Nov. 13—The attempt of the United States and the NATO countries to use central bank money-printing to fund a gigantic new “green” bubble on top of $300 trillion in already unpayable debts, and to “crush” and dismember Russia to kill the resistance to this Malthusian plan, has put the trans-Atlantic financial oligarchy in a huge crisis. The entirety of Europe has been thrown into intolerable 10-20% annual inflation rates and simultaneous economic contraction, causing productive capacities to begin to collapse, and popular resistance to break out in a dozen countries. Whipped by the U.K. and United States, the European countries have all multiplied their defense spending and rushed their best weapons systems to Ukraine, causing more inflation and attacking their own economies’ productivity.
Oct. 9—The most extreme war government in Europe, that of U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss, by stupidly trying to bail out the price-gouging energy merchants of that war on Russia with £2-400 billion in borrowed government funds, has set off “instability” in a quadrillion-dollar global bubble of unpayable debt and derivatives. It has lit a match under the tinder that the Federal Reserve and European central banks have been piling up since the last global financial crash, in 2008. Now that the bonfire of all that financial speculation is beginning to burn, political leaders and active citizens around the world must prepare, through urgent conferences and discussions, a new economic architecture. That new architecture must block debt leverage for speculation and instead fund credits for development, for infrastructure of power, water and health, and for industrialization. It must do what President Franklin D. Roosevelt intended for the Bretton Woods credit and monetary system in 1945, but must do so for the benefit and progress of every nation in the world.
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.
July 4—Let’s remember that it was on Independence Day, July 4, 1821 that President John Quincy Adams issued the famous reminder to his countrymen that America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
June 5—The LaRouche movement has won two major victories: Well over 700,000 views for an American military and political leader warning the world how near NATO has brought it to nuclear annihilation; well over 45,000 signatures secured for a U.S. Senate candidate who has told New Yorkers and other Americans the LaRouche “Four Laws” truth about the crisis of hyperinflation and collapsing production.
May 23—The world is stumbling into a new Dark Age. Consider the array of crises: The Western dollar-based financial system is unraveling in a hyperinflationary collapse; the “likelihood” of war between nuclear powers is casually discussed in all the news outlets; the pandemic continues to kill, while new epidemics emerge; famine is killing thousands and threatening billions.
May 8—The May 6 report of April U.S. employment rising by 428,000 and finally back to the mid-2019 level of approximately 151 million, was falsely claimed by the White House, and plunging Wall Street, as showing the fall in U.S. GDP did not mean recession. But it was full of signs of accelerating decline of an economy brought down by NATO war policy and central bank money-printing.
April 21—Important possibilities are appearing, that NATO’s war with Russia may not cause more than a billion human beings to be swept away by hunger and famine and cold this year, and that escalation to nuclear war can be prevented. They certainly don’t arise from the global bankers’ gathering meeting in Washington this week; nor from military events or negotiations in Ukraine. Rather, statements and active cooperation are coming from some major nations to increase food production despite all; and the Schiller Institute’s worldwide mobilization is working to win thousands of leaders around the world to create a new strategic and economic development order before catastrophe strikes.
April 11—The trans-Atlantic nations, as NATO and its “allies and partners,” are ravaging the world’s economies, including their own, and including subjecting hundreds of millions of people to the threat of famine, in order to “weaken” and “crush” Russia and its partnership with China. Their leaders, instructed by oligarchs of the City of London and Wall Street, seem almost to welcome the severe austerity they are imposing on their own peoples, as some sort of talisman of victory in what can easily become a world war with nuclear weapons. The “weaponized” U.S. dollar is being discredited as the international reserve currency it has informally been since the 1970s destruction of the Bretton Woods monetary system.
April 4—The NATO Alliance and Russia are sliding further down the slope toward nuclear war, and no sane person can deny that now. The UK and United States will now be demanding from NATO allies a full embargo of Russia, compounding—if they agree to it—the economic disasters hitting European and threatening developing nations.
March 21—The NATO countries’ unheard-of monster economic sanctions and financial confiscations are, deliberately, forcing the world toward two blocs; the media in those countries portray Russia as being economically, permanently crushed, with China and India unable significantly to help it.
March 14—Although nearly daily negotiations are taking place between Russian and Ukrainian teams, NATO’s leading U.K. and U.S. governments and media have mobilized to prevent any successful settlement from emerging, as fiercely as they have mobilized to destroy Russia’s economy and overthrow its President Putin.
