EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2021

Turn the Mars Spirit Loose on Earth

Feb. 3 , 2021 (EIRNS)—In less than a week, the three exciting, much-anticipated visits to Mars are set to begin. On Feb. 9, the “Hope Mars” probe launched by the United Arab Emirates will reach Mars. On Feb. 10 China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft will reach and enter Mars’ orbit. The craft weighs five tons, and will slow down its engines enough to be tugged into Mars’ gravitational pull. On Feb. 18, NASA’s Perseverance rover is to make its landing onto the surface of Mars.

Taken together, these achievements signify humanity’s potential to develop, and increase “natural” resources, on Mars, the Moon, here on Earth, and untold places beyond. As the saying goes, “the sky’s the limit,” and in fact, mankind has the power to literally expand the sky! What we urgently need, is to turn this spirit loose on Earth right now.

What stands in the way is the anti-human, anti-development movement, ironically named “green,” which is downgrading production and conditions of life, insisting there are limits to growth. They hold that people foul the universe. Implementing this outlook is the fast track to de-population and war. Among the reasons this green thinking, embodied in the “Davos Agenda” of the Great Reset—now defensively renamed Stakeholder Capitalism—is being pushed so hard is that the financial system serving its core originators and backers is itself blowing out. The ESG con game (“environment, social issues, and governance”) offers them the prospect of short-term green bubbles, while they plot to put in place dictatorship over what’s left of the human race.

What is required is a new system of financial practices of credit and investment, deployed in the interests of building up the productivity and achievements of nations and peoples. The thinking and programs of statesman economist Lyndon LaRouche have never been so necessary. There is a dramatic demand for his outlook and policies, ranging from activists in France—the Yellow Vests, sovereignists, and other groups— to the millions of disenfranchised in the United States, to the farmers in India.

In the United States, the latest green push is to shift agriculture policy away from food and fiber production, into “carbon sequestration,” for contributing to an early “Net Zero” of CO2. At his Senate hearing yesterday for Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack—who never knew a policy he couldn’t peddle— gushed how committed he is to change over from traditional agriculture to the new green mandate. For example, he said he can’t wait to use the FDR-era Commodities Credit Corporation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has some $30 billion in it, for a new purpose of funding carbon reduction programs, not commodities. Thus, the 75-year-old agency, which has been concerned, however effectively or not, with real farmers, real food needs (such as school lunch programs) and real food—butter, wheat, corn—is now to be a destructive kook operation. Vilsack told the Senators that the CCC is “a great tool to pursue what will encourage carbon capture. I hope you would allow me the opportunity to utilize that.”

Instead of this insanity, we need the “spirit of Mars” to guide a mobilization to deal with the pandemic and famine, and, in the course of that mobilization, to establish a high-productivity economy in the process.

Today an internet seminar was held, centered in Germany, on this perspective, focusing on the need for rapidly building a world health security system. Speakers reported on lessons from China’s experience, including the physical logistics involved, as well as the emergency financial measures that must be taken for accomplishing these goals. It requires a whole new paradigm of thinking, said Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who gave the keynote address. She stressed international collaboration, not the conflict politics which endanger full scale war.

An example of the new paradigm, of leadership in the mutual interests of nations comes from Argentina. President Alberto Fernández earlier this week spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They discussed not only the need for more Sputnik V vaccine in Argentina, but joint projects of various kinds in the future, including infrastructure and aerospace. Fernández has accepted an invitation to visit Moscow. In May, Fernández will be in Beijing conferring on cooperative ventures. China has sent 42 planeloads to Argentina in an air-bridge bringing medical supplies to fight the coronavirus.

Zepp-LaRouche said yesterday in a briefing with European associates, “The only way the world will get out of this absolutely insane mess it’s in right now, is a new paradigm around cooperation around fighting the pandemic: There is not going to be any solution if there is not a modern health system in every country, and that must be the beginning of overcoming the underdevelopment in the developing sector and the so-called Global South. And obviously, for Germany and other European countries—as Hungary has already done—to start overcoming their ideological prejudices and actually cooperate on such lifesaving questions as fighting COVID-19, is a very important step. I think it also reflects the fact that, as [Chancellor Angela] Merkel said in her speech to the virtual Davos, that she is not interested in having new blocs being built, and she even mentioned in her speech, ‘the Great Reset, do we really need that?’....

“So I think all of that makes our task more urgent, more clear, because the time bomb is ticking. The danger of a blowout of the system is clearly in the air. The madness of what it would mean if there is more green policy, green transformation, means the end of European and U.S. industry, so we are not in the least in safe quarters. There are only tiny silver linings on the horizon in the cooperation around the vaccines and we should build on it.”