The Economy Is Dying: LaRouchePAC’s Productive Jobs Program Cannot Wait

The IMF’s aggravated guess this month that the world economy will shrink by 4.9% this year, and the United States’ and all the European economies will each contract by 8-11%, doesn’t begin to describe the economic collapse which has now stretched on for four months with no action for growth taken by governments.

In the United States, the situation in which more than one-quarter of the entire 170-million-person labor force is either unemployed (35 million) or on forced part-time work (10 million) has not changed since the second week of June despite claims of “reopening.” The International Labor Organization reported already in April that one-sixth of all workers 18-34 years old in the world had lost their jobs; and in May said that that had risen to one-third, and could be headed for two-thirds. It now says that 81% of all workers in the world have had their income “affected” by the pandemic and/or measures trying to control it.

More and more economic forecasts now flatly warn that we are headed for several years of this—economic depression, not recession. The latest, from a university-based economic group the UCLA Anderson Forecast’s “second quarterly forecast” report June 24, says “a Depression-like crisis” will last until 2023 with unemployment staying over 10%; and right now, “a 42% annual rate of decline in real GDP for the current [second] quarter.”

Through all this the big Wall Street- and City of London-centered banks, obscenely, are rolling in new deposits and liquidity and being preserved from any securities markets losses thanks to the Federal Reserve; while they deny and withhold credit from businesses, small businesses and minority businesses in particular. They have just been allowed, by U.S. regulators, to take $40 billion of their own reserves against super-speculative financial derivatives trades, and throw them into a bigger volume of derivatives trades!

If these banks are not broken up fast through a restored Glass-Steagall Act, there is no credit channel for lending for productive investment and employment.

The Democratic Congressional leaders pass legislation to give trillions in “relief,” while saying they have no funding plans for building infrastructure. President Donald Trump wants a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, but no Republican in Congress will introduce or support one. There is only one plan for “action, and action now” on essential infrastructure building and productive work: That is the LaRouche Political Action Committee’s proposal of immediately building—and staffing—new hospital and public health infrastructure worldwide to fight the pandemic, as just the opening wedge of new high-tech transportation, power and water infrastructure all over the world.

This was discussed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and diplomatic, economic and medical leaders from the United States, Russia, China and Japan in the opening session of the Schiller Institute’s “Will Humanity Prosper, or Perish?” conference June 27.

That opening wedge alone, a “new world healthcare system,” will create 6-7 million new skilled, productive jobs in the United States, more than 100 million such jobs internationally, and will launch a medical-biological training process for young people, a kind of medical youth corps.

Politicians and medical officials alike must stop denying that the United States’ hospital system, and those of European countries, were shown to be critically short of hospital beds of the right characteristics and equipment. This was due to decades of public health neglect under the speculative “floating exchange rate” system which took over in the 1970s. In the United States the shortage is at least 500,000 beds. In the developing countries, the lack of a healthcare system to combat the pandemic is true not in spades, but ten times over.

And tens of millions in America, hundreds of millions worldwide, need productive employment and decent income. LaRouchePAC’s proposal must be taken up now by a summit of major national leaders, and by the White House and Congress.