By Harley Schlanger [This is an edited transcript of a presentation by LaRouche spokesman Harley Schlanger at The LaRouche Organization's Manhattan Project event, on October 9, 2021.] HARLEY SCHLANGER: We are in the midst of a dizzying array of events, which is enough to make the heads of even sober people spin. We have a systemic breakdown, there’s no other way to look at it. You can try to look at different sectors and what’s happening here and there, but if you take it in its totality...we’re in what Lyndon LaRouche described as a systemic breakdown. On the economy, there is inflation, energy shortages, supply chain breakdowns. Secondly, we have the accelerating collapse of infrastructure. Energy is one area, and this is not just collapsing, it’s being deliberately collapsed as part of the Green New Deal. The idea that the climate is changing for the worse, because we are trying to produce enough electricity to take care of 8 billion people on the planet, is crazy. Roads need repair, bridges are collapsing. The public health sector has been badly damaged through underfunding and privatization, as became clear with the COVID pandemic -- we didn’t have adequate healthcare capabilities to take care of the people. It’s all breaking down. Then you have on top of that, the war danger. Just one example: The Wall Street Journal had a report in the last couple of days that the United States has sent about two dozen special forces to train military layers in Taiwan. This was reported right after Joe Biden and Xi Jinping had a conversation in which Biden re-affirmed the traditional policy of the U.S. toward Taiwan, which is that there is one China, and Taiwan is a part of that. Well, why are we putting military people in Taiwan if we recognize that’s part of China? Suppose we heard that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army was training units in Texas, or in Washington state? So, one day Biden re-affirms the One China policy, and then we hear that we’re actually preparing a regime change with military forces there. And of course, the Chinese are rightfully concerned, and pointing out that this is, in a sense, an invasion. Add to this the AUKUS pact -- the just-announced Australia-United Kingdom-U.S. military pact, Asian NATO, the pivot to Asia. All of this is a pre-war targeting of China, based on the idea that somehow we can contain the second largest economy and the largest population center on the Earth through deploying military forces in the Pacific. Demanding Poverty For The Planet What has also been exposed is a moral and intellectual problem—depraved indifference. The United States is conducting policies that are killing children in Syria, in Yemen. The World Food Program is reporting that 4 million Afghan children could starve to death this winter. Where is the outcry about this? Why are we not moving to rally forces and move goods that are necessary to protect people? Not to mention Haiti, which is not too far from the United States, where we’re turning our back on that country, which has been devastated by natural disasters and outside interference. Then you have the spectacle of the U.S. Congress pretending to deal with problems, and I won’t even get into that.... And then finally, we have massive disinformation. We have lying narratives which are flooding our print and visual media, and outright censorship. We now hear that Google is moving to limit what can be said on its platforms about climate change. Soon, they will be censoring anyone who argues that the science behind [man-made] climate change is a fraud. All of this this is a prelude to the next phase of the destruction of the Western economies, which is announced in a book by Klaus Schwab, the director of the World Economic Forum, the Davos group. The book is Stakeholder Capitalism; A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People, and Planet.