How Did It Come to This?

American farmers are being forced to euthanize their livestock at unheard of rates, as over 25% of hog processing is shut down in the U.S., and the workers in the plants laid off. If not reversed, there will soon be major meat shortages across the country, along with waves of farm bankruptcies. Meanwhile, millions are starving in Africa, while the FAO warns of a five-fold increase of starvation in West Africa and the Sahel—not to mention the 40 million poor and hungry Americans in this country.

The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil plunged below $13 per barrel on Monday, a 72% drop so far this year; and global sales are so low that hundreds of oil tankers are at sea with full loads. The largest U.S. storage areas are so full, that at this rate they will reach maximum capacity in little more than a month. Will we then see oil being burned and dumped, the way farmers have been forced to euthanize their hogs? Meanwhile, the world is desperate for energy to meet every manner of physical need of most of the planet’s population.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated he preferred to drive U.S. states into bankruptcy and default on their pension funds, rather than allow the federal government to come to their aid in the coronavirus crisis. But neither he, nor the majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, have any problem giving Wall Street $4 trillion in largesse from the Fed.

In a word, the world’s physical economy is being destroyed in a vain effort to salvage the cancerous speculative bubble. People’s very lives around the planet are being sacrificed on the altar of a dead system, and its Malthusian ideology.

How did it come to this? How did we let it come to this?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche addressed that issue, in a conference call with European associates yesterday, stressing the importance of the solutions provided by the April 25-26 Schiller Institute conference to just this crisis.

“We absolutely have to change the paradigm,” Zepp-LaRouche said, “and we have to have a Four Power combination to accomplish that,” consisting of the heads of state of the U.S., China, Russia and India. “The crisis is getting worse. The pandemic is by no means under control,” and the global financial breakdown is upon us.

“As we discussed at the conference,” Zepp-LaRouche stressed, “the hard core of the problem is the British Empire. They are responsible for the long-term effects of this policy. As Lyndon LaRouche warned for half a century, it is the British liberal policies which have reduced the living standard in the developing countries, which created the conditions for this pandemic add more pandemics to come in the future—unless we find a completely different approach and preempt it by raising the planet’s living standard and by having fundamental scientific breakthroughs.”

“It is also the British Empire which is behind the war drive,” Zepp-LaRouche stated, in particular the efforts to place the United States and China on a collision path. “There is a battle going on inside the United States that matters for the entire world,” she said. “Either we will have an American republic” of the sort envisioned by the Founding Fathers against the British system, “towards which Trump has an inclination; or if the U.S. goes in the direction of the War Party—such as Pompeo, Esper, Navarro and others—we will truly be on a short fuse to World War III.”