Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 15, April 10, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF Edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 15, April 10, 2020

- I. ‘All Men Shall Be Brothers’

- LAROUCHE PAC WEBCAST DIALOGUE, APRIL 4 We Must Build a World Health System Now by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

- We Are All One Human Race by Hussein Askary

- A New, Higher Order of Human Civilization by Jacques Cheminade

- II. Change the Axioms of Policy

- Mike Bloomberg’s Destruction of New York’s Virus Defenses by Barbara Boyd

- NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED Overturning Axiomatic Assumptions by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1997)

- III. Redefining the Relationship among Nations

- Does South Africa Have the Moral Fitness to Survive? A Proposal to Defeat the Coronavirus Pandemic by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

- Pandemic Requires Emergency Action Against Monetarist ‘Markets’ System Principles to Secure Food Supply Set by LaRouche by EIR Staff

- AN IMMEDIATE REQUIREMENT Cease the Annual Installment Payments On the So-Called Public Debt of Greece by Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos

- MARCH 26, 2020 An Open Letter to the People of the United States from 100 Chinese Scholars

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Systems Are Manmade: You Can Change Systems When One Breaks Down

- EDITORIAL If President Trump Controls the Fed What Can Now Be Done? by Paul Gallagher

From the Alliance To Defeat the Pandemic,

A New Direction for the World Can Be Built

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

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Rainer Apel

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

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

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Göran Haglund

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 15, April 10, 2020

Cover This Week

Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation

Russian military doctors arrive to begin round-the-clock duty with their Italian colleagues, treating patients with coronavirus infection in a field hospital in Bergamo, Italy, April 8, 2020.

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FROM THE ALLIANCE TO DEFEAT THE PANDEMIC,

A NEW DIRECTION FOR THE WORLD CAN BE BUILT

I. ‘ALL MEN SHALL BE BROTHERS’:

FROM COVID-19 TO THE NEW PARADIGM

3 LAROUCHE PAC WEBCAST DIALOGUE, APRIL 4

We Must Build a World Health System Now

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

President of the Schiller Institute

5 We Are All One Human Race

by Hussein Askary, Southwest Asia Coordinator for the Schiller Institute

7 A New, Higher Order of Human Civilization

by Jacques Cheminade, President of Solidarité & Progrès

II. CHANGE THE AXIOMS OF POLICY

10 Mike Bloomberg’s Destruction of New York’s Virus Defenses

by Barbara Boyd

26 NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED

Overturning Axiomatic Assumptions

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

September 1, 1997

III. REDEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG NATIONS

33 Does South Africa Have the Moral Fitness to Survive?

A Proposal to Defeat the Coronavirus Pandemic

by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

36 Pandemic Requires Emergency Action Against Monetarist ‘Markets’ System

by EIR Staff

40 AN IMMEDIATE REQUIREMENT

Cease Annual Installment Payments on the So-Called Public Debt of Greece

by Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos

41 MARCH 26, 2020

Open Letter to the People of the United States from 100 Chinese Scholars

44 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Systems Are Manmade: You Can Change Systems When One Breaks Down

51 EDITORIAL

If President Trump Controls the Fed

What Can Now Be Done?

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. ‘All Men Shall Be Brothers’

WEBCAST DIALOGUE

‘All Men Shall Be Brothers’:

From COVID-19 to the New Paradigm

We present here an edited transcript of the three presentations to April 4, 2020 LaRouche PAC Webcast Dialogue. The full video, with extended discussion, is available here.

We Must Build a World Health System Now

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

President and Founder of the Schiller Institute

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Helga Zepp-LaRouche

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

It’s getting now very clear that we are in the middle of, or at the beginning of what seems to be becoming the worst crisis in human history. It is clear that already in Europe, in Italy and Spain, and in the United States, the health systems are not sufficient. There are not enough medical supplies, face masks, respiration machines, doctors, nurses, and ICU units. It is also very clear that this pandemic—this worldwide epidemic—is spreading very quickly to the developing countries. You can be absolutely sure that if it hits countries like Haiti, or the 54 African nations, or large, populated nations in Asia, the situation will be much worse. They do not have enough medical supplies; they don’t even have health systems. They don’t have enough clean water. The idea to self-isolate and wash your hands will mean nothing, because there are no such things possible for half of the population at least. This means that this thing is getting completely out of control.

So, the purpose of the call that I made, and the purpose of this meeting tonight, is to launch a campaign to put one single issue on the agenda. That is, that we have to react to this as the one humanity, and we have to drop all other agendas. We have to build a world health system; we have to gear up naturally for the defense of the people in the United States, in the European countries. But given the fact that it is a pandemic, this will be not enough.

This virus is going to mutate; it will come back, and it will come back in waves, increasingly destroying our real production. It will have a severe impact on food production. The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) has already put out statements that it expects the economic effect to be a reduction of industrial production in the OECD countries of 30%; you will have millions of unemployed. That is why we have to have a complete shift in the agenda to completely produce only for one effect—namely, to build up a health system in every single country in the world with the same energy, the same passion, the same means.

President Trump has invoked the National Defense Production Act. New York Governor Cuomo has called for an unprecedented mobilization of all health personnel—doctors, nurses, retraining, training of young people. This is a step in the right direction, but this must be accompanied with a gearing up of the industrial production, to produce all the means necessary to combat this pandemic. That means hospitals in every country; it means protective clothes, face masks, respiration machines. The whole industry must be retooled to this effect until we have defeated this pandemic.

There is no way that the liquidity pumping of the central banks will be able to be continued throughout this mobilization. There are people who say this comes unprecedented, this is a complete shock. Well, we can prove to you that this is not the case. Lyndon LaRouche warned of this coming since 1971, when he warned of the consequences of the abandoning of the Bretton Woods system by Nixon. He especially warned since 1973 and 1974, what would be the economic impact of the conditionalities policy of the IMF and the World Bank on the developing sector. And he warned that pandemics would be the result. His entire life’s work was to warn of the fact that monetarism—this second deadly virus—would result in pandemics. You cannot lower the living standard of entire continents over prolonged periods of time without encouraging lower forms of life in the biosphere to take over; namely, viruses.

Worldwide Mobilization for a New Paradigm

The idea is to start a mobilization worldwide that will completely change the paradigm. We have called for a summit of the most important countries of the world—the United States, Russia, China, and India—that they must conduct a summit to change the system, to agree to have a new world economic order that allows for the survival of every country on this planet. There are motions in this direction. Just today, President Trump was talking on the phone with French Prime Minister Macron, and they agreed to speed up a similar proposal made by Russian President Putin at the beginning of January, that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council must immediately convene an emergency meeting and agree on increased international collaboration to move in this direction.

The Schiller Institute will convene an international internet conference on April 25th and 26th. The aim of it—long before the dimension of the pandemic was clear—was that this conference of the Schiller Institute must have a program which will help to shape the discussion of the summit of these large nations. We have to have a sudden axiomatic change. There are many discussions already which are useful and must be supported, such as for the lifting of all sanctions to allow all countries to fight the pandemic. To have an immediate ceasefire; to stop all military actions. But we need something more. We need a steamroller mobilization of many people and many organizations joining, to completely change the agenda.

There is one successful model of how the coronavirus was defeated, at least temporarily; that is what China did in Wuhan and Hubei province. That is, you have to have total testing; you have to have identification of the people testing positive, you have to isolate them and put them in quarantine. That way you can interrupt the infection chain and you can defeat the virus. The problem is, it has been proven that in the trans-Atlantic world it was not possible to replicate this model, because the test kits were not available, the industries were not yet geared up. The Western governments delayed in taking advantage of the warning time they should have gained in learning from the Chinese intervention.

That now must be geared up through the kind of mobilization I was talking about. The apocalyptic dimension of what we are facing will be getting very clear in a very short period of time. All the confusion, all the fake news that the coronavirus would be only as bad as the flu, all this disinformation will vanish. There will be an openness to discuss a completely new paradigm.

The Crisis Perpetrators

There is also the need to become very clear that the ideas of the perpetrators, of the people and the forces who are responsible that we ended up in this situation in the first place, must not prevail. Today, for example, there is an article by Henry Kissinger in the Wall Street Journal, with the headline “The Coronavirus Will Forever Alter the World Order.” We should remember that Kissinger may know what the hour is in which the old-world order becomes irredeemably and forever gone. But we should not forget that it was Kissinger’s policy of the National Security Study Memorandum, NSSM 200, agreed upon in 1974, which was one big part of this murderous Malthusian depopulation policy against the developing countries.

This memorandum, which was only made public and published in the early 1990s, said that the population in certain developing countries must be reduced and controlled because there are large resources there which are all in the strategic interests of the United States to control and conserve. Another one of the perpetrators was the evil policy of the Club of Rome, which started to spread this idea that there are limits to growth and you have to go into a zero-growth economy. A lie which was immediately refuted by Lyndon LaRouche, who wrote a very important book titled, There Are No Limits to Growth. It was also the policies of John D Rockefeller III, who at the UN Population Conference in Bucharest in the same year, 1974, started to talk about overpopulation, population explosions, and other such Malthusian ideas.

These people are murderers. If you want proof, look at what Jeremy Warner wrote on March 3rd in the Daily Telegraph, where he said that there is a benefit to the coronavirus. That is that it will cull the elderly. Obviously, Warner walks in the footsteps of Prince Philip, who in a public conference on religion said that he wants to be reincarnated as a deadly virus so that he can better help to reduce the world population. Or listen to Sir David King, the chief scientific advisor of both the Blair and Brown governments, who openly said the elderly must be sacrificed for the sake of the economy. These Malthusian views must be put in front of a new Nuremberg Tribunal, because it clearly applies to them that they knew or should have known what the consequences of their policies would be on the Third World.

Even the think tank of the German Army (Bundeswehr), the German Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies, just put out the demand for a ruthless investigation as to why the world so blindly could slide into this catastrophe. Such an investigation has already been made. We did that over the last 50 years. Lyndon LaRouche, for half a century, warned exactly that this would happen. Also in the German Parliament, in 2012, in the context of the SARS pandemic, there was a scenario run about a “Modi-SARS”—modified SARS—posing a possible pandemic reaching Europe, the United States, and Asia. Strangely enough, they left out Africa. If you talk about a pandemic and you leave out Africa, that is very strange. But that was ignored as well.

What we now need is an unprecedented—and I really mean unprecedented—mobilization. I’m calling on all of you to join in, to build an alliance of people who participate in the conference of the Schiller Institute on April 25th and 26th. And I want you to reach out to many organizations and people in North America and Europe, but also in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Reach out to UN organizations, to NGOs, to world health organizations, for only one purpose: That we have to gear up to build a Health Silk Road health system in every country. We must get a steamroller effect of people demanding the immediate construction of hospitals and ICU units. But also the production of food, because there is already the danger that this pandemic will be accompanied by a world shortage of food, because of the breakdown of parts of production, the affected people, and so forth.

Only By Burying the Casino Economy

But at the same time, if we want to build a new health system worldwide, it is very clear it cannot be done with the present casino economy. So, we will need the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche. It will be necessary to have a global Glass-Steagall banking separation in order to finance a health system in every country. We need a national bank in every country, and these national banks must be connected to a New Bretton Woods credit system. The outcome of this must also be a completely different set of values. Absolutely not the liberal order and the values of the Enlightenment that Kissinger is asking for, but what we need instead is a return to humanist values, to the idea of mankind as one humanity.

We put the interest of the common human species ahead of national interests, and we must come out of this with a completely New Paradigm of love for humanity and a new system of international relations, replacing confrontation through cooperation. If we all are united in that spirit, I think we can turn this terrible crisis into a chance for all of humanity to change the paradigm to become truly human as befits a human species.

We Are All One Human Race

by Hussein Askary

Southwest Asia Coordinator for the Schiller Institute

BRIX

Hussein Askary

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

I’m really honored to be at this conference with all these distinguished speakers. I’m going to be a bit more optimistic, because there are certain things I’m going to say which you will realize. But without being complacent, and while we fight this pandemic together with full force, we need to take a step back sometimes and think about the positive aspects of the coronavirus pandemic. People might be surprised that there are some. There are important aspects.

Number one, people are gradually realizing that we are all one human race. This was not really self-evident before. The coronavirus is treating us all as equal people. We are now, in the words of President Xi Jinping, a true community of a shared destiny. We share today the same destiny. The other thing the coronavirus has done is to expose the fateful shortcomings of the current system, which is dominated by the trans-Atlantic powers. It has also shown people what is truly valuable in terms of what LaRouche calls physical economy, which means that if you need an intensive care bed, you get it. If you need a specific medicine, you get it. If you need to be transported somewhere, you can have that possibility. This is something which is now taking place all over the world. People feel they are getting closer to other humans, although they are on a different continent, because we are all facing the same problem.

The situation in West Asia, or Southwest Asia generally, and in Africa, has many ironies. It’s a terrible situation, but the fear that there is no real health care system is forcing people to stay at home. They know—I saw a video of a person going around with a loudspeaker in Morocco, although Morocco is more advanced than many other countries, he says on the loudspeaker, “Stay at home! If you get sick, we only have aspirin in the hospital. If you get any problem, we will not be able to treat you, so you better stay at home.” That’s, in a certain sense, a disastrous situation, but at the same time, it’s forcing people to be careful. We have the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, he wrote a fantastic opinion piece in the Financial Times last week, where he said, “In my country, and in many countries in Africa, drinking clean water is a luxury. So, to tell people to comply with the recommendation to wash your hands, is completely absurd.” This is the situation we have.

We have to think about why did that happen? Helga explained very clearly the criminal policy which has led to this situation, that countries were not allowed to develop. But the thing is that what we have to do now, as Helga said, is to look forward, work actively now to implement the things we need to implement. The good news in a certain sense is that humankind shall overcome this crisis. We know that we as a human race have gone through many such catastrophic events before. Now the viruses like the coronavirus are very smart, but they are not intelligent. They take advantage of us when we have our guard down, when we are vulnerable. We made ourselves vulnerable. But we are the species which is intelligent. We have 1,010 ways to get these viruses if we use our intelligence, if we use our activity. But the issue is, what we will learn from this; how we act now, and what kind of world we need to build after this crisis is overcome.

Look Back to the 14th Century

In this respect, I would like to invite two gentlemen from the 14th century, whose works I am now revisiting because of a lot of downtime. The first one is Ibn Battuta. He was born in Tangier, Morocco in 1304 in the 14th century. He was educated in theology, but at the age of 20, he decided to go make a pilgrimage to Mecca in what is today Saudi Arabia, to fulfill his duty as a Muslim. However, he was fascinated by the opportunity to meet other theologians and philosophical thinkers in the different cities. He was visiting in North Africa, Tunisia, and Egypt; then Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and so on and so forth. He spent 27 years travelling around what was his known world then. So, instead of going home after the pilgrimage, he travelled for 27 years. He visited most parts of the world, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and India. He worked in India for three years as a judge in Delhi. Then, he went to East Asia and China.

On his way back home to North Africa after these 27 years, he witnessed the Great Plague in 1347 and 1348. What he witnessed in Damascus and Jerusalem and Cairo and other big cities of the time, his description is almost identical to what we see for example in northern Italy, what we saw in Wuhan in the first days and weeks of the outbreak. So, there is very little difference between what people went through then and what we see today. But he survived the plague, and now we can read his fascinating account.

The other gentleman is Ibn Khaldun. He was born in 1332, a couple of decades after Ibn Battuta. He is described as the first true historiographer, a real history scientist. He lost both his parents in the plague; they died when he was 16 years old. This affected his life a lot. He was very well educated, and he wrote many volumes about the history of the world. But his most important work is called The Introduction; this introduction to his work is in two volumes. So, this is a very fascinating character.

End the Cycles of Oligarchical Failures

I have certain criticisms of his method sometimes; it is somewhat Aristotelian. For example, in his criticism of historians before him, he says they are just reporting events as they happened. But, he says, there is no causality: they don’t mention the level of ideas and culture, the level of scientific, artistic, and economic productivity at the time. He says these are the things we have to study in history—what are the ideas and the behavior and habits that control a society? He is also known as the person who came up with the idea of a cyclical development of civilization; that civilizations rise and fall. [audio garbling] and you are mission-oriented.

Then you get to the age of 40, people are prosperous, but then they become complacent. They forget the importance of culture, science, art, and so on. They turn, like we have had in the past two or three decades, into a consumer society which is focussed on pleasure-seeking. Acquiring money and profit and never paying attention to the development of the mind. He said in that sense, these societies become senile, because they forget how they started; they forget the reasons why they became great. So, in that sense, Ibn Khaldun is thinking like LaRouche does in a sense that history is not the history of events, it is the history of ideas. That’s the thing we learn from understanding history.

He said these societies become senile and finally collapse, either by natural disaster, epidemics, or invasion by foreign powers. He sums up the situation during the plague and the aftermath in a very chilling way. He writes:

Civilization in both the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind [of population]. Cities and buildings were laid waste. Roads and way signs were obliterated. Settlements and mansions became empty, and dynasties and tribes grew weak; the entire inhabited world changed.

These are the words of a person who actually survived the plague. But what he is discussing is what preceded the great plague—it was the decline of civilization. We had 200 years of the Crusades; we had the Mongol hordes invading from the East into the Islamic world. Then the Venetian banking practices, they were both running the Crusades as well as attempting [to control] all financial matters in the Mediterranean and the trade. Then, as some of my colleagues have described it in EIR, we had the financial and banking collapse. But the infrastructure of the nations was already destroyed, and that’s why the plague could take such a toll on the populations in Asia, Africa, and Europe.

So, what we have to do now, as Helga is saying, is, we have to relaunch civilization, basically. We have to go back to the best of our civilization in every country; what were the best times we have had? Energetic, creative, and mission-oriented; that’s what we need. This is the way we need to think. I will end with a Chinese saying, which President Xi Jinping repeated in a conference: “Never forget how you started, and you will succeed.”

Therefore, I am speaking in a tone of optimism, but also with the understanding of what the reality is. That’s why we have to act accordingly. Thank you.