March 8, 2022—As forecast with awesome precision by Lyndon LaRouche 10 years ago in a webcast, NATO is crashing the global financial system and the economy all around us, through a world war against Russia. LaRouche broadcast in December 2011, when the regime-change wars had reached the stage of the murder of Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, that “What is intended [by these wars] is a confrontation with Russia, the principal nuclear power on this planet.” London and Washington were threatening world war, he said.The reason? “Most of this bailout debt, the Wall Street debt, the London debt, is unpayable,” LaRouche said. “It is absolutely worthless. It can never be repaid. And the only solution for this thing was to have this war. And if the British Empire came out as the victor in such a war, with the support of the United States, then they would cancel their debts, and they would go about their business. But the population of the world would be reduced, greatly, through hunger, disease, and so forth.” Led by London, Wall Street and Washington, NATO is bringing the world economy down willfully and deliberately, although with “unintentional” and disastrous consequences. Major European governments, particularly Germany’s, fear telling their people that Russia’s [unsanctioned] energy exports to Europe are banned. But they are banned in effect, by intimidation of any company that would think of buying Russian petrochemicals. See the abject apologies of Shell Oil after it dared make an oil purchase. The same is true for metals and fertilizers; Russia is a huge exporter of both. It is possible, even likely, that within a week all Russian exports of natural gas, oil, and fertilizers to Europe and the United States will have stopped. Fossil fuel prices made another huge jump over the weekend into Monday morning, reaching $125 for West Texas Intermediate oil and in Europe 375 euros/MwH (or roughly $3,900 per thousand cubic meters) for natural gas, although they then lost a part of those increases. As for coal, “Monday’s price for thermal coal, used to produce electricity in coal-fired power plants, was $435 a ton. According to Jason Bostic, Vice-President of the West Virginia Coal Association, that’s the highest price in history, by about $200,” reported the West Virginia MetroNews. Over a 48-hour period, the futures prices of half a dozen important metals, and all petrochemicals, have risen by 50-100% each. This cannot happen without hundreds, perhaps thousands of major corporations and banks receiving margin calls because their hedged short positions must be closed out at very great loss. To give an idea of who is unable to pay current margin calls: Peabody Coal, the biggest coal company of all, and it is in formal default as a result; and the China Construction Bank, one of the four biggest state commercial banks in China, which got a grace period of a few days from the London Metals Exchange to try to pay an obviously huge margin call. In addition, a food shock has hit, due to scarcity, which may send food commodity prices up another 50% and spread famine worldwide. The market for financing oil and gas trading is reportedly losing liquidity. Credit default swaps (CDS) on Russian debts are now reportedly considered unlikely to pay out as those debts default; CDS of non-Russian companies linked to the same commodities have suddenly jumped in price, requiring more margin calls. Most Russian commodities like metals have become unacceptable as collateral for any company’s trading credits, meaning those credits must be repaid—more margin calls. In spite of immense amounts of Fed-printed liquidity, the interest rate for borrowing against commercial paper rose by 0.5% on Monday. The repo market expert Zoltan Poszar continues his daily assertions that the interbank lending market is starting to seize up as it did in mid-September 2019, requiring emergency liquidity of hundreds of billions from the Fed. The futures prices will fall back from current unbelievable levels. But the underlying commodity prices will keep marching upward, and the cracks in the international debt and trade credit system will widen until they explode the credit markets. There is one way out: Fast “Glass-Steagall” bank separation, capital and exchange controls by nations; and establishment of “Hamiltonian” national credit banks in every nation.
Feb. 28—UPDATE: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb. 28 called, through an advisor according to Axios, for the United States and “the West” to establish a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft over significant parts of Ukraine. White House press spokesperson Jen Psaki had to scramble, not jets, but a fast rejection. Psaki said, “Here’s what’s important for everybody to know about a no-fly zone: What that would require is implementation by the U.S. military. It would essentially mean the U.S. military would be shooting down Russian planes.” In short, World War III—with Russia’s strategic nuclear missile force already placed on heightened alert Sunday, Feb. 27. Will this break the illusion so many Europeans and Americans have developed from non-stop war propaganda, that NATO is involved in a painless and heroic defense of heroic Ukraine against evil Russia?Feb. 28: At first view all the economic austerity and suffering from the financial and economic “extreme sanctions” on Russia imposed this weekend, seems to devastate only Russia. Its central bank had to raise its repo rate drastically Monday morning, Feb. 28, from 9.25% to 20% to stop an ongoing 50% collapse of the ruble. That interest rate will contract and do great damage to the Russian economy. The head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen, characterized the economic attacks on Russia on Sunday: “You are essentially directing a financial and economic crisis in another country.” Bank runs which were occurring with perhaps 1 trillion rubles withdrawn by Russians over the weekend. The Bank of Russia central bank barred foreign residents from selling out investments in Russia (capital controls) and required export firms to convert 80% of their sales revenues to rubles as received. The European divisions of major Russian banks are going under. EIR has informed you, with the quotes from senior U.S. officials to document it, that crushing the Russian economy was the objective of NATO’s daring Russia into a war over Ukraine or some other Eastern European nation on the Russian border with potential nuclear missile launchers, like Poland or Romania. China is the other, even bigger obstacle to the trans-Atlantic nations’ as they face a financial crash worse than that of 2008. They cannot drag their dominant City of London- and Wall Street-centered banks through the crisis without imposing the drastic austerity of “the Great Reset” on their people and businesses. They have to eliminate the economic alternative for nations all over the world, represented by the China-Russia partnership. The outcomes now triggered by an economic takedown of Russia will be serious, highly inflationary, and deadly for the world economy and the developing nations in particular. A UN representative of Brazil was right to say on Feb. 27, in the UN Security Council discussion of calling an emergency General Assembly session to condemn Russia, that the effect of these economic attacks on one of the world’s leading fertilizer-producing nations would be famines—fertilizer is already hyperinflating out of the reach of farmers around the world. But also in the NATO nations’ their leaders, suddenly self-righteous warriors for at least the sixth time since they bombed Serbia in 1999, are going to impose serious economic austerity on their people, with bigger and bigger war spending, rapidly rising inflation, shortages of vital products including enough heat, electricity and food. Unless a nuclear war intervenes—and it may. We are in a form of Cuban Missile Crisis “in reverse” right now. The one way out of that is the Schiller Institute’s proposed “strategic architecture” based on the economic development principles of Lyndon LaRouche’s “four economic laws” prescribed in 2014. This petition, calls for an immediate international conference to get nations to cooperate on those principles. Signing it, and discussing it with other people, is the best action you can take to get mankind off the downward slope toward world war, which it is now on.
