Food for Peace and Thought, Credit for Development

During his two-day state visit to France, President Donald Trump has continued to build working relationships with President Xi Jinping of China; with President Vladimir Putin of Russia; and with other sensible heads of state, who are waking up to the fact that the future of humanity lies outside the controlled geopolitical game of the British Empire.

With French President Emmanuel Macron at his side at a joint press conference two days ago, Trump praised China’s Xi as a “man of quality, [who] loves China.” He described Russia’s Putin as someone who “wants what’s good for Russia, and I want what’s good for the United States.” And Trump strongly defended his recent meeting with Putin, which he explained had already produced important results in Syria: “I think in a case like Syria where we can get together, do a ceasefire, and there are many other cases where getting along can be a very positive thing.”

All of that is fine, Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented yesterday, but what is urgently lacking is an industrialization program for the United States to stop the onrushing collapse of the physical economy—nowhere seen more clearly than in New York City. The Trump administration has yet to move on its announced policy of a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, nor on the urgently required Glass-Steagall bankruptcy reorganization of the U.S. and trans-Atlantic banking systems. If there is no crash program built around Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws, she stated, nothing else is going to work: the U.S. must join China, Russia, and other nations in the construction of the World Land-Bridge, including inside the United States. “It’s the economy, stupid!” Zepp-LaRouche insisted.

Just consider the following. Over the past decade, China’s banks have generated some $10 trillion of credit, with a growing amount of that now channeled abroad as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. With that credit, they have pulled 700 million people out of poverty, built some 22,000 km of high-speed rail, and launched the planet’s most advanced scientific activity in the fields of space, fusion energy, etc.

During that same decade, the financial institutions of the trans-Atlantic sector (plus Japan) have issued more than $15 trillion in cumulative “quantitative easing”—half again as much as what China issued as productive credit—purportedly to increase bank lending. But absent Glass-Steagall and LaRouche’s Four Laws, none of that has gone to productive investment. Instead, we have industrial and infrastructure collapse; growing poverty and real unemployment; soaring suicide, and drug and alcohol death rates; and an abandonment of scientific endeavors, as best represented by the NASA mission.

This is the big weakness in the strategic situation, Zepp-LaRouche emphasized, a weakness which the LaRouche movement can help remedy by getting the U.S. population focused on the required solutions to the collapse, much as we succeeded in doing at the recent New York conference on “Food for Peace and Thought.” Now the needed infrastructure programs must begin, and credit for development must start to flow.

Wall Street and the City of London won’t like it. But everyone else will.