With the intention to dramatically change the national and international agenda, the LaRouche Political Action Committee intervened into the economic and health crises shaking the world in 2020 with the release of a May 23 report entitled, “The LaRouche Plan To Reopen the Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs.” Rather than addressing the variegated effects of the pandemic and economic shutdowns or piecemeal responses, the report locates today’s crisis in the underlying systemic failure of the current Trans-Atlantic financial system.
Grounded in the method of economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, it calls on nations to adopt a new model of economics, one which makes science-driven advances in human productivity, not money, the metric for physical economic growth. By reconfiguring national economies and putting the current international financial system through bankruptcy reorganization, the 1.5 billion people on this planet who are now de facto unemployed, can be employed in genuinely productive jobs in manufacturing, infrastructure, health care, and agriculture. Such a transformation will be led by the creation of 50 million of those jobs in the United States, fueled, over the next generation, by programs to train young people in “New Frontier” programs such as the Moon-Mars mission of Artemis. Mobilizing the planet to establish modern health systems in every nation to adequately address the COVID-19 pandemic, is the first step in that direction.
In the weeks since the release of the report and its national and international circulation, a number of world leaders have put forward important initiatives which resonate with the intention of that report.
On June 18, Russian President Vladimir Putin, once again, advanced his call for a summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain and France—the P5. Highlighting the current economic crisis, Putin stated, “A special item on the agenda of the meeting is the situation in the global economy. And above all, overcoming the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.”
On June 30, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his government’s approach to the pandemic-triggered crisis: use the model of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to “build, build, build” Britain’s way out of the crisis. The Conservative Party leader overturned the ideological apple cart with his proposal that the British government reject austerity measures and, instead, foster the conditions for building infrastructure, advancing science, and reindustrializing the economy.
And Chinese President Xi Jinping continues to urge cooperation with the U.S. and other nations around a win-win-strategy of major infrastructure projects.
In response to the proposals of both Putin and Johnson, Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche called for the P5 summit to take up such a New Deal approach. “I think that that would be the appropriate forum for such a proposal to take place.… We want to create the kind of discussion which must be the one taken up by such a summit: And that is the full package proposed by my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche: A New Bretton Woods system, which includes, naturally, the cooperation of all countries with the specific aim to provide long-term, low-interest credit for the industrialization of the developing countries.”
A New Language for Economics
The urgent need to act now is grounded in a brutal reality: the global pandemic has ripped the mask off the failed British neo-liberal economic system, exposing the tragic transformation of the agro-industrial base of Western economies into hollowed-out consumer- and entertainment-driven service economies. It has exposed the equally tragic idea that the “underdeveloped” countries could remain permanently underdeveloped, without genocidal consequences as seen in the spread of the pandemic and the danger of starvation in parts of the Southern Hemisphere.
That failed system must be replaced by one based on a new conception, as put forward by America’s first Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and advanced by Lyndon LaRouche — that profit cannot be measured in monetary terms, but only by physical economic growth, driven by breakthroughs in science and technology that will increase the productive powers of labor. That means one must look at the labor force, not in terms of money, but in terms of productive relationships.
The principles of the American System and American history, itself, are currently under attack by the global financial elite, making it all the more urgent that the difference between these principles and various failed nostrums of monetarism and Malthusianism be understood.
