EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, MARCH 9, 2021
The Choices: Hyperinflation, Financial Crash—or Major Powers Cooperate for Worldwide Recovery
March 8 , 2021 (EIRNS)—China plans to put a new space station in low-Earth orbit by next year, coming at the same time U.S. and China landers and the U.A.E. orbiter are all at Mars, and with America planning a new space station in Moon orbit in five years. Our nations will have to try hard not to engage in at least scientific, if not technological cooperation in these extraordinary space missions. We have been trying very hard not to cooperate: in space; in vaccinating the world’s population in time to end the pandemic; in development projects in poor nations; in anything. Where has it gotten us?
So much employment, wealth and food access has been lost around the world since the start of 2020, and the big central banks and trans-Atlantic governments have printed so many trillions in new debt and currency without creating a single productive project or job, that we’re now in the early stages of a sharp inflation headed for a hyperinflationary explosion. We could escape that, of course—we could see the hyper-inflated “everything bubble” of corporate debt and stock valuation collapse instead, in a crash worse than 2008. In Yemen, in Eastern Africa and Sahel countries children are malnourished or starving due to wars, crop failures, border closures; but food production is not gearing up in developed countries, it is being suppressed.
What about the alternative? America can put badly needed capital into China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia’s nuclear power export projects, for example, while collaborating with Canada to build the latest generation nuclear plants in the Western Hemisphere including in the United States. World food production needs to be doubled, and that means breaking up the biggest banks and food cartels to free up more credit for high-tech family farms. Modern hospital systems are needed in scores of nations far more than in the United States, where they are needed. None of these missions will “divert productive funds” because the money being printed is all non-productive.
Last May the LaRouche movement published “How To Restart the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs.” They were to come from the biggest productive missions facing the major nations of the world today: those described just above, and developing the world’s major river basins like the Tennessee Valley Authority was developed by FDR. We specified the productive missions for 50 million of those new productive jobs in the United States over the next generation.
This productive mobilization could head off a financial crash which is otherwise built in. But no mobilization has occurred since we laid it out in that Special Report. What we see is extremely dangerous warfighting and war confrontation among those nations. A New York Times report of March 7, if true—and it is quoting senior Biden officials in some cases by name—puts the three leading nuclear powers in the midst of major cyber-attacks and retaliatory cyber-attacks on each others’ vital systems. These are based on dubious intelligence reports about these cyber intrusions, and we saw how dubious those can be in the infamous four-year “Russiagating” of the Trump Administration. But they can easily get us into a “pre-war” standoff of major powers.
Are the constant McCarthy-like media attacks against “enemies” China and Russia impossible to overcome? When Senator McCarthy denounced “card-carrying Communists” in the 1950s, did he believe any of it? Of course not; he was seeking a political bonanza. When Secretary of State Pompeo insists China produced the COVID virus to subdue the world, and all Chinese students in America are spies, does he believe it? Not as much as he believes such lying might make him President. When a Chinese official claimed COVID was created at Fort Detrick in Maryland, or certain Russian and Chinese officials said U.S.-made vaccines were unhealthy, did they believe it? They did not. Citizens need not believe these “enemy” stories either.
What is important is actions—stop the most dangerous “red-line” confrontations like the large-scale cyber-war attacks and permanent wars, and start actions of economic and cultural collaboration. They can pull us out of economic collapse while saving lives worldwide.
