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Securing the Right to Food, Fuel, Medicine—and Progress
22 July 2022
EIRNS——It is in times like these, when an imperial system reigning even for centuries has driven itself to its inevitable disintegration, that humanity has often found the strength to assert itself, and bring about a new system under which people and their nations can flourish. Yet today most citizens in the Western world are still in far too much awe of the alleged “strength” of the powers that be—or were. Consider some “news of the day:” Today, Italian President Sergio Mattarella had to call snap elections, when the global financier interests failed in their last-ditch attempt to re-impose their hitman, Mario Draghi, as Prime Minister. The same day, the European Central Bank announced a half-percent hike in interest rates—ending eight years of negative rates! But fearing that this slight tightening of the money spigot that has maintained the Euro and European banks afloat, might blow out, say, Italy’s debt, the ECB also announced a new program, pompously named the “Transmission Protection Instrument,” under which the ECB will step in to buy government bonds which might be crashing. One problem (among many): countries to be “helped” under this so-called “TPI” must meet the ECB’s crushing austerity conditions—the same austerity which was a major factor in creating the social upheavals which led to Draghi’s fall in the first place. No one believes this can last. The “powers that were” are not in control, and so the conditions for a Euro crisis are ripe. Similarly, ungovernability is spreading from country to country still trapped in the West’s monetarist system—the system Vladimir Putin dubs “the Golden Billion.” Take the case of Panama. This small country of 4.5 million people in Central America has been shut down for the last three weeks by a national strike of teachers, construction workers, indigenous people… everybody. The strikers’ demand is that the government lower prices for three things—food, fuel and medicine—and raise wages. Similar strikes by truckers and farm workers are starting in Peru. The farm rebellion in Europe, with the Dutch farmers in the lead, is not lessening. Under conditions of the global hyperinflation created by the financiers of London, Wall Street, et al., people cannot live. They are demanding their right to live—to food, fuel, and medicine. But governments will not be able to provide them that right unless they join with other nations to establish a new international system under which credit is provided for the development of the physical economy, not speculators: the New Bretton Woods system for which the Schiller Institute is mobilizing now. Governments which refuse to do that may find themselves, like Mario “whatever it takes” Draghi, out on their behinds. “Food, fuel, and medicine!” is becoming the rallying cry everywhere. A loud cry demanding a return to progress and development, will quickly join the demand for “food, fuel, and medicine,” as people in the West look beyond their relatively small share of the planet and discover that giant nations like China and Russia have refused to be crushed by “the powers that were.” China and Russia are not only surviving, but are mobilizing their people to participate in the kind of great projects for which the United States was once the great example: developing frontier technologies, building great water projects when faced by drought, going out into space, harnessing the atom for fusion power. They are not only helping their people live better in the process, but are helping poorer countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas join in that development. “No matter how much the West and the supranational elite strive to preserve the existing order,”Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday, “a new era and a new stage in world history are coming. Only genuinely sovereign states are in a position to ensure a high growth dynamic and become a role model for others in terms of standards of living and quality of life, the protection of traditional values and high humanistic ideals, and development models where an individual is not a means, but the ultimate goal.” Putin added: “Sovereignty is about freedom of national development, and thus, the development of every individual. It is about the technological, cultural, intellectual and educational solvency of a state—that is what it is.” |