become the dominant human infector (the old strain seeming to disappear) with a frequency that aligns closely with the 11-year cycle of solar activity.[fn_1] (See Figure 3.) What does this mean? What could the trigger be? While it is known that viruses can be activated and deactivated by light and radiation under certain conditions, the specific mechanism is not known in this case.

Though there are many unanswered questions, they cannot be taken out of the context of the anti-entropic development of life on Earth as modulated by our Sun and by our galaxy.

These things are raised not to say anything specific about the particular coronavirus that’s threatening humanity now, but to point to the fact that humanity has to emerge from this with a new paradigm of thinking, with a determination to make an evolutionary leap in our understanding of disease—viruses included—and of the science of life and our mastery of it. Gaining such mastery must be a cooperative process, with participation from the greatest minds, young minds, from nations across the world. This will have true economic value and can move humanity into a new paradigm in which future generations “experience a life span far longer than ours, as disease yields.”

[fn_1]. Five of the pandemics of influenza A in the 20th century have occurred 11 years apart, and historical data going back to the 1700s has shown that of the 15 recorded influenza pandemics since that time, 12 have occurred within 1 year of a solar maximum or minimum. Qu, Jiangwen, “Is Sunspot Activity a Factor in Influenza Pandemics?” Reviews in Medical Virology, 2016. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rmv.1887. [back to text for fn_1]

II. The Health Silk Road

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Stark Reality: Act in Solidarity,

Or Face Hell on Earth

CGTN

CGTN

UN

Tanzanians shopping at a supermarket in Dar-es-Salaam.

---------------------------------------------

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s March 25, 2020 interview with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, by Harley Schlanger. A video of the webcast is available.

Harley Schlanger: Hello, I’m Harley Schlanger from the Schiller Institute. Welcome to our webcast with our founder and President Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Today is March 25, 2020.

There’s no question that we are now in the middle of a hammering effect of two crises, which are changing life on the planet dramatically: The coronavirus pandemic and the global financial disintegration. And this is where we have to start, to take a look at where we are in terms of the spread of this pandemic, so Helga, why don’t you begin with that?

Coronavirus Update

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: COVID-19 is very quickly spinning out of control. I think it’s useful to look at the condition of several countries, to really quiet those idiots who still say that this is “just a flu,” and therefore no worse than an influenza, and that people who say it is worse are all just conspirophiles. This is a real pandemic, and it does require the absolute unified cooperation of all countries in one effort to overcome it—because, this is a pandemic. And a pandemic means it is raging across the globe.

Yesterday, India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, ordered his country shut down for 20 days. That’s 1.3 billion people. Because the conditions of life are of extreme poverty in many parts of India—no basic infrastructure, no roads in some parts of the country—the effect of COVID-19 on India and its people will probably be much worse than experienced by China, despite India’s excellent healthcare system.

Photo/UN Country Team in Guatemala

In Guatemala, healthcare workers are showing how to put on goggles and full safety gear.

---------------------------------------------

COVID-19 is spreading very rapidly to Africa, Latin America—to Peru, to Brazil—and other countries.

In Europe, the north of Italy is out of control. In Lombardy, the army had to come to transport the corpses from Bergamo and other places, because there were too many to be handled by the civilian medical staff. Yesterday, the trade unions called for an eight-hour general strike, to insist that the government impose stricter measures. Because of confusing messages, people are still running around, even trying to drive to Sicily by car, and so forth; so this situation is one of really, absolute disaster.

In Spain, now the rate of infection is even greater than in Italy. You’d think you were in the 14th century, as depicted in the paintings of Breugel and Bosch and Holbein. For example, in Madrid, there were so many dead that the army had to come to transport them temporarily to a big ice-skating rink, because the hospital morgues were overwhelmed. There are 400,000 people in nursing homes, where there is no protective gear, not enough personnel; the same situation obtains in Germany.

In Germany, the supposedly rich industrial power, because of a lack of precautions, and after twenty years of budget cutting, we have heard from the chief of emergency services of the Wolfsburg Clinic, Dr. Bernadett Erdmann, who reported that there is absolutely no protective gear for the medical personnel; others are saying that they have only a few days’ supply, and if the coronavirus strikes the medical personnel, that is the end.

In Great Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, finally, after pursuing for quite some time, the completely irresponsible policy of so-called herd immunity, the idea that 60% or 70% of the population must get infected first—which naturally means many people will die—he reversed course and imposed a lockdown, pretty much in the same way as has Germany—only two people can meet, and only important missions can be done out of the home.

In the United States, the situation is getting to be the worst epicenter, according to the World Health Organization. New York and other places, but especially New York and Seattle, on the West Coast, are now categorized as red alert areas. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is doing whatever is possible to increase the intensive care units in the hospitals and provide more hospital beds, but it is an absolutely dramatic situation, considering also the many homeless people. There is a general lack of medical staff, a lack of medical equipment, and now the effects of the neo-liberal cutbacks of the last decades are really coming home to roost. It’s a dramatic situation, which is why we absolutely need to reflect on the changes needed.

CGTN

---------------------------------------------

Obviously, we first have to do everything possible to stop COVID-19, and there I can only say the experience from China, from Wuhan and Hubei province, is that you have to have testing, testing, testing—as much as possible; you have to gear up production of test kits as much as you can, because what functioned in Wuhan was that they just tested everybody several times. They isolated the infected people, they put them in quarantine, and that worked. So, as a positive result, today, the quarantine in Wuhan will soon be lifted. But these kinds of measures which were applied in China are not being applied everywhere in the West, and that lesson has to be learned very quickly.

CGTN

---------------------------------------------

China Pitches in to Help the World

Schlanger: Helga, in discussing the health emergency, you’ve mentioned the importance of cooperation and solidarity among nations. There is an enormous effort coming out of China, and also Russia, to provide personal protective equipment and so on, and yet, we still hear voices attacking China, blaming China—what’s wrong with these people?

Zepp-LaRouche: As you say, China is making an unbelievable effort: They’re now sending medical equipment to 82 countries around the world. They’re sending medical teams, helping the African nations; they’re sending teams to Italy, to Spain, to France, to Iran, to Iraq, to Venezuela, and actually also to every country which asks for help. They’re even responding to Germany, where the District Administrator from Heinsburg wrote an open letter calling on President Xi Jinping for help. The general consul in Düsseldorf responded instantly on behalf of the Chinese ambassador in Berlin, asking how much equipment was needed, and saying China would immediately cooperate.

This district administrator was on a German TV program and the moderator asked, quite indignantly, “Why did you do that?” And he responded: “Look, you have no idea. Heinsburg was the hotspot which was put under quarantine—it’s a small city but the entire population was under quarantine, because of a high infection rate. You have no idea what it means to have days and days to treat so many people, and then have no equipment, so it was a complete act of desperation.”

CGTN

Members of the Kenya Police Service receive N95 mask donations from the China Chuanyu Association, for the fight against COVID-19, March 27, 2020.

---------------------------------------------

I’ll say it again: Any nursing situation, or any hospital, that lacks equipment, should ask China, because China has done certain things right, and the West has not. So, let me just say this: In an emergency like this, anyone who attacks China and Russia—or Cuba for that matter—I think these people are either insane, that they just don’t have the moral fitness to survive, or they’re criminal. There are right now many think tanks and mainstream media that are still on this rampage. The think tank CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), the American Enterprise Institute, both had such statements, even blaming the Belt and Road Initiative and connectivity for [spreading the virus]. This is just completely insane and shows a very evil intention.