Feb. 27 (EIRNS)—Large steps down the slope toward a world war—a thermonuclear war—were taken over this weekend. The most widely publicized was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement this morning that he had told his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Military Staff Valery Gerasimov to put the Russian strategic nuclear forces on high alert.He made his announcement following economic attacks on the Russian banking system, attempting to freeze and steal Russia’s financial reserves and crash its currency and banks, and bans on all Russian flights and all Russian media, while European high-tech arms and soldiers of fortune poured into Ukraine to fight. RIA Novosti quoted Putin as follows: “Western countries are not only taking hostile actions towards our country in the economic realm, by which I mean the illegitimate sanctions everybody knows about very well, but the highest officials of leading NATO countries are also making aggressive statements towards our country. Therefore I order the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff to place the [nuclear] deterrent forces of the Russian Armed Forces onto a special alert status.” We are now clearly in a form of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, nearer than anyone alive then, ever wanted to come to nuclear war. U.S. military leaders wanted then to launch war on Cuba; had President Kennedy not stopped them and negotiated a solution, nuclear missiles would have rained down on America’s Eastern cities. Now U.S. and European political and military leaders, accustomed for decades to brutalizing smaller countries by wars and economic strangulation, want to provoke Russia to war and destroy it. These leaders have surrounded Russia with hostile military—including nuclear—capabilities to a point it could not accept. They moved to make Ukraine—reaching deep into Russia itself—their ultimate anti-Russia military platform. President Putin warned them 15 years ago in a 2007 speech in at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, that Russia could not tolerate indefinitely being surrounded and enveloped by hostile arms. But having lit that fuse of war, they’re now fanning it to the point it may go nuclear. (See Putin’s speech, EIR, Feb. 23, 2007.) Once nuclear weapon attacks begin anywhere, they will envelop the globe. Now an entirely different approach must be taken, where strategic stability is put on the basis of economic development. Now the economic and scientific development policies of Lyndon LaRouche must be on the agenda. They have long been neglected as impossible (like returning to the principles of Franklin Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods credit system); or unnecessary (like crash development of laser and fusion plasma technologies in every nation); or even ridiculous (like nations cooperating to colonize the Moon and explore Mars). Those policies are the last available chance for peace now—the very last chance. The Schiller Institute on Feb. 25 launched a petition in this crisis, “Convoke an International Conference To Establish A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations.” “Every person,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche urged today, “should deploy with every capability to distribute this petition and to discuss it.” Get others to discuss it, and to write about it in everything from Internet commentaries to simple letters to the editor. “Just 50 leading individuals in the world promoting this idea could convene an important conference.” Ask why so many millions, 60 years ago this October, were so alarmed that nuclear war was staring them in the face; and now, after 25 years of war and with the world’s second-largest nuclear missile force on high alert, people pretend it cannot happen. Perhaps we were then more morally fit to survive. A real, broad mobilization for this petition and this conference is the only issue which can bring about an alternative to the further slide down toward world war. The petition is literally drawn so that civilization will survive.
Feb. 21—Russian President Putin’s determination to preserve Russia’s nuclear deterrent and prevent hostile NATO-armed, even nuclear-armed states on its doorstep, is only the outward issue of the present war crisis. The driving cause is two economic partnerships or alliances in the world, and the fact that one of them—led by the trans-Atlantic NATO nations—is sinking economically and heading for a financial implosion, a “second 2008” or worse.Leading European Union and World Economic Forum officials have flipped out at the revelation on Feb. 4 that the growing China-Russia economic cooperation of 2021, had become a full economic and strategic partnership between the world’s leading infrastructure-building and poverty-fighting nation and the world’s leading nuclear and nuclear energy power and leading food exporter. Cooperating, they could shortly be the leading spacefaring power as well. The fantasy of destroying that alliance has become a motive for war. The financial elite of London and Wall Street decreed in recent years a “Great Reset,” less dramatically called the Green Deal, and it has turned the economic stagnation ruling since 2008 into a deepening recession. Look at what was caused in 2021 by seven years of rapid forced “green” disinvestment in fossil fuels and nuclear (annual investment cut by more than half outside Russia and China) caused in 2021. Global energy production stagnated; global electricity generation dropped. Corn, wheat and seed oil production are falling in 2022 due to fertilizer hyperinflation and shortage. The “green” replacement for fossil fuels and nuclear does not function. Worldwide, the solar- and wind-power share of total energy production was still just 4% in 2021, according to a long review of the situation by Gail Tverberg today. Disappearing wind power caused serious economic damage in 2021 in the central U.S. Plains, across Northern Europe and across Northern China—China alone solved the problem quickly. Technology for large-scale storage of intermittent power is still far off. Combined with vast money-printing by central banks to provide “an asset and money economy” where the productive economy is shrinking, this has triggered inflation heading for hyperinflationary blowout. Check the Feb. 18 note on The Carson Report of Joseph Carson, former chief economist for AllianceBernstein investment bank: “The current inflation cycle is unlike anything seen before. The 1970s and 1980s inflation cycles centered on consumer and producer prices, while assets prices (equities and real estate) powered the 1990s and 2000s inflation cycles. Today’s inflation cycle has all of the above. And based on the broad price index, the current inflation cycle is as big as the 1970s and the dot.com and the housing bubble combined. (Note: CPI less shelter has risen 9.1%in the last year, the biggest increase since 1981. Including a market-price shelter … lifts CPI to double-digits. The old producer prices for finished goods are up 12.5, while core intermediate and crude prices have increased by 23% and 13.5%, respectively….)” Now sanctions over Ukraine, openly intended and designed by U.S. Treasury and National Security Council officials to crush Russia’s economy, are being discussed and demanded by the NATO powers. Against the world’s largest fossil fuels exporter, they will wreak worldwide havoc, as China helps Russia withstand them, as it has withstood others. World energy reserves are already so low, oil and natural gas are being “priced to destroy demand,” as JPMorgan’s chief oil trader described it on Feb. 17. Or in Gail Tverberg’s description in the above-cited analysis, the option of pricing into a deep recession. Sanction Russia’s major banks so that they cannot make loans? What about the biggest U.S. and European banks, which already control most deposits and don’t make loans? Thus arises the motive to force war, to destroy the alternative represented, for developing nations in particular, by China and Russia. But their partnership alone, with the Belt and Road Initiative of infrastructure building, is not sufficient to a solution for all nations. That demands a new strategic agreement or conference based on a completely different economic policy from the collapsing casino game Wall Street and the City of London are playing. Guiding that policy should be the well-known but not implemented (except significantly in China) Four Laws spelled out by Lyndon LaRouche. These include Glass-Steagall laws in every nation, Hamiltonian national banks in every nation, and crash programs to conquer space with fusion and plasma technologies.