A New, Higher Order of Human Civilization

by Jacques Cheminade

President of the French political party, Solidarité & Progrès

LPAC

Jacques Cheminade

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

I’m very happy to be with you in this moment that challenges our humanity. It is an unprecedented moment, an historically unprecedented moment, but not unpredictable, because Lyndon LaRouche had warned against it since August 15, 1971. Unprecedented, because half of humanity is confined at this point. We have been confined in France for three weeks, and we are going to be confined probably until the end of April, maybe later. So, it’s many weeks. Also, most of the world economy is shut down. You have a terrible crisis coming in the auto industry, oil industry, agriculture—the whole foodstuffs question—and the service sector, obviously. In this condition, the world that comes after is not going to be back to normal. It is this normal world of the last 50 years, mainly since August 15, 1971, that has generated the present situation. It was normally destructive.

At this point, either we are thrown into chaos, destruction, and a murderous Malthusian universe, or we change it. And that is what we are doing with the upcoming April 25-26 international Schiller Institute conference. It is time to throw away the axioms and habits of the past world and build a new one; a world dedicated to the generations to come, and to the common good of us all. In that sense, as was said before, the coronavirus pandemic is the opportunity of our lives—the moment for which Lyndon LaRouche has prepared us since 1971 to 1974.

It was 1971 when he said that the financial deregulation and cultural degeneration were going to create the conditions for an economic and cultural collapse, which would generate world pandemics. Then, in 1974, when he created the Biological Holocaust Taskforce. Now the whole world is in the state that LaRouche forecast, and it is our moment to grasp, as Beethoven once said, it is moment to grasp fate with our teeth; to grasp destiny with our teeth.

We Have to Change Society

For that, we have to change our society, and the individuals that are part of this society, to re-establish the immune systems of both the society and the individual. The human immune system is connected with both the emotion of life and the emotion of the mind—the mind of nations as well as the minds of each of us individuals composing those nations. This means to prevail over three interconnected enemies—the financial dictatorship of the British Empire and its allies in the world, all bureaucracies organized to serve the Empire, and our self-destructive inactions generated by the social cultural system of the Empire, generating within ourselves, which has generated what I would call a voluntary bondage. Our complicity from inside, from a fear of being exposed, or a hunger for rewards.

Lyndon LaRouche has polemicized against the many different ideologies that generate individual impotence, so as help us free ourselves from our shackles, and create a universal living chorus. Here again, the pandemic is an opportunity to deal with it. We are at home; we have time to listen to the best of Classical music, to read the best philosophers, and read and reread the wise writings of Lyndon LaRouche in order to proceed to what the first Christians called an examination of conscience. To communicate through the internet, as Schiller Institute NYC Chorus Director Diane Sare is organizing in the United States and beyond, to sing together the tribute for our human future.

We have to spread within ourselves the germs and challenges of creativity, not for creativity to please ourselves, but rather to be ready to organize during the pandemic, and above all, to fight for a better world; to seize this opportunity to change the world. For that, we need to act as a unified whole, as a symphony of civilization. Or better said, a symphonic civilization. In that sense, each of our sovereign nations is not a population, but it is an inner creative force in action.

What have our governments done until now? Some have been criminal by action—generally the British government; others by omission—a benign criminal neglect. Within each nation, we have to act as one unity universally, and all the world nations should also act as one.

Let me remind you of something. During the Spanish flu, from 1917 to 1919, tens of millions of people died in the whole world. Why? Because there was no internationally organized mobilization to fight the flu. Inside every country, the state left the responsibility of a fight to the decentralized agencies, the Aristotelian approach that the sum of initiatives would lead to a good result. There was no conductor for that orchestra. It brought disaster. In France, it was the prefects, the leaders of the regions, who had to take over. In Germany, it was the municipalities. So, it was a disaster. Millions of dead, including a very brilliant physicist and mathematician, who died because she took care of the wounded soldiers. What we need now, as LaRouche said, is a top-down approach, an anti-parochial approach, even if requires confronting certain people; I have some training on that here.

The Situation in France

In France, we have a very good example of a well-organized, empathetic social unit: It is the public hospital. We had that. It has been dismantled, deconstructed piece by piece, less financing, fewer beds, and above all, the imposition of a just-in-time management, instead of a wise inventory management. The result is that we had a very large supply of surgical and care-giver masks in 2013. But, decisions were taken in 2014 and then again in 2016, which liquidated most of the stock in reserve for financial reasons. That created the conditions in which we are now living, and many people have died as a consequence.

At the beginning of this year, in March, we did not have enough surgical masks or the other types of protective masks, an absolute disaster. We had the same type of deficit of ventilators, and screening tests. Was it unknown to our authorities? In September 2019, a panel of experts issued a report calling for emergency anti-pandemic policy, stocking materials to fight against epidemics. It was not done. Nothing was done!

Today, the government parades as a war-government, and does a few useful things, like an industrial mobilization to produce ventilators, and the Airbridge with China. But it’s too little and it’s too late. They have lost all credibility: The prevailing institutions have lost all credibility; the government has lost all credibility. The hospital staffs are furious, from the caregivers to the top professors, because they don’t have the means to take care of infected people. Worse, in our French senior living facilities, and for elderly who have to stay home, either in these senior homes, or in their own homes, they only have limited medications available, and no cures, but only a lady-do-rightly distribution of palliative care medicines.

They don’t kill people, but they are letting them die benevolently for lack of means provided by the state institutions and the administration. The responsibility is put on the back of the doctors serving in our senior facilities and the private practice physicians, who are desperate and furious. It is triage, to say it bluntly, against old people over 70-75 and people with chronic diseases, but it’s triage because they don’t have the means to treat everybody. And the fault is with these institutions that did nothing to prepare for what was going to happen, and what was, again, predictable, as LaRouche warned.

All in all, we have today, more than 60,000 cases in France with about, let’s say, 6,000 dead, 10%. That’s what we had, and this was a result of what was not done.

Paris is an absolutely dead city. All France is semi-dead, like Italy and Spain.

The Role of the Schiller Institute

We are doing three things here: The first thing, of course, is the invitation for the international Schiller Institute conference, to establish an international platform for the world to come. People sometimes have problems in understanding that it’s not a conference like other conferences, but that it’s an emergency conference, that will have to insist and fight for people to understand, because some of them are like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

Also we are answering the questions people have with a roadmap of mobilization for public health, from total confinement, which is necessary here, as in all other countries—the Chinese model—to a mandatory international cooperation which leads us into our Schiller conference. We are communicating everything we can that Lyn has written, translated into French, and also my warnings during my Presidential campaign. We have a permanent flow of programs addressed through the networks, internet, YouTube, Facebook, on what’s happening. We have a team of about 50 people intervening in the social networks and sending our message to elected officials, but more than that, and much better than that, to firefighters, police, to doctors and all the medical caregivers in public and private hospitals.

I want to say one last thing: First, we are very close with people in French-speaking Africa, and every time I tweet something, it’s picked up in French Africa, in a rather unprecedented way. We have people in France that want to use Africans as guinea pigs for tests, which I protested against, and this created a wave of response, with people asking us, “What should we do?” instead of that. So, we are responding to that, and we are leading them towards our conference.

It’s very dangerous in this situation to have an insufficient combat command against this virus, of the type that brought forth the disaster of the Spanish flu. It’s insufficient. We need a combat command at a world level.

And in this situation, whenever people from the West and the East should meet, with their different cultures, they are not the same people, but they have the same commitment to the future of humanity. And in this political moment, I want to convey this message: We want all here, for the sake of this world future, that the United States re-emerge as something I like to call a “dynamocracy” which means a dynamic democracy, in this sense: dynamic because it has a center, and it’s not going into all kinds of directions. We need to have unity in diversity and a dynamic nation, which becomes a beacon of hope for the whole world, with a real, strong Presidency, to serve the future.

And I must say, we don’t want a penalty setting system spreading sanctions around the world. There should be a ceasefire, there should be a dropping of all sanctions, for the future of humanity, and to organize this international cooperation that Helga is going to organize in this conference. And I think that’s the key to our future. And in the United States, if people go back to thinking about their destiny and for what they have been fighting, what their ancestors have been for, they should understand that this inspiration should be part of the future, and people should understand that into the future, they should have the same thrust that their ancestors had, in a much better way, because the United States should be doing that with other countries around the world. And in particular, the four main countries: India, United States, Russia, and China, but also with other countries, creating cooperation of people caring about the advantage of the other. And I stress, again, Africa should be an example of that.

II. Change the Axioms of Policy

Mike Bloomberg’s Destruction

Of New York’s Virus Defenses

by Barbara Boyd

THE THIRD IN A SERIES ON MIKE BLOOMBERG

Gage Skidmore

Michael R. Bloomberg

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April 5—A virus, one of the most primitive forms of life, has felled the reigning axioms of human thought of the last 50 years. Those axioms have exacted a higher death toll over these decades than this horrible virus, virulent as it is, ever could. The outbreak has simply and elegantly focused attention on the pathogens of thought which have lurked just beneath the surface all along.

It is the “trends”—the Malthusian axioms of limits to economic and population growth, the “efficiencies” of the market and systems analysis modeling of large-scale human activities (which do not and cannot take into account sudden new shifts for good or ill)—which have left us locked in our houses, and the medical system we imagined to exist, collapsed and overwhelmed, and with people dying completely unnecessary deaths.

But, since August 15, 1971, when the post-industrial and globalist speculative systems structured by these axioms burst on the scene, millions have also died, in the shadows, unnecessarily, without 24-hour-a-day coverage on the television. And they will die now, in the developing sector of the world and in the impoverished areas of our country, because those axioms have denied us the means to fight at full capability. At the same time, the world rises to fight, as in most wars, with the army it has.

Necessity has called back into being, as if in a wondrous instant, the sheer power of a mobilization of the physical economies of the world. Scientific discovery and innovation are the watchwords of the day in the race against the virus and its toll of awful, horrible human suffering and death caused by the axioms we wittingly or unwittingly came to believe. The President now calls upon the United States to be the arsenal of democracy once again, supplying the entire world in its battle against the virus and beyond. He proposes to undertake a trillion dollar infrastructure program, rebuilding and modernizing the physical platform of the economy as the first step in its economic revival.

So, now, it is finally possible to end a world in which the privateers of Davos, Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg, throw crumbs at the poor of Africa or New York City, lecture them about their habits, and virtue-signal to one another, while actually implementing plans for genocide through such Malthusian schemes as the Green Finance Initiative. It is also finally possible to tame our absurd media, sowing panic and hectoring the President about the deaths this virus will cause because of the axioms which drive their thoughts, while praising global warming hoax and continuing their mad coup d’état against the Presidency, assuring even greater death, should they prevail.

Now it is possible to put into place something entirely new, participating in the universe’s bend, finally, as Martin Luther King would have it, toward justice. And, all of this only because a very hard and painful lesson is being learned. Ideas count. What you think counts. More importantly, how you think counts; it is the difference between life and death.

This third in our series of how Michael Bloomberg thinks, examines how New York City eliminated 21,000 hospital beds, closing 20 hospitals during Michael Bloomberg’s reign on behalf of his Wall Street and City of London sponsors. New York City’s inventory of 1800 ICU beds, or 2.7 ICU beds per 10,000 residents over the age of fifteen, has not budged in 20 years, placing it at slot 220 in a national survey of 305 U.S. hospital regions. Bloomberg’s predatory excesses now spell death, disproportionately, among the poor, working, and middle classes, if the scientific race for mitigation drugs and a vaccine, and the production of medical equipment under the Defense Production Act does not outpace the virus fast enough.

This is a story which can never be told in terms of the “healthcare issue” as that is understood in our present retarded and stupefied politics. Treating the issue as such mistakes a symptom for the disease which is killing the patient. There is no healthcare “solution,” be it Medicare for All or other programs, that does not flow from creating a new industrial and scientific revolution and a full set national economy along with implementing regulations which de-financialize the healthcare sector both here and worldwide. There is no defense against the disease or economic destitution unless we now harness our productive and scientific power to conquer underdevelopment throughout the world.

None of the Malthusian proposals for healthcare reform since 1971—all developed in the specious systems analysis approach to “healthcare economics” at Stanford University, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, New York City’s Manhattan Institute, Washington D.C.’s Heritage Foundation, and similar dystopian locales—ever mention large scale economic development as the true means to ensure first rate healthcare for all. Lyndon LaRouche insisted, however, that any discussion of healthcare outside the context of massive physical economic development, breakthroughs in fundamental science and our understanding of the laws of the universe, rising productivity and rising wages, is mentally deficient. President Trump clearly has the idea of this when he keeps talking about economic expansion as the prerequisite for any discussion of entitlement reform.

Similarly, all of the prevailing economic nostrums about healthcare, since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 refuse, as a matter of principle, to take into account the actual human cost and inflationary impact of the privatization of healthcare services and the accompanying ideology of “just in time” economics and maximization of shareholder value in outsourced and competing “services” within the “healthcare sector.”

EMT and ambulance services are all privatized companies now; ER docs are the same. While lying on a stretcher in the ER a few years back, it was not unusual for a separate privatized company to send representatives to collect any outstanding bills or your insurance deductible. Denials of life-saving care by Health Maintenance Organizations and other insurers still occur with regularity. Hospital bills, running many, many pages of single-spaced items dictated by “chargemasters,” routinely and massively inflate charges for such simple items as gauze and aspirin.

In his 1981 piece, “Systems Analysis is White Collar Genocide,” Lyndon LaRouche forecast precisely the course of events we now see. As we shall see, LaRouche fought tirelessly at each step of the devolution and outsourcing of the physical economy of the United States, in New York, the nation, and the world. As early as 1974, LaRouche convened groups of specialists to study the global pandemics which would invariably emerge from twin plagues of poverty and underdevelopment, particularly in the developing sector.

The attack on the physical economy built by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s war mobilization following August 15, 1971 was accompanied by an assault, by the same oligarchs, on cultural optimism, the belief in the sanctity of all human life, and the funding of technological and scientific progress, which allows for human creative breakthroughs in understanding the fundamental laws of the universe. It is those creative breakthroughs, unprogrammable and unpredictable in static systems analysis models, which, throughout human history, have accounted for humanity’s victories over disease and economic collapse and will do so now.

Mayor Bloomberg’s Deadly Healthcare Follies

Some might ask, why focus on Bloomberg still? Wasn’t his campaign a flop? What does he have to do with our present crisis, where, if you believe the rabid media, people seem to be dying in the streets because of Donald Trump?

The late Lyndon LaRouche, in his autobiography, The Power of Reason: 1988, tells us why. He noted:

Essentially I define individuals and organizations not by what they imagine themselves to believe, but rather by how they think. The republican mind and the oligarchical mind see God, creation, and man from opposing philosophical viewpoints; their minds work differently.

NYCMayorsOffice

Mayor Bloomberg’s official portrait, December 2013, which depicts him standing in the Bullpen at City Hall.

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Bloomberg, as we demonstrated in the previous articles in this series, is the poster boy for oligarchical thought. Understand and expose how he thinks, not how many non-disclosure agreements he has accumulated, and you can defeat him and all the other would be controllers of our destinies. That is why the internet circulation of his 2016 Oxford University appearance, where he publicly exposed how he thinks while chatting with those he considered the future intelligentsia, had such a devastating effect on his presidential campaign.

At Oxford, he arrogantly declared farmers and industrial operatives to be brain-impaired relics of the industrial age, only capable of learning systems analysis’s dictated recipes and “processes,” while claiming that coding involves some higher form of human thought generally, that is genetically unreachable by the lower classes.

Bloomberg’s “healthcare” policies, developed in conjunction with Bill Gates and based on the very latest thinking of the Davos set, are the policies which turned the former profession of medicine into yet another Wall Street swindle in which systems analysis and austerity kill whole sections of society. That result is rationalized by resort to the popularly accepted belief that the social Darwinism of the “market” is natural law. These axioms have been endorsed by the politicians of both political parties, including the Republican leadership (which has wrapped itself around Donald Trump) and New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo—the media and the Democrats’ current favorite anti–Trump—has done almost as much to facilitate the crisis in New York City as anyone by accepting the oligarchical nostrums of Bloomberg and his ilk. Trump, on the other hand, is mobilizing a full war against the virus with the army he bequeathed to him, in the midst of a continuing coup against his Presidency, conducting daily war room broadcasts about the state of battle and the daily innovations which will spell victory or defeat.

Under the post-1971 post-industrial regime change in the United States, teachers, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers, who formerly practiced as professional missionaries conquering disease and ignorance, became employees in the newly formed “competitive market based” privatized industries of healthcare and education, creating yet another income stream for the investors and bankers of the City of London and Wall Street.

Presently, healthcare, a soft infrastructure expense in a functioning full set industrial economy—paid for by gains in productivity, an expanding tax base, and overall physical economic growth, along with regulation against predatory practices—has become a huge “industry” in and of itself, a behemoth registering almost 20% of GDP in the United States while providing mediocre care, at best.

Gage Skidmore

Stuart Butler came to the U.S. as part of a wave of British think tankers to inculcate Americans with British ideas.

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The Washington lobbyists who support this largely unregulated, rentier capitalist sector of the economy spend five times as much protecting it as does the lobby protecting the equally predatory defense industry. It is a sector of the economy where technological advances result in inflated and increased costs, defying normal economic rules. As of 2007, it constituted one third of the overall federal budget.

It is also the largest economic expense of almost every family in the United States and accounts for 60% of all bankruptcies. The infrastructure of this “industry” has been shrunk, looted, and consolidated, in stages, by the actions of Wall Street’s vulture funds, health insurance companies, the hospital associations, and the drug and medical device companies. In New York and other cities, this is complicated by the real estate vultures who hover over endangered medical facilities on city land targeted for gentrification, waiting to call the bulldozers, so that luxury towers can replace them. In rural areas of the country, there is virtually no remaining health infrastructure. People must travel hundreds of miles to access care.