A certain moderator on the 2nd Channel on German TV yesterday, went into a raving attack, really going rabid, commenting on the fact that Wuhan is now ending the quarantine, and that they can also reactivate the economy. I think this moderator should be tested for rabies, because something is wrong with the way he thinks.

If you look at what China did, and this cannot be stressed enough, China alleviated 850 million people from poverty in the last decades. Because of that, it became the second strongest economy in the world, and if China had not done that, it would not have been in the position it is today to have been able to react to the outbreak of the pandemic the way it did, namely by immediately taking strict measures in Wuhan and Hubei province, by sending 42,000 medical staffers from around the country, and by the whole country going into solidarity to support this most-affected region. And that was successful, so now they can lift the quarantine.

Meanwhile, China has geared up its production lines to produce testing kits, masks, protective clothing, respiratory ventilators—and has decided to keep this up, despite the fact that the crisis has slowed down and there are signs of hope that it will be lessened inside China—so that it can supply the rest of the world.

To attack that, as I said, shows either an insane mind or a criminal intention.

Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University/Weibo

Medical workers tend to an infected patient in Wuhan.

---------------------------------------------

I think what China is doing, and Russia for that matter, which have both sent large amounts of medical supplies to Italy; and Cuba, which has sent many medical teams around the world—these countries should be praised and this ideological indoctrination which some people cannot rid themselves of, really has to be seen as a sign of senility, or worse.

Governments Were Warned, But Didn’t Listen

Schlanger: Another sign of insanity are those people who are saying, “No one could have predicted this, that’s why we’re not prepared.” It’s clear that there’s a lack of personal protection equipment, a lack of ventilators, lack of hospital beds, but the idea that no one could have known about this, is completely false, as proven by what your late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, had been warning about, going back to the 1971 break with the Bretton Woods system. And given the economic crisis that’s a part of this emergency, I think it’s really important for people to hear from you, precisely because of what Lyn had said and tried to do to get us prepared for this.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. As you said, when President Richard Nixon took down the Bretton Woods system in 1971, he warned that this would lead to the danger of a new Depression, the danger of a new fascism, and pandemics. And then, in 1974, he instituted a Biological Holocaust Task Force, to study the effect of both the austerity policy following from these Nixon measures, but also the effect of the IMF and World Bank “conditionalities” policy imposed on the developing sector, which meant that developing countries first had to pay their debt before they could invest in their health sector or infrastructure. This Task Force warned that this policy would lead to new pandemics.

Throughout the ’80s, the ’90s, the 2000s we published six comprehensive studies showing exactly what this Malthusian economic policy towards the developing sector would do, warning of pandemics, so nobody can honestly say that we did not put out the warning that this would happen.

Then, in 2002-2003, when the SARS epidemic broke out, there were many studies and scenarios saying it could come back. And at that time, at the latest, the governments should have gone into preparations for the outbreak of such pandemics, but the opposite was done: They increased the austerity, the cutbacks in the health sector, many hospitals taken down, the privatization of the health sector to just go for profit, instead of the protection of the health of the population.

In 2012, a study was presented to the German government warning of exactly such a pandemic of a coronavirus to come—and still, absolutely nothing was done. We talked last week about the scenario done last October by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and the World Economic Forum exactly studying the outbreak of a coronavirus pandemic—and still, nothing was done.

And even when the pandemic broke out in China, end of last year, into January, and the Chinese government reacted with the known measures, all they could do was to attack the “authoritarian style” of China, but they did not do anything! In fact, the German Health Minister, Jens Spahn, in this period, said he did not expect the virus to come to Germany! He kept saying, in January into February, that the German health system was well prepared. This is all either utter incompetence, or worse.

So it should really be noted that my late husband, and the organization associated with him, have been on this for 50 years. And a lot of the attacks on us came because of that, because we attacked Wall Street and the City of London and the casino economy as being responsible for this. The powers that be really felt that to be their Achilles’ heel. So they started an unprecedented attack of slanders and vilification against us. They put my innocent husband in jail. President George H.W. Bush, in particular.

And I think the fact that our warnings were not listened to, really is now the reason that many people are paying with their lives. And if there’s any conclusion, then people must look at the analysis of my late husband, and also the solutions he had proposed, and which are still the only solutions to remedy the situation in the future.

UN

WHO and public health experts conclude a COVID-19 mission to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

---------------------------------------------

Support Worldwide Ceasefire and

Lifting of Sanctions

Schlanger: Helga, I want to get to that in a moment when we take up the financial crisis, but I just want to bring it back to one other aspect of the solidarity of cooperation versus geopolitics: We have a call from the UN Secretary General for a world ceasefire. You’ve issued a call for an end to sanctions on Iran and Venezuela. Both countries are suffering from lack of medical equipment, lack of supplies. Please say something about that. I think geopolitics is showing itself to be a war crime.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes. Sanctions are a war crime, because if you prevent entire countries from acquiring the medical supplies to protect their population, this is a war crime. And I think there must be an absolutely ruthless change in the thinking: I wholeheartedly endorse what UN Secretary General António Guterres is calling for, a ceasefire worldwide. All the drone attacks and skirmishes, and whatnot, have to stop. Because only if mankind puts all our forces together to solve this, will we have a chance to overcome this crisis.

President Xi Jinping called for a “Health Silk Road” in 2017, at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, in Beijing, which I attended. This is also something that absolutely must be put on the agenda. Because we have to work together to build a decent health system in every single country around the world—which is what Xi Jinping calls the Health Silk Road—because if we don’t do that, no country can be protected. You cannot stop a virus from coming through the border.

The only protection is to go in the direction of building the economy in the Southern Hemisphere—our proposal to develop the Silk Road to a World Land-Bridge connecting all the continents through infrastructure, and creating human economic conditions for countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, and parts of Europe and the United States. That is the only remedy. And people have to really straighten up and become reasonable.

UN

UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged all warring parties across the world to lay down their weapons in support of the bigger battle—against COVID-19, the common enemy now threatening all of humankind.

---------------------------------------------

And as the crisis escalates, I think that will become clearer, and those who are still warmongers should be shut down and put in asylums, because they’re really a danger and a menace to the whole human race.

So I think this initiative of Guterres should really be discussed everywhere, and that should be the mindset to solve the problem.

Shut Down Wall Street!

Implement LaRouche’s Four Laws!

Schlanger: The other area where your husband has been proven right, over and over and over, and you have absolute authority, is the economy: We have to distinguish, I think, in the financial package, between the emergency health aid that’s needed, and protection of people, versus the use of the so-called “big bazooka” to carry out multi-trillions of dollars of bailouts of hedge funds, shadow banking institutions and others. You issued a call for a shutdown of financial trading—why don’t you tell us what you had in mind?

Zepp-LaRouche: As you say, it is absolutely legitimate for the governments to provide liquidity to keep firms going, to keep wages flowing to people, to make payments to just maintain economic activity of the real economy. That is legitimate.