Feb. 14—The Biden Administration, with a very bad misjudgment of the real condition of Afghanistan after 20 years of NATO’s war there, made a rushed pull-out and then moved to seize all the country’s cash and punish its people with no food, medical care or shelter in the dead of winter. It never even told America’s NATO “allies” what it was doing. It’s leaving a country destroyed.Can the Biden White House now be allowed to make an even worse disaster in Europe—even a nuclear disaster—in a crisis, the “Ukraine crisis,” which could set off a war to destroy humanity itself? The more and more angry and aggressive bluffing of Russia by the Biden Administration over Ukraine has brought us closer to nuclear war than we have ever been since October 1962, when the whole world was terrified by the Cuban Missiles Crisis. One possibility is that Biden and his dubious national security team is looking for a victory to sell at home, by telling us Russia will invade Ukraine next week, tomorrow, any minute … and then when Russia does not invade, telling us Biden’s threat of crushing economic punishment stopped Putin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said this was the “elaborate charade” yesterday on Twitter. Former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock put out the idea in a column today, writing for the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her own way, hinted at it Sunday on “ABC This Week”: “If we were not threatening the sanctions and the rest, it would guarantee that Putin would invade…. So, if Russia doesn’t invade, it’s not that he never intended to. It’s just that the sanctions worked.” But we cannot rest on hope that this is political fakery. The Biden White House is punishing Afghanistan incompetently, but with a vengeance. It wants to punish Russia and destroy its economy. Senior White House officials said it in a background press briefing Jan. 25: The goal is “hit Putin’s strategic ambitions to industrialize his economy quite hard…. Undercut Putin’s aspirations to exert influence on the world stage.” The officials vowed, “we’re talking about denying to Russia downstream products that are critical to its own ambitions to develop high-tech capabilities in aerospace and defense, lasers and sensors, maritime, AI, robotics, quantum, etc. … And so, as we build this effort with our allies and partners, we’re willing to work with any country in order to deny Russia an input that it needs to diversify its economy.” With that goal, Biden’s team—which had “everything under control” in Afghanistan—is daring Russian President Putin to go to war. It is squeezing Ukraine’s President Zelensky so hard that he feels compelled to contradict every Russian invasion forecast that London and Washington make. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her widely read analysis Feb. 6, said “We Are 100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture.” Two European bankers put out a call for France to block Ukraine’s entry to NATO and leave the NATO strategic command, now, anything to stop the march toward war. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went to Ukraine today to say, “The issue of [Ukraine’s] membership in the alliance [NATO] is not on the agenda,” so Russia should stop worrying about it. But the NATO weaponry America is pouring into Ukraine and around it is unprecedented: Ukraine’s Defense Minister admits it now has far more anti-tank missiles than Russian tank targets. We all need to mobilize ourselves, not to “watch and wait,” as most were scared into doing in October 1962. There is no John F. Kennedy here to solve this. The solution is to compel more breaks toward negotiation, and to attack the cause, the threat of hyperinflationary collapse which the Biden Administration and Federal Reserve have done so much to bring on themselves and us. Our next D-Day is Saturday, Feb. 19, the Schiller Institute’s all-day conference with the message of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Feb. 6 article: We need a new security architecture, one based on economic recovery and development. Register for the conference and organize others.
The din of war in the trans-Atlantic media, the drumbeat of “Russian attack and invasion,” has now reached a crescendo. Can there still be some Leonard Bernstein of London who will raise the orchestra of the intelligence services to a still louder pitch, until American and European publics actually believe that a Russian military invasion of Ukraine is underway? Will some stiff-necked journalists continue to demand actual evidence?On Feb. 5 the Financial Times took the podium, with “U.S. Believes Russia Plans Nuclear Exercise To Warn West over Ukraine.” It declared with the London media’s usual evidence-freedom that “U.S. military and intelligence officials believe Russia is planning a major nuclear weapons exercise this month as a warning to NATO not to intervene if President Vladimir Putin decides to invade.” This nuclear weapons exercise should be in September, the FT decides, but the bully Putin is going to hold it in February or March instead to intimidate NATO when the invasion goes ahead. The invasion that, according to NBC on Sunday, Biden Administration officials believe is coming “any day now.” “Russia generally holds its annual nuclear exercises—which involve testing intercontinental ballistic missiles from land, sea and air—in the fall,” wrote the FT. “But the U.S. believes Putin has decided to hold them earlier this year as a show of strength in the event that he orders his military to further invade Ukraine” probably in “mid-February to the end of March.” Then a somewhat unintelligible—perhaps crazy—analyst from the Hudson Institute is quoted, of this hypothesized February nuclear exercise, “It would be an incredibly provocative and foreboding message if they did that simultaneously with an invasion of Ukraine.” What the FT presented as its war scoop—similar to Bloomberg News’ short-lived headline, “Russia Invades Ukraine,” on Feb. 4—actually was already apparently stated to the Congress Feb. 3 in closed-door, classified testimony by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and DNI Avril Haines, and then leaked to Fleet Street. What about the fact that the United States right now is holding nuclear weapons exercises, called Global Lightning 2022, which exercises are intended to simulate an extended nuclear war, with first strikes—nuclear and conventional—retaliatory second strikes, responses to those strikes, and on, with more and more of the nuclear arsenals being fired? Nothing such inconveniently directed threat matters, facing the “Russia is invading Ukraine” drumbeat. But it does matter to its real target, the human race. Helga Zepp-LaRouche in a new article said of Global Lightning, “This nuclear war plan includes not only nuclear weapons but various other lethal systems such as missile defense systems, directed energy weapons such as electromagnetic pulse weapons and lasers, cyberattacks, and Space Force attacks from space. Who would be able to survive such a prolonged nuclear war?” There are some signs of motion toward a solution: French President Emmanuel Macron’s negotiation with Russian President Vladimir Putin gave signs of immediate, possibly productive follow-up from both sides. But the real solution can only be found in the direction Zepp-LaRouche indicated. The financial system is an immense mass of unpayable debts preparing to crash again, worse than in 2008, and the City of London and Wall Street can survive it only if they beat down Russia and/or China before it crashes, distracting millions in the process from perceiving the failing monetarist system. A new paradigm of economic as well as moral and cultural relations among the great powers is the antidote both to the coming financial crash, and to the resort to unsurvivable war. A New Bretton Woods credit system is urgently needed which can save Afghanistan and other war-destroyed nations, and build modern healthcare systems in every country to save people from pandemics.