As opposed to training and supporting the doctors and nurses required for exemplary medical care here in the United States, this nation now depends on importing foreign doctors and nurses who will accept years of lower rates of pay. In the managed and accountable care systems, physician assistants and nurse practitioners have replaced doctors. They have much less training and, most importantly, they cost a whole lot less. The entire labor force, the lifeblood of any medical system because of the ability to innovate and fight under battle conditions, an element far more important than masks and respirators, has been deliberately shrunk.

Large private hospital systems, organized as tax exempt non-profit entities, by hedge funds and billionaire donors, now dominate the field nationally and they are gobbling up both valuable real estate and individual physicians’ practices, creating the same type of cartels which are seen in agriculture and food production. As of 2018, Northwell Health, Montefiore Health Systems, and Mount Sinai Health System constituted the top three employers in New York State. NYU Langone Health ranked fifth, just after Walmart. The last of the big five hospital networks, New York Presbyterian/Cornell, was tenth. The key to success in these systems, we are told by its financier architects, is “full occupancy,” ensuring that beds are full and procedures are being performed at the highest rates possible. Excess beds, supplies, or personnel constitute economic heresy, a sin which the market will “discipline.”

There were four phases in the dismantling of New York City’s once deep public health infrastructure. First and foremost, there was a destructive counterinsurgency and profiling phase conducted under the Lindsay Administration from 1968-1972, which culminated in a wave of hospital closures as the result of the actions of Felix Rohatyn’s Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB) from 1975-82. These first two stages of the battle, the Lindsay profiling operations and the EFCB shutdowns, reflected national policies undertaken during the same time period, and featured the axiomatic ideas and terms of battle which have persisted to the present. They are the major focus of this article.

The entire structure of Obamacare, passed by Congress in 2010, was invented, lock, stock, and barrel, by the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler in 1989. True to how things really work, it was also the Heritage Foundation which coopted large sections of the Tea Party movement which revolted against the death panels of Obamacare, claiming leadership against the very idea it authored.

Stuart Butler came to the U.S. in 1975 as part of a deliberately deployed wave of British free market think-tankers aiming to reconquer the United States. Most had direct ties to the oligarchical Mont Pelerin Society and British intelligence. All of them presented the ideological narratives and myths justifying the massive cannibalization of the U.S. public sector by Wall Street and the City of London. The HMO concept—managed care—the monstrous enemy of both doctors and patients throughout the past 30 years of concerted implementation, was made law by President Richard Nixon in 1973, after a campaign by industrialist Edgar Kaiser, Dr. Paul M. Ellwood, Jr. of the Jackson Hole healthcare study group in Wyoming, and Alain Enthoven.

Enthoven, the most significant force in this bunch, had been a whiz kid in Robert (Vietnam Body Count) McNamara’s Defense Department under Kennedy and Johnson, occupying the newly created post of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis. He started his career at the Rand Corporation, the heart of the military industrial complex. He has been a continuing ideologue for a systems’ analysis, “managed” market based competitive healthcare model in work with the Jackson Hole Group, Kaiser Permanente, and Stanford University’s Center for Health Policy, ever since.

A third round of dramatic forced hospital closures was initiated as the result of Governor George Pataki’s deregulation of hospital pricing in 1996 and the Berger Commission report which followed in November of 2006. More recently, a fourth round of closings resulted from Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, along with Obamacare’s incentives to the large consolidated and cartelized hospital and outpatient surgery and clinic networks which now dominate the “industry.”

The Berger Commission was chaired by investment banker Stephen Berger, who had served as Director of the Emergency Financial Control Board during Felix Rohatyn’s pillage of the City. Berger personally engineered the massive hospital and public health closings under Rohatyn. Berger’s public career as a “change agent” for his Wall Street and City of London sponsors, began with service on Nelson Rockefeller’s Commission on Critical Choices.

Following the 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods system, that Rockefeller Critical Choices Commission, the Project 1980s studies of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission were responsible for creating the policies which transformed the United States into a post-industrial, service-based economy and pivoted American foreign policy into that of permanent imperial warfare. The gross diversion of resources to the bloated defense, intelligence, and related Silicon Valley sectors, and the “business” of war, completely privatized with private publicly traded companies now undertaking war and mass surveillance, means that the President, any President, has little control of American foreign policy and that money can’t be found for something as essential as health.

The round of hospital and nursing home closings following the Berger Commission Report, was closely coordinated with the Bush Administration which was engineering massive cuts in Medicaid spending, the primary means for healthcare access by the poor. Medicaid is responsible for 40% of all revenues flowing into New York City hospitals.

By 2011, Berger now a director of the Partnership for New York City, through which Wall Street exercises it control of the City, had moved on to covertly control Governor Andrew Cuomo’s first Medicaid Redesign Team. There, he recommended closing six Brooklyn hospitals because they would never be able to take advantage of Obamacare, which “incentivized” turning the poor and disadvantaged away from acute hospital care to community based primary care. Just prior to the outbreak of the present COVID-19 crisis, Governor Andrew Cuomo had announced more draconian Medicaid cuts which, if they take effect as planned, will throw even more public and independent private hospitals into bankruptcy.

Among other provisions, Obamacare’s “accountable care” reimbursement practices have substantially reduced already completely inadequate Medicaid subsidies to hospitals and nursing homes. In addition, an escalating series of Obamacare cuts in Medicaid reimbursements starts at $4 billion in May of this year. These are cuts in funds which go to “disproportionate share” hospitals, those serving the poor.

In the Obamacare cost containment health environment, psychiatric services, addiction services, and Level 1 trauma services are deemed economic loss leaders, in hospitals serving poorer populations where such services are paramount. At the same time, drug prices, and medical equipment, device and other supply costs, and cartelized hospital network bills to insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid, have spiraled out of control, dwarfing even the profiteering of insurance companies which now operate on much thinner margins.

English Wikipedia/David Shankbone

Wikimedia Commons

Courtesy of Bill De Blasio

Two of the many hospitals closed during Bloomberg’s mayoralty: St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center in Greenwich Village, and Brooklyn’s Long Island College Hospital. The closing of 20 such hospitals was met with many protests.

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In a September 9, 2013 piece in the New York Post, “Why NYC Needs Hospitals to Close,” Stephen Berger proclaimed that efforts to save Long Island College Hospital and Interfaith Medical Center (which handles the vast majority of Brooklyn’s psychiatric cases) were deeply “misguided.”

Health-care delivery in America is evolving into a system marked by fewer hospitalizations and more community based primary care....

[T]he time has come for New Yorkers, especially those in vulnerable, low-income neighborhoods, to overcome their reliance on hospitals and embrace the rapidly shifting healthcare landscape....

The Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) and Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) reforms are helping New York pursue the “triple aim” of improving population health, enhancing the patient experience, and reducing health-care costs....

Berger argued that the fight to keep Long Island College Hospital and Interfaith Medical Center open “will have a chilling ripple effect. Other hospitals on the financial brink will put off necessary downsizing or outright closure simply to avoid the chaos unfolding in Brooklyn.”

As a result of these actions, New York City presently consists of two hospital systems. One group, the remaining 11 public acute care New York Health and Hospitals System hospitals, and the 7 private community hospitals which still serve the poor and working classes and the uninsured, constantly struggle to avoid bankruptcy.

A second group, the big five voluntary private hospital networks, cited in the New York State employment statistics above, are flourishing because they attract privately insured patients, and receive massive private and foundation support. They advertise themselves as part of the “Luxury City” concept with which Mayor Bloomberg “branded” New York City for the world. Prior to the present COVID-19 crisis, these voluntary hospitals persistently offloaded “undesirable” patients into the public system. Now, as Governor Cuomo has emphasized, they must somehow find a way to set the past aside and cooperate in care of patients and shifting of medical personnel, something not readily achieved given the antinomy in the mission orientation of the two systems.

Michael Bloomberg completely absented himself from any fight to save the 20 closing hospitals or to even comment on their closures. Even the New York Times found this complete silence newsworthy, but it is hardly surprising. Bloomberg’s public career was sponsored by Wall Street’s New York City Partnership and he was mentored by Felix Rohatyn himself. When Cabrini Medical System closed, Bloomberg quipped, simply, “You just can’t have a hospital on every corner.” A video which emerged during his ill-fated presidential campaign found him counseling that unless doctors could refuse to treat older people and send them home to die, present trends in healthcare would bankrupt the country.

Given his inclinations, Bloomberg would have privatized every single public hospital he could lay his hands on, but Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor who preceded him, had already tried a massive hospital privatization initiative which failed when New York’s Court of Appeals stopped it. In New York’s system of government, the governor and the legislature have far more nominal control of what happens than any Mayor, and both found Giuliani’s initiative just too aggressive for the time. The Emergency Financial Control Board, the actual behind the scenes controllers of such events, agreed. Few realize that the EFCB, installed in 1975, can still override any decision by a New York mayor until 2033. Bloomberg did privatize laundry, sanitation, and dialysis services in the public hospital system, but otherwise stayed his hand.

Instead of publicly campaigning for the closures, with which he agreed, Bloomberg campaigned relentlessly for various “public health measures” targeting the poor while thrilling his obsessed, virtue signaling, millionaire constituency: the smoking ban, the soda ban, the trans fat ban. He claimed that these initiatives were more important than hospital closures because they would prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.

The tragedy at work here can be seen in the history and closing of just one hospital, St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village. The hospital opened in 1849 under the Sisters of Charity and the Brooklyn Archdiocese with a primary mission to treat all who walked through its doors, particularly the poor. It operated through cholera epidemics, typhoid epidemics, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the FALN bombing of Fraunces Tavern in 1975, and the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. It was the primary receiving hospital for victims of all of these events.

In the 1980s, St. Vincent’s established the first AIDS ward on the East Coast and became one of the leading research institutions discovering the mitigation measures which quelled that epidemic nationally and internationally. Faced with bankruptcy in 2005, based on the Medicaid cuts taking place in that period, it was finally closed in 2010, its land converted to luxury real estate development. The “market” you see, does not recognize great and hoary tradition or the expertise, intellectual capital, and potential for innovation and new discovery built through over a century of devotion to the public good.

What the virus has proved, abundantly, is that you cannot construct a viable healthcare or public health system on an economy, like New York City’s, which couples a fifty percent poverty rate with one million millionaires receiving preferential treatment, all of it sold on the myth that you are operating a “competitive free market” in healthcare. But that, as we shall see, has been known, all along. It was the plan. “Efficiency,” and the “market” after all, demand that the “losers” be triaged and closed out. It is a most effective cover for conscious genocide.

Step 1 in the Destruction: Ford Foundation, Rand Corporation, John Lindsay

Prior to 1965, New York City still employed 865,100 manufacturing and related workers in printing, clothing, breweries, specialty construction, and in hundreds of small machine shops and factories. Other major employers included the ports involved in world trade. The City’s industry was also fed by Grumman’s participation in the Apollo and related space programs from Long Island.

The City itself was run by a coalition of Democratic politicians representing ethnic constituencies from all over the world, trade union leaders, civil rights leaders, and other representatives of the Franklin Roosevelt coalition. There were also, of course, national publishers, artists, and the intellectuals associated with the City’s university and private college system and its cultural institutions, making the city the intellectual and cultural capital of the country. Wall Street and the Anglophilic establishment elite were hugely powerful, but operated largely behind the scenes, fearing and shunning public exposure.

In 1965, however, John Lindsay, the charismatic WASP and son of the establishment, was installed as Mayor of New York by Wall Street sponsors. This anomaly signaled that a huge phase change, a destructive paradigm shift, was being undertaken nationally and in New York City’s governance.

LBJ Library

Robert McNamara, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis. McNamara used the systems analysis approach to help create the “managed,” market-based competitive healthcare model applied by Mayor Bloomberg.

JFK Presidential Library/Abbie Rowe

McGeorge Bundy, as President of the Ford Foundation, reduced New York City to “strategic hamlets,” each given nominal “control” of services, as had been done in Viet Nam during the war.

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On the national level, John F. Kennedy, who had utilized the Apollo program to begin rebuilding an American system economy, prevented a world nuclear war staged by a mad defense and intelligence establishment over Cuba, and had begun to directly oppose the British led effort to drag U.S. ground troops into the disastrous Viet Nam war, had been assassinated in 1963. Malcolm X was assassinated in February of 1965.

President Johnson enacted the Medicare and Medicaid programs in 1965, creating the safety net for the poor, disabled, and the elderly in healthcare. But, at the same time, in March of 1965, the United States “officially” entered the Viet Nam War, although the CIA and the Pentagon had a covert presence in the country for decades prior.[fn_1] In 1964, the Beatles came to the United States, officially kicking off the emergence of the rock, drug, sex, New Age counterculture. These were not unrelated events.

In 1964, the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution had published a tract and presented it to President Johnson, arguing that the industrial age was about to be superseded by the information age and cybernetics, with all physical production done by robots and machines, necessitating the building of a post-industrial society. This document was foundational to both the New Left and the New Age counterculture.

In 1962, Mont Pelerin’s star U.S. economist, Milton Friedman, published Capitalism and Freedom, arguing that the government enjoyed monopoly control of public services and that a true capitalist economy required complete privatization of all of these services, including ending licensing of professionals, such as doctors. In the same work, Friedman urged that the post-war Bretton Woods monetary system must be abandoned and replaced by a floating exchange-rate system. This document was foundational to the neo-liberal and libertarian movements and was the founding document of the speculative, deindustrialized hell in which the world has lived since August 15, 1971.

Here is how Lyndon LaRouche described the underlying economic dynamics of the time:

Over the interval of 1965-1970, the rate of growth of the U.S. physical economy slowed toward a net zero growth for the economy as a whole (in terms of rate of increase of physical output per capita, per household, per square kilometer). This slowdown was triggered by the “downsizing” of the highly stimulative, “post-Sputnik” aerospace “crash program” and investment tax credit programs upon which the post-1960 economic recovery from the 1957-1950 recession had depended almost entirely. This “downsizing” was worsened by the combined influence of such “post-modernist” lunacies as Robert Theobald’s Triple Revolution, Robert S. McNamara’s lunatic “systems analysis,” Herbert Marcuse’s ultra-leftism, and sundry “post-industrial” utopianisms. The international effects of these and similar “New Age” policies led to Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s November 1967 collapse of British sterling, and the ensuing first round of successive collapses of the U.S. dollar emerging visibly during February and early March 1968.

Here is LaRouche describing the broad cultural attack undertaken at the same time:

1964 was the year when what was to become an epidemic of invading British Beatles scuttled across Ed Sullivan’s national television screen. From that time on, the post-Kennedy years, 1964-1972, continued to be dominated by the spread of a radical change in the mental and other habits of much of the population. This change, called variously a “New Age,” the “sexual revolution,” “the rock-drug-sex counterculture,” or a “cultural paradigm shift,” spread like a new, virulent form of venereal disease, from among university student populations in the Americas and Europe, into broader layers of adolescents and young adults. As university graduates moved on ... to their more or less inevitable upward march through private and public institutions of power, the influence of this “New Age” gained a correspondingly stronger grip on the reshaping of our nation’s cultural and economic policies. By the middle of the late 1970s, New Age policy-thinking had fastened its Dracula like bite into the necks of our leading political parties and institutions of government.

For the traditional constituencies of the political parties, this change was not only merely a shock, but an economic as well as a cultural disaster. Every stratum of the population whose households’ standard of living and security was gained through participation in the frontiers of technological progress and increased productivity in agriculture, industry, and basic economic infrastructure, was experiencing shocking setbacks to its standard of living and general security.

LoC/Orlando Fernandez

John Lindsay, Mayor of New York City, 1966-1973.

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Nowhere was this phase shift more pronounced than in Mayor John Lindsay’s deliberate profiling and targeting operations which ripped to shreds the FDR-led political alliance which had previously governed New York City. Lindsay, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation’s McGeorge Bundy, and deputy city administrator Emanuel Savas, did this by using the very same genocidal counterinsurgency, surveillance, and profiling strategies the United States was using in Viet Nam. They introduced community control of city services, particularly education, pitting blacks and other minorities against whites, and inflaming racial tensions throughout the City. They also demonized public sector workers, claiming that they were only out to enrich themselves.

Lindsay’s deliberate and highly publicized dalliances with black gangsters, like Sonny Carson, contributed to the massive working class and middle class flight and demoralization, a flight to the suburbs otherwise resulting from the collapse of productive industries. At the same time, traditional constituency leaders, like former Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack, were subjected to repeated prosecutions and harassment.

The destructive national economic trends cited by LaRouche were exemplified by the departure of the entire garment industry from New York City to the non-unionized South in pursuit of drastically lowered wages. Lindsay instituted tax and zoning policies which penalized the industrial base and rewarded real estate and financial interests. The result was a loss of 328,000 manufacturing jobs, 42% of the 1965 total, by 1975. Studies conducted by EIR during the early 1970s showed that the City was under-assessing real estate in the rich areas of Lower Manhattan and on the Upper East Side to the tune of $33 billion a year.

As the result of lost tax revenues from the fleeing workers and businesses, zoning and tax policies favoring realtors and Wall Street’s financiers, and long-term debt obligations to Wall Street, some of them going all the way back to the building of the subways, New York’s finances were crashing. The national economic crash, in the wake of August 15, 1971, put it on the edge of bankruptcy.

Lindsay conducted a relentless campaign against the City’s unions: police, fire, teachers, nurses and other hospital workers, in order to slash wages. Lindsay’s Deputy Mayor for Administration, Emanuel Savas, had been the manager of “urban systems” for IBM and was and is one of the country’s foremost advocates of privatization of public services. Savas’ 1971 article, “Breaking Municipal Monopoly,” carried Milton Friedman’s theories to the extreme. Municipal workers relish crises to “increase their budgets”: dirty streets are good for sanitation workers, high crime is good for police, and an epidemic is good for doctors and hospitals, he argued. Radical privatization would cure these distortions caused by the public monopoly on services.

The tactics the Lindsay Administration employed were derived directly from the counterinsurgency and depopulation strategies Robert McNamara’s whiz kids in the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), in conjunction with the Rand Corporation, were deploying in the killing fields of Viet Nam.

