March 13—The developments of 2022 to date have made it abundantly clear that Lyndon LaRouche’s forecasts over the last half-century about the unavoidable breakdown crisis of the post-Bretton Woods floating exchange-rate financial system were shockingly accurate. World production of physical economic essentials is plummeting; hyperinflation of financial aggregates has unleashed soaring prices of consumer and producer goods, making them unattainable for most; trade warfare under the guise of sanctions has erupted worldwide; and pandemics of old and new diseases have already taken the lives, directly and indirectly, of anywhere between 6 and 18 million people.
Political leaders and the mass media in the West pathetically blame Vladimir Putin for all of this—and more. But the actual, underlying cause is the decades-long plunge in the potential relative population density of Mankind as a whole, as a result of the austerity policies dictated by the City of London and Wall Street. The mechanism through which this policy is being carried to its conclusion today is a radical decoupling of the world economy into two blocs—a militarized NATO dollar bloc, and the Belt and Road bloc—both of which are meant to be plunged into an inferno of depopulation and war.
It is now time for Lyndon LaRouche’s programmatic solution to this crisis to also become abundantly clear, and acted upon, across the planet while there is still time to do so. Against London’s Malthusian decoupling of the world’s physical economy, the nations of the world must instead be recoupled around a program of economic growth and security for each and all.
Under existential threat, Russia’s leaders have adopted war economy measures to defend their basic sovereignty. As Vladimir Putin put it in a recent meeting at the Kremlin with top government officials: “You and I are well aware that many countries have adapted to living with their backs bent, obsequiously accepting every decision of their sovereign. Russia cannot exist as a miserable and humiliated entity.”
Putin is right. But more is needed. We pose the issue with the following excerpt taken from Lyndon LaRouche’s January 12, 2004 essay, “On the Subject of Tariffs and Trade,” offering it as a touchstone for the broadest international discussion in response to the Schiller Institute’s call for an upcoming conference on a new international security and development architecture:
“Now, the world’s present, floating-exchange-rate monetary-financial system is hopelessly bankrupt. It must be placed into governments-controlled receivership for necessary forms of administration and reorganization. Virtually none of the leading banking institutions of western Europe and the Americas (among other cases) are not implicitly bankrupt presently. Therefore, the first, most immediate objective of intervention by sovereign governments must be stability of the normal functions of society; the second, short- to medium-term objective, must be an increase in productive employment to levels sufficient to bring current accounts of nations into balance; the third objective must be the negotiation of a nested array of long-term sets of protectionist treaty-agreements on credit, tariffs, and trade among a set of leading nations. The latter agreements should range from one to two generations: corresponding to capital cycles of from twenty-five to fifty years.
“The possibility of a recovery from the condition presently bequeathed to us by the combination of the floating-exchange-rate IMF system and the wildly aberrant behavior of central banking systems of nations, depends upon a massive supplement of long-term credit for capital formation, with initial emphasis on capital formation in basic economic infrastructure. To sustain such a program of expansion over two generations, as we must, requires a system in which fundamental borrowing costs must be no higher than between 1-2% simple-interest rates. This can be achieved only under conditions defined by a fixed-exchange-rate monetary-financial system. Therefore, this means a ‘gold reserve system,’ but not a revival of a British-style (or looney Ezra Pound’s) ‘honest money’ sort of gold standard system. This also means a system of long-term trade and tariff agreements among nations, to an effect consistent with such goals as long-term growth of capital formation.”