After a tremendous increase in fertilizer prices since 2019, and particularly during the course of 2021, the world stands on the brink of a substantial drop in global food production in 2022, at a time when mass starvation has already hit Afghanistan, Yemen, and six nations in Africa. If dramatic actions are not taken to reverse this process right away, more than 100 million more human beings can be added this year to the ranks of those in danger of starvation, which already number more than 200 million in the latest judgment of the World Food Program and its head David Beasley.The causes of this terrible toll of hunger and starvation are mostly a failed economic model which must be replaced; but in Afghanistan, they are viciously geopolitical and we must undo this punishment now. Regarding the economic failure: The World Bank Fertilizers Price Index for the world, which in April of 2020 was at 66.24 and in January 2021 had risen slowly but steadily to 82.96, by December 2021 had exploded to 208.01, more than tripling in 20 months. The rise of 60% in just the last two months of 2021 has particularly devastated farmers around the world. Their situation is even worse in the Northern hemisphere where fertilizer (and pesticides) for the spring planting look entirely inaccessible. The Wall Street Journal’s Jan. 21 article, “‘Farms Are Failing’ as Fertilizer Prices Drive Up Cost of Food,” reported that despite global food prices having risen to the highest level in a decade, rapid food inflation is almost certain to continue in 2022 due to fertilizer prices and accessibility. This, the paper understates, “would exacerbate hunger—already acute in some parts of the world.” World wheat output is set to drop by 10 million tons in 2022, according to the French agriculture analysis firm Agritel. The effect on maize production will be worse. Corn/maize production costs are rising 15-20% in the major producers America and Ukraine. Lower yields of many foods and agricultural products are projected around the world in 2022. Amid widespread famines already in 2020-21, and loss of informal agricultural work in the developing countries, food may enter global shortage in 2022. And according to the International Fertilizer Development Center, exceedingly high fertilizer prices could result in a reduction of agricultural output in Africa alone, which will be “equivalent to the food needs of 100 million people.” Although this monumental fertilizer price increase coincides with sharp rise prices of natural gas and is exacerbated by them, it is far larger, and far more widely and evenly spread around the world, than the natural gas spikes. As corn/maize growers in the United States insist, the gas price spike is not the primary cause of the fertilizer shock and loss of food production. In fact, as fertilizer use and price both rose in 2019, the International Fertilizer Association forecast that global production and use would drop after 2019, as they did—by roughly 10% in 2020-21. The huge fertilizer price rise after 2019 went along with sharp price rises across the whole range of important global commodities for industry and agriculture; its cause was wild money-printing by the major trans-Atlantic central banks starting late 2019; and global monopoly of production by a few big firms. Four monopolies control 75% of nitrogen-based fertilizer distribution: They are Nutrien Ltd., (Canada-based), Yara (Norway-based), CF Industries (U.S.-based), and Mosaic (part of Cargill, U.S.-based). Afghanistan is a terrible special case, where when NATO countries withdrew their forces after 20 years of destructive war, they retaliated with a punitive cutoff of international aid and development investment, and the United States Treasury seized Afghanistan’s own financial reserves. A German official just back from Kabul reported in Tagesspiegel Jan. 30 that 7 million children are starving now in Afghanistan; 1 million, he said, would be in hospital ICUs if they were in Europe. Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said of the plight of Afghanistan’s population, and the world threat to food-growing this year, “This is the greatest threat to civilization, not nuclear weapons.” She demands, now with many others, that the frozen Afghan funds be released to restore the lost liquidity in the entire economy; and has launched Operation Ibn Sina, to make the nation an exemplar for building a modern healthcare and public health system in every country in the world. To do this the United States must cooperate with Russia, China, and India in particular. And it must break up both its biggest banks with Glass-Steagall, and with anti-trust acts break up the food monopolies.