In a series of 1960s projects between ARPA’s Command and Control Research Division and Rand, huge delegations of American psychologists and sociologists were deployed to profile the rebellious or potentially rebellious throughout Southeast Asia in order to pacify them, or, alternatively, to target them for assassination in the infamous Phoenix program, if they could not be pacified. Profile data, gathered for systems analysis predictive models and rapidly gathered and analyzed for the first time by computer, was to be the new revolutionary tool for counterinsurgency and mass surveillance.

As described in Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley, the Secret Military History of the Internet:

A strange pseudoscience emerged. Blending free market economics and rational choice theory, military planners and scientists viewed the Vietnamese as automatons, nothing more than rational individuals who were acting purely in their self-interest. They had no bigger guiding values or ideals—no patriotism, no loyalty to their communities or traditions or to some bigger political idea. They were interested in nothing other than maximizing positive outcomes for themselves. The trick would be to peel the Vietnamese away from the insurgency through a mix of mass marketing, consumer style incentives, and a bit of tough love when nothing else worked. Cash handouts, jobs, small infrastructure improvements, land privatization schemes, anticommunist propaganda, crop destruction, mutilations, murder, assassinations—all these were legitimate variables to throw into the coercion equation.

In 1966, McGeorge Bundy, the foremost proponent of the Viet Nam War and these counterinsurgency strategies, left the White House to become the President of the Ford Foundation in New York. There, in conjunction with John Lindsay, he advocated a policy of profiling, bribing, or jailing New York’s formerly politically unified leadership while reducing the City itself into ethnically homogenous strategic hamlets, like those which had been constructed to control or eliminate the population of Viet Nam, each hamlet given nominal “control” of the services delivered to them.

This community control of services by ethnic groups living in hamlet-like enclaves in the City was to become the battering ram for breaking the unions and igniting fierce rivalries for declining services. Bundy and his friends already knew, based on their Viet Nam experience, that identity politics and the tribalism of strategically limited small communities, was the best, now refined, modality for the divide and conquer techniques which had been employed by the British Empire for centuries.

As documented by EIR, Lindsay and his financier and real estate sponsors undertook targeted arsons in the areas of the city designated for outright depopulation and/or “urban renewal.” Between 1966 and 1968, fires in New York increased by 42%. Understanding what was afoot, the Firefighters Union demanded 14 new fire companies and the City’s Public Employees Board granted the demand.

In response, Lindsay hired the Rand Corporation, the lead private contractor for ARPA in Viet Nam. Between 1968-1971 Rand conducted more than a dozen studies on overhauling New York City to slash both the budget and services. Acting on Rand’s recommendations 35 fire companies were eliminated between 1971 and 1976. Four fifths of the companies eliminated were in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, where the fires were being deliberately set. Two thousand four hundred firefighters were fired.

The assault against the teachers’ union was opened when the community-controlled school board fired union teachers at Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968, the same year both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. The teachers responded with a strike, which was uniformly opposed by the socialist left and the Ford Foundation, whose “identity politics” created and funded racial identity formations. The media deliberately stoked the battle by resort to racial profiling. The fake cartoon they concocted pitted the white Jewish teachers against the seething black militants. As the result of the King assassination and the events at Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the united front between Martin Luther King’s quest for economic justice and organized labor, the alliance at the heart of the civil rights movement, was destroyed.

Lyndon LaRouche responded to all of these developments with a relentless campaign of programs for economic development, basic science, and technological progress to be led by all of the producing classes of society—a campaign for what LaRouche dubbed, “the class for itself.” Most significantly, LaRouche stressed that there was a power of the mind unique to all human beings and that it was the mobilization of that power by reference to the history and reliving of fundamental discoveries in science, mediated by the instrument of classical culture, which were the lifeblood of any successful political movement. “Learn to use your mind like a boxer uses his fists,” was the way he repeatedly expressed that concept during this period.

LaRouche launched an intelligence operation to profile and target the dirty assortment of social scientists, psychologists, and knuckle draggers who, through Lindsay and the Ford Foundation, were now warring against the population of New York.

He published pamphlets and books about the fascist origins of local control and the New Left, intervening and pulling people away from the burgeoning anti-war movement, into an organization which would fight on behalf of trade unionists, farmers, scientists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and welfare mothers for fundamental economic progress while mastering the scientific principles and classics of human thought and culture which had led to previous dramatic upshifts in civilization, such as the Renaissance and the American Revolution.

At the same time, he campaigned internationally, for full scale development of the developing sector of the world, advocating a New Bretton Woods monetary system which would finance large-scale and capital-intensive development, contrary to the slave labor policies of the IMF and World Bank.

Based on his principled belief in the ultimate creative power of the human mind, and the type of infrastructure needed to foster it, LaRouche intervened on behalf of the teachers at Ocean Hill-Brownsville, exposing McGeorge Bundy, the Ford Foundation, and Rand’s dirty psychologists, sociologists, and systems analysts by name, directly, and earning an accelerating and full-scale FBI investigation with accompanying defamations, which would last for decades.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Felix Rohatyn’s Emergency Financial Control Board engineered massive hospital closings and termination of other public health facilities.

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Step Two: Big MAC, the EFCB,

and the Birth of HMOs

As we detailed in Part II of this Bloomberg series, following Richard Nixon’s abandonment of the Bretton Woods financial system on August 15, 1971, the U.S. economy was treated to a series of deliberate shocks, beginning with the “oil shock” of 1973. These shocks vastly contracted the U.S. science and industrial base and the infrastructure required for its continuing progressive development. America’s Anglophilic oligarchical families laid out their plans in a series of papers and studies calling for “controlled disintegration” of the world’s advanced industrial economies with outsourcing of production to cheap labor havens in the developing sector. Paul Volcker, through his reign at the Federal Reserve in the Carter Administration, administered the blows to the real economy which implemented these policies.

In 1974-75, the municipal financial crisis was manufactured in New York City by the same financial interests. Rather than solving the actual financial crisis with an orderly debt moratorium and reorganization, and a program to rebuild the physical economy of the city based on modern manufacturing and new industries exploring the frontiers of science—as demanded by the LaRouche movement, in political campaigns for Mayor, Senate, and Congress at the time—a financial dictatorship was imposed on the City to salvage Wall Street’s unpayable debt.

Big MAC, the initial bankers’ putsch, evolved into the Emergency Financial Control Board, both chaired by Michael Bloomberg’s mentor, Lazard Frères banker Felix Rohatyn. Victor Gotbaum, the head of the largest municipal union, later admitted that he knew that the banks had “caused” the financial crisis. Nonetheless, he willingly helped destroy his own union as a member of the EFCB.

Historically, Lazard had played a critical role in the installation of the fascist regimes in Europe which resulted in World War II. Roger Starr, Rohatyn’s {New York Times} mouthpiece, writing in the {New York Times Magazine} on November 14, 1976, openly declared what was in store: New York City had to be shrunk, its population drastically reduced by one-third, its services, including education and healthcare, rationalized and cut.

Starr issued the additional maxim:

Stop the Puerto Ricans and the rural blacks from living in the city ... reverse the role of the city ... it can no longer be the place of opportunity.... Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and turning him into an industrial worker. Now there are no industrial jobs. Why not keep him a peasant?

Under Rohatyn’s EFCB, Lindsay’s strategic hamlets were financially starved and strategic arsons now burned down whole sections of the city entirely, labeled “dead zones” by Roger Starr, as fire and police services to them were stopped. Financial services, “media,” and entertainment became the economic drivers of the City.

New York City’s public hospital system—the largest in the U.S. at the time—then consisted of 17 hospitals, providing at the time, over 3 million days of inpatient care, 1.5 million emergency room visits, and 4.5 million ambulatory visits. These hospitals were supplemented by a robust Catholic healthcare system dedicated, as a matter of principle, to serving anyone who walked in the door and the absolute sanctity of human life.

Rohatyn directly ordered the firing of 11,200 employees and the closing of four of the New York City Hospital Corporation’s public hospitals. The New York Times on October 18, 1976, called for the “division of the city into autonomous and semi-autonomous health care units” administered through community control and “a fundamental restructuring of reimbursement formulas to promote ... alternatives to hospitalization.” Stephen Berger had previously articulated the idea at the center of this policy: “One out of every four New Yorkers must go.”

In the complementary leadership decapitation strategy implemented by the Rand Corporation’s Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti, the popular leader of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, John Hollomon (also a revered hero of the civil rights movement), was fired. On his way out the door Hollomon stated the obvious: Rohatyn and friends were aiming to destroy “the municipal hospital system,” reorganizing that system under private Wall Street control.

At the same time, the Catholic hospital system was slowly starved to death as “entitlement” funding was cut again and again under successive Democratic and Republican administrations while, culturally, religious institutions were demonized in the public sphere.

In 1973, Richard Nixon signed the law allowing for the formation of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) as a mode of healthcare delivery. This law was justified through a fundamental attack on the doctor-patient relationship. According to its propagandists, greedy doctors and self-serving patients were creating out-of-control medical costs by demanding treatment with the very best drugs, surgeries, doctors, and new technologies. These unrealistic demands and associated spiraling costs could only be controlled if there was a “market arbiter” or disciplinarian, dictating, via the invisible hand, what costs were reasonable. The HMO was to be this “market force.”

Paul Ellwood, MD, and Alain Enthoven, operating out of the Jackson Hole group in Wyoming, engineered the HMO law with assistance from Edgar Kaiser, the founder of the Kaiser Permanente managed care system. Since that time, all of the iterations of their healthcare reforms and similar plunderings of formerly public entities have been the same: Apply market-based systems analysis and privatization to all services previously operating under the principle of doing the public good; rationalize costs in such a way that Wall Street and the City of London maximally profit. The ridiculous profits at Kaiser Permanente have resulted in numerous regulatory actions by California state authorities. Similarly, billions of dollars in profits accruing in New York’s voluntary hospitals feature multiple executives earning multi-million dollar salaries.

In 1989, Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation had designed all of the features of the Obamacare healthcare initiative explicitly. First implemented by then Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, Butler’s 1989 plan was adopted almost verbatim by the Democratic Congress and the Obama White House in a lengthy political “battle” in 2009-2010. Founded in 1975, Heritage has been an “outpost of British intelligence in the United States,” according to admissions of Heritage staff to EIR investigators as far back as 1981. Heritage had engaged in a defamation campaign against LaRouche and a counterintelligence investigation was conducted by EIR at the time to determine what this institution was all about.

Stuart Butler, at the time, declared his mission to be “inculcating America with British ideas.” Butler’s plan for managing the “inner cities” was for “free enterprise zones,” “little Hong Kongs,” where the minimum wage requirement would be lifted and residents employed in small-scale equivalents of cottage industries, all “locally controlled.” Butler’s 1981 vision is little different from the “gig economy” operating in most U.S. locales today.

In 1977, a sister British-oriented think-tank to Heritage was founded in New York City, the Manhattan Institute, also pushing massive privatization of public services. Its founders were William Casey, who was to become director of the CIA under Reagan, and Sir Antony Fisher, a protégé of Friedrich von Hayek and himself also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Fisher was the intellectual guru to Margaret Thatcher.

CC

Stephen Berger, Executive Director of the New York State Study Commission on New York City.

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Step Three: Deregulation and the Berger Commission

While all of these evil ideas were pioneered nationally in the wake of August 15, 1971, there was widespread popular resistance, reflected in the blocking of the most significant initiatives by the Congress. The same revolt occurred when Obamacare was finally implemented in 2010. The potential for an actual revolution, overturning these deadly axioms, rather than simply resisting them, exists right now.

While plans were laid for full-scale privatization—declared to be the revolution in public affairs of both the Reagan and Bush administrations—they were never fully implemented. Similarly, the nominally liberal Bill Clinton implemented a massive welfare reform, throwing thousands off the public rolls while privatizing programs to administer food stamps and other benefits. He also imprisoned minorities at a record rate under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

Clinton also implemented a “National Performance Review” through which Al Gore presided over a program designed to outsource most national government services. While praised by Heritage as the most effective implementer of its privatization proposals, Clinton’s proposed healthcare reforms—hatched by his wife Hillary in secret sessions with Alain Enthoven, his protégé Richard Kronick, and other HMO ghouls from California—were dead on arrival in the Congress.

And, in New York, in 1982, legislators had come up with a plan, the New York Prospective Hospital Reimbursement Methodology (NYPHRM), which largely stabilized the hospital system. It was a price control system meant to control costs, ensure treatment to all, and offset losses on Medicaid. It required wealthy insurance plans and high-end hospitals to subsidize care for the poor and training of new medical residents. Medical training was a major historical and national activity undertaken by New York’s hospitals.

That changed, however, with the advent of the Newt Gingrich led “Conservative Revolution” in 1994-96. In March 1994, healthcare consultant John Rodat reported that New York’s per capita hospital spending rate was the second highest in the country, while spending on primary physician care was below the national norm. Both the rates of hospitalization and lengths of hospital stays were the highest of any available comparable datapoints. That, according to Rodat, and the people who were paying him for his finding, meant that the system was “inefficient” and costs were out of control. In response, a new system involving almost complete deregulation of costs was put into place by Governor George Pataki in the Health Reform Act of 1996.

The statement of intent for the new law said,

The NYPHRM system does not provide the economic discipline to contain costs, affects a shrinking proportion of the market, maintains excess hospital capacity, provides incentives to train too many physicians and inappropriately targets funds for uncompensated care. [The new law would] promote competition in the healthcare marketplace by increasing reliance on market incentives while reducing the role of regulation.

This reform set up the massive reduction of hospital capacity carried out both immediately before and immediately after the 2005-2006 Berger Commission under Pataki. That, along with Medicaid cuts and perverse incentives against acute care hospitals created under Bush and Obama, accounts for the closing of 20 hospitals with Bloomberg’s assent during his mayoralty.

Destabilized, just like the city’s finances under the Lindsay Administration and Rohatyn’s EFCB, the newly deregulated hospitals came under massive financial stress in the nine years before Berger wielded his axe. The grim reaper, Stephen Berger, points out in the Executive Summary of his Commission’s report that many facilities, “critical to preserving access” had already closed due to “market forces,” while others teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.

Berger targeted “excess capacity,” the number of hospital beds, as the major cause of what he announced was a major financial crisis in healthcare.

According to his report, “excess capacity” was dispersing, rather than concentrating the “volume” of medical procedures and the “expertise” required to perform them, diminishing quality of care. Excess capacity was resulting in “higher rates of hospital admissions and services,” in order to create the necessary hospital revenues through unnecessary admissions and stays. Excess capacity was also creating a medical arms race in which high-end technology was needlessly redundant. Further, low occupancy rates, resulting from excess capacity, were increasing financial pressures on institutions, particularly those serving the poor. And, of course, excess capacity was driving all costs since “bricks and mortar” based systems carried enormous fixed costs. Even empty beds, wards, and buildings had fixed costs and somehow diverted dollars from “otherwise productive uses and reinvestment opportunities,” by their very existence, according to Berger.

Courtesy of Bill De Blasio

A protest rally at Foley Square against the closing of New York City hospitals.

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The New York American College of Emergency Physicians said that Berger’s analysis simply did not pass the smell test and swung into active resistance in alliance with the New York State Nurses Association:

No one needs to tell emergency medicine physicians that New York State’s health care delivery system is in crisis. Far too many New Yorkers are uninsured or underinsured. We spend a disproportionately high percentage of the state budget on health care without a corresponding increase in health. Our emergency departments are gridlocked with inpatients, prohibiting us from providing the care new patients require. Our departments are flooded with patients without access to consistent outpatient psychiatric and medical care. And we are asked to participate in planning for pandemic outbreaks and unnatural disasters while we acknowledge that we cannot provide care to the patients we already have? [emphasis added]

And yet, a state commission has concluded that we have too many inpatient beds and that this inefficiency is a major contributor to the exorbitant health care expenditures. How is this conclusion, one that contradicts many of our daily experiences, possible?...

For many of us, the Commission’s recommendations do not pass a reasonability test. If keeping inpatient capacity at its highest possible percent is the driving force behind financial viability for a hospital, why do so many inpatients stay in our emergency departments? Why do we keep patients who could legitimately be inpatients in our emergency departments for 12 and 16 hours? Why do hospitals not have adequate resources to obtain the testing and treatment our patients need to shorten their inpatient stays?...

Nonetheless, by 2008, 2,800 of Berger’s recommended 4,200-bed shrinkage of hospital capacity had been implemented and, more importantly, his specious arguments about “excess capacity” had become the reigning explanation for the “healthcare crisis.” The second component of Berger’s recommendations resulted in mergers of many smaller hospitals into the voluntary large hospital networks which dominate the “market” today. In 2010, Governor David Paterson closed St. Vincent’s, the last of the City’s flagship Catholic hospitals.

Step Four: Obamacare and Its Perverse ‘Incentives’

As noted previously, Obamacare allowed for a vast expansion of Medicaid recipients and was supposed to deplete the ranks of the uninsured. In return, massive cuts to federal funding of Medicaid were legislated, particularly to the hospitals serving the poor, with the idea that revenues from the newly insured would offset the cuts in the federal share of state Medicaid funding. That did not happen. Medicaid enrollment failed to expand at the rate anticipated or, as in New York, did not outpace rising costs. From the time Andrew Cuomo took office in 2011, he focused on slashing the state’s share of Medicaid costs, while maximizing federal funds based on the perverse incentives for closing hospitals embodied in Obamacare.

A series of reforms under Obamacare, allowed states to receive supplemental federal Medicaid funding if they were able to demonstrate that they were diverting patients from acute inpatient hospital care to community care in clinics or to gateway primary care physicians and HMOs. This was the impetus for Andrew Cuomo’s first Medicaid Design Team featuring Stephen Berger.

And Cuomo echoed Berger’s arguments about “over capacity” driving a healthcare crisis repeatedly. In an interview for The Nation, Sean Petty, a pediatric nurse in the Bronx and a ranking member of the New York State Nurses Association noted:

Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly stated, over and over again, that New York has excess capacity of hospital beds, that it’s too expensive, and not needed and we need to reduce spending.