But that is not the entire reason why the Federal Reserve and the ECB (European Central Bank) are going in the direction of “helicopter money.” The Federal Reserve has already announced $4 trillion in liquidity creation, declaring that there is no limit. Christine Lagarde, the President of the ECB, has also said “Whatever it takes.” Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the EU Commission, said every country can now “pump”—she used the word “pump”—as much money into its economy as it wishes. The black zero is all of a sudden no longer the sacred cow it once was.

Were all that “pumping” solely for the real economy, it would be fine. But a large part of it is to maintain the casino economy part of the problem. The former economist of the Landesbank Bremen, Folker Hellmeyer, put out in his newsletter the correct point, that the larger part of it is to protect the dynamic of the algorithms in the financial markets, which is a sort of,— one way of describing it is that the derivatives trade is occurring in nanoseconds around the globe, and to protect that speculative bubble they are opening the sluicegates of the financial system.

And that will lead in the very short term to hyperinflation as happened in Germany in 1923. And if people remember that lesson, that meant the expropriation of the earnings and life savings of the entire population, and that is now being threatened not in one country, but really in all the countries which are part of that system. And only those which are not entirely integrated into it have a chance to escape it, under present conditions.

Close the Markets!

So this is why I said that this is now the moment to close the markets, to stop these insane vacillations in the stock market, and use that pause of a short period of time, whatever it takes, and then implement a Glass-Steagall reorganization. We have talked about this many times: The reintroduction of Glass-Steagall, the banking separation introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, would mean that the state intervenes to protect the commercial banks, keep them running, and make a firewall, so that the investment banks are separated and have no longer access to the savings in the commercial banks, or bailouts from taxpayer money, but that they have to bring their books into order on their own, and if they can’t, they have to declare insolvency and disappear.

LoC/Carol M. Highsmith

The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, one of the two epicenters of the monetarist virus. The other is the City of London.

---------------------------------------------

Now, the reason why you need a certain pause, is because it’s complicated, because many of the things belonging to the real economy and that are legitimate, like the pension funds, are now heavily involved in the casino economy because that has been the system as it developed. And you have to protect those things which belong to the life’s earnings of people or their physical existence, that belong to the real economy—and that takes some sorting out. So some things you have to freeze, and it takes a while to figure it out. And meanwhile there is a lack of liquidity, and that’s why you have to have the immediate installation or reactivation of National Banks: These National Banks must give out credit lines directed to the real economy, and investment in productive projects. And that has to be done in every country.

Credit must be earmarked, and there are institutions or historical precedents for doing that in most countries. In Germany you can reactivate or just strengthen the role of the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, the Reconstruction Credit Institute, which was used in the postwar period to finance the economic miracle in Germany, which was based on Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corp. in the United States. Similar approaches can be taken in every country.

Then we need to have cooperation among all these national banks. You have to reintroduce a fixed-exchange-rate system, and then that becomes the New Bretton Woods system, a new credit system. And then different criteria will have to be introduced to distinguish legitimate investments from illegitimate ones. The legitimate ones are those which bring an increase in the productivity of the economy, such as crash programs for thermonuclear fusion, for optical biophysics, for life sciences in general, to combat the causes—or to find out what are the origins—of these pandemics, and how to overcome them; but also space medicine, space technology in general, international cooperation in space research and travel, these are the areas which absolutely need to be serviced by these credit lines, in order to develop new economic platforms.

The devastation of this pandemic in the real economy is going to be very big. And when we combat it—which hopefully will happen as soon as possible, with new vaccines and other new treatments—we will have to face the devastating after-effects. We will have to recreate the world economy on a higher level.

So those are the principles which my husband called the Four Laws, and we are calling right now to implement all of this. I ask all of you, all our viewers and listeners: Help in our mobilization, because it is very clear that the governments who were caught by surprise by this pandemic—which they should not have been, because there was ample warning—are also not yet in a position to discuss the principles of how to reorganize the economy: Sign our call to shut down the markets, go for the Four Laws, and have a summit of the most important countries, especially China, Russia, India, and the United States—and hopefully with the cooperation of some other countries—to implement such a top-down, new world economic order, because nothing less will solve the problem.

To Survive, Humanity Must Reach a New Paradigm

Schlanger: Helga, I think people will appreciate what you just went through in terms of an actual solution, without panic—how to address what is an existential crisis. But you’ve also made the point, repeatedly, that this offers us an opportunity to think about the way we think about ourselves and our fellow human beings. You’ve talked about the “new paradigm.” I think, in the minutes we have remaining, it would be useful to give a sense of not just why that’s necessary, but also why it’s possible.

Zepp-LaRouche: I think the idea that geopolitics would be here forever is really a troglodyte idea, which only people like Ursula von der Leyen and such people seem to cling to. Geopolitics, the idea that one nation or a group of nations has the right to defend its interest against another group of nations, with all means, if necessary even military means, is something which—in the age of thermonuclear weapons, pandemics, and just the fact that the whole world is bound together so closely—is really an outdated idea. And it absolutely must be replaced by a new paradigm of cooperation, of defining the interest of the one humanity first.

We have to adopt as our philosophy that there are common aims of mankind, such as the Strategic Defense of the Earth (SDE): This is a program of my late husband, which he put forward some years ago, in which he said, our planet is not only threatened by thermonuclear war, but also by asteroids and comets, and if one of these heavenly bodies were to crash into Earth, it could be a complete catastrophe for our species. That’s something which no one nation can defend itself against, but we should cooperate.

With the same SDE approach in mind, he also said that we have to defend against the outbreak of pandemics. And obviously, that is an urgent lesson to be learned, because a pandemic also cannot be solved by one country, but you need to eliminate the conditions which make pandemics possible, which requires a study of what is life. Life is not yet well understood, because otherwise we would have solved sicknesses like cancers and viruses.

A virus is not something which is not part of life—there are many viruses which are part of the biosphere, but we don’t understand exactly how they function and what the process of life is in general as part of the universe. It’s a principle of the universe, which we have to absolutely work together to understand; all the scientists of the world should exchange their knowledge, they should cooperate on it.

So, I think the new paradigm calls for completely different relations among nations. Nations will probably be important for a very long time to come, because they are the expression of a common history, a common culture, a common language and poetry—you will not have an Esperanto and write poems. So nations will be important, but I think also they will become less important as compared to the idea of the one humanity, if we are to survive as a human species. And that is an idea which also was articulated by my late husband, actually, late in his life, but he made it a big point.

In the same way, he called for the abolition of the party system, in the tradition of George Washington, who said watch out for the party system because this is what causes the separation of people who then follow their lobby interests. We should not have these parties. And in the same way, nations should cooperate and not be pitched against each other.

Where Do We Want Humanity to Be in 100 Years?

So I think the future of humanity must be defined from the standpoint of the kind of future we want to have in 50, in 100 years from now. Xi Jinping has called it “the community of a shared future” and this pandemic makes very clear, we do have a shared future! We either survive all together, or maybe only a few of us, or none.

If we look at the present from the standpoint of where we want the world to be in 100 years from now, we will have joint space exploration, we will have villages on the Moon, we may have a city on Mars by that time—we will have a completely different idea of collaboration and rationality, working together, referring to the creativity of the other, being happy when the other is developing, instead of seeing it as a competition.

I’m quite confident that if the human species, the only creative species—at least that we know of in the universe so far—gets through this crisis and we really change our lives, and change the view we have about this question, then we can actually come out of this crisis strengthened and be able to start a new era of cooperation of all of humanity.

