President Barack Obama continues to stage one provocation against Russia and China after another, with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter this week floating a defense budget that can only be described as a commitment to World War III.  That budget calls for billions of dollars in new spending to beef up US and NATO forces in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific, while also launching a $1 trillion modernization of the US thermonuclear strategic triad.

Lyndon LaRouche observed on Wednesday that this entire swindle is a dangerous bluff, given that the US is in the advanced stages of a physical economic breakdown.  “There is a precipitous decline in the mental life of the US citizenry. Our productive capacities as a nation are gone.  All we have is a tiny residue for show purposes.”

Indeed, that January monthly survey by the Federal Reserve into loan requests from the manufacturing and commercial sector show a dramatic decline — more than 11 percent.  The banking sector on both sides of the Atlantic is crashing down.  Among the major US and European banks, stock values have crashed by more than 30 percent since January 1, 2016.  Handelsblatt declared today that “Deutsche Bank is in a Freefall,” adding that the real center of the collapse of European finance is not in the periphery, but is centered in Germany and France, the industrial heartland of Europe.  One financial publication estimates that Deutsche Bank is sitting on a pile of debt that is 70 percent
“impaired.”

But, as Lyndon LaRouche emphasized, the collapse of the financial sector is due to the collapse of the real productive economy. The physical economic breakdown process is the driving factor.  “Obama is the commander-in-chief of an incompetent force, and the British are not doing any better.”

The case of California is exemplary.  At the close of World War II, California had emerged as a key part of the Arsenal of Democracy, with shipbuilding, aircraft manufacturing, and major research laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and Cal Tech.  All of that has been wiped out, at an accelerating rate in recent years, under Schwarzenegger and Brown.

Our concern, therefore, is to rebuild the real economy, and that starts by recognizing and reversing the mistakes that have been made, consistently, since the death of Franklin Roosevelt. It begins with our educational and training programs, which have been destroyed.  The productive powers of the young generation of Americans are non-existent, particularly when compared to the level of productivity just two generations ago.

This reality underscores the sheer insanity of President Obama’s provocations against Russia and China, which will only have the effect of accelerating the onrushing collapse of the productive powers of the American people.

Obama has to be removed from office, before he, on British orders, starts a thermonuclear world war.  Wall Street and London, which are already hopelessly bankrupt, must be wiped out. We need a clean slate, starting with a global cancellation of all the accumulated gambling debts.  They are worthless, so just cancel them all.  As former chief economist of the BIS, William White, said at the recent Davos World Economic Forum, there needs to be a global Jubilee, as has been required, repeatedly, over the last 5,000 years.

Wipe out the gambling debt, launch an FDR credit policy, to create jobs, launch training programs for the under-skilled younger generations, tap into the skills of the older generations as we rebuild—and cut out all of the insanity around preparations for war against Russia and China.

Competent Western military strategists acknowledge that Russia has gone through a genuine qualitative revolution in its war-fighting and war-avoidance capabilities.  That includes new generations of military equipment and well-trained personnel. The top NATO maritime commander recently commended the Russians on their technological leap in their submarine warfare capabilities.

Only an insane, desperate British oligarchy—and their stooges like Obama—could contemplate modern war against major powers like Russia and China, who have no intention of posing a strategic threat.  The gravest threat to world peace and survival is the accelerating collapse process in the trans-Atlantic region.  The shutdown of NASA and the gutting of the automobile sector, with their embedded machine-tool-design capabilities, was the death knell of the once powerful American System economy of the United States.