The Lead

The Financial Cancer Metastasizes; Patient Prognosis: War

by Dennis Small (EIRNS) — Apr. 27, 2024

April 27, 2024 (EIRNS)—There are causes, and then there are effects.

Effect: U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken wrapped up a three-day visit to China on April 26 by threatening his host President Xi Jinping that, if China doesn’t break its most decisive economic cooperation with Russia in the area of high-tech industrialization—which Blinken pronounced to be of “dual-use” for the war in Ukraine—then “if China won’t act, we will.” Blinken specified that trade and financial sanctions against China could be ramped up sharply in short order.

Earlier in the week, on the eve of Blinken’s trip, the Wall Street Journal had suggested that the U.S. should prepare to launch full-scale financial warfare against China, up to and including the “nuclear option” of expelling them from the SWIFT system of interbank communications. That same policy applied to Russia since 2022 has contributed to turning the European economies, Germany in particular, into a post-industrial junk heap, and has brought the world financial system to the brink of a blowout. Now they are planning to double-down on China, whose population and physical economy are an order of magnitude greater than Russia’s.

Effect: On April 26, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned: “We are sending clear and unequivocal signals to the United States and NATO warning them about potentially catastrophic consequences of their policy toward jeopardizing Russia’s security. Regrettably, the level of nuclear risks has risen dramatically.” That followed Polish President Andrzej Duda’s April 22 statement that his country is “ready” to host NATO nuclear weapons on its territory. At the same time, three U.S. Senators, including the same deranged Sen. Roger Wicker who earlier called for launching a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia, have just proposed increasing the U.S. deployment of ICBMs from 400 to 450.

On April 22, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered a stark warning that NATO policies “increase the level of nuclear threat,” including by the “stockpiling of precision weapons for delivering preemptive and decapitation ‘global strikes.’” The next day, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced drily that Russia’s new-generation S-500 anti-aircraft missile system will be put in service later this year, which Russian media report is capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles as well as destroying targets in low-Earth orbit—the sort of weapons that might be used by the West in a suicidal preemptive decapitation strike against Russia.

Effect: Vociferous student protests against the genocide in Gaza are rapidly spreading on university campuses across the U.S., and are beginning to extend to other countries as well. The combination of violent police efforts at suppression—such as at Emory University—and cynically false charges of antisemitism to try to discredit the protests, have only served to fan the flames. The dehumanizing genocide in Gaza, with the cynical blessing of the Biden administration, has awakened the campuses, and growing number of American youth are standing up and speaking out.

Cause: “The world monetary financial system is actually now currently in the process of disintegrating,” Lyndon LaRouche warned in a historic, July 25, 2007 webcast—one week before the reality of the global banking crisis began to hit the public. “What’s listed as stock values and market values in the financial markets internationally is bunk! These are purely fictitious beliefs. There’s no truth to it; the fakery is enormous. There is no possibility of a non-collapse of the present financial system—none! It’s finished, now!”

LaRouche went on to explain, as he had since August 1971, how an unresolved economic breakdown crisis would drive the world to war, intentional depopulation, and to fascist police states needed to implement Schachtian austerity policies.

“The present financial system can not continue to exist under any circumstances, under any Presidency, under any leadership, or any leadership of nations,” LaRouche asserted. “Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general, immediate chain-reaction type of collapse. At what speed we don’t know, but it will go on, and it will be unstoppable! And the longer it goes on before coming to an end, the worse things will get.”

Things have indeed gotten worse since 2007, as LaRouche warned they would. The financial cancer has now metastasized to what used to be the bedrock of the trans-Atlantic financial system—the market in U.S. Treasury bonds—threatening to blowout the entire $2 quadrillion global speculative bubble.

But the solution is also at hand, as LaRouche repeatedly explained: “You have to change the world monetary-financial system immediately, and you can not do that with a couple of small nations. You can only do that from the top. You have to pull together the might of the world, the major powers of the world and those who will support them, and say, `We’re going to change immediately the world monetary system. We’re going to get rid of the floating-exchange-rate monetary system. We’re going back immediately to a fixed-exchange-rate system.’”

LaRouche explained the sort of bankruptcy reorganization required: “We’re going to take steps to clean up the financial mess. Most of the financial claims and the financial assets and obligations in the world today, are worthless.… We’re going to freeze a lot of things, and we’re going make sure that things that have to be paid, things that have to go on, go on. That production is not cut; farming proceeds, food is produced, infrastructure is built, and so forth. And we’ll have to build our way out of this process.”

In short, a completely new international security and development architecture is the order of the day, as Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has stressed.