But it does require a change in thinking, and I’m inviting you to join us in this effort. We need a lot of support: So, contact us, sign our petition for the Four Power summit, and work with us, because we need right now a mass mobilization, to do the kinds of things which the politicians, obviously, have not been able to do, or very poorly. So: Join us!

Schlanger: Thank you very much, Helga. We’ll see you next week, as we evaluate how things have moved in the course of the next days ahead. So, thank you.

Zepp-LaRouche: Stay healthy!

China Unleashes the Health Silk Road

Against Corona Pandemic

by Hussein Askary, board member of BRIX, the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden

CGTN

Chinese medical professionals show solidarity with Italy in its fight against COVID-19. China has already sent three teams of medical experts to Italy.

---------------------------------------------

March 28—When China was fighting alone against the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, back in January and February, Western media mocked China and its leadership for mismanaging the nation’s health affairs. A Danish newspaper gleefully published a cynical cartoon of the Chinese flag with a cluster of coronaviruses instead of the stars. Others called the COVID-19, a “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus.” China was described as “Asia’s sick man” in the Wall Street Journal. Chinese and Asian nationals suffered racist attacks in Europe and the United States.

Throughout this, the Chinese people and their leadership were busy fighting ferociously, making huge sacrifices in lives and wealth to control the epidemic. Their fight was praised by the World Health Organization (WHO), which called on the other nations of the world to learn from China in dealing with the outbreak in their own countries. Now that China has successfully stopped the advance of the virus, with zero cases reported on March 19 in mainland China, what are the Chinese people and their government doing? Are they mocking the EU nations and the U.S., which have become the centers of the global pandemic? Is the Chinese media making cartoons about the “European virus”?

No, China has instead unleashed the full force of the “Health Silk Road” to help not only one nation, but virtually all nations, now that it is regaining its production capacity and its medical staff is not under so much stress. As President Xi Jinping indicated in his speech to the March 26 virtual G20 summit, what’s required to defeat the pandemic is a “global all-out war.” International cooperation is required “so that humanity, as one, can win the battle against such a major infectious disease.” Nations must all work together, he emphasized, so that together “we can build the strongest global network of control and treatment that the world has ever seen.” That was a point that Xi also made forcefully in his March 27 phone call with President Donald Trump.

What is the Health Silk Road?

President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 to connect the nations of Asia, Europe and Africa along the routes of the ancient Silk Road with modern transport corridors. However, the BRI has soft infrastructure aspects too, such as health. In the most detailed description of the Belt and Road Initiative by the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission, “Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Belt and Road,” published in March 2015, one can read this:

We should strengthen cooperation with neighboring countries on epidemic information sharing, the exchange of prevention and treatment technologies and the training of medical professionals, and improve our capability to jointly address public health emergencies. We will provide medical assistance and emergency medical aid to relevant countries.

CGTN

The Chinese government responded where the EU failed, with shipments of medical supplies to Italy

---------------------------------------------

In his speech delivered in the Legislative Chamber of the Uzbek Supreme Assembly on June 22, 2016, President Xi emphasized:

We should step up efforts in deepening medical and health cooperation, and enhancing mutually beneficial cooperation in the alert of infectious diseases, disease control and prevention, medical assistance, traditional medicines and other areas, so as to jointly build a healthy Silk Road.

In an April 2019 scientific paper, “Combating infectious Disease Epidemics through China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” researchers Jin Chen, Robert Bergquist, et al. wrote that, “The Healthy China 2030 plan, promulgated in 2016, considers health as one of the national policy priorities, and the Memorandum of Understanding with the World Health Organization (WHO), [was] signed in 2017, which promotes global health security and development along the terms of the initiative.” They argue that “Based on these agreements, the building of a Health Silk Road has become a core task leading to an extensive engagement in global health development.” Chen and Bergquist refer to the “Belt and Road High-Level Meeting for Health Cooperation: Towards a Health Silk Road,” held on August 18, 2017 in Beijing, at the end of which the 64 participating countries signed the “Health Silk Road communiqué.”

East-West Cooperation the Key

On February 26, Mrs. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and president of the Schiller Institute, issued a call for an emergency summit among those leaders, as the most important step to cope with the coronavirus pandemic, because it is imperative to coordinate and mobilize all the resources and technologies of all nations toward a common goal and in a unified manner. Otherwise, the COVID-19 virus will be able to penetrate through the cracks created by the schism between East and West based on completely unfounded geopolitical grounds. A very important element in this international effort is to help poor countries build modern hospitals and healthcare centers as soon as possible, to prevent the contagion from bouncing back again.

On March 19, the Russian and Chinese Foreign Ministers, Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi, respectively, discussed the proposed UN Permanent-5 Security Council summit (proposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin), the Foreign Ministry reported on March 18. Lavrov and Wang spoke by phone on the international coronavirus situation and their bilateral cooperation in confronting it, in the spirit of their strategic partnership. They also “touched on” the UN Security Council’s “preparations for the summit of permanent members of the Security Council, and the development of cooperation in the Russia-India-China format.” China is the Security Council chair this month.

What the coronavirus should have already taught the leaders of the world is, that it does not care if the victims are Asian, European, American or African. It attacks them because they are human. The leaders’ response should be likewise—as humans! Every nation is called upon now to join the Health Silk Road to save lives and build a secure and healthy future for all mankind.

In a March 25 opinion piece in the Financial Times, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmedi made exactly that point. African nations have no ability to launch large stimulus packages as is being done in advanced-sector nations, he warned. “We can defeat this invisible and vicious adversary, but only with global leadership,” he said, adding that “If the virus is not defeated in Africa, it will only bounce back to the rest of the world.” A few days earlier, on March 19, African finance ministers called for the suspension of interest payments on their multilateral and sovereign bonds due in 2020, to free up $44 billion to combat the coronavirus and its economic impact.

It is noteworthy that in his address to the August 2017 Beijing conference referenced above, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus observed:

As you know, the world faces increasing and more complex epidemics, pandemics and disasters. Not only are these events more likely to occur, they’re also likely to have a bigger impact on human health, the social fabric, security and the economy....

President Xi’s proposal for a Health Silk Road, which strengthens and renews ancient links between cultures and people, with health at its core, is indeed visionary.

If we are to secure the health of the billions of people represented here, we must seize the opportunities the Belt and Road Initiative provides.... WHO has proposed a strategic partnership with China to target vulnerable countries along the Belt and Road and in Africa....

The Belt and Road Initiative contains the fundamentals to achieve universal health coverage: infrastructure, access to medicines, human resources, and a platform to share experience and promote best practices....

China has much to teach us about these issues. It is a world leader in disease surveillance and outbreak control, and was one of the first countries to step in during the Ebola outbreak. China has built a nationwide health insurance scheme that covers more than 95% of its population. The country also has a great capacity for research and development, and was one of the first countries to meet the Millennium Development Goal for maternal health.

We should build upon those experiences.... Let us, the health leaders of 60 countries gathered here, and public health partners, build a healthy Silk Road, together.

