EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, APRIL 13, 2021

IMF and World Bank Give Powerful New Reason They Should Be Shelved

April 12 , 2021 (EIRNS)—The IMF and the World Bank, in a new report issued March 26 on their planned “lending” activities, have taken the people-killing effects of the global “Green New Deal” (or “Great Reset”) to an even nastier level. The report is called “World Bank/IMF Support for Debt Relief under the Common Framework and Beyond” and its first paragraph says, “We need to make sure we do not lose sight of green and inclusive reforms because of ... a looming debt crisis.” It makes clear that what debt suspension has been granted to developing countries during the pandemic economic collapse, will now depend on “debt for climate swaps,” where they have to trade closing their fossil fuel power plants, for example, in exchange for the debt relief.

The big central banks and Wall Street giants have already been muscling private investment internationally and nationally to get out of coal and oil power and heating, carbon-based industry, and mechanized agriculture and go exclusively into primitive “green” technologies. This is supposed to meet “zero carbon” goals for economies and “save the planet.”

Now, the IMF and World Bank are going to grab government-to-government lending to developing nations and push it toward the same “zero carbon” goal. They’re going to put “green” conditionalities on all the lending and debt relief those developing countries can get, and make them “swap” debt relief or credit for shutdowns of coal plants that many developing nations depend on for electric power and heat, for chemical fertilizer use that could upgrade their farm yields, and more. These global financial agencies say to the government lenders of G20 countries, “allow continued access to concessional resources [low interest loans or debt relief] to finance priorities for green, resilient, and inclusive development,” and that’s all

These nations are buried in debt after more than a year of pandemic deaths, COVID lockdowns, border closures, trade breakdowns, crop failures. The World Bank itself thinks 150 million more people have fallen into extreme poverty in 2020-21. The real “swap” here is: You reduce your country’s population; the IMF will reduce your debt.

This directly attacks, if we understand it—the United States, Europe, the other major technological powers like China, Russia, India, Japan. Capital goods exports to these developing nations, for infrastructure development projects in these developing countries, are where the new, productive employment will come from in a United States with 25 million people still on unemployment benefits or dropped out of the workforce.

Capital goods exports like modern hospital and clinic systems to fight the pandemic and vaccinate; electric power and freshwater supplies for them; machinery and inputs for productive family farming. Infrastructure projects like water management and flood control projects in river valleys, electrified rail connectivity, modern ports.

This is where real recovery of productive employment and productivity will come from, in the leading nations which shelve the IMF and World Bank—and the Federal Reserve for that matter—and create a new credit system for the purpose.

Such a recovery will never come from hyperinflationary money printing in the many trillions and multi trillion-dollar support for the big Wall Street and City of London-centered banks, even if the Fed and ECB keep up that printing until it explodes.

The policy which stands over us as the deadly enemy of productive development and recovery, is the Green New Deal. There are poles of resistance to it developing, a “worldwide anti-Malthusian resistance,” as when India last week said “No” to Joe Biden’s climate ambassador John Kerry, who came to demand a “zero carbon pledge” from them.

EIR News Service and The LaRouche Organization (TLO) are working to organize that anti-Malthusian resistance, and TLO’s mass-circulation pamphlet exposing the Green New Deal, as “The Great Leap Backward: LaRouche Crushes the ‘Green New Deal’ Fraud” goes into second printing next week. Any group or individual that wants to stand up for the scientific creativity and technological progress of the human race, will want to use it.