In 2014, Cuomo announced that he had worked out an $8 billion dollar federal infusion for Medicaid based on a promise to reduce hospital use by an additional 25%. Shortly before the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, Cuomo also announced, that he was seeking $400 million in cuts in the state’s share of Medicare funding this year, part of $2.5 billion in cuts he is seeking over five years. Cuomo has said that he is willing to risk more than $6 billion in matching federal Medicaid funding already approved in order to enforce his austerity budget. This is being done to balance the state budget without raising taxes on the state’s wealthy, as advocated by the Nurses and other hospital unions.

Cuomo has stuck to these planned cuts despite the fact that COVID-19 is crashing New York’s existing delimited hospital capacity. The Chair of the New York State Senate’s Health Committee, Gustavo Rivera, called Cuomo’s planned cuts, “obscene” and “immoral” in remarks to The Nation. Under Cuomo’s plans, many of the New York hospitals on the front lines of confronting COVID-19 would lose millions. Central Brooklyn hospitals, serving many of the borough’s working class and poor would lose $38 million a year. Manhattan hospitals would lose up to $58 million a year. Sean Petty warned in his Nation interview that if Cuomo’s budget goes through in this month as planned, next year’s Health and Hospitals budget is “going to be devastating.”

Hopefully, the virus, and Cuomo’s brother’s positive diagnosis, will result in Cuomo changing his axioms, the necessary element in winning this battle. And change anyone wishing to win must. That is the nature of the battle we now face and must fight and the call is to move forward now, courageously, forging the future. The battle is to win that future. And the casualties in that battle will be honorable and famous men and women, provided we transform the nation and the world. Those who stick with the axioms of the past 50 years will be the ultimate casualties, however, whether the virus strikes them now or they are struck, alternatively, on some fateful day in the future with history’s moral judgement.

[fn_1]. As documented by historian Derek Leebaert, in his book, Grand Improvisation, Malcolm McDonald, Britain’s viceroy for Southeast Asia, had successfully been conducting a years-long campaign to draw the United States into Viet Nam, utilizing salons at his headquarters in Singapore, to seduce members of the U.S. establishment and military concerning the superior intellectual skills of the British in the counterinsurgency tactics needed to suppress popular rebellions. [back to text for fn_1]

NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED

Overturning Axiomatic Assumptions

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

September 1, 1997

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

Lyndon LaRouche keynotes the Schiller Institute-ICLC Presidents’ Day weekend conference, “The World Depression Has Arrived: What Do We Do About It?” Reston, Virginia, February 15, 1997.

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The editors of EIR are making available the edited transcript of a previously unpublished speech by Mr. LaRouche addressed to a conference of members of the ICLC[fn_1] on September 1, 1997.

This is my proposal.

We are going for what is called a New Bretton Woods. We are not going to submit, or base the proposal, on a program. The New Bretton Woods is not a program. That is, it is not a design based on some already accepted set of axiomatic assumptions, which is what all programs are. It is not a bill you submit to Congress, asking for a specific amount of money for specific projects. Not that kind of program.

What it is, is a change in the axiomatic assumptions of government. Overturning the Adam Smith economic liberalism system, putting all the institutions into bankruptcy, whatever that means, overturning economic liberalism in whatever form it presents itself, cutting off Satan’s tail, wherever he presents himself—that’s the policy. Not a program, it’s a policy. Whenever that horned gentleman sticks his nose out, cut his tail off. Or if you can’t get the tail, get the nose. To set up a system, whatever that requires, which conforms to the best aspects of the former Bretton Woods, particularly before 1959. Why before 1959? That is during a period in which we had conditional convertibilities of currencies, of well-regulated currencies. And we’re going into a condition which has to be addressed in significant degree, by reducing many currencies around the world, to conditional, as opposed to free, convertibility. Because you must have a national economic protectionist system, so that economies are not destroyed by the vicissitudes of price mechanisms in a monetary market. You must fix the value of currency on some rational basis, and defend those values, through international cooperation, as we did from 1946 through 1958. The period before we began to introduce free convertibility.

U.S. National Archives

A soup and bread line in New York City, circa 1932.

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Return to Sovereign National Economy

Which means, we have to have a system of exchange, a system of convertibility, which is based on formulas, which will be very similar in many respects to the kinds of formulas and mechanisms, the gold reserve mechanism which we used back in that period. That is, a fixed price of gold, declare the unlawfulness of holding gold privately, at any other price. Buying or selling gold at any other price, than that fixed price. To establish that as a monetary reserve unit, which is not used in the internal economies, but is used only in terms of balance of payments, and balance of trade among national economies. Going back to a system of sovereign national economy, absolutely sovereign nation states. The economy of each nation state must be primarily, and internally, a sovereign one—an end to globalization, of all forms and approximations. Going back to the conditions of relations among sovereign nation states, which in their best aspects, were used prior to 1959, prior to the first major crisis of the dollar, which led to the open convertibility.

FDR Library

Assembly-line workers at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach, California in 1942.

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Secondly, we are going back to scientific and technological progress, or to what I have illustrated by reference to the machine tool design principle. An emphasis on modern education, which is task-oriented, to foster high rates of investment, both in basic economic infrastructural improvements, and to foster, and to favor, investment in high-technology, physical production, and scientific discovery, over and at the expense of, any other form of capital investment.

In other words, if somebody is coming to a bank, under the new system, to receive a loan, if the loan is going to credibly contribute to an increase of the capital-intensive, power-intensive, technologically intensive investment in the improvement of the productive powers of labor, and quality of design of product, that investment should receive favored consideration. Whereas if somebody says, I want to set up a pool hall, they want to set up a gambling hall, you can tell them, why don’t you just go turn yourself into the nearest jail and get this whole problem out of my way. (Laughter) Something like that.

So, it’s going to be a selective, dirigistic system, under which things which should be favored will be favored, and those which should not be favored, will not be favored. And there will have to be national policies which govern these priorities. So, your morals are going to be the basis on which you get a loan. You don’t show your balance sheet, you show your moral balance sheet, and your competency.

As we did in World War II. We took people off the street, and, based on a surface conception of their competence, and determination, and morality and commitment, we gave them credit, as a subcontractor. A contract. They could go down to a bank and get a loan at very low rates, on this contract, or subcontract. And this was done on the basis, I like your face. It’s that simple. Because we had to get the result, we had to get the production, and therefore we took all the broken-down, worn-out shops that were available, all the broken-down people that had not had a skilled job for ten years or so, and we put them back into production, based on their skills, the skills which they had almost lost. And said, well, go to work, you’ll make a lot of mistakes at the beginning, but it’ll come back to you, and you’ll do a good job. And we’re going to have to do the same thing again, on a world scale.

We got a bunch of people who don’t know how to do anything. Most of the X generation will tell you that. We don’t know how to do anything. How can we get a job?

U.S. National Archives

In 1939, the U.S. military counted 356,000 men and women in its ranks. During World War II, 16 million were recruited.

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Necessity of Cultural Optimism

So, you say, well, look, we’ll give you the job, and you’re going to have to learn. And it’ll work! Because you’ll use the factor of cultural optimism, and the basic problem of the Xers—they don’t have any cultural optimism. You say, I don’t want to commit suicide. Why? Because nobody will bury me. (Laughter)

Isn’t that true? Xers, isn’t that true?

You really feel like Heideggerian creature, or a Steppenwolf, out of Hesse’s Steppenwolf. You feel like you were thrown into this society, that nobody cares. You’re like somebody thrown into a strange jungle trying to survive. And you find people who belong to the same generation, in the same jungle, and you may gang up, and say, let’s stick together. Isn’t that the X generation generally? No education, no knowledge, no nothing. Here we are, thrown in like babies, like we were mentally born yesterday, into this terrible jungle. Nobody would bother to educate us, nobody would give us anything, we have no future. We’re just trying to survive; we don’t know why. (Laughter) We may change our mind tomorrow. (Laughter). Isn’t that what’s happened to them?

Okay, therefore, that’s the reality of the population you’re dealing with, in people under 35, and some people who’ve become Generation Xers by osmosis.

So, therefore, you have to start with the ugly reality of the poor sinner we’re dealing with. And somehow, take almost the worst cases in society, as we did during World War II. I had the experience when I was doing non-com, I was doing training in Texas, and you get these draftees coming in. And I would have a training platoon that I was running around with. And we would line these guys up on the company street, and I’d look at the way they couldn’t line up on the company street, and I’d say, I think we just lost World War II.

But, that was the situation. We had a population, not as bad as today, but a population that had been ground down, intellectually, morally, and every other way, by this process of the 1920s and the Great Depression. In order to win the war, and to accomplish the other tasks that went with it, we had to mobilize everybody. We had to scrape the bottom of the barrel, and get the top-level performance, employing the bottom of the barrel people to do it. And that’s the situation we’re going to face in the world in the coming period.

Policy, Not Program

So, we don’t want a program, where somebody calculates, and proves on a computer, that, at these prices, and these elements, this is the budget, here’s the package. It is not a package. It is a policy. It is a set of axioms which henceforth, will govern the way we shape policy.

Now, how do you do that? You do that, given the bunch of the creeps we have in the Congress today, some of whose humanity has not been checked carefully. There should be a species check on people, like in the Congress, something people have overlooked here. You are going to have to control the institutions of government under our Constitution, by mass movement, the way that President Franklin Roosevelt tried to do it.

CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikipedia

Above: the AVE Tarragona-Madrid high-speed rail line in Spain. Below: a technician adjusts a laser target in a fusion experiment atLawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility in California. Below,at bottom: High-voltage electric power transmission lines at the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state.

LLNL/Philip Saltonstall

CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikipedia

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So, when you have a mass of people, who really don’t know what they’re talking about, in general, but who know we’ve got to go in a new way, and are willing to accept the idea that there is truthfulness, which can determine what is right, and that there are certain moral principles which determine whether this is really truth or not, and that population will have to discipline the politicians, and institutions of government, so that those in leading positions, in and out of government, who are initiating the policies of recovery, that these people get support, popular support, and the guys who don’t go with the program, are put to one side. If they’re civil service, we’ll find, probably we’ll send them down to the Galapagos Islands, where we’ll set up a big research center down there, to study turtles. We can’t fire them, because they’re civil servants. We can, however, change their assignment.

Or, send them to Antarctica, to educate the pigeons, or penguins, rather.

But, that’s what we require. So don’t think about program, in terms of somebody’s got a bill, with a budget, and all the calculations all worked out—no. But what we are going to do, which takes the place of a program, we have certain target objectives. Including some specific programs.

Now, the one specific program area we have, is infrastructure. You know, we have a space program, but that’s not a program—that’s an open-ended effort, to conquer space, and to develop the scientific knowledge that goes with that, for the benefit of all mankind.

But, infrastructure. Transportation. Rebuild the world transportation system, on a modern, rational technological basis, on principles of physical economy, not on price considerations.

Develop enough power to meet the requirements of growth. No more blackouts and brownouts. Get a power expansion program going immediately.

Re-establish a healthcare system in the United States, in terms of institutions. On the federal level, by reactivating the Veterans Administration, because we have a lot of people becoming older, who are veterans. The Veterans Administration system is a fallback system, which, if properly expanded, can handle a great number of cases that need medical assistance, particularly drastic medical assistance, and that institution is presently not really there. So, make it there.

We need more physicians, competently trained physicians, with this program. We don’t want some guy who learned how to stick a needle in someone four weeks ago. That’s what you’re getting now. You are getting welfare people, stuck in the hospital, performing procedures which were formerly performed by nurses.

USAF/Donald Hudson

“The value of a nurse is, she’s there, has enough training to recognize when something has to be done, and can initiate procedures, quickly.” Shown: A U.S. Air Force nurse in training.

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And the value of a nurse is not that she knows how to stick a needle in someone. The value of a nurse is, she’s there, and has enough medical training to recognize that something has to be done. And can initiate the procedures and make the calls to get that thing in motion, quickly. Or, to report to a physician, that I don’t like what I’m seeing with this patient, and report what it is, clinically. A person who’s a needle-sticker can’t do that. So the idea that some efficiency expert says, well, you can train somebody to stick a needle in so and so for this procedure, and they can do it more cheaply than a nurse. Yes, but they don’t have any eyes, or mind, to see the clinical symptoms which they should be observing, in the patient with whom they’re dealing. They’re not competent. We developed professional nursing for that purpose. I dealt in the war with nurses. I know what the difference is between a good nurse, and a bad one. We put all the bad ones on the poor wards, and we put the good ones on the wards which, like the surgical, or emergency, wards, which were most crucial. Because they would perform, they had the best clinical qualities, the best motivations, the best knowledge. We need that.

Build Real Infrastructure

We need to reform the whole approach to urban development. This idea of urban sprawl is crazy. Think of this idiocy. This is not a program, it’s a principle. Think of the idiocy of people travelling in this area, an hour and a half to work in Washington. Living in a shack that is assessed at say, a quarter million dollars, which will blow over in a windstorm, which they can’t pay off anyway, and having to travel those extra hours, commuting to work, but also, as a result of commuting, and these second-job requirements, to meet family income, it means that we are turning the children of those households into latchkey children, who are going to have emotional, and intellectual problems, as a result of that kind of situation.

So, therefore, we’ve got to rebuild the cities of the United States. Which in many cases, means, going down to the bedrock, ripping it out, and in a planned way, developing a new kind of city, using modern technologies and modern materials, which is a livable and safe area, for people to live close to the places that they have to move to in the course of daily life. Such as schools, and whatnot, recreational centers, all that sort of thing.

So, we’re going to have to build the infrastructure. We’re going to have to launch a massive, major water control project for the United States, which will pick up where we stopped in the late 1960s. What happened to the Red River, the next flood, which is forecast for Northern California, which they haven’t fixed the place up yet, they haven’t learned the lessons of the last century flood, and they’re about to get another one. We must institute flood control, and water management. We must find ways of getting the excess water which we get in flood periods and steering it into places where we need the water.

For example, in the West, we have the Ogallala aquifer is dying out. Aquifers are deteriorating, because they’re drained, because nothing has been done to fix this. We have to have a global, better control over water management. We get so much water out of the atmosphere, in rain, and the trick, to use that water many times over, before it gets back to the ocean, by a process of water purification, and similar kinds of methods, and loading up aquifers. We’ve got to do it.

We have to increase the amount of fresh water available to our country and other countries, in many cases through high-energy methods of desalination. For example, it is insane to feed Los Angeles fresh water, from the desert areas, from the arid areas of the United States, by long pipelines, when there’s all the water they need, sitting right out in front of them in the Pacific Ocean. (Laughter). That’s insane. We have the technologies, or are on the verge of the technologies, to deal with that.

So, we have a tremendous amount of work to do, to take people out of useless occupations, or so-called cheap, unskilled service industries, to take people who have no skills whatsoever, and put them to work under these kinds of programs. They will not be efficient the first year. They will not be efficient the second year. But by the third and fourth year, as we learned in World War II, they will become proficient enough to do more, more than do the job.

So, this is a more long-range effort. It’s not how much this guy’s going to make for you, this year, it’s how much he’s going to perform three years from now, four years from now. In the meantime, he’s going to do something useful, and he’s going to become a useful person in the economy, as opposed to what he is today.

So, we need these kinds of programs, in the sense of projects, project-directives and infrastructure, and we need to apply them in such a way, that we tend to bring the employment opportunities to the area in which the people who need to be employed, are present.

CC Flickr/Doc Searls

“We’re going to have to launch a massive water management control project for the U.S., picking up where we stopped in the 1960s.” Two-thirds of California’s fresh water comes from the Sacramento and San Joaquin inland delta, serving 25 million people and 3 million acres of farmland. Shown: the delta, peppered with islands.

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19th Century Development of U.S. Agriculture

So it’s matching people, available people, with available work to be done. But the right work. Right? Now this is the only way we can officially stimulate the private economy. The way we’ve always done it. The two ways which we’ve stimulated the economy in this century and in the past century. One is through war, economic war mobilizations, particularly in this high-tech machine tool design mode. Secondly, the space program, which is another similar thing, but it’s not a war program. Then through other science-drive programs, but largely through other public programs in infrastructure-building. The improvement of infrastructure creates the conditions under which private production can flourish, and private life can flourish. It also is a vehicle whereby government can mobilize credit and other resources to get large scale projects going which, through contracting and sub-contracting, become stimulants to the relevant private entrepreneurs to the region, including farming.

One of the best ways to develop agriculture in our century was—how? You put a transcontinental railroad across the U.S. and the agriculture development around the railroad. Then, but of course you have these thieves that took over the grain elevator operations, when these thieves from Minnesota and elsewhere moved in and by taking over the railroads, they took the grain sites, the grain delivery sites, and they controlled them. That’s the Cargill operation, what became the Cargill operation. And they control the sites where the grain would be picked up by the railroad. Therefore, they could control the price they paid to the farmer and the price and delivery of the food and at what price on the world market.

But the system was good. The problem was because of the Species Resumption Act of the 1870s and similar measures, this system was corrupted and taken over by the Cargill—actually the British interests operating through Cargill. And that kind of operation. But, the system works. If you bring the infrastructure project into an area, you must rely to a large degree on local labor, local subcontractors, and the development of new industries in those industries which are necessary to support the project. Therefore, if you consolidate government credit in the form of the printing of currency which is deposited in a national bank as opposed to a privately-controlled central bank like the Fed; if you concentrate that currency on deposit, onto the provision of Article I of the U.S. Constitution, the fact that that bank has that money printed, it can now loan access to that money as credit to both states and others, and private utilities and also to private contractors.

So, you’ve got a contract with a project, if it’s a government-authorized project, you go to the bank, and, as we did with war-production subcontracts, that contract gives you access to the credit needed on a program basis, not a lump-sum payment, but a program payment. I need so much a week for my payroll, I need so much for this, so much for that. And the bank will deliver that credit to you, to meet your payroll, to meet your purchases of necessary equipment, and so forth, as we did with war production. And we can use the war production example, from the best experience of World War II, as to how to do that. We know how to do that. In that way, you can revive viable private industries. And you will also use this credit mechanism, and will use projects, to steer it in ways where you save vital private industries from going under, for lack of business.