CGTN

A team of Chinese experts arrived in Iraq March 8, 2020, as part of China’s assistance in confronting the COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

---------------------------------------------

Toward this end, now that it has its own COVID-19 epidemic more under control, China has been providing vital assistance—both equipment and personnel—to many countries. In a March 26 press conference, Zeng Yixin, Deputy Director of China’s National Health Commission (NHC), reported that the commission has compiled documents on the latest diagnosis and treatment, prevention, and control plan, as well as other technical documents, and has shared them with 180 countries, and more than ten international and regional organizations. Moreover, he said, the NHC held a joint meeting with the World Health Organization, to share China’s epidemic prevention and control experiences, attended online by representatives of 77 countries and seven international organizations. More than 100,000 people watched the meeting online, Xinhua reported March 27.

As part of this effort, China has achieved extraordinary outreach to more than a hundred nations, conducting video-conferences with medical experts and government officials in Asia, Africa, Ibero-America and the Caribbean, and the United States—sharing its expertise and experiences in combatting the coronavirus pandemic.

Italy and Spain Case Studies

In the European Union, it’s worth looking at the situations in Italy and Spain. In a March 16 phone conversation with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Xi promised to provide additional help in the battle against COVID-19. Noting that the Italian government has taken a series of resolute prevention and control measures in response to the epidemic, Xi said that China firmly supports Italy and has full confidence in its victory over the epidemic. Xinhua reported Xi as saying:

China identifies with Italy’s urgent concerns, and will send more medical experts to Italy and do its best to provide medical supplies and other assistance. China is willing to work with Italy to contribute to international cooperation in combatting the epidemic and to the construction of a Health Silk Road.

CGTN

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO).

---------------------------------------------

On March 17, China sent a team of experts to Italy, including medical doctors and pediatricians, who first went to Rome, to the Spallanzani Hospital, and commented that the work done by Italian doctors is excellent, but “there are still too many people around.” Then in Milan, at a March 19 press conference with Lombardi governor Attilio Fontana, the head of the Red Cross in China, Sun Shuopeng, pointed out that also in Milan and Lombardy, the epicenter of the contagion, too many people are still running around and violating the government restrictions. “This is not good, it is a matter of life or death,” he warned.

Italy has since then become the epicenter of the coronavirus in Europe, with 86,498 confirmed cases—second after the United States. The Italian people have expressed their gratitude to China in many ways, including by singing the Chinese national anthem from their balconies.

As for Spain, its initial fierce attachment to the European Union and insistence on dealing with China only through the EU, quickly changed as the coronavirus infection rate began to soar, and it became obvious that the EU, now in the process of disintegration, had no intention of responding. A report in the March 16 El Confidencial, “Welcome Mr. Xi: Chinese Marshall Plan against Coronavirus Lands in Spain,” noted that the Spanish government had initially turned down the Chinese government’s offer of medical material and advice, on grounds that “we prefer to do that through the EU.”

But on March 15, Foreign Affairs Minister Arancha González Laya spoke with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi about Spain purchasing medical material to build up its stockpiles, and China facilitating imports from thousands of Spanish small and medium companies. “Cooperation to protect health and the economy,” she tweeted. “It is inevitable that we accept the Chinese offer, as Italy has done. At this moment, we need help urgently and we could care less about the China propaganda,” a Foreign Ministry source told El Confidencial.

Since then, the Spanish situation has dramatically worsened, creating in many parts of the country scenes straight out of the Middle Ages. As of March 28, Spain has registered 72,248 cases and 5,812 deaths. This is the fourth highest number of cases in the world. It is not that the Spanish government has done nothing, but, like almost every other government in Europe and the Americas, it failed to act in time. The crisis is such that security forces have been called in to transport the bodies of the dead from hospitals and nursing homes in Madrid to a large ice skating rink which the city government commandeered as a temporary mortuary, needed to store the bodies until the personnel of funeral homes receive the personal protective equipment (PPE) to handle them.

Now under discussion is the establishment of an “air bridge” between Spain and China involving Spain’s Iberia airline and several government ministries, along with companies that produce medical equipment, to begin operations on March 30 to bring in urgently needed equipment. Discussion of retooling Spanish companies to produce medical supplies is underway, and, as elsewhere, China is stepping in to help right away. The cities of Madrid and Valencia contacted China directly to purchase material, with the acquiescence of the national government. Valencia, which is taking patients from Madrid in addition to its own, was expecting two planeloads of PPE, beds and respiratory ventilators to arrive by March 25. The city government dubbed this “Operation Silk Road,” in honor of the 2,000-year-old history of Valencia’s connection to the East, from the ancient Silk Road to today’s New Silk Road.

Working Overtime to Produce Equipment

for the World

More broadly, China has ramped up production of medical equipment to meet the growing needs of countries fighting the coronavirus. Shenzhen’s Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co., Ltd. said the Italian government had procured nearly 10,000 devices for fighting the disease, most of which are for patient monitoring, from the Guangdong-based medical equipment giant, whose products were part of the Chinese medical aid that arrived in Italy on March 12.

Shenzhen-listed Guangdong Biolight Meditech Co., Ltd on Tuesday disclosed that since March 2 it had received orders for nearly 2,000 pieces of medical equipment from eight countries including Italy, France and Germany. Zhejiang Dali Technology Co., Ltd, another manufacturer of infrared thermometers, said production is running at full tilt to meet growing orders at home and from Asia, Europe, and America. Oriental Energy Co., Ltd, says that since February it has exported over 3,000 tons of Y381H, an essential fiber for making the melt-blown non-woven fabric used for making face masks and protective suits, to countries including India and Vietnam.

Mask maker Great Star Industrial Co., Ltd has received the EC declaration of conformity document approving the quality of its products for sale in the EU. At least 10 Chinese producers of detection kits for nucleic acid and antibody testing have also won approvals to enter the EU market. Meanwhile, 14 novel coronavirus testing kits developed by five Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University, have obtained the CE marking certification, which allows them to be marketed across the European Union, according to the Ministry of Education.

In addition, China has sent the following items to virus-stricken nations:

• The first batch of 300,000 face masks donated by Chinese charities arrived in Belgium on March 16.

• An aircraft carrying 500,000 medical masks from China arrived at Zaragoza airport in northern Spain on March 17, as confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country rose to 11,178.

• A team of 12 medical experts from China’s Zhejiang Province was sent to Italy March 17 by the Chinese government.

• China donated 2,000 fast test kits for COVID-19 to the Philippines on March 16.

• Beijing will donate protective supplies including medical isolation gowns and gloves to the cities of Seoul, Tehran, Tokyo and Yokohama to help with their novel coronavirus control. Some 200,000 medical isolation gowns, 100,000 pairs of gloves, 200,000 pairs of shoe covers and 200,000 disposable medical caps will be delivered to these cities.

• South China’s Guangdong Province has donated more than 80,000 testing kits to countries including Iran, Japan, Iraq and Peru.

• Central China’s Hunan Province has donated supplies to aid the novel coronavirus fight in Laos and the Republic of Korea.

COVID-19 Eruption Challenges

Take-Down of U.S. Healthcare System

by Richard Freeman and Mary Jane Freeman

March 28—The current rampaging spread of American COVID-19 cases rips off the mask of a functioning U.S. healthcare system. On March 9, there were 637 U.S. COVID-19 cases; by March 20, there were 18,747; by March 28, 105,726. The eruption has revealed the carnage of the U.S. hospital system: the slashing of the number of hospital beds; the refusal to produce or purchase ventilators, or N95 respirator masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE). This is a process forty years in the making.