Today’s “news” is that the three full months of escalating British and U.S. accusations that Russia is “imminently” about to invade Ukraine, along with a crescendo of threats to “crush” Russia when it does, are getting so wild that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to reject them publicly and tell American officials to “calm down” and give him some economic aid. But British media still escalate, now putting the most provocative possible words in President Joe Biden’s mouth. Their purpose is to provoke the war they accuse Russia of, then attempt to destroy Russia’s economy.But because Russia has moved more and more into an economic and strategic partnership with China, this is the most dangerous form of bluffing. The United States and European economies are being corroded by “Green New Deal” technological primitivism; their banking systems are facing a hyperinflationary explosion. The partnership of Russia and China is more than strong enough for a new Cold War; but the best would be to cooperate with the United States in international development, and in a new credit system that can replace a bankrupt “everything bubble” of debt. China’s 2021 GDP growth was reported 8.1% over the year. U.S. GDP growth in the fourth quarter was 6.9% relative to the third quarter, but for the full year 2021 it was just 5.7%. Moreover, more than 70% of the fourth-quarter U.S. growth was attributable to businesses building up their inventories; the remainder, to increased consumer spending. China’s national planning and reform body attributed its faster growth to greater and growing investment in research and technological innovation. The other key factor is technology in infrastructure; China is investing $300-$400 billion a year in new infrastructure, led by high-speed transportation and new power supplies in many countries. Joe Biden’s “infrastructure” visit to a Pennsylvania bridge that collapsed just before he arrived was poignant; but putting another bridge there is not going to raise America’s economic productivity. Because U.S. growth for the fourth quarter only was supposedly higher in that quarter than that of China, Biden on Jan. 27 lied to the American people, saying that afternoon, “For the first time in 20 years, American GDP grew faster than China.” But the opposite is true. And just under $16 trillion equivalent, China’s GDP, even in nominal dollar terms, is now more than two-thirds that of the United States at just over $22 trillion, and will overtake it in coming years. China’s industrial production grew by 9.6%, fixed asset investment by 4.9%, job creation was at 12.69 million, according to the National Bureau of Statistics release Jan. 17. China’s real disposable personal income, after inflation, rose by 8.1% in 2021. On the other hand, Americans’ average real weekly wages fell by −2.4% over the year. U.S. Industrial production was 3% lower than its peak level of mid-2018; manufacturing output was 5% lower. And regarding labor productivity, with labor forces growing fairly rapidly in both countries in 2021, a long-term trend nonetheless continued: China’s productivity growth was 1.6%; that of the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 0.6% for the first three quarters of 2021, the latest figures available. The Chinese banking system’s loans outstanding, offered both to the domestic economy and to many countries in the Belt and Road Initiative framework, rose by 11.7% in 2021; loans outstanding of the U.S. banking system grew by less than 0.5% over the year. Americans and people of the NATO countries should think: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s idea of saving Afghanistan from the Soviet Russia, produced al-Qaeda, and a country destroyed by 40 years of war; Tony Blair’s neo-cons’ idea—saving Iraq, Syria and Libya from Russia—produced ISIS. The crazy idea of saving Ukraine from Russia, would give us a country run by neo-Nazis; but before we even get there, it’s producing a new Cold War against the effective partnership of Russia and China, and may produce a world war. Rather than this insane pursuit of a global superpower military confrontation, Americans in particular should look at what Russia and China are actually doing. They are developing their economies, making loans for high-technology infrastructure projects in third countries, developing advanced nuclear power technologies, jointly working toward a base for scientific work on the Moon in the 2030s, and looking for the United States to join in the projects of the Belt and Road Initiative China started in 2013. And the trans-Atlantic nations’ economies need a New Bretton Woods credit and monetary system or their banking systems are going to explode again, soon. This is the way to do it.
With the sounding of a “Russian coup coming in Ukraine” siren by British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on Jan. 22—to push the British demand to hit Russia now with the financial super-sanctions that were supposed to be threatened to deter war—it has become clear that there is no “unity of the NATO allies and partners” on dealing with Russia in the Ukraine missiles crisis.Rather, there is a British drive to force Russia to invade Ukraine or capitulate; a beleaguered but definite German opposition to the British war drive; a French President who wants to negotiate but is trying to look good and get re-elected; and a weak American President who would like to avoid war. If war, even world war, comes, it will be war imposed on the weakened American Presidency by the City of London and Britain. Not a second Crimean War, but a war for revenge against Russia and China for resisting and ruining the grand Glasgow global climate summit in November, leaving the British ministers who ran that summit in angry tears as it ended in failure. That included Prime Minister Boris Johnson, “BoJo” the nasty clown, who is discredited and inches from a no-confidence vote by his own Conservative Party MPs. “His resolve has hardened” against Russia, his spokesman announced on Jan. 22. The New York Times coverage of the new fake was headlined, “Britain Pursues More Muscular Role in Standoff with Russia on Ukraine,” although it’s always U.S. muscle Britain uses. Even the nervously hyper-aggressive U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken did not respond to the newest British war fable, beyond “We’re taking that seriously,” when it was thrown at him today by “Face the Nation’s” anchor Margaret Brennan, who raved as if she had taken some British meth with her coffee before the program. Against the London-Kiev demand that the supposed financial super-sanctions be imposed on Russia tomorrow, Blinken noted the obvious, “We’re using them as a deterrent. You would lose their deterrent effect.” He did not include the equally obvious, “and push Russia toward war”—the British intent. Blinken repeatedly stressed two points: “We have rallied allies and partners across Europe in a very intense way in recent days”; and “We are also responding to some of Russia’s concerns in further talks, and we expect them to respond to our concerns.” The Russian Embassy in London stressed today that the British were outside the process of negotiation with Russia: “The U.K. Foreign Office continues with a series of provocative statements on the situation around Ukraine…. These rallying cries come against the background of an obvious deterioration of British expertise on Russia and Ukraine. …The words by Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss about Ukraine having suffered from various invaders, ‘from the Mongols to the Tatars,’ is one example. Then came the ‘news’ of Russia intending to establish a puppet regime in Kiev led by a former Ukrainian MP—one that happens to be under Russian sanctions for being a threat to national security,” referring to Yevheniy Murayev. Germany does not want to allow the British war drive to succeed. Its Navy Chief Vice Adm. Kay-Achim Schönbach was forced to resign by media attacks, when he stated that what Putin “wants is respect. And my God, giving someone respect is low cost…. It is easy to give him the respect he really demands—and probably also deserves.” It is now widely reported that Chancellor Olaf Scholz was asked to Washington for consultations with President Biden and declined to go until some later time. Germany will not permit Baltic nations to which it has sold German weapons to pass them on to Ukraine, and the breakneck British shipments of lethal weaponry are having to be flown over Danish airspace because the U.K. does not dare ask Germany for flyover permission. The Biden Administration is about to respond in writing to Russian President Putin’s proposed agreements to keep NATO missiles and warfighting arrangements out of Ukraine and off Russia’s border—“and stating our concerns” about Russia, Blinken said today. The United States has decided it wants Russia to agree not to publish these responses, most likely because such publication will either infuriate the warmongers around BoJo’s government and inside the City of London, or cause more doubts in Germany, France, and perhaps other “allies and partners.” The most important question now is, what will American citizens do to direct their flailing government toward solving the most important problems facing humanity? That requires cooperation with at least Russia and China as a means to reverse the American industrial economy’s decline toward “green” suicide, and involve the United States in building new public health systems and infrastructure development programs around the world. London’s Malthusian policy of deindustrialization by war can’t be tolerated.