You’ve got a farm sector, you’ve got a certain kind of industry in an area, it’s in danger of going down because it’s operating below its breakeven point. Now if you put in some business which is perfectly legitimate business, in that firm, you’re going to save it. You’re not going to make them rich right away, you’re going to make them save it, by getting enough new activity to bring it above a breakeven point. And you can do that by simply adjusting the way, in which you implement your projects, so that you put your projects, as we’ve done in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as in wartime. Your project is accelerated or decelerated, in order to regulate the way in which this functions. To keep the whole economy going.

I guess the famous Kennedy statement—the rising tide must lift all boats—and that is the general policy for administrating such a thing. You have your overall objectives which must be reached, but you have flexibility in reaching your overall objectives, you adjust that in order to effect, as Senator Kennedy said, cause the rising tide to lift all boats. That’s the way you approach misery in cities, the way you approach other problems, by letting the tide of credit flow through these projects in such a way as to lift the relevant boats.

So, we don’t want projects, in the sense of programs. We want projects in the sense of policies. The policy is a change, an axiomatic change in the way we think. So what we have to push, using programs and projects merely as illustrations, for this purpose, say, here’s how society has to be run. And the principle you have to get across, is, we have come through 30 years of changes in policy, which have, except for the limited success of civil rights reforms, have all been disastrous failures. So we have to eliminate all of those policy changes, which were made in the past 30 years, which have been failures. That’s the first thing we have to do.

Return to National Banking

We have to go from a private banking system, which is totally bankrupt now anyway, to national banking, instead of central banking. We have to go back to the principles of regulation, or international monetary relations, of the pre-1959 Bretton Woods period. Once we agree upon that, what we’ve done is we have changed the mentality of policymaking around the world. We have set up relations among states, where the principle which governs the way actions will be taken, will be in conformity with these principles.

Then the job is to find good administrators who make that system work, in place of trying to fix the unworkable system.

So, the two things go together. The question of the organizing, as a first proposition I make today for discussion; the second thing, is you have to get a concept of axiomatic changes in the way policies are made, in place of the idea of what is your program, we’ll take it in the Congress, and we’ll vote it up or down. Because the Congress presently is incapable of voting up or down anything. You don’t want this Congress operating on the basis of its present established opinions. We do not wish to submit what we propose to the Congress for a vote. We wish to submit the Congress as a whole for a vote.

[fn_1]. In a 1981 article, LaRouche described the ICLC (International Caucus of Labor Committees) “as an international academy movement, consciously modeled in intent and practice upon such precedents as Plato’s Academy at Athens, and tracing its heritage through Philo, Augustinian Christianity, the Arab Renaissance, and the 15th-century Golden Renaissance ... in existence since 1973-1974, based chiefly in the U.S.A., Canada, Latin America, and Western Europe.” [back to text for fn_1]

III. Redefining the Relationship among Nations

Does South Africa Have the Moral Fitness to Survive?

A Proposal to Defeat the Coronavirus Pandemic

by Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane, leader of LaRouche South Africa

LSA/Samuel Tsietsi Lepele

Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane

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April 1—It has been well over a month since I issued my 15 February call-to-battle against the coronavirus pandemic crisis facing the people of our nation, Africa and the world. In that call, I explained that the Brutish Empire has to go—that Africa would not long survive the continuation of the Brutish Empire’s system of monetarism, whose policies of looting, primitive accumulation and enforced underdevelopment have created the conditions of biological holocaust, just as the greatest man of the recent century, the late physical economist and American statesman Lyndon LaRouche had warned for more fifty years.

Mr. LaRouche, who founded the global movement which I am proud to lead in South Africa, said that only the creation of a New World Economic Order can end the British system of managed death and genocide. It is only by investing in the productivity of human labs and creativity as the source of all real value, that the evil Empire’s valuation of human life in money terms can be defeated and the continued existence of mankind on this planet be assured.

FAO

Massive swarms of Desert Locusts in East Africa, destroying crops on a scale not seen in generations, are a precursor to famine, unless food is provided by international donors. Shown: a swarm in Kenya.

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It was in that spirit that I called on our leaders at home and abroad to mobilize an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in Africa a response to the locust plague and starvation conditions especially in southern and eastern Africa. While our nation with its full-set economic capabilities, if mobilized properly, must play a key role in this war for survival, I urged that help come from President Trump’s United States and President Xi’s China, whose nation has waged a heroic and successful battle against the virus.

For weeks I saw little or no action in response to my call for urgent action. Then, as the virus began to spread in Europe and the United States, and those nations began to respond, finally South Africa’s leaders began to act. On March 15, President Ramaphosa finally declared a national state of disaster, per the Disaster Management Act, and on March 23 put our nation in a 21-day lockdown.

While this latter measure, if enforced, might slow the spread of COVID-19, it cannot stop it. How can it, when we do not even know who is sick and needs to be isolated and treated, and when we do not have the means to treat? We have neither hospital beds sufficient to meet what will be a growing grim demand, nor equipment such as ventilators to help the acutely ill. Nor do we have sufficient medical personnel nor the protective personal equipment they require, not even simple masks that might be needed for our citizens. We also lack medicines, including antivirals that could be used to treat those who are symptomatic.

While there are already promising vaccines now undergoing trials, I know of no plans to pry them loose from pharmaceutical companies to make them available at no cost, or as close to no cost as possible in this emergency.

It is clear that policies of social distancing and restriction on travel, if enforced, can slow the spread of the virus—if, and only if they are accompanied by other measures including mass testing. Compelling people to stay at home can have potentially disastrous consequences, unless people with relevant symptoms are removed from close contact with their family members and placed under medical supervision in empty hotels or converted schools until they are tested.

If we remember the unspoken fact that more than 12% of our people are infected with the immune-system-destroying HIV/AIDS, then it is not hard to project a death toll of millions in our nation from the COVID-19 pandemic, unless all-out measures are taken. Indeed, the number of HIV-infected persons may be much more than 12%, as testing has not been adequate.

GCIS

These South Africans were placed under quarantine after repatriation from Wuhan, China, following the outbreak of COVID-19.

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I cannot accept minimalist or contradictory plans, and I will not succumb to the idea that an enormous loss of life is inevitable. That will only happen if we continue to do what amounts to nothing to stop the foreseeable mass death. Just because measures are harsh does not mean that they will be effective.

Today there are 1,353 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in South Africa and five deaths. These numbers will now grow by leaps and bounds, as we have seen in every country. Teams are now going into the townships to do testing, but only selectively, to hotspots, so this response is still woefully inadequate to the threat.

A Workable Plan

Let me now propose the outlines of a workable solution.

1.0 We must call together our leading public health professionals, epidemiologists, military figures, business leaders and others into an emergency public health task force. They must monitor data and propose actions based on that data, revising plans on the go.

2.0 We need to obtain literally millions of COVID-19 test kits so that we can test people with symptoms and identify those whose respiratory specimens test positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19, and isolate and treat them. We should issue an urgent appeal for these test kits directly to China and the United States, requesting their help, while ordering designated companies in our country to produce them if they have the capacity to do so. This is urgent. We must also devise a plan to administer these tests and train what amounts to a public health corps to augment those who are already trained for this purpose.

3.0 We need to increase immediately the number of hospital beds and acute care beds. We will need to convert existing space into hospital space while we rapidly build new temporary facilities and new hospitals, mobilizing our construction industry for this task. Again we need to request help from the world in this task, especially from the United States and China, the latter which showed its capability to build new ultra-modern purpose-built hospitals in fewer than two weeks in the worst-stricken city of Wuhan.

4.0 We will need a large number of ventilators to treat those who become acutely ill; we currently have about 6,000, but we will need vastly more than that. We need to see if we can quickly begin production in our own country, and do so immediately. But we must urgently request ventilators from China as well as from the United States, where production is being geared up as I write. The world needs the U.S. industrial base to function as an arsenal for this war against the virus. The President must gear up production not only to meet domestic needs, but—as is his stated intent—to meet the world’s needs.

5.0 Until a vaccine becomes widely available, if there are drug protocols that show promise in treating the virus while not harming patients, we need to get these into operation as fast as possible. We cannot tolerate any holding back for questions of patent rights, as hampered us in the AIDS crisis. Doing so would be a crime against humanity. We need to have access to these treatments, and we need to produce them generically in South Africa if we can, as long as they are safe; and produce patented drugs to be offered at low cost as well. There can be no waiting for “peacetime” full drug testing regimens when we are in a war for survival: we need to get these medicines to the battlefront as soon as possible, as was done with the penicillin during World War II.

6.0 We must treat potential vaccines—on which the survival of much of mankind will depend—in the same way. We cannot accept a 12- to 18-month delivery timeline for a vaccine. We must demand a preventative vaccine by no later than the end of June. This is not a job for our scientists and our drug companies alone. It is the urgent requirement of mankind and must be treated as such in a cooperative global effort run with the same kind of all-out effort as America’s Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II, this time to develop a “bomb” that kills this pandemic.

7.0 I fully endorse the call of the President of the Schiller Institute, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, for an urgent workday summit of the leaders of Russia, China, the United States, and India—as well as others who might want to participate—to discuss coordinated action against the pandemic and for the creation of a new global world economic order that would usher in a period of peaceful progress and development for mankind.

8.0 For the duration of this crisis, there should be a moratorium on the payment of all sovereign debt to foreign banks and such institutions as the International Monetary Fund, as well as a moratorium on all payments of government debt, at all levels, to financial institutions. These moratoriums shall be without penalty. In addition, there shall be a moratorium on all personal and business debt to financial institutions, for all categories of loans, without penalty. And as long as the emergency exists, there shall be, without penalty, a suspension of all rent payments. It shall also be understood that the government will encourage policies of debt forgiveness, on a need basis, as it will be likely impossible for individuals and families to earn the income necessary to make such payments without endangering their welfare and wellbeing.

The Moral Fitness to Survive

I realize that some may greet my proposals with skepticism, saying, “It is impossible to get so much done so quickly.” My answer to them is: “Anything less will not assure our survival.” To those who will say that my plan is too costly, I say: “Thinking that way shows you are not morally fit to survive.”

I note that the U.S. Congress has just passed a multi-trillion-dollar bailout package and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank has pledged to deploy unlimited amounts to save financial institutions and financial markets that are little more than gambling casinos for speculators. Where are the trillions to save lives? Is that not our first and foremost concern, saving lives? If we need funds to fight this war against the virus, let our government issue credit in the form of War Against the Virus bonds. Let our citizens of means and our financial institutions buy them. We will let it be known that we shall secure these bonds with the future well-being of our people and nation.

Let us stand together now, against all those like his Royal Virus Prince Philip who share a sick delusion that they shall achieve a new economic equilibrium and maintain their power by killing people on a scale that would have made Adolf Hitler blush with envy. Such people have no use for Africans or people of color. They are not human.

In this moment, I hereby renew my plea to President Trump: Africa desperately needs your friendship, right now. We do not need kind words, but physical goods in the form of ventilators and drugs to fight the “war” against what you call a deadly “invisible enemy.” We need millions of testing kits, millions of doses of the so-called Trump cocktail (hydroxychloroquine) to fight the disease, and other antivirals, which must be brought into this fight more quickly than profit-seeking big pharma companies are willing to do on their own. And we need a preventative vaccine not in a year or more, but as soon as possible, to save lives now and when the next wave of this pandemic strikes, as it will. Mr. President, act to mobilize the awesome power of the American economy—as your great predecessor President Franklin Roosevelt did during World War II—to become the great arsenal for this new global war. Do this and you will be rightfully celebrated by grateful future generations.

So I issue this call to battle, to save human life here in South Africa and everywhere on this planet. By so doing, we show our true love—what the Greeks called agapē—for what is human in all of us. Will you join me?

Pandemic Requires Emergency Action Against Monetarist ‘Markets’ System

Principles to Secure Food Supply Set by LaRouche

by EIR Staff

April 5—Action is urgent to assure the food supply under pandemic conditions—food production, processing, storage and delivery. Millions of lives are at stake because of the pre-existing condition of food scarcity in Africa, parts of South America and other areas of chronic import-dependence. In addition, food shortages can occur anywhere as production and supply lines snap, either from COVID-19 directly, or from the blowout of the financial system, which, except in China, had already undercut farming to the breaking point, even before the virus came on. Farmers in Europe have had tractor protests in the streets since last fall.

Photo credits, left to right: White House; quirinale.it; Kremlin.ru; SCO

The leaders of these four nations urgently must convene a summit to coordinate the international response to the coronavirus, and food security has to be an integral part of their deliberations. Left to right: Presidents Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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No motivation is required to convey the benefits of eating, but the March 31 joint appeal for international collaboration on ways to secure food supplies, issued by the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), will remain just that—a plea for food security, unless there are stronger initiatives by key nations. The WHO/FAO/WTO statement expresses worry over food uncertainty, export restrictions, and shortages: “It is at times like this, that more, not less, international cooperation becomes vital.”

In brief, emergency measures are required in three areas:

1. Intervene to stop commodity speculation, price-rigging from the monopolized processing sector, trade control by the cartels, and all other aspects of decades of Wall Street/City of London rake-off in the name of “market forces” monetarism. At the same time, support farms and ranches, with price stability measures based on parity pricing, and with moratoria on foreclosure, extension of special production credits, and income support wherever necessary. Implement anti-trust actions, while in the meantime, government intervention can override cases of violation of public interest by cartel processing and trade concentrations. Plentiful credit must be directed into farming and ranching in a timely way, to facilitate cycles of planting/harvesting and livestock production; and for defending against disasters (fires, floods, storms). This requires a Glass-Steagall type re-organization of banking in the U.S. and other countries, as of yesterday.

2. Commission and support farm and ranch production of priority commodities, and expedite shipment of foodstuffs to final destinations. This requires international collaboration to benefit each nation’s profile of domestic production and imports. Nation-to-nation commodity contracts are essential, or use of the FAO or other agency as a coordinating body, but to the same effect of mutual benefit among nations. In addition to raw commodities and foodstuffs, all essentials for agriculture must have the same nation-to-nation contracting, or approval-power over private contracting, including for oil and gas products, fertilizers, agro-chemicals, seeds and livestock genetics, veterinary medicines, and the like.

3. Effect these measures by initiating at the earliest moment a summit of the leaders of the four Great Powers—Presidents Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and leaders of other nations as willing, who together have the moral and political force to confer and initiate decisive action. Consult farm leadership on all continents, beginning now, to inform and assist the food and agriculture agenda, as part of fighting COVID-19, and to meet food emergency and ongoing food needs. This means gearing up for establishing agriculture productivity, necessary infrastructure, and food abundance everywhere on the planet, indefinitely.

There are precedents for these initiatives. For example, the World War II Lend Lease program (March 1941-August 1945) involved nations collaborating to set targets of what commodities would be produced in the U.S. (foodstuffs, machinery and other materiel) and delivered to designated nations (UK, USSR, Free France, China and others) under various terms. What must happen today, is collaboration in the same way, but on a world scale, for millions more people.

Africa, as a continent, in recent “normal” years, is 40 percent food import-dependent for daily diet. The import-share varies country by country, but overall it is a huge vulnerability. Right now, with the combined effects of COVID-19 spreading, on top of other diseases (measles, Lassa fever, HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis), plus the eastern Africa locust scourge and southern drought, holocaust conditions are pending, unless there is an international emergency mobilization for food as well as medical aid.

Statesman Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly put forth over recent decades, the principles needed to deal with emergencies and for sustained progress. He warned of pandemics and other deadly consequences from lack of economic development, and mobilized to avert suffering and the disaster we are seeing now. China has been singularly outstanding in applying forms of the principles that LaRouche stressed. Had they been heeded universally, the planetary crisis would not now exist. LaRouche focused attention on the necessity of ending the neo-British Empire monetarist system, which is now cracking up chaotically. [Box: LaRouche: Principles to Solve the Food Crisis]

At different times in the course of his warnings, LaRouche addressed agriculture specifically. He met with farmers in many countries, and conferred on the gamut of agriculture, from science to credit questions. For example, in the 1980s—only a decade after the August 1971 floating of currencies—the U.S. farm sector was drastically hit by a run-up and then a plunge of prices, a collapse of induced debt, along with bankruptcy, foreclosure and destruction. In 1979, 3,000 farmers staged a cross-country national tractorcade—driving 2,500 miles from some states, to call for remedy. LaRouche put out the principles to be acted on. They still stand as guidelines for today. Here we report more on the conditions in the three areas of action cited above, with a focus on the United States.

Stop ‘Markets’ Speculation, Monopolization

Farmers have been whipsawed by low prices and price swings for years, but especially so in the last few months. Since January, prices received by U.S. corn growers—already low, dropped by 12 percent; soybean prices dropped 7 percent.

Meat and dairy producers are very hard hit. Milk prices to dairymen have fallen drastically, as schools and restaurants have been closing, thus lowering demand. Dairy farmers are dumping milk in Wisconsin. Producer beef prices from Jan. 23 to March 16, dropped 28 percent from $126 down to $91.35 per hundred pounds for live cattle—the biggest drop in 40 years. However, this is not simple “supply and demand.” The meat packers—four firms dominate over 85 percent of U.S. beef processing (Cargill, Tysons, National Beef/Marfrig, JBS)—made $500 to $700 per head of cattle processed. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley (R) called for an investigation.

Other sectors of farm production are in extreme chaos. For example, thousands of fruit and vegetable growers saw their markets disappear overnight, whenever stay-at-home orders shut restaurants, colleges, school systems, courts, hotels, cruise ships and vacation zones. Some farms are trying to re-tool for supermarkets. Other farm operations cannot function without seasonal labor, most of which had been from migrants, now not there, directly or indirectly because of COVID-19.

The March 27 CARES Act has in it more than $40 billion for aid to farmers through the Agriculture Department’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC, founded in the 1930s). Every such stopgap might help, but farmers are being looted by the Wall Street-rigged “markets” structure itself.