As state governors scramble to deal with state systems that are overwhelmed, no one can say that they didn’t see this crisis coming. As for the virus itself, the world has gone through waves of SARS, Ebola, influenza H5N1, and other pathogens, and as long as the world is dominated by a speculative world financial system, such waves are almost a certainty. Lyndon LaRouche warned in 1974—and put together a Biological Holocaust Task Force that amplified those warnings—that pandemics would occur as monetarist economic policies drove human beings below the level of intake required to preserve the existing level of potential relative population density.

Secondly, the pull of the City of London and Wall Street banking system has forced the take-down of every aspect of our health system, in plain day, in front of everyone’s eyes. This includes the sustained neglect or dismantling of hospitals, clean water systems, sanitation, power systems. Some may have fought individual aspects of this take-down, such as a hospital closing, but not the entire assault, and the policy behind it.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche discusses his Typical Collapse Function during a webcast, September 2012.

---------------------------------------------

LaRouche, in his famous “triple curve” graphic of a “typical collapse function,” Figure 1, showed the cause of the crisis: the growth of a City of London-Wall Street speculative bubble, a financial cancer that parasitizes and sucks the life blood out of the underlying physical economy and its scientific-physical productivity, upon which all human survival and growth depends.

Could anyone miss the flashing red lights? In 1975, the United States possessed 7,156 hospitals by the broadest measure of all types of facilities; and by 2016, one out of every four of them had been eliminated. Also in 1975, the U.S. had 1,466,000 hospital beds, again using the broadest measure of hospitals; by 2020, this had been slashed by two-fifths. On this broad basis, the number of hospital beds per 1,000 persons fell from 6.8 in 1975, to 2.6 today.

Governments often publish a narrower measure, based on beds in community hospitals, which are short-term, and general hospitals, to which most people go today. That measure shows hospital beds per 1,000 people in the United States fell from 4.4 in 1975, to 2.3 in 2020.

This hospital, in Mitchell County, Georgia, built in the 1950s, was one of hundreds constructed under the auspices of the Hill-Burton “Hospital Survey and Construction Act.”

---------------------------------------------

The Change

What went wrong was the trashing of the exemplary 1946 Hill-Burton Act, while financiers implemented genocidal policies represented by the 1973 Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Act, whose implementation cut costs and reduced services while advancing a Malthusian purpose.

In 1946, the U.S. Congress passed, and the President signed into law the Hill-Burton Act, otherwise known as the Hospital Survey and Construction Act. The Act authorized the provision of federal grants and guaranteed loans to states to upgrade the nation’s health care facilities, including specifically building new hospitals, with the stated goal of building and maintaining the level of 4.5 beds per 1,000 people. This was based on the work of the U.S. military during World War II, and the remarkable achievement of President Franklin Roosevelt in raising the number of hospital beds by 68% between 1933 and 1944. FDR used New Deal agencies, especially the Works Progress Administration.

While Hill-Burton activated hospital construction in the late 1940s, and the 1950s, the financiers pushed it aside in the 1960s, and shifted to the HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) policy in the 1970s.

By 2002 LaRouche, with his movement, had been involved for seven years in a mass mobilization to save the nation’s capital’s only public hospital, D.C. General Hospital, from being shut down with thousands of others nationwide. On May 20 of that year, he said in part:

Over a period of more than three decades to the present date, there had been a trend in national policy and practice, away from the Constitutional commitment to promotion of the general welfare, toward an increasingly radical notion of what is sometimes named “shareholder value.” With the rising flood-tide of global monetary-financial and economic crises, the United States, like other nations, is being impelled, of necessity, to return to what some prefer to name as “protectionist” measures, and to economy-rebuilding policies referencing successful features of the U.S.-led recovery and reconstruction programs of the Americas, Europe, and Japan during various phases of approximately the 1933-1965 interval.

We present below a battlefield report of the forced bankruptcy and shutting down of hospitals in major cities, as well as in rural communities; the planned shortage of intensive care facilities, so necessary to fight the coronavirus; and the awakening to reality by several of the nation’s governors who are re-opening closed hospitals and converting other facilities to emergency healthcare.

A top-down policy change must be achieved to combat this terrible crisis. Every closed hospital that has been reopened today to provide beds and services must remain open in the future. A mobilization is needed to construct modern, state-of-the-art facilities containing equipment based on advanced physical principles, and the required new 700,000 permanent hospital beds to meet Hill-Burton standards. This and other healthcare requirements can only be achieved within the implementation of LaRouche’s Four Laws, as we explain below.

wikipedia /Pinoy916

The Center City Philadelphia campus of Hahnemann University Hospital, with 496 beds, has been closed for months, after its purchaser, private equity investor Joel Freedman, put it into bankruptcy.

---------------------------------------------

Bankruptcies Instead of Construction

The year 2019 was a disaster of bankruptcies, and the process carried over into 2020. This during a time when new hospital construction was required. A January 6, 2020 Bloomberg News article, “Hospital Bankruptcies Leave Sick and Injured Nowhere to Go,” reports that, “at least 30 hospitals entered bankruptcy in 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.” This ranges from Hahnemann University Hospital in downtown Philadelphia, to De Queen Medical Center in rural Sevier County, Arkansas, to Americore Health LLC, a company built to preserve local hospitals.

The closing of Hahnemann Hospital is particularly severe. Founded in 1848, this 496-bed facility with a medical staff of 570 had been serving mostly the poor and under-served among Philadelphia’s 1.5 million people. It provided 30 medical specialties. It was taken over by private equity investor Joel Freedman, who on June 26, 2019 put the hospital into bankruptcy reorganization, forcing its closure. An entire section of Philadelphia now has no hospital.

The 214-bed Astria Regional Medical Center was in Yakima, Washington state, one of the centers of concentrated coronavirus deaths. Two months ago, after sustaining $40 million in losses over the previous months, it was put into bankruptcy and shut down. Another case is MetroSouth Medical Center, a 314-bed, acute care hospital, that employed 800 doctors, nurses, and other professionals, and serviced over 70,000 patients each year in a district of Chicago with extensive pockets of poverty. Quorum Health Corporation, which had taken over the hospital, closed MetroSouth on September 30, 2019.

This problem is particularly acute for rural hospitals. From 2005 to 2019, a total of 168 rural hospitals closed. Over 57% (or 96) of those were closed during the Obama years, and the largest number were closed in the South. Especially hard hit have been Texas and Tennessee. The closures are concentrated in East Texas and West Tennessee. For example, McKenzie Regional Hospital, in Tennessee, closed in September 2018, and now families face an hour-long commute to the nearest hospital, if they have a car. In Texas, of 22 communities impacted, 11 now have no hospital, emergency services, or clinic services.

NYC Didn’t Have to Have Mass Outbreak

New York City is the current epicenter for coronavirus for the United States, with 26,600 cases and 450 deaths as of the evening of March 27. Two instances show why this didn’t have to happen.

EIRNS/Dan Sturman

Felix Rohatyn, Lazard Frères banker-hitman.

