Among the major industrial economies of the world, it looks at this moment like China’s 2% economic growth in 2020 — if it is even that high — will lead the world. The entire global economy is further below zero than even the interest rates of the central banks, which are worse than worthless in this crisis. The economies of the United States, Western and Central Europe, India, Brazil, South Africa are all shrinking over the year; and in many of them, the contraction looks to be getting worse entering the last months of the year.
Not only do all of these nations suffer mass unemployment — which, again, is showing no improvement as of last month — and substantial to very large waves of the pandemic disease. They are also all suffering, admittedly to very differing degrees, from a pandemic of hunger from unemployment. The equivalent of 500 million full-time jobs have been lost worldwide in 2020, according to the International Labor Organization, and pandemic disease and border closings have closed down food harvesting, processing, shipment. The hunger pandemic is worst across Africa and Latin America but it is biting sharply in India and even in the United States. (Bloomberg News, Sept. 28: “No Meat, No Milk, No Bread: Hunger Crisis Rocks Latin America.” The number of people facing “severe food insecurity” — hunger — is quadrupling there this year, and doubling worldwide, according to the World Food Program.)
The most recent employment and industrial production reports in the United States and Europe, which show stagnation at a low level rather than recovery, should be the last signal needed in this year of crisis, that “action, and action now” must be taken to jolt production, raise productive employment and raise productivity of economies — and the action obviously requires cooperation among the major nations which are so afflicted.
In the United States “Sleepy Joe” Biden and his campaign show no awareness or capacity for this, whatsoever. In fact it was observed that even on Sunday, President Donald Trump, hospitalized for treatment of COVID-19, made more public appearances than Biden did — Trump went in a car caravan to greet his supporters on the streets around Walter Reed Medical Center, and announced the event in his own video on his Twitter account. And Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is now actually blocking Congressional action. Yet the fact that President Trump has had to cope with pandemic and economic collapse — while under constant and escalating destabilizations originating from British intelligence, U.S. intelligence agencies, and military-industrial groupings — has given Biden the polling lead. And beyond that lie potentially weeks of post-Election Day chaos resulting from huge masses of mailed-in votes and street demonstrators looking for a “color revolution.”
For President Trump’s policy of ending the “regime change” wars and engaging productively with Russia and China to be lost, would be a defeat of the American republic by a military-industrial complex which has been happy with Biden for decades; it would be a crushing blow to its hopes for revived space exploration and scientific and technological progress. But with the President ill and under such attack, it is immediately up to every American who thinks for himself or herself, to understand what must be done — not merely to complain and oppose, but to know what is necessary.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the Schiller Institute’s international founder, said this to a webcast “town meeting” Oct. 3: “It should be clear that with the combination of problems which we have today — an out-of-control pandemic, an economic collapse worse than anything since the Second World War, the danger of a financial crash worse than 2008, the danger of a geopolitical confrontation going out of control in respect to Russia and China — We have to change course. And that is why we need a summit, and the only realistic option right now which is on the table, is that which has been called for by President Putin. The permanent five members of the UN Security Council must meet and address these questions:
“Have a new world financial system, a new credit system, a New Bretton Woods system; because this system is bankrupt and you need credit for development and to finance all of these things in the tradition of the initial intention of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his idea of the Bretton Woods system. Then, naturally, the LaRouche Four Laws: Glass-Steagall, end the casino economy. Implement Glass-Steagall in the form of a separation of the banks; protect the commercial banks. Do not any longer bail out bankrupt speculators. Create a national bank not only in one country, but in all countries of the planet. And then, establish a credit system which cooperates for long-term investment for the reconstruction of the world economy. Then, go into a crash program for fusion technology, which is really making incredible progress, as we heard in a recent Schiller Institute conference. And go for international cooperation in space exploration, as President Trump has said the Artemis project would be.
“If all this is being agreed among the United States, Russia, and China as a minimum, and then add other industrial powers who have the capacity to reconstruct the world, we can solve this problem. But what is required is that many such patriots … really start to take responsibility for the outcome of this period. I think nothing else will work, and I really think that it can be done.”
