Trump’s Plan and Wall Street’s Plan — They Cannot Coexist

President Donald Trump Tuesday afternoon issued a tweet, which, if acted upon, quickly, could mark the beginning of a recovery—not only from COVID-19, but from the festering collapse of the American economy since the assassination of John Kennedy and the launching of the Vietnam War. Trump wrote: “With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long awaited Infrastructure Bill. It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country! Phase 4.”

Can this work? With the Democratic Party leadership forced to cooperate with the President in the face of the worst crisis since World War II—passing three large humanitarian aid and stimulus packages to address the devastated economy and the decades of looting by Wall Street of the nation’s public health, industry, and infrastructure—the Democrats will almost certainly back Trump on this as well. The problem lies elsewhere.

At virtually the same moment Trump issued this historic tweet, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was announcing that the Fed balance sheet has reached an historic high of $5.3 trillion, having risen this week alone by 12.4%. Further, Wall Street pundits added that this was just the beginning, with the figure by the end of the year likely to reach $10 trillion. This is assuredly not for the real economy, but is going directly into the purchase of increasingly worthless derivatives and other speculative paper from the banks—and not only Wall Street banks, but all the Western central banks as well. This massive injection of money, backed by absolutely no production, is precisely what Lyndon LaRouche has pointed to—since Richard Nixon destroyed the fixed-exchange-rate Bretton Woods system in 1971—as the almost certain cause of a hyperinflationary collapse, turning the savings, wages and pension funds of the working people of this nation into toilet paper—and you can be certain this is not intended to solve the problem of our supermarkets being out of toilet paper.

Printing money as a form of credit, with the intention of creating productive wealth for the future, is the precise opposite of printing money to bail out bad gambling debts. One creates wealth, the other steals wealth from the real economy to prop up the (actually bankrupt) British imperial oligarchs who run the City of London and Wall Street. As LaRouche loved to say: Money is stupid, credit knows what it’s doing.

Trump has been campaigning for an infrastructure bill for years, since long before he decided to run for President. He also campaigned for the Hamiltonian “American System” and the Glass-Steagall Act, knowing that without these, the credit for restoring the American economy and infrastructure would be sucked dry by the Wall Street bottomless pit. But—he has not had the political strength to take on Wall Street.

This “double virus” crisis—COVID-19 and the derivatives virus—has already created a “phase change” in the mind of the population. People increasingly know that the old system is dead. No patchwork can fix it up. But they are also scared, not sure how to prevent the new Dark Age whose visage is rising before them.

Yesterday, Helga Zepp-LaRouche held a two-hour videoconference call with youth from across the U.S., Ibero-America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. She motivated them to participate in the required mobilization of the world’s nations and peoples, to demand that an urgent series of summits be held by the Four Powers and allied nations to build an alternative to the old, dead paradigm—noting that the passion and vision of youth are an integral part of any revolution and renaissance. In particular, she called on them to mobilize thousands of people internationally to attend the International Conference of the Schiller Institute, to be held online on April 25-26. Please plan to attend, and organize all you know to join in this critical event.