Only One Leader Made Action Plans for This Crisis

President Donald Trump met with his “economic team” yesterday afternoon about the accelerating financial crisis; House Democrats will have a hearing with their “economic team”—Barack Obama’s economic advisor Jason Furman of Harvard—Wednesday afternoon. The President will meet with Wall Street “leaders” (banksters who have been fined more than $100 billion for their serial lawlessness). Furman will reportedly propose some “stimulus” of $350 billion over several years. The President’s advisors Larry Kudlow and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will discuss a small tax cut and loans to small businesses.

And all Wall Street will do is ask President Trump for help, a bailout. Since the Federal Reserve by law cannot buy the corporate bonds and stock that are plunging on their books, they may propose that “the Treasury backstop [such] credit-easing facilities for the Fed” according to Goldman Sachs. In other words, the Treasury should buy the toxic junk from Wall Street.

What is needed is for the American President to act as Franklin Roosevelt acted against economic collapse. Failed Wall Street needs to be put in quarantine. President Trump should be holding, not meetings with Wall Street banksters or free-trade economists, but an urgent summit with the leaders of the other scientifically and technologically pre-eminent nations, particularly President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and above all, President Xi Jinping, whose China has shown the way to put protection of human life first in the coronavirus battle. Secondly, the President can productively keep meeting with his military service and science research chiefs including at NASA, who can provide both logistics and technologies to defeat the pandemic.

Even considering such national leaders, there is only one leader who laid out the action plans for exactly this kind of crisis: That was the late Lyndon LaRouche, who did it multiple times as the trans-Atlantic financial system sustained one bubble meltdown after another since the 1980s. LaRouche did this in the form of his “Four Economic Laws,” which started from the Glass-Steagall breakup of the giant City of London- and Wall Street-centered banks which now must be done immediately. And he did this in proposing, already 25 years ago, that the leaders of the nations above, and others, create a New Bretton Woods credit system to foster productive infrastructure and capital goods investment worldwide.

Repeatedly, banks and toxic securities have been saved instead. Recall that in October 2008 Congress was threatened into voting $700 billion in Treasury investments in bank stocks—just the kind of thing they will ask President Trump for on March 11. Had Glass-Steagall remained in force that bank bailout would have been unnecessary. That $700 billion, even now, as U.S. national bank credit, could build new hospitals and new electric power plants, train personnel, acquire new equipment, fund space and thermonuclear science to defeat this pandemic disease.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in a call for action on the crisis issued March 8, has spelled out once again the steps which must be taken to that Four Power summit and a New Bretton Woods, using her late husband’s “Four Laws” as action by the United States. That statement calls for everyone’s support; as she said March 9, the situation calls not for panic, but for “dogged determination” to meet the crisis.