At a bad time for the British and U.S. war party which is striving to put down Russia and China in confrontations over Ukraine and Taiwan, China’s annual economic data release has shown that its economy again grew faster than that of the United States in 2021. And more important, China’s credit channel is fully open both for domestic industry and Belt and Road loans, while U.S. banks’ lending cannot grow until the dominant Wall Street megabanks are broken up and reorganized.This time, financial analysts and business economists in New York and London had widely and confidently predicted, early in 2021, that the U.S. economy’s supposed “red-hot recovery” from what was alleged to be simply a pandemic-induced recession, would cause it to outgrow China’s economy both in 2021 and 2022. They were proven wrong. China’s GDP grew by 8.1% over the year, and *South China Morning Post) reported that former World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin now estimates China’s economy may become the world’s largest by GDP in 2028, rather than 2030 as he had previously forecast. Industrial production grew by 9.6%, fixed asset investment by 4.9%, job creation was at 12.69 million, and retail sales grew by 12.5%, according to the National Bureau of Statistics release Jan. 17. China’s real disposable personal income, after inflation, rose by 8.1% in 2021—and for urban areas, by 7.1%—while Americans’ average real weekly wages fell by 2.3% over the year. In a strategic crisis in which an effective partnership of Russia and China has stopped a “color revolution” attempt in Kazakhstan and is pushing to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, this development makes reality clearer for American policymakers. The feared U.S. Treasury sanctions, including anti-China tariffs, do not work against these two major economic and scientific powers, although they devastate developing-nation adversaries and are killing or exiling millions of Afghans. Sudden coal shortages, price spikes and even blackouts in late summer, triggered in China by London’s global Green New Deal, were handled quickly by regulatory action while Europe struggles. These economic facts of life will also affect the Federal Reserve and the dominant dollar. The People’s Bank of China was actually lowering interest rates and the reserve requirement ratio for banks as 2021 ended. The Fed supposedly plans several rate increases to “control inflation” which is out of control at 7% for consumer goods and almost 10% for producer goods. But its data presumably show the Fed’s governors that the U.S. real economy is again contracting, after failing to regain even early-2020 pre-COVID levels of activity. Seriously raising short-term interest rates, and the impact on long-term rates, could not only blow out the “everything bubble” of debt, but trigger another deep recession. U.S. industrial production dropped slightly, −0.1% in December, and is just about equal to late 2019 and −3% lower than its level of mid-2018. Manufacturing output fell by −0.3% in December and is about 5% below the mid-2018 level; again, equal to that of late 2019. Construction investment and employment are lower than in 2018, particularly in “public and government structures,” although contractors are expecting new highway and bridge contracts from the $1.2 infrastructure legislation just passed. Retail sales also fell in December, as a reaction to inflation of consumer goods. But the most dramatic contrast in the economies, is effective credit policy: Outstanding loans by China’s banks, including overseas lending, grew by 11.7% for the year; and although the big Wall Street and regional U.S. banks are crammed with trillions in excess deposits through Federal Reserve quantitative easing programs, American banks’ loans outstanding grew by less than 0.5% in 2021. An initiative for a new international credit and monetary system, a Rooseveltian New Bretton Woods, could now originate from the Eurasian “strategic triangle” nations of China, Russia and India and be proposed to the United States as a solution for strategic crises—jointly seek the benefit of third countries. This must begin with modern medical facilities and food aid for Afghanistan and other war-destroyed nations, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute propose.
