To Fight Pandemics, Don’t Waste $5 Trillion ‘Resuscitating’ Wall Street

March 26 (EIRNS)—The presidents and prime ministers of the Group of 20 nations clearly wanted to cooperate to speed up the defeat of the COVID-19 virus all over the world, when they met on a long teleconference today, and to expand their aid to developing countries which lack public health capacities.

“We are gravely concerned with the serious risks posed to all countries, particularly developing and least developed countries, and notably in Africa and small island states, where health systems and economies may be less able to cope with the challenge, as well as the particular risk faced by refugees and displaced persons. We will strengthen capacity building.... We stand ready to mobilize development and humanitarian financing.” And they pledged to conduct expanded, frontier scientific research together to save human lives from deadly pandemics.

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

After the G20 telemeeting today, the Chinese Foreign Ministry explained that the nations on that call had spent and/or had now committed $5 trillion toward reviving economies collapsed by the pandemic’s impact—$3.5 trillion of it by the governments of the United States and China. But a single central bank, the Federal Reserve, had printed and/or committed to print at least $5.2 trillion to buy the failing assets from City of London and Wall Street banks, hedge funds, you name it; and is also providing additional dollar “swap lines” with other central banks to do the same.

This inhuman waste has to stop; it is costing many lives, and when hyperinflation results, it will cost many more. Government taxes and borrowing are backing this immense financial bailout instead of backing national bank credit to build and equip modern hospitals in developing nations and create new high-technology infrastructure in industrial ones.

LaRouchePAC says “Triage Wall Street—Not Grandma.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche insists the pandemic can be defeated, but only by throwing out the London monetary virus, the “floating exchange rate” system of the past 50 years.

Implement the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche beginning with Glass-Steagall breakup of Wall Street- and City of London-centered financial firms and creation of Hamiltonian national credit institutions in each major nation. Create a fixed-exchange-rate, Bretton Woods-type credit system to export capital goods, led by those modern hospitals, to poorer nations.

Put people first. Kill the British Malthusian virus as well—the one that let loose from Imperial College the anti-human “herd immunity” idea that 60% of every population had to get this coronavirus. This idea was angrily rejected by President Donald Trump yesterday when he said “I don’t accept a single death,” and equally angrily by his scientific advisor Dr. Deborah Birx.

On May 20, 2002 Lyndon LaRouche, who with his movement had been involved from 1995-2001 in a mass mobilization to save the capital’s only public hospital, D.C. General Hospital, from being shut down, along with thousands of other hospitals nationwide, said:

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

That is the “New Bretton Woods” system, like President Franklin Roosevelt’s, that Helga Zepp-LaRouche demands we return to now, in time to save our lives.

And LaRouche continued: “For a period of nearly thirty years, our nation’s health-care system has been increasingly the victim of a misguided shift from the system developed under the Hill-Burton law, to the presently evolved HMO system. It should be recalled today, that the Hill-Burton legislation was adopted under the impetus of the experience of our participation in two World Wars. Thus, Hill-Burton reflected an included awareness of the kind of health-care capabilities wanted to deal, inclusively, with health-care and related challenges of even traumatic national-security characteristics. That included awareness must be reawakened in legislative and other relevant practice under the increasingly strategically perilous conditions of today.”