Back Production to Meet Food Needs

Agriculture capacity everywhere needs to be matched—through consultation within and between nations—to meet the food needs of people. The time is over when farm production can be outsourced or fostered in one place or another, and the practice billed as the means to “compete” in commodity production, gain a trade balance surplus, and other such monetarist goals—through which the commodity cartels and speculators were the only gainers all along, not farmers nor eaters.

Nation-to-nation contracting can be implemented to stabilize supplies. Basic staples must be assured. High-protein sources must be figured in. At present, amid the virus and financial turmoil, some nations are announcing grain export restrictions. Russia, the top wheat exporting nation, has a 7 million metric ton cap on its foreign wheat sales from April-June (still in the range of its customary sales level). Likewise, from April 12 to June 30, Russia and fellow nations of its customs union (Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan) will restrict exports of rye, sunflower seed and soybeans. Vietnam, the third biggest rice exporter, announced that for a specified period, additions to its own national rice stockpile will have priority over exports to its trade partners. Cambodia has put bans on rice exports. Egypt will limit bean exports. If bad crop weather hits on top of this import-export chaos and the pandemic, the results will be catastrophe.

Besides collaboration to de-escalate food conflict, it is also time to end the bio-fuels diversion of farm capacity to fuel, and make way for more food production. To save the agricultural capacity involved, provide stipends for the farmers to make the shift—both corn growers and the DDG (dried distiller grains) users who can shift to other livestock rations.

Put Food on Summit’s Pandemic Agenda

The nature of what is needed to shift to an agriculture policy based on supplying world food needs, and benefitting all nations and peoples, calls the question on the City of London/Wall Street monetarist system, that has for decades perpetuated hunger in Africa and elsewhere, while undermining the family farm system everywhere. Only the highest-level decision making can start to end this destruction.

LaRouche: Principles to Solve the Food Crisis

EIRNS

Lyndon LaRouche, campaigning for President in 1980. With him is his wife Helga.

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April 5—During the 1980s, the United States lost tens of thousands of farmers as a result of the impossible financial conditions, which were part of the same British Imperial monetarist system through which African nations were then thwarted, by IMF and World Bank conditionalities, from developing their own economies and food security.

Lyndon LaRouche, for his 1984 presidential campaign, wrote a 450-page platform, The Independent Democrats’ 1984 Platform, presenting what he called, “Five Crises Facing the Next President.” Two of them concerned food: “Collapse of U.S. Agro-Industrial Output,” and “Erupting World-Wide Food Shortage.” In the latter section, he wrote measures for the President and Congress to “act immediately.” A longer excerpt from that section of the book is available in the March 12, 1985 issue of EIR. The principles embodied in seven proposed measures to be taken are relevant to today’s crisis, and are presented here in summary form:

1. There must be an immediate moratorium on farm foreclosures, nationwide.

2. Establish immediately, a policy of intervention to maintain farmers’ gross prices at 90 percent of parity.

3. The President and Congress must intervene with emergency measures, to facilitate the reorganization of financial affairs.

4. Disaster relief for farms in relevant regions of the nation.

5. Immediate action to develop fresh-water management systems in areas suffering from, or threatened by major water shortages.

6. Immediate action establishing in the Department of Agriculture an improved market-forecasting system of service to, and in cooperation with farmers.

7. The President and Congress must take emergency action in response to the existing and worsening world food shortage. [back to text]

AN IMMEDIATE REQUIREMENT

Cease the Annual Installment Payments

On the So-Called Public Debt of Greece

by Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, Ambassador ad honorem

EIRNS

Leonidas Chrysanthopoulos, career diplomat of Greece.

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April 1—The Greek government announced measures this week to alleviate the plight of those Greeks who had been hit financially by the closure of their businesses within the framework of the measures adopted to protect the population from the coronavirus. These measures amount to €6.8 billion and cover a period of one to two months. They were correct and were welcomed by the population. The problem arises of what will happen after this amount is used up and the pandemic continues, as is expected.

The government has started to deny that it is thinking of reducing salaries and pensions in the public sector. But we all know from past experience that these denials mean that it is already being contemplated. However, if the government dares to make these reductions, the consequences will be the following: Those who are on pensions, have already had their income reduced by 60%, because of the of the memoranda imposed upon Greece by the EU lenders and the IMF. Consequently, those people will no longer be able to pay taxes or the installments of their loans to banks. Whatever remains after that expected reduction they will have to use to maintain themselves and their families. The same applies to those receiving salaries.

The banks will threaten those who cannot repay their loans with confiscation of their properties, but it will be a useless threat since the banks will not be able to sell the confiscated properties, now that the global economic system is collapsing. That reduction of salaries and pensions might also lead to the collapse of the state. Spontaneous popular uprisings might take place that would lead to more fatalities than the coronavirus itself.

So what could the government do instead? It could declare a cessation of payments or a moratorium to the EU lenders for the so-called public debt of Greece. But let us first look at some of the obligations that have been imposed upon Greece. In 2020, Greece must pay €5.9 billion; in 2021, €4.9 billion; in 2022, €9.4 billion; in 2023, €11.7 billion; and so on: 2024, €9.4 billion; 2025, €9.24 billion; 2026, €8 billion; 2027, €5.9 billion; and 2028, €11.5 billion.

Due to the exceptional measures taken for the protection of the population from the pandemic, the government truly must declare a cessation of payments for the so-called public debt, at least for the years 2020 and 2021. This money will be needed to ensure the survival of the population of Greece.

The government will not ask for permission of the lenders to cease payments, but will inform them simply out of courtesy. The existing global economic chaos and the anticipated dissolution of the EU makes it difficult if not impossible for the lenders to react to the cessation of payments that Greece would be declaring. And we must not wait for EU decisions concerning the proposed “coronabonds” since such a decision will be too little and too late. Klaus Regling, head of the European Stability Mechanism, has already recently declared that he will need at least one year for a new Eurobond of any kind to be issued.

Cessation of payments is the only solution that will be able to guarantee the survival of the Greek population and of the country in this difficult moment that humanity is facing. The so-called easy solution of reducing salaries and pensions will only lead to social unrest of such a magnitude that its victims will be much more than the victims of the coronavirus, something that we hope will not happen.

MARCH 26, 2020

An Open Letter to the People of the United States

from 100 Chinese Scholars

Dear American friends:

We are a group of 100 Chinese scholars representing diverse academic fields including philosophy, political science, economics, medicine, international relations, sociology, law, communication, military science, and technology. Our members include a number of university professors from Wuhan. While our areas of expertise are diverse, as intellectuals we all share a common desire to express our concerns about the well-being of all people in China, the U.S., and every country on Earth.

Recently, we have heard many critical voices politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic. Facing the most dangerous infectious disease in a century, these criticisms help neither China, the U.S., nor the world to curb the spread of the virus. Political bickering does nothing to contribute to the healthy development of Sino-U.S. relations, nor will it help the people of the world to rationally and accurately understand and cope with the pandemic. We want to sincerely and frankly share our views with our American friends today.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global public health crisis with a horrific scale not seen in generations; the effort to overcome both it and its impact will be nothing short of a long-term and arduous global war. Countries should be working together, not complaining, finger pointing, and blaming one another. The virus does not know any borders, but neither does love, nor friendship. As two of the great countries on Earth, cooperation between China and the U.S. could, and should, be used to bring a more positive outcome for all humankind.

Respecting science, cherishing life, and protecting people from harm should be our shared goals in the fight against COVID-19. The COVID-19 outbreak in China is now basically under control. Since the virus first emerged in early January, the Chinese people have made unimaginable efforts and sacrifices to achieve hard-won results.

We are grateful for the support of the international community, including donations from American friends, during the most critical stage of the fight. We respect the epidemic containment programs and policies implemented by other countries according to their own national conditions, and we are willing to share our experiences with other countries and provide all available assistance to them.

At this stage of the pandemic, the exact source and origin of COVID-19 remain undetermined, but these questions are unimportant and finger pointing is demeaning and hurtful to everyone. In the end we will all respect the final determination of scientists. Like many other countries, China is a victim of the virus, but also a success story overcoming it, and it is willing to work with people of other countries to stop the spread of the pandemic.

We sincerely hope to cooperate with the international community, including intellectuals and experts from the U.S. that look forward to a brighter future. We look forward to the time when doctrines of international cooperation once again flourish around the world. We call on all nations to work together in sincere cooperation to defeat this common enemy of humanity.

Hopefully, we soon will be able to celebrate the final victory over COVID-19!

Signed by:

Bao Qiting, Dean of Beijing Minsheng Big Data Research Institute

Cai Jiahe, Professor of the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies

Cao Wenlian, Vice President of China Society of Economic Reform

Chen Dingding, Associate Dean, Institute for Belt and Road Initiative and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area

Chen Dongxiao, President of Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS)

Chen Jing, Vice President of Technology and Strategy Research Institute

Chen Qi, Director of Tsinghua Center for U.S.-China Relations

Chen Zhongyang, Professor of School of Finance, Renmin University of China

Chen Wuyuan, Executive Vice President of “The Belt and Road” Research School, Xiamen University (XMU)

Chen Yunsong, Director of the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies

Cui Xiaojing, Professor of School of Law, Wuhan University

Da Wei, Professor of University of International Relations

Diao Daming, Associate Professor of School of International Studies, Renmin University of China

Ding Gang, Senior Editor with People’s Daily, Senior Fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Ding Xuankai, Research Fellow of Chinese Think Tank Studies and Evaluation Center, Nanjing University

Dong Xuebing, Executive Vice Director of China Academy of West Region Development, Zhejiang University

Du Zhizhang, Vice Dean of the Institute of State Governance, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Fang Changping, Deputy Dean of School of International Studies, Renmin University of China

Fang Xingdong, Founder of ChinaLabs

Feng Leiming, Dean of the “Belt and Road” Tianjin Strategic Research Institute, Tianjin Foreign Studies University

Feng Xi, President of Future Business School

Gao Jian, Secretary-General of Academy for Global Governance and Area Studies

Gao Qiqi, Dean of Political Science Institute, East China University of Political Science and Law

Guo Wanda, Executive Vice President of China Development Institute

He Hui, Professor of Beijing Foreign Studies University

He Maochun, Director of Research Center for Economic Diplomacy, Tsinghua University

He Weiwen, Senior Fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Huang Dahui, Deputy Dean of School of International Studies, Renmin University of China

Huang Jing, Academic Dean of Academy of International and Regional Studies, Beijing Language and Culture University

Huang Renwei, Former Vice President and Research Fellow of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences

Huang Rihan, Assistant to the Dean of School of International Relations, Huaqiao University

Hu Wei, President of the Shanghai Society of Public Policy

Jiang An, Professor of School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shenzhen University

Jia Jinjing, Assistant Dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Jia Min, Associate Research Fellow, School of Advanced International and Area Studies of East China Normal University

Jia Wenshan, Distinguished Professor of Shandong University

Kong Xinfeng, Vice President of the Institute of State Governance, Shandong University

Lan Weiqing, Chief Expert of Urban Governance Research Center of Zhejiang Province

Li Gang, Professor of School of Information Management, Nanjing University

Li Guodong, Dean of School of Marxism, Yantai University

Li Mu, Dean of School of Law, Humanities and Sociology, Wuhan University of Technology

Liang Shuanglu, Dean of School of Economics (School of Accounting), Yunnan University

Lin Chenghua, Vice Director of Institute of Science and Technology Management, Zhejiang University

Lin Danming, Professor of Shantou University

Liu Feng, Director of Philippine Research Center, Hainan Normal University

Liu Haiming, Professor of School of Journalism and Communication, Chongqing University

Liu Yang, Advisory committee member of CITIC Foundation for Reform and Development Studies

Liu Zhiqin, Former Chief Representative in Beijing Office of Zurich Cantonal Bank; Senior Fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Long Xingchun, Professor of School of Foreign Languages, China West Normal University

Lu Shanbing, Dean of Institute of Silk Road Studies, Northwest University

Luo Liangqing, Chair Professor of Statistics, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics

Mei Xinyu, Research Fellow of Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, Ministry of Commerce

Ouyang Kang, Dean of the Institute of State Governance, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Pu Yongjian, Vice Director of Development Research Center, Chongqing University

Pan Qingzhong, Executive Dean, Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University

Qin An, Director of the Internet Policy and Law Research Center, Tianjing University Law School

Shi Zhiqin, Professor of Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University

Su Hao, Professor of China Foreign Affairs University

Chu Yin, Professor of University of International Relations, Vice Dean of DE Think Tank

Chu Zhaogen, Director of BRI and Non-traditional Security Research Center, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University (ZSTU)

Sun Wen, Vice Director of the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies

Sun Xiaomeng, Professor of Beijing Foreign Studies University

Song Luzheng, Researcher of China Institute, Fudan University

Tang Renwu, President of School of Government, Beijing Normal University

Tu Xinquan, Dean of China Institute for WTO Studies, University of International Business and Economics

Xing Liju, Professor of Institute of International Studies, Fudan University

Xu Erming, Dean of Business School, Shantou University

Xu Ning, Assistant to the Dean of Yangtze Industrial Economic Institute

Yao Shujie, Deputy Director of Faculty of Social Sciences, Chongqing University

Yi Peng, President of Pangoal Institution

Yi Jiandong, Professor of Wenzhou University

Wang Jinguo, Dean of School of Politics and International Relations, Lanzhou University

Wang Chaoen, Director Assistant of the Collaborative Innovation Centre for Silk Road Economic Belt Legal and Policy Studies, Xi’an Jiaotong University

Wang Lei, Director of the BRICS Cooperation Center, Beijing Normal University

Wang Shaoguang, Distinguished Professor of School of Public Policy & Management and Schwarzman College; Senior Research Fellow of Institute for Contemporary China Studies, Tsinghua University

Wang Wen, Executive Dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China (and the open letter’s Initiative Coordinator)

Wang Xingnan, Professor of Guangdong University of Finance

Wang Yiwei, Director of the Institute of International Affairs, Renmin University of China.

Wang Zaibang, Senior Fellow of Taihe Institute

Wu Dahui, Deputy Director of Russian Research Institute of Tsinghua University

Wu Danhong, Director of Difficult Evidence Center, China University of Political Science and Law

Wu Sike, Former Special Envoy for China on the Middle East Issue, Senior Fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Xia Liping, Dean of Institute of International and Public Affairs, Tongji University

Xia Youfu, Executive Director of the Strategy Center for China’s Open Economy and International Technology Cooperation-SCOT, University of International Business and Economics (UIBE)

Yang Guangbin, Dean of School of International Studies, Renmin University of China

Yang Xuedong, Research Fellow of the Institute of Party History and Literature of the CPC Central Committee

Yang Yujun, Dean of Academy of Media and Public Affairs, Communication University of China

Yu Li, Deputy Dean of School of Politics and Public Management, Zhengzhou University

Zhang Dongming, Dean of Northeast Research Institute, Liaoning University (LNU)

Zhang Haibing, President Assistant of Shanghai Institute for International Studies (SIIS)

Zhang Yiwu, Professor of Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University

Zhao Gang, Vice Chairman of China Society for Social System Analysis

Zhao Kejin, Deputy Dean of Institute of Global Development, Tsinghua University

Zhao Jianping, Chairman of China-Africa Development Fund; Senior Fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Zhang Shengjun, Professor of School of Government, Beijing Normal University

Zhang Weiliang, Dean of the Institute for Urban Studies, Hangzhou Normal University

Zhang Yanling, Former Vice President of Bank of China; Senior Fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Zhang Zhenjiang, Dean of School of International Studies, Jinan University (JNU)

Zhou Feifei, Associate Chief Physician and Associate Professor of Peking University Third Hospital

Zhou Rong, former South Asia Chief Correspondent of Guangming Daily, Senior Fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

Zhou Xiaojing, Former Director of Institute of Asian and African Development at the Development Research Center of the State Council; Senior Fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China

This letter was circulated by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies and appeared in The Diplomat news magazine on April 2.

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Systems Are Manmade: You Can Change Systems When One Breaks Down

This is the edited transcript of the Schiller Institute’s April 1, 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. It’s April 1, 2020.

We’re clearly in the midst of one of the most profound crises in modern history with the combined effects of a financial system that’s blowing out and the expanding pandemic of coronavirus. It’s clear that the old way of thinking no longer works. So, Helga, what’s your assessment, especially with the situation in the United States seeming to be heading out of control?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: It is an unprecedented crisis, and I think none of us has experienced anything like this in our lifetimes. Maybe it was like this in the world wars. I think the seriousness of its reality has dawned on some people in Europe and the United States belatedly, but unavoidably. It will really be extremely bad for the developing sector. We will come to that in a second.

White House/Andrea Hanks

Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at a White House coronavirus briefing. Standing behind him are President Trump and Vice President Pence, March 31, 2020.

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Let’s start with the United States. Yesterday’s White House coronavirus taskforce meeting, which was given by President Trump and his health advisors Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, was really completely sober and sobering. What they said is that if everything is done right, now, maybe the number of deaths can be held to 100,000 to 240,000. But if things go wrong, it may be 1-2 million. Right now, it does not look like this is going to be an easy job.

In hotspots like New York and New Jersey, with the highest infection rates increasing exponentially right now, it is quite desperate. Despite New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s attempts to get sufficient ventilators for the outbreak, he has only been able to secure 2,500, and those are expected to arrive from China two weeks from now, leaving New York short by 15,000. All the other states in the United States were in a bidding war to get ventilators until the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took it over, and is now organizing it centrally. Ventilators are needed in the critical phase of a coronavirus infection, when the ventilator is the life saver. If there are no ventilators, then these people will just die. It is a very serious situation.

For an industrialized country, the pandemic has unbelievable social consequences. For example, they have released some prisoners jailed on Rikers Island. Many have no other place to go, so they are now spending their time in New York’s Penn Station where they get food deliveries from the Guardian Angels. Then, you have 114,000 homeless children in New York City alone, who used to get their meals in the schools.

Office of Governor/Darren McGee

Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York State.