---------------------------------------------

First, in 1975, Lazard Frères banker Felix Rohatyn and other Wall Street bankers set up the Municipal Assistance Corporation (the “Big MAC”), which effectively supplanted the Mayor and City Council of New York City. The Big MAC shut down Sydenham Hospital in West Harlem, Manhattan, which served that community; Long Island College Hospital and other hospitals in Brooklyn; and other hospitals in New York City. In 1960, New York City had 154 hospitals; by 1990, in large part because of the Big MAC policy, that had been cut in half, to 79. Then Sir Michael Bloomberg, during his 2002-2013 reign as mayor, effected the closure of another 20 hospitals. Do you think the city could use the more than 95 closed hospitals, and the attendant beds, to save lives right now?

Second, in the March 19 New York Post, former New York Lt. Governor Betsy McCaughey ran an explosive exposé, “We Didn’t Have to Have Ventilator Shortage—Leaders Chose Not to Prep for Pandemic.” McCaughey related:

Several years ago, after learning that the Empire State’s stockpile of medical equipment had 16,000 fewer ventilators than the 18,000 New Yorkers would need in a severe pandemic, state public-health leaders came to a fork in the road.

They could have chosen to buy more ventilators to back up the supplies hospitals maintain. Instead, the health commissioner, Howard Zucker, assembled a task force for rationing the ventilators they already had.

In 2015, that task force came up with rules that will be imposed when ventilators run short. Patients assigned a red code will have highest access, and other patients will be assigned green, yellow or blue (the worst), depending on a “triage officer’s” decision.

McCaughey says that in 2015, the state could have purchased an additional 16,000 ventilators for $36,000 apiece, or a total of $756 million. She added, “It’s a lot of money, but in hindsight, spending half a percent of the budget to prepare for pandemic was the right thing to do.”

COVID-19’s appearance in New York City could not have been totally stopped. Nonetheless the consequent death and illness could have been greatly reduced with beds and ventilators, but austerity triumphed with horrible consequences.

Where the ICU Beds Are

Kaiser Health News

More than half of U.S. counties have no ICU beds, a grave danger for the more than 7 million people who are aged 60 and up, who face the highest risk of serious illness or death from the rapid spread of COVID-19, a Kaiser Health News analysis shows. Hospitals for veterans run by the Department of Defense are not included in Kaiser’s analysis.

---------------------------------------------

Wall Street: No ICU Bed if You’re 60 or Older

Intensive care units, which in the case of COVID-19 would have ventilators, are critical for patients with the disease to survive.

A study released March 20 by the Kaiser Health News (KHN) service shockingly reported that, “More than half of the counties in America have no intensive care beds, posing a … danger for more than 7 million people” over the age of 60 who reside in those counties as COVID-19 rapidly spreads. Further the study indicated that even where there are ICU beds, the numbers available for senior citizens “vary wildly.” The study’s data is a comparison between hospital data and the numbers of persons over age 60.

The KHN study reports that those counties with hospitals with no ICU beds, encompasses 18 million people, and that of those, “about a quarter of them are 60 or older.” And, there are 11 million more people who live in counties with no hospital at all, and “2.7 million of them [are] seniors.”

The real evidence of what LaRouche always identified as Wall Street gouging is seen in KHN’s data comparing numbers of the available ICU beds to the number of seniors who might need those beds in a given county. Among counties that do have ICU beds, the average is 1,300 seniors per bed in each county. Some incredible examples are given: Clinton County, Michigan, has 8,469 residents aged 60 and up, for each ICU bed; Santa Cruz County, California, has 2,601 seniors per ICU bed.

Those are the most extreme. It’s not better in the big cities: Los Angeles has one ICU bed for each 847 senior residents; San Francisco has one per 5,323 older residents. Using KHN’s data table, EIR found that in New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic, the ratios for ICU beds for seniors are: Manhattan, 452 seniors for each ICU bed; Brooklyn, 1,499; and Queens, 3,648.

The farm belts are extreme in the lack of hospitals and ICU beds. For example, in Kansas, 68 of the state’s 105 counties have no ICU beds at all.

Reality Strikes State Governors

On March 16, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed an omnibus health care order that “calls on the [Maryland] health department and [healthcare] providers to reopen closed hospitals in an effort to increase the state’s healthcare capacity by 6,000 beds.” The same order allows healthcare practitioners from other states or those with inactive licenses in Maryland to work in the state. Governors across all 50 states, to varying degrees, are reopening hospitals or placing hospital beds in various facilities.

The most serious issues are faced in two of the nation’s largest states. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stressed that at the peak, his state will need 140,000 hospital beds and 40,000 ICU beds, but currently has only 53,000 of the former and 3,000 of the latter.

CGTN

New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center was converted to a temporary hospital, housing 1,000 hospital beds.

---------------------------------------------

At a March 24 press conference, he detailed how New York will increase its active bed inventory: He has gotten agreement from all hospitals to increase their bed supply by 50%, which will yield 27,000 additional beds, and he will use dormitories of the state university system, which will yield 29,000 beds. This will include installing beds in the Javits Convention Center, the sending of the Navy’s USNS Comfort 1000-bed hospital ship to New York, and so on. But even with all that, he will be 20,000 hospital beds short. As for the drastic shortage of ICU beds, they are limited by the supply of ventilators.

On March 23, California Governor Gavin Newsom said that the state, the most populous in America, will need an additional 50,000 hospital beds. He said he is asking existing hospitals to add 33,000 beds. The Navy’s 1,000-bed USNS Mercy has already docked in Los Angeles. These added beds are vital to saving lives now. They show momentum, but don’t meet the level required.

LaRouche Versus Nazi Policies

The Washington Post on March 25, in an article titled, “Hospitals Across U.S. Consider Universal Do-Not-Resuscitate Orders for Coronavirus Patients,” reported that “Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago has been discussing a universal do-not-resuscitate (DNR) policy for infected patients, regardless of the wishes of the patient.” This is a re-incarnation of Adolf Hitler’s health policy of killing those “whose lives are not worthy to be lived.” President Trump’s epidemiology advisor, Dr. Deborah Birx, angrily opposed the Post for publishing this: “No situation in the United States warrants this discussion,” she stressed. LaRouche’s “People First” and no-triage policy denounced it 20 years ago.

The City of London-Wall Street bankers have destroyed the U.S. hospital system, and now demand that as a consequence of its inadequacy to meet the novel coronavirus crisis, we must murder people.

White House

Dr. Deborah Birx, U.S. Special Representative for Global Health Diplomacy and White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, speaking at the President’s press conference announcing a National Health Emergency to combat and defeat COVID-19.

---------------------------------------------

That argument presumes a fixed universe of destruction and austerity.

Mankind is not bound by that universe. The United States and the world have another course and responsibility.

Every closed hospital that has been re-opened during this emergency must be kept open permanently. This may mean financing arrangements, including perhaps grants or subsidies by federal and state governments for hospitals that were losing money. Concurrently, medical staffing and training needs be geared up.

There must be a massive hospital building program, to build new, modern fully-equipped hospitals possessing equipment based on the characteristics of the electromagnetic spectrum, including optical biophysics. This defines the needed permanent new 700,000 beds to meet Hill-Burton standards of 4.5 beds per 1,000 persons.

The recent $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, signed into law by President Trump on March 17, provides $130 billion principally for maintaining hospitals, re-opening some that are closed, and turning other facilities into temporary hospitals with beds as well as equipment that must be produced. This is a useful first step, but not adequate. The full construction would need be done under the Hill-Burton law, perhaps complemented and accelerated through the use of the National Defense Production Act, which would provide hospital builders accelerated amortization credits.

