EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2021

The Big Awakening

Sept. 29, 2021 (EIRNS)—Helga Zepp-LaRouche today issued a stern warning that the Green Reset policies of the bankrupt Western financial Establishment have unleashed a hyperinflationary price explosion, notably in the energy sector, coupled with a breakdown collapse of the global physical economy, including its so-called supply chains. This is careening towards “the end game of this financial system,” she forecast, and as this slams the population of the nations of Europe and the United States, “the big awakening will come.”

Zepp-LaRouche laid the blame for this systemic breakdown squarely on the Great Reset’s channeling of all investment and capital flows into a gigantic green speculative bubble, on top of 50 years of Malthusian austerity policies which are responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as for killing 16 million people a year through starvation.

Consider some recent developments in this collapse:

• The United Kingdom has escalating shortages of gasoline and of food on the shelves of supermarkets, and they are expecting major disruptions in the ability to harvest food crops this fall. The government has mobilized the army to deal with the gasoline crisis, beginning with 150 tanker truck drivers to move oil from depots to gas stations.

• Italy will be raising consumer electricity prices across the board by 30% next Monday, Oct. 4. This will cause massive social and economic dislocation, and it is being blamed on global price hikes for coal, natural gas and other energy sources.

• U.S. home sale prices jumped by 19.7% in July, the largest monthly increase in 30 years. They’ve been going up for 14 straight months, and the same inflationary pattern applies to rents.

• U.S. shortages of all sorts of consumer and producer goods are expected increasingly through the Christmas period. The transportation system cannot move goods quickly, and major ports such as Los Angeles and San Diego have huge backups and delays.

• The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and other industry groups representing 65 million transport workers worldwide today issued a public letter warning of a “global transport system collapse.”

• China is facing continuing power cuts and rationing, especially in the northeast of the country. Factories are also affected and many have had to shut down, which is expected to have a big impact on the global supply chain, since China is a major producer for the world market.

• The price of natural gas in Europe has quadrupled so far this year, and the international price of oil is following in its wake. Brent crude yesterday traded above $80 a barrel and ended the day at $79.09—near its three-year high.

Government spokesmen and financial media are pumping out stories to explain away each of these developments as a string of unrelated events, each with its individual cause: rising energy prices, labor shortages, panic buying, supply chain disruptions, you name it. But the reality is that this is a global pattern which reflects a physical-economic breakdown that is underway, coupled with financial asset hyperinflation of the $1.7 quadrillion speculative bubble. This is a process described uniquely by Lyndon LaRouche’s famous Triple Curve function, a process which is now inexorably playing out on the global stage. Inflation in specific markets (consumer prices, raw materials, etc.) may or may not show up as such in a given period; but it is the overall hyperinflation of financial asset prices which is driving the process —in other words, the “everything bubble,” especially the derivatives bubble.

Lyndon LaRouche explained this process in a Sept. 19, 2000 memorandum, “Bring Oil Price Inflation Under Control,” in which he wrote:

“Broadly, the current global inflation in petroleum prices threatens to be the detonator of a chaotic breakdown in many, if not all of the economies of the world.... The underlying cause of the crisis, of which the petroleum-price crisis is but the presently leading political-economic consequence, is a general hyperinflation in financial asset-prices, which is now being expressed, at increasing rates, as a hyperinflation in commodity prices now following a trend similar to that suffered by Weimar Germany during the interval March-November 1923.... The increasingly desperate effort to secure inflows of financial assets into the U.S. dollar sector, has seized upon several combined factors, as the opportunity to increase asset-price accumulations from hyperinflationary trends in the delivery prices of petroleum products.”

Predictably, the financial Establishment centered in the City of London and Wall Street is in a real conundrum over what to do. On the one hand, they must raise interest rates and “taper” quantitative easing if they wish to contain the inflationary explosion. On the other hand, they can’t raise interest rates and “taper” QE if they want to prevent a total blowout—in fact, they have to unleash ever more extreme forms of monetary and fiscal QE (“financial regime change”) just to live to see another day.

The LaRouche movement’s policy to address the crisis is the diametrical opposite of both of these failed Establishment approaches. “The only remedy,” Zepp-LaRouche explained in her weekly webcast, “is a banking separation, a global Glass-Steagall, and to replace this bankrupt system with a new one. That is what we are going to continuously bring into the debate, because this is now really the end game of this financial system.”

She went on to draw out what’s at stake in Europe and the United States, and why the Schiller Institute has focused urgent attention on solving the crises in Afghanistan and Haiti, in particular:

“There must be a change in attitude! Stop this depraved indifference, the notion that we are trying to get people to reflect upon. Because you have all these people in the West who aren’t even interested. They go about their business as usual. But the only way the U.S. and European nations will overcome their own problems is by focusing on the mission of overcoming the underdevelopment of the developing sector.... You invest in physical economy. You shift from speculation and profit to the idea of the common good, which always has to start with investment in real infrastructure development.

“If we cannot get the West to make such a shift, then it is almost a foregone conclusion that the West will go under like the Roman Empire, because of decadence, a depraved state of mind. So we intend to shake people up.

“And the way to go is to stop this geopolitical nonsense, which can only end up in the annihilation of the human species, and join hands with the countries of the Belt and Road Initiative, and have joint projects ... and move civilization to a condition where the laws of the universe are also the basis of the economic and political policy. That’s why natural law does exist.”