Double Crisis, Single Solution

The global coronavirus pandemic continues to spread at a breathtaking rate. On April 10 there were about 1.5 million cases worldwide; on April 12, there were 1.8 million. On April 10 there were some 80,000 deaths from COVID-19; recently the number has soared to 111,000. Over 20,000 of those deaths are in the U.S.

It must be stressed that this is the world panorama before the pandemic has struck full-force in the less-developed nations. The devastation in these poor countries looted to the bone by the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system, will in all likelihood be far greater than has been the case so far in the developed sector.

And now India, with its 1.3 billion people, is facing a coronavirus crisis greater than any yet seen on the planet.

At the same time, the very financial system which spawned the conditions that opened the door to the pandemic, is using the central banks of the world—most prominently the U.S. Federal Reserve—to hyperinflate itself into a speculative frenzy that will end in a blowout of the entire system.

In her address to the April 11 Manhattan Project meeting, Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed the underlying nature of the problem, and its solution:

“Many of these people think they can just keep going by having the central banks putting out trillions and trillions of dollars and euros, like the Federal Reserve, which issued not only $2 trillion for different aspects of the economy— households, small enterprises, and so on—but also $4 trillion to keep the financial system going. All the central banks have practically decided that they will pump liquidity without restraints into the system. There is no way that this system of $1.8 quadrillion in a speculative bubble can be maintained.

“There is no quick fix. You cannot just reopen the economy; you cannot just keep pumping money, because if you do not address the fundamental reasons for why the world got into this crisis, there is no way out.

“What are these fundamental reasons? My late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, in 1971 put out a warning that this would happen. Later on, he added many predicates by warning already from 1974 on, that if you lower the living standard over a long period of time, and if the nutritional throughput of entire continents is below the biological minimum, then the danger would be that these undernourished populations of the developing countries would become breeding grounds for epidemics and pandemics of old and new diseases. This is the problem which has now occurred, that the actual potential relative population density has fallen under the number of actual living people.

“This is what we see right now especially in the developing countries, where you have not only the coronavirus pandemic hitting, but it hits on an already completely impoverished population with locust swarms in much of East Africa, malnutrition of 60 million children in Africa alone, a large degree of HIV infection and tuberculosis, and so on. If the pandemic hits on that, the consequences can only be catastrophic.

“Therefore, what we are calling for—and this is the only way we can solve this problem; no other solution, no side deal, no minimum approach will be sufficient. You have to answer this situation by building up a World Health System, a decent health system in every single country. The standard which has to be applied is exactly what the Hill-Burton standard was in 1946 in the United States; which prescribed—just to mention one important figure—4.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people. The current level of hospital beds in the United States, because of the privatization of the health sector, is 2.8 beds per 1,000 people. In South Africa, it’s only 0.7 beds. In Nigeria, it’s 0.5—and one-fifth of the total population of Sub-Saharan Africa lives in Nigeria.”

Zepp-LaRouche concluded:

“We have now really reached a point where we have to find our humanity on a completely different level. If we do that, I think we can overcome geopolitics, we can overcome confrontation and war as a way of conflict resolution, and find a new way for all nations to work together for the one species, the one humankind. I call on all of you to join this effort, because it will get worse. Unfortunately, I am absolutely certain that the worst period is still to come.

“But if we use that to unite for this task to establish a just new world economic order, starting with a World Health System, I think we can grow out of this crisis and become more human.”

Those are precisely the issues that will be addressed in depth at the April 25-26 Schiller Institute conference, “Mankind’s Existence Now Depends on the Establishment of a New Paradigm!”