EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, 2021

Reject the IMF Hype-erinflation, and the British Green New Deal

April 6 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Going into its annual Spring meeting the IMF has spread worldwide disinformation by claiming the United States is the “world economic engine for 2021,” set to grow 6.5% in GDP, import the whole world’s goods, and so on. What kind of an “economic engine” does not export capital goods to industrialize the developing countries; makes no investment in building healthcare and hospital systems when they are being overwhelmed by pandemic in scores of nations; refuses even to export from its overproduction of effective vaccines? And look at what the IMF itself forecasts will happen if such a “U.S. boom” does occur, and causes inflation and higher long-term interest rates—a dangerous flow of capital out of the most affected developing nations like India and Brazil and, explosively, into the well-named “everything bubble” of American corporate and household debt!

The last 18 months’ frantic liquidity-pumping by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks, combined for the past year with hyperinflationary government borrowing for non-productive “COVID relief” programs, has only made wealth concentration greater and poverty worse even in the United States and European nations. The IMF forecasts it: Over the two years 2020-21, average incomes in developing countries will have dropped by 20%, and in the “advanced countries” by 11%. That’s a booming recovery? Poverty in the United States struck nearly 10 million more people in 2020, and is forecast to rise by another 5 million people in 2021. That’s a “world economic engine”?

What has to be done instead of this hyperinflationary money-printing policy, fairly cries out aloud to us.

Vaccine production must be accelerated by new licensing and exported wherever necessary to developing nations where the COVID pandemic with its deadly variants is still spreading and vaccination is still negligible—this is necessary for every people’s survival.

Well over 100 million people can gain new, productive employment in the United States and around the world in just the next year or two building modern hospital and healthcare systems, staffing them, and constructing the power and water supplies for them. Scores of nations’ hospital systems are now being overwhelmed by the pandemic simultaneously.

Food production has to be stimulated and doubled where it can be, to stop mass starvation in nations where the pandemic has collapsed it. And this is only part of a process of creating “Tennessee Valley Authority” economic development in watersheds worldwide.

The most challenging task of all calls for political action: Stop and reverse the so-called “Green New Deal” or “Great Reset,” which is sacrificing human and economic productivity, and human lives, supposedly to “save the planet” from a beneficial component of all living systems, carbon. We now have the example of India, which has stood up for developing nations against the “zero carbon” dogma which for them will bring mass death, for “advanced” countries will bring economic chaos and decline.

Two Indian ministers in the past week have said “No” to the “net zero carbon” demands of the City of London and Wall Street “green finance” banks and the central banks’ carbon disclosure committees. Indian Energy Minister Raj Kumar Singh told the International Energy Agency meeting on March 31, including Joe Biden’s climate czar, John Kerry, “You have 800 million people who don’t have access to electricity. You can’t say that they have to go to net zero. They have the right to develop. They want fossil fuels for power and they must use them.” And nuclear power!

The Green Deal, the Great Reset so-called, has to be crushed. A real worldwide economic recovery—based on the starting principle of ending the loss of human life to pandemic disease and famine—will produce hundreds of millions of new jobs using power-dense and advanced technologies. The LaRouche movement made it clear last May how this could be done. Now it is holding a series of growing international conferences to organize that solution. Please join them.