Sept. 5—The countries of NATO and the European Union, that were going to “crush” Russia with monster sanctions and vast supplies of their most advanced weaponry, now desperately need leadership with new, worldwide economic and strategic policies. They are themselves being torn asunder by an economic explosion, visiting runaway inflation and production breakdown on their own populations and industries, and famine on the developing nations. And they are facing an Autumn and Winter of mass unrest, under a threat of world war.
Calls for new elections in various European countries is a reflection of this breakdown, but leadership with a successful new strategic and economic policy will have to come from elsewhere. The candidates are forced by London, Wall Street and Atlanticist media to agree in advance, to escalate war with Russia and impose austerity and popular suffering, “as long as it takes.” As German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, infamously said Aug. 31, “I don’t care what my German voters think”; supporting Ukraine to (impossibly) defeat Russia for NATO, is the policy to the end.
Now the European economies, to quote another German minister, are undergoing “a drastic collapse of industry.” Tens of billions in bailouts are now flying out of government Treasuries—Sweden €23 billion, Finland €10 billion, Austria €2 billion, Germany €15 billion a month ago and yesterday announcing €65 billion—to try to save major energy and industrial companies from plant shutdowns, illiquidity, insolvency; and to coax households to try to pay unpayable electricity and heating bills. Natural gas prices to European business and industry have multiplied by 11-12 times in a year, electric power prices by 6-8 times with special levees in addition. Natural gas consumption has dropped 11% for everyone, 21% for industry this year—“demand destruction” and production shutdown by inflation.
Every government coalition blames it on Russia, but the truth will out. Commodity inflation exploded worldwide in 2020 and 2021; consumer price inflation ran away in Fall of 2021; both from monetarist central bank policies and speculation which flattened productivity and suppressed production.
Fifty years ago, when those policies took over after Nixon’s takedown of FDR’s Bretton Woods monetary system, Lyndon LaRouche looked ahead and made a long-term forecast. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche wrote in an article appearing this week on his Sept. 8 centennial, “He warned … that if the change in course that assumed—toward a purely monetarist financial system aimed at profit maximization—were to be maintained, the world would necessarily head toward a new depression, a new fascism, and the danger of a new world war, unless a totally new and just world economic order were established.”
Lyndon LaRouche designed the policies for that new order: the International Development Bank; the Eurasian and World Land-Bridge development corridors; a multi-nation Moon-Mars mission and thermonuclear fusion development as the “science drivers” of economy; Glass-Steagall bank separation and Hamiltonian national banking in every major nation. Had his “New Bretton Woods” policies been adopted in the 20th Century up to the 2008 global financial crash, we would not now be facing the grave threats of hyperinflationary economic collapse and superpower nuclear war right before us now. But for putting those policies before national leaders and citizens around the globe, LaRouche was vilified and ridiculed by U.S. and European media, repeatedly prosecuted on orders from London and Wall Street bankers and NATO influentials like Henry Kissinger.
In this crisis, the Schiller Institute is providing leadership and a new policy to widening circles in the stricken trans-Atlantic countries, and to Russian, Chinese, Indian and developing-nation leaders. As a sign of that leadership, it is being picked out for special, hostile attention of the “Global NATO” war party and its proxies.
At what would be his 100th birthday this week, a major international conference Sept. 10-11 will celebrate his work and give new impetus to his ideas which will be the cornerstones of the future—if we see to it that humanity has one.
