In Italy, farmers, fishermen, and truck drivers have launched a national protest over the deadly economic conditions they face as a result of the European Union’s war-friendly policies, which are geared to bail out the bankrupt City of London and Wall Street banks. The Schiller Institute today sent a letter of support to the Italian strikers, noting that in France, Spain, Germany, and other countries across Europe, people are also taking to the streets “with different demands, but they are all united by opposition to policies that divert resources away from social services and production, while allocating more and more to rearmament and the financing of the war in Ukraine.” The Schiller Institute message adds: “We demand that resources be redirected away from rearmament and war, and toward adequate support for producers; and that we return to stable, low-cost energy supplies.”

In Brazil, a boisterous youth movement quickly took to the streets after President Lula’s setback in the first round of that country’s presidential elections on Oct. 4, to mobilize to make sure that Lula wins the Oct. 25 second-round vote against Trump-backed neo-con Flávio Bolsonaro. A national wave of student protests is in the offing, with a major demonstration scheduled for tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. Denouncing Flávio’s austerity and privatization policies, one graduate student group wrote: “Let’s take the public debate by storm and make sure Brazilian science is heard in this runoff election. We need to prevent what could be the greatest blackout of science the country has ever experienced.”

The Schiller Institute’s International Youth Movement, which includes a number of Brazilian members, promptly sent a message of greetings and support to the planned demonstrations, stating that a defeat of Lula would be a defeat for the BRICS and for the entire Global South in its struggle to end 500 years of neo-colonialism once and for all. Lula made Brazil a founding member of the BRICS, and Flávio has announced he will pull the country out of the BRICS if he is elected. “For Brazil, the Global South, and humanity to prosper, we need a new international security and development architecture, one that will be win-win for all participants—and a permanent end to the austerity and attacks on sovereignty that Wall Street and the City of London are imposing everywhere,” the message states.

In country after country, people are up in arms and searching for solutions. They know in Europe that their highly unpopular political leaders (such as Merz and Macron) are dragging them into a war with Russia that only a lunatic would want. They see that the banks and the hedge funds are evicting vulnerable seniors out of their apartments after tripling and quadrupling their rent, as is happening in Spain, and that millions of people can no longer afford to pay for both their rent and their food. In Brazil, they know that austerity and privatizations will only make things worse. In the United States, the skyrocketing price of diesel is making it likely that farmers will simply not bother planting wheat this season, because they lose money for every ton they produce. And measles, a disease which was officially declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, has now exploded in New York State, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, thanks to the medievalist anti-science and budget-cutting policies coming from Washington.

All of this ferment is very dangerous… and at the same time an opportunity not to be missed. As Lyndon LaRouche repeatedly explained, for example in a March 2, 2011 speech headlined “The Mass Strike Calls For Real Solutions:” “When you have a mass-strike phenomenon, it can go bad, too. One case, for example, the French Revolution, was a mass-strike phenomenon, which went bad…. So, when you get a mass strike like this, a movement which we’re having now, which is coming on, if the nation-state system does not respond to the demands of the mass-strike movement, the mass-strike will turn into an obscene mass…. So therefore, we better listen to the mass-strike voices now, while there’s still time to do so. We now have to offer real solutions.”

What the Schiller Institute, and other organizations associated with the thinking of Lyndon LaRouche, are now doing, is injecting the urgently needed real solutions into this ferment, to make sure humanity arrives in the safe port of a new international security and development architecture.