So many institutions of the U.S. intellectual establishment are now echoing the Schiller Institute and demanding the release of Afghanistan’s aid and reserve funds—15 think-tanks and organizations in a Jan. 8 joint letter to President Biden and others on their own websites—that there is clearly a horrible realization: United States financial and economic sanctions are murdering an innocent people, for insufficient loyalty to NATO occupying forces. Any citizen who thinks this crime is unrelated to the threat of an imminent, much bigger conflict over Ukraine, is mistaking moral posturing for morality.In the U.S.-Russia meetings now going on in Geneva about NATO in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, moral posturing by U.S. diplomats has quickly and completely replaced the personal diplomacy between Presidents Biden and Putin which seemed to give hope of a solution. After the bilateral U.S.-Russia stage of the meetings on Jan. 10, State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the United States would never consider keeping Ukraine out of NATO, “had not intended to reach any agreement” with Russia, and did not even “consider the talks as a negotiation.” He concluded his briefing with a talking points list of Russian “malign activities,” to claim that Russia, and only Russia, had to de-escalate and make concessions, to allow NATO forces and missiles to complete their long advance right to Russia’s borders—while Russian troops must vacate their own western border regions and “return to their permanent bases.” Secretary of State Tony Blinken added, at the same time, a gratuitous attempt to gloat over Russia’s assistance to the government of Kazakhstan to control rioting and attempted insurrection. Unless President Joe Biden intervenes personally again, Russia’s proposed agreements have been bluntly and permanently rejected. This is the equivalent of Nikita Khrushchev having refused ever to consider withdrawing Soviet missiles from America’s southern border in the terrifying Cuban Missiles Crisis of October 1962. At that time, tens of millions of frightened people around the world had already imagined what that refusal would mean. Even if the consequence now is “merely” a conventional conflict in Ukraine, U.S. former chief weapons inspector and military expert Scott Ritter gives an idea why that would not go well for NATO forces. What if the consequence is only the “complete rupture of relations” threatened by Putin and a deep and immediate Cold War. The nation with the world’s most rapidly expanding and technologically advancing economy, and with the greatest anti-poverty and development influence in Africa, South and East Asia, is firmly in partnership with Russia. This is clearly shown once again in the suppression of the apparently failed “color revolution” attempt in Kazakhstan. If the Biden Administration has decided the United States will attack and confront Russia and China together in a new Cold War—opposing them in space, fighting their policies of exporting nuclear power to third countries, demanding they stop using coal for power, attacking China’s Belt and Road and poverty eradication policies, and so on, who will it have in its corner? Why, the British Empire, of course—those green royals and Bojo the Clown and Her Majesty’s forces eager to deploy into Ukraine. What will America have in reserve? No development credit institution; a weak economic recovery from a deep recession; a labor force 3 million workers and 3.5 million jobs down from two years ago; declining real incomes; a Federal Reserve creating economic calamities worldwide, as the IMF warned Jan. 9, trying to stop the inflation it caused. But far worse than any of this is the ongoing strangulation of the people of Afghanistan by U.S. sanctions. It is causing a growing cascade of deaths by starvation, by freezing in homes with no winter fuel, in a nation for which the United States clearly bears responsibility after 20 years’ war and occupation. Murdered for the sin of not sustaining a puppet government when NATO left it. These sanctions are a crime against humanity. With this Afghanistan as its “banner,” nations will instinctively shun an Anglo-American attempt to make the rules for the world. There would be perverse new meaning, as Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today, to the phrase “Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires.” This must be prevented, reversed. The policy must be changed to one of development, by Helga LaRouche’s Operation Ibn Sina. The Schiller Institute’s urgent organizing for this objective, will take its next step forward with a webinar on Martin Luther King Day, Monday, Jan. 17.
As the year 2022 opened marking economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche’s 100th birthday, the heads of state and government of the five nuclear weapons states, which are also the permanent members of the UN Security Council, consulted as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has insisted they must do, and issued a declaration, for the first time, that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” (see the Declaration in Documentation). The words were used by Presidents Biden and Putin following their Dec. 7, 2021 video conference; and this declaration will now sit over the U.S.-Russian-NATO negotiations on the Ukraine crisis Jan. 10-13.But the fundamental reason for optimism here is not so much the words of this declaration as that the five powers’ leaders acted together against global war. Helga Zepp-LaRouche had publicly called on them to do exactly two years ago—Jan. 3, 2020, in the dangerous period after the assassination of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani—and has urged it on them many times since. On Jan. 15, 2020, two weeks after Helga LaRouche’s first call, Russian President Putin called for a P5 heads-of-state summit to deal with problems of peace, security, and terrorism—and he, too, has repeated that proposal several times since; and his spokesman emphasized today that it is still necessary after this “nuclear war never” declaration. Already by early March 2020, Helga LaRouche had identified the COVID pandemic—demanding a modern healthcare system be built in every country—as the new requirement for such a major-power summit. This must be done on an emergency basis in Afghanistan, along with food aid and power supply guarantees to save millions of lives. It is the start of, through physical-economic development, the real name for peace; and it points to a new international credit system like FDR’s Bretton Woods, in place of the crash-prone casino we have now. These are the missions uniquely reachable through what Lyndon LaRouche called “the four-power agreement” of America, Russia, China and India. That makes today’s “P5” declaration significant beyond its words. The declaration was posted simultaneously at roughly 11:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time on all five Presidents’/Prime Ministers’ websites. “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” the statement says. “As nuclear use would have far-reaching consequences, we also affirm that nuclear weapons—for as long as they continue to exist—should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war. We believe strongly that the further spread of such weapons must be prevented.” This rebukes those mad war-hawks like Sen. Roger Wicker who have been raising the “option” of a nuclear first strike on Russia over Ukraine. The five signers also reaffirm the importance of addressing nuclear threats, as well as their commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its obligation “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date.” They “reaffirm that none of our nuclear weapons are targeted at each other or at any other State.” They also declared: “We intend to continue seeking bilateral and multilateral diplomatic approaches to avoid military confrontations, strengthen stability and predictability, increase mutual understanding and confidence, and prevent an arms race that would benefit none and endanger all. We are resolved to pursue constructive dialogue with mutual respect and acknowledgment of each other’s security interests and concerns.” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, “We hope that, in the current difficult conditions of international security, the approval of such a political statement will help reduce the level of international tensions.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized that Moscow still considered a summit between the world’s major nuclear powers to be “necessary.” China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu was quoted by the official Xinhua that the pledge “will help increase mutual trust and replace competition among major powers with coordination and cooperation.” But it is only a step that these nations’ leaders must be kept to. The trans-Atlantic banking and financial system is headed for hyperinflation and crash. What the world absolutely needs is a major-power negotiation process which involves at least India as well, to launch a new international credit system capable of funding real economic development, “TVA-like” thorough development of poorer regions, advanced nuclear power development, technological progress led by space science and fusion power crash programs. The guide and planner of this process, and the world’s leading fighter for it, was Lyndon LaRouche. This begins LaRouche’s year.