David Christie has calculated for EIR that simply to add 575,000 new hospital beds would mean adding about 9600 MW to the United States’ electricity grid. That’s about 1.5 times the output of the Grand Coulee Dam, or equivalently about 10 Westinghouse pressurized-water nuclear reactors. We would also have to add about 85 billion gallons of water a year to supply these added hospitals.

But this construction would never occur under the present gigantic speculative bubble that hangs over and strangles the world and the United States. The world financial system, which has been hopelessly bankrupt for two decades, is disintegrating. The signs abound, including the buckling of the $10 trillion U.S. corporate debt market and the failing of sections of the hedge fund industry. This bubble cannot be bailed out, no matter how much money is thrown at it, nor should it be.

To correct this, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for the immediate shut-down of the world’s speculative markets, and has issued a call for the Presidents of China, the United States, Russia, and India to meet at a summit, where the current, cancerous world monetary system is cancelled and replaced by a New Bretton Woods as designed by Lyndon LaRouche. That system would transform the world through projects of infrastructure and machine-tool growth, financed by Hamiltonian credit. The United States would simultaneously implement LaRouche’s Four Laws, including new scientifically advanced platforms of fusion power, a Moon-Mars mission, high-speed and maglev rail, and mass hospital building.

The U.S. could re-establish President Franklin Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a vehicle for Hamiltonian credit-generation, which could set up a Hospital Construction Corporation like the Defense Plants Corporation of World War II, to supplement Hill-Burton.

Similar measures need be undertaken on a crash basis in Africa, Asia and Ibero-America, as their forced underdevelopment is removed.

We can ensure that a COVID-19 crisis, or anything like it, never happens again.

---------------------------------------------

G20 Teleconference May Be Precursor to Economic and Scientific Joint Action

by Paul Gallagher

---------------------------------------------

March 26—The presidents and prime ministers of the Group of 20 (G20) nations clearly expressed their desire to cooperate to speed up the defeat of the COVID-19 virus all over the world, when they met by teleconference on March 26, and their intention to expand aid to developing countries that lack public health capacities. The meeting was followed twelve hours later by an apparently substantive phone call between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, whose two nations are the most important in creating a new international system of economic development.

The G20 leaders’ statement on COVID-19 reads, in part:

We are gravely concerned with the serious risks posed to all countries, particularly developing and least developed countries, and notably in Africa and small island states, where health systems and economies may be less able to cope with the challenge, as well as the particular risk faced by refugees and displaced persons. We will strengthen capacity building.... We stand ready to mobilize development and humanitarian financing.

The G20 leaders pledged to conduct expanded, frontier scientific research together to save human lives from deadly pandemics. And they further said in their statement:

We will expand manufacturing capacity to meet the increasing needs for medical supplies and ensure these are made widely available, at an affordable price, on an equitable basis, where they are most needed and as quickly as possible.

For weeks before this teleconference, Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche had publicly proposed that the four key leaders on that call meet—Presidents Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. She had called on them to jointly create credit for just such efforts, including hospital building worldwide and scientific crash programs, through cooperation of national banks in each country. And she urged them temporarily to close the lately collapsing securities markets and stop all bailouts to those markets and the Wall Street and City of London banks.

The task Zepp-LaRouche is urging on these four nations’ leaders is far, far larger than that set forth so far by the G20 nations—the task is the creation of a new international credit and monetary system fostering capital goods exports to developing countries, setting fixed currency exchange values, and using Glass-Steagall Acts to make the biggest banks shed all their speculative investment units. That larger task requires, however, the agreement to cooperate economically and on scientific frontiers. The great challenge of the coronavirus pandemic may have begun to force this new order into sight, to the exclusion of continued geopolitical conflict.

Trump Reasserts China Cooperation

Following the personal call between Trump and Xi, the U.S. President sent out a Twitter message which would be unrecognizable to his knucklehead Secretary of State:

Just finished a very good conversation with President Xi of China. Discussed in great detail the CoronaVirus that is ravaging large parts of our Planet. China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the Virus. We are working closely together. Much respect!

The Hill publication in Washington understated the case: “Trump’s remarks signaled an effort to ease tensions between the United States and China, which have run high amid the global spread of the virus.”

From China, President Xi commented on the call:

The relationship of China and the U.S. is at a critical juncture. Cooperation is mutually beneficial to both nations, while fighting will hurt.... It is hoped that the United States will take concrete actions to improve China-U.S. relations and the two sides will work together to strengthen cooperation in areas such as epidemic control.... China is willing to continue to share information and experience with the United States without reservation.

Again, from the G20 leaders’ statement:

We are currently undertaking immediate and vigorous measures to support our economies; protect workers, businesses—especially micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises—and the sectors most affected; and shield the vulnerable through adequate social protection….

We will continue to conduct bold and large-scale fiscal support…. The magnitude and scope of this response will get the global economy back on its feet and set a strong basis for the protection of jobs and the recovery of growth.

The economic actions taken so far by the major powers, to reverse the depressionary impact of the pandemic, are suddenly very large but entirely directed toward their own economies; worse, they are being hijacked by central banks, led by the Federal Reserve—printing money to save financial speculators on Wall Street, in the City of London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and other centers. A “monetarist virus” runs in harness with the pandemic virus.

After the G20 teleconference, the Chinese Foreign Ministry explained that the nations on that call had spent, and/or had now committed a total of $5 trillion toward reviving economies collapsed by the pandemic’s impact—$3.5 trillion of it by the governments of the United States and China. It is shocking that in comparison a single central bank, the Federal Reserve, had printed and/or committed to print at least $5.2 trillion to buy failing assets from City of London and Wall Street banks, hedge funds, investment banking and broker-dealing vehicles, and so forth, and is also providing the dollars, through “swap lines,” for nineteen other central banks to do the same.

And the heads of state on the teleconference decided, despite their stated intention for new degrees of cooperation against the coronavirus, that “We support the extraordinary measures taken by central banks”—which are overwhelmingly supporting unpayable debt assets.

The challenge for real, joint economic development action was put to the G20 leaders in a March 15 statement, “Three Things the G20 Must Do to Support Africa in COVID-19 Pandemic,” by nineteen African nations, directed to the G20 teleconference, asking for a debt moratorium. In an opinion column titled, “If Covid-19 Is Not Beaten in Africa It Will Return to Haunt Us All,” published in the Financial Times on March 25, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali invoked the higher order of cooperation that Helga Zepp-LaRouche is calling for. Abiy wrote:

There is a major flaw in the strategy to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Advanced economies are unveiling unprecedented economic stimulus packages. African countries, by contrast, lack the wherewithal to make similarly meaningful interventions. Yet if the virus is not defeated in Africa, it will only bounce back to the rest of the world.

That is why the current strategy of uncoordinated country-specific measures, while understandable, is myopic, unsustainable and potentially counter-productive.

African nations lack the fully equipped and scientifically advanced hospital and public health facilities. The advanced nations must create the credit and capital exports to build such facilities worldwide. The opening exists now for discussion of a new Bretton Woods system launched by the leaders Zepp-LaRouche is calling on. The rest depends on the LaRouche movement’s current mobilization for a new Bretton Woods four-power summit.