‘Restart’ the Economy Post-Pandemic? Only a New Paradigm Can Succeed

Amidst both the suffering and mobilization from COVID-19, a clear voice is sounding, that a new paradigm is required, and will work, to establish economic activity on the level and principles needed for humanity to succeed both in the immediate health emergency, and in the long term. This is the vantage point of the April 25-26 international Schiller Institute conference, titled, “Mankind’s Existence Now Depends on the Establishment of a New Paradigm,” which will also be reflected in the topics of the next two weeks’ Saturday LaRouchePAC Town Halls, and related conference call events.

This organizing process itself—even while gathering force—promotes the agenda for what should happen at the earliest moment: a summit of the four Great Powers—Presidents Trump, Xi Jinping and Putin, and Prime Minister Modi, and others as willing, to deliberate and act top-down to create a worldwide health security system against pandemics, rev up economic production, and conduct foreign relations of peace and mutual benefit.

Other voices are raising certain points, in the same direction, either explicitly, or implied. For example, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador addressed his nation April 5 on fighting COVID-19, denouncing the destruction done by “neo-liberalism for the last 36 years,” and calling for a complete break, as shown by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

This is not just nice rhetoric. There will be no defeating COVID-19, nor magic “restart” of economic activity on the scale required, without a new paradigm and collaboration. The Wall Street/City of London system, which created the conditions for today’s pandemic and other economic crises, has now collapsed of its own evil nature. Nevertheless, in the U.S. yesterday, where President Donald Trump had a conference call with state leaders, some local officials—either desperate or deluded—are speaking out with the vain notion that each of the 3,000 counties should decide how and when to “go back to work,” and all will be well.

In reality, measures must be taken to deliberately foster agro-industrial production, to create a world health system, and to provide for every aspect of life and work, from food, to housing, to water, power, transportation, education, and healthcare delivery. Most of all, this involves special focus on Africa, parts of the Americas and Asia, deliberately kept down by the now-dead, British Empire monetarist system.

Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp LaRouche stressed yesterday on her weekly webcast, “I can only repeat: That only if you take an approach to really fight this pandemic in the way it has to be fought, is there any hope to contain it, without millions and millions dying. There will be millions of people dying, but there must be absolutely the approach we have been pushing for, for several weeks now, and we will escalate that: To have an immediate world health system, you need to build up a health system in every country which is on the standard it used to be with the Hill-Burton Act in the United States, or as it used to be before Germany and France privatized their health systems, which used to be very excellent health systems before the privatization. And we need to have an international mobilization to accomplish that.

“And that’s what the economy should be oriented to. Any idea to just speed up the economy and go back to the usual, without taking that as a prime focus is just foolishness.”

The goal is the widest participation, beginning now, in the shared task of mobilizing for what nations must do. That means reaching out to all institutions and constituencies, young and old, from unskilled to experts, from diplomats to farmers, and all souls in between. This is the moment.