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So, you have all kinds of social consequences which really show the underlying problem of the lack of infrastructure investment, the privatization and dismantling of the health system over the last decades; all of that is now really coming to a point of complete crisis.

There are incredible efforts being made to retool some of the industries. An “air bridge” has been established with many planes coming in from China and other Asian countries—50 planes all together. Yesterday, the first Russian cargo airplane, filled with medical supplies, landed at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens, New York. So, there is an incredible mobilization going on, but it is also very clear that this is a pandemic, and America will experience mass unemployment. Some are saying that the unemployment in the United States may go up to 30%; so this is really an unbelievable crisis.

The Coronavirus in Africa, India, Indonesia

Schlanger: Helga, you talk about the crisis affecting the United States, and how desperate it is. What about the countries of Africa? India is in total lockdown; Indonesia is now in the midst of a developing crisis. This is obviously much more dangerous in the developing sector.

Zepp-LaRouche: The United States is a very well-industrialized country—or at least, it used to be. In Africa and other developing areas of the world—supposedly developing, not so developing—it will be really very bad. Lagos, Nigeria, without a robust health system, is already completely overwhelmed. Other infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis are rampant, not to mention the prevalence of systematic malnutrition and outright famine. This is really a powder keg.

UN/Laura Jarriel

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization.

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Dr. Tedros, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), said that both in the United States and in Africa, the next two weeks will tell how bad the crisis will be. But so far, there has been a certain delay factor for Africa. Because of the limited transport connections of the African continent to the rest of the world, COVID-19 arrived relatively late. But now it’s there, with the absolute danger that it will spread.

Half of the world is now in de facto lockdown; that’s incredible! India, a country of 1.3 billion people, in lockdown. But that obviously is relative, because many day-workers—people who just work for a day’s pay in big cities like Delhi—are now all fleeing these big cities, because they can no longer earn any money, and have no savings. You have perhaps seen pictures of poor people getting on crowded buses, where they are in no position to keep the required social distance, rushing home in the rural areas. But there is no health system. Despite the fact that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quite some success with the “Clean India” campaign, and “Modicare,” through which he tried to improve the healthcare system, it is all not enough.

Jakarta, Indonesia—10 million people in one city, half of whom have no access to clean water. A similar situation exists in many developing countries, including Mexico, including Peru.

So, we are really looking at an unprecedented world crisis. The danger is that this will overwhelm the health systems; there is not enough production possible. Winter, which is just eleven weeks away in the Southern Hemisphere, will favor the spread of the virus. Many millions will probably die. I think this makes it very clear that we urgently need a completely different system. Nothing will be like it was before.

CGTN

“Every life in Africa, in Latin America, and in Asia is as precious as any child in Germany or the United States or any other place.” Shown: A COVID-19 hospital ward in South Africa.

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Mass Mobilization for a Great Power Summit

I think we have to go into a mass mobilization internationally, which the Schiller Institute is already engaged in, to establish a new world economic order. We have called for that for a very long time, but immediately in this situation it requires a summit of the most important, most powerful countries: China, Russia, India, the United States. They have to establish a new system. What we need is a completely new system.

All the rules of the liberal economy, of the neo-liberal model, the cheap labor markets, the outsourcing, all of that has to be replaced; and it has to start with the immediate building of a world health system where a decent health system is being built up in every single country. That must be the beginning of an industrial revolution for the whole world. Nothing short of that will do. That means we need a New Bretton Woods system, and a new credit system to finance it. If you agree with that, then help us in this mobilization, because what is at stake are the lives of many millions of people, and maybe yourself.

PIB

Dr. Harsh Vardhan, India’s Minister for Health, visiting the Lok Nayak Jaiprakash Narayan Hospital in Delhi, April 4, 2020.

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Schlanger: Over the last few days, President Trump has had discussions with President Xi Jinping of China and President Putin of Russia. Do you see this as a positive step towards a summit? These are bilateral discussions, but so far we haven’t seen a response to your call at the level needed.

Zepp-LaRouche: I think they are steps in the right direction. The fact that Trump and Xi Jinping re-established contact, that there were discussions between the health ministers, that the United States started to accept this air bridge, that Trump started talking with Putin again. All of these things are very positive, but they do fall short.

Also, the proposal by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), for a $2.5 trillion coronavirus aid package for building up the health sector in the developing sector, is a step in the right direction: $1 trillion is for debt write-off, $1 trillion is for Special Drawing Rights from the IMF, $500 billion is for a Marshall Plan for health recovery. That is very positive, but when it’s all added up, it’s still the proverbial peanuts, because to build up a world health system needs much more than $500 billion. That’s for all the developing countries, not just for one country. It’s for the entire 180 or so developing countries; if you divide it, it’s just not enough.

LaRouche Warned the World

Schlanger: There’s a lot of talk about the time-lag in doing the emergency mobilization, getting the equipment, and other things. To me, the real time-lag is the almost 45 years since your husband first sounded the warning in 1974 that a shift in the financial system to a neo-liberal new kind of colonial system would lead to this kind of pandemic. People obviously weren’t listening. The idea that there was no warning is completely false, isn’t it?

Zepp-LaRouche: The first memorandum stating that the economic and financial policies of the IMF and World Bank would lead to pandemics, he issued in 1973. Then in 1974, he initiated a Biological Holocaust Taskforce, which presented the findings of its study at the end of 1974. I was just rereading an EIR Special Report, Economic Breakdown and the Threat of Global Pandemics, published in 1985, which is one of several large studies which absolutely predicted that this would happen and why.

There is a connection between the biological sphere—the biosphere—and the economy. If you lower the living standard and the energy of the system of society, then lower forms of life in the biosphere just take over. In a very fitting image for today, he said that the cheap labor orientation towards the developing sector and keeping development down in the so-called Third World, has to be compared to the Schachtian economics of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. He said a lot of deaths in the concentration camps came from forcing the people in these camps to do hard labor. They would have to do work requiring 2,000-3,000 calories per day, but would only get about 1000 calories. It was just a matter of time before they died of starvation.

That is a fitting image, because as the living standards in the developing countries have been unnecessarily driven down by denying them infrastructure, like the World Wildlife Fund did in all their campaigns to ruin the prospects for dams, for industrial development, just blocking development with phony arguments of ecologism, the ability of those people to withstand diseases is also reduced, and their weakened immune systems make them susceptible to pandemics. This is exactly what we are witnessing today. That was clear then; we discussed it then in no uncertain terms. He said, then, that such policies would have more devastating consequences than the genocide of Adolf Hitler.

CGTN

Chinese doctors in South Africa, March 2020.

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I absolutely want to repeat that. Some people today are indifferent, who say “I don’t care. What do I care about Africa? What do I care about Latin America?” Such people are morally the equivalent of Nuremburg criminals. At the Nuremburg trials after World War II, the judges convicted the accused on the principle that they either knew or should have known, about what was going on in the Third Reich.

Concerning the conditions in the developing sector today, the exact same thing can be said. The people who are pushing no development, who are more concerned about a little snail in some corner than millions of people, these are people who are criminal. That criminality absolutely has to stop! We have to start rebuilding the world. And every life in Africa, in Latin America, and in Asia is as precious as any child in Germany, or in the United States or any other place. I am consciously using this rather stark language, because this complacency and this arrogance of the Euro-centrists, or the America-centrists has to stop.

A Moral and Economic Breakdown

We are at the point of a moral and economic breakdown crisis of the whole world. We need a new system, and that has to be mobilized, and it has to be gotten through. If we don’t do that, we are risking our humanity either physically—because it is not yet clear if it doesn’t lead to war as a consequence of conditions of a breakdown crisis—or it leads to our moral demise.

I really think that we have to absolutely change this. We have to allow industrial development in every single country in the world, and we have to have a decent living standard. It is very easy, because China has shown the way, that you can bring infrastructure development as the precondition for general development to every country. It is up to us in the so-called Western countries in Europe and the United States to absolutely change our ways.

Schlanger: In the early 1970s Lyn’s warnings identified particular individuals who were committed to population reduction, who knew this would happen. Some of these anti-human comments are being made today, as you mentioned before: People saying, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful! There are now blue skies!” There are people who are cheering on the demise of the elderly and the so-called “useless eaters.”

Zepp-LaRouche: The flagship magazine of the British Empire just came out with that line today—The Economist. They say, “Isn’t it wonderful that the economy is coming to a grinding halt? No CO_2 emissions! We just have to make sure that after this crisis, we are not going back to normal.” There are some other criminals who call themselves economists, who are saying that when the coronavirus crisis stops and is over, the economy should be rebuilt, but based on climate protection. We have discussed the reasons why the Green ecology is exactly what caused this crisis; and if we were to go back to those policies, we clearly do not have the moral fitness to survive.

First Ever Schiller Institute Youth Web Meeting

Schlanger: Helga, you’ve been talking about rebuilding the whole world health system. You had a web meeting yesterday morning with young people, during which you called on them to take responsibility for the organizing process to do this. What is your sense of the ability to mobilize youth today to take on this task?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think the meeting was very encouraging, because this was our first such international youth call. About 70-75 young people from all over the world attended from the United States, Mexico, Peru, Pakistan, Africa, Europe, and China. I think the discussion really reflected that these young people are morally absolutely committed to make sure that they have a future. The idea that every country has the right to have a decent health system is obvious. They are committed to bringing this message to a lot of other young people, to the universities. They are committed to spreading it to other organizations, especially in the developing sector.

All of them are really tuned in to the approach that the leaders of the most important countries need to change the system. I think this is important, because people have not really thought about it. No one can sit out this crisis; you cannot just wait until it’s over. This is a pandemic, and it may come back in waves. It has intersected the breakdown of the financial system, the collapse of the physical economy.

The only way to get out of it is to put in a completely new system. Most people have not spent much thought on whether that is necessary or possible, or they say, you can’t do that. Yes, you can! Systems are man-made; they are inherent parts of the physical universe. They are man-made, and mankind can change the system. If the old system is not suitable for the common good of the people, then it has to be replaced.

We have specified many times what that must look like: A global Glass-Steagall banking separation; an end to the casino economy; protection of the commercial banks; creation of a national bank in every country; connection of these national banks in a New Bretton Woods system that provides cheap, long-term credit for clearly defined development projects. International cooperation and coordination.

I think among young people in particular, the notion that cooperation has to replace confrontation, is very easily understood. Several young women attended this meeting—which made me especially happy, because I’m all for woman-power—and they especially emphasized that the passion which needs to be mobilized for that is agapē. The change which has to occur must be based on a love for humanity.

Out of our discussion came an inkling of what the kind of new system will be like; namely, that the geopoliticians will be out. Those who think it’s okay to have endless wars just to make profit, are clinging onto an obsolete idea, one of troglodytes. The future must belong to young people who organize the world in different ways, in the interests of each country. It was actually a very hopeful discussion, and I would urge people to get in contact with us to see how they can join it.

Schlanger: Speaking of troglodytes, look at what’s going on in Europe with the European Union; the battles that are going on around the continuation of the neo-liberal policies. This is in complete contrast to what you’re discussing with the young people, the complete absence of agapē. Catch us up a little bit on what’s going on in the EU.

Government of Italy

Giuseppe Conte, Prime Minister of Italy, is asking the EU for financial help in dealing with COVID-19.

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The European Union and the Federal Reserve

Zepp-LaRouche: It’s almost a question of the past to talk about the EU. Right now, it’s really a question mark as to how long this construct will remain in place. There is no solidarity; there is a big feud right now between Germany and Italy, France, and the other southern European countries. It’s a little bit on the wrong issue; namely, this issue of Eurobonds, which I think is not a good idea. It’s still in the realm of banking bail-out.

Just to mention in parentheses, the Federal Reserve just yesterday opened its repo credit facility to all other central banks. That means basically that they intend to help each other to bail each other out. The Federal Reserve earlier had allocated $4 trillion for the bail-out of the U.S. banking sector, which was characterized by Republican Congressman Thomas Massie as the biggest transfer ever of wealth from the ordinary people to the very rich and the bankers. This is part of the Eurobonds, so I’m not in favor of the Eurobonds.

The conflict that has arisen between Germany, Holland and Austria on the one side, and these other countries on the other side, pertains to a real issue. And that is that the countries of the South—especially Italy and Spain, and increasingly also France—are really suffering an incredible exponential growth rate of this virus, and they have demanded some finance mechanism organized by the EU, which was blocked by Germany in particular and Holland and Austria.

These countries are saying that this is the ugly face of Europe. The tone becomes quite nasty. For example, the Italian media, and I think also Prime Minister Conte, were saying that if this had been the attitude of the other European countries at the 1953 debt conference in London—where half of the German debt was forgiven, which obviously was an extremely important factor in the reconstruction of Germany after the Second World War—if that had not been done, then Germany would still be living on garbage piles. So, the tone is becoming nasty, and everybody—Italy, Spain, Serbia—all say that they got more help from China, from Russia, and from Cuba. Even the small country of Albania sent thirty health personnel to Italy to help. You can really see who’s your friend, and who is motivated by completely different reasons.

CGTN

A nine-member Chinese team, accompanying tons of medical supplies, arrives at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, March 12, 2020.

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I think the anti-China campaign coming from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, from Foreign Affairs magazine, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, who are all still in this absolutely vicious campaign against China, will vanish. Because people in this crisis see who is helping, and who is not. In a week or two, when we talk again, I think the situation in Europe is such that by then the EU may not exist.

That’s not a bad thing, because it was a bad construction from the very beginning. It could not work. It never existed. There is no “European people.” There are many nations and many cultures, but the European bureaucracy is an evil structure which is not in correspondence with the interests of its own members. The sooner it is replaced by something else—either a Eurasian alliance of sovereign states from the Chinese Sea to Vladivostok to Lisbon, or some other kind of new alliance of sovereign republics working together for a new world economic order—the better. That does not mean that European countries cannot work together, but they should not be under the tutelage of some supranational structure.

DoS/Ronny Przysucha

Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of State, continues to conduct his anti-China campaign, unlike his boss, President Trump.

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I think we will see big changes in this coming period. It requires the active intervention of as many state citizens as possible. So, please get in contact with us and help us to try to change the agenda on a large scale.

Schiller Institute International Conference

Schlanger: Toward accomplishing that goal, the Schiller Institute is going to have an international conference, April 25-26. Just give us a little bit of a sense of what you hope to come out of that conference.

Zepp-LaRouche: We had to shift that conference, which was planned for April 25-26, to the internet, because physical conferences are impossible at this point. But therein lies also an advantage; namely, that you can reach much larger audiences. Therefore, people should start to register for that conference, because then you will be also supplied with additional information and materials you can read ahead of time to be prepared to participate as a more active person in this conference.

We will try to discuss the issues at that conference that we think should be taken up by the large country governments. We will try to inform the population on the needed changes in the strategic alliance, the needed cultural changes, the need to go to a Classical renaissance of art and music. We will discuss the frontiers of science; what is necessary to defeat not only the coronavirus, but to really get a completely different sense of space medicine, of breakthroughs in optical biophysics in redefining what life is, what we need to know to be able to combat such problems much better. And naturally, the principles of physical economy upon which we intend to rebuild the world economy.

So, you should definitely get in touch with us, register for the conference, and be part of it.

Schlanger: I would encourage everyone to join this mobilization with a very simple act. Share this webcast! Pass it around! Get your friends to watch it. Then, go to the Schiller Institute website and the LaRouche PAC website and study the ideas presented there. Those ideas, generated by Lyndon LaRouche beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, are not only valid today, but represent universal principles. It’s through a return to those kinds of principles that we can restore mankind.

Helga, thank you very much for your comments and for joining us today. As you always say, hopefully we’ll see you next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, let’s do something to move mankind in a better direction.

EDITORIAL

If President Trump Controls the Fed

What Can Now Be Done?

by Paul Gallagher

April 5—There are indications that the Trump White House, acting through Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, is now in partial, and perhaps increasing control of the Federal Reserve. That control is being shared with Wall Street and real estate billionaires, whom the President calls his “brilliant” acquaintances. Nonetheless, this situation could be the first presidential control of the Fed, however partial, since President Franklin Roosevelt exercised considerable influence over the policy of his Fed Chair Marriner Eccles. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is now conferring many times a day with current Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and, in Mnuchin’s words, “approving” each Fed bailout program before it begins.

But so far, Mnuchin and President Trump appear to agree with all of the programs the Fed has launched, the overwhelming majority of which are potentially hyperinflationary attempts to save unpayable debt assets of Wall Street and City of London banks, and also those of the shadow banks. The $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act “relief” legislation is directly connected to the Fed by the $454 billion with which the Treasury is effectively buying the “first loss tranches” of the slick investment vehicles being created by BlackRock, for the Fed to attempt to save these toxic assets with printed dollars.

This “sharing” of power, however, could change suddenly and dramatically. Under the now-developing circumstances, President Trump is coming into cooperation with the leaders of China, Russia, India and other nations in providing developing nations with medical equipment—as China is doing already—and also producing healthcare capital goods and building hospitals, which will rapidly make clear the immediate need to build the required power and water supplies. This imperative will become increasingly clearer as the coronavirus pandemic spreads into, and through, unprepared nations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

The United States has two agencies—the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the International Development Finance Corporation (IFDC)—capable of lending for such capital goods exports, but both are undercapitalized and, as of this writing, lack the mission assignment.

The Fed, loaded to the gills with Treasury securities, could be told to combine with the Treasury to lend to these agencies, to back contracts given to engineering and construction firms, or other agencies, to build healthcare infrastructure in third countries. EXIM and the IFDC could in turn work with other advanced nations’ credit institutions, in a mobilization such as Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche has repeatedly called on those nations to get going now.

That will require a new approach from President Trump, and a battle with Wall Street.

Thus far, international cooperation has only been manifest in the Airbridge by which medical supplies are being brought into the United States to combat the virus. President Trump has several times stated, at press conferences, that he wants this flow to go out from the United States as soon as possible, to the more than 150 countries that have this virus. Healthcare infrastructure building is the only infrastructure program that can now be called an emergency, and it is immediately required for anti-pandemic action right now.