EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2021

Stop the Genocide in Afghanistan! Stop the Global Malthusian Looting of the Planet!

Oct. 13, 2021 (EIRNS)—The British Empire has recently notched up a number of economic policy successes—successes, because their policy of Malthusian deindustrialization and depopulation is succeeding in destroying many parts of the globe. Afghanistan, for example, after 20 years of senseless geopolitical warfare, is now being denied access to its own funds ($9.3 billion, as per orders of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen) and is facing a de facto Western economic boycott, which threatens to bring starvation to countless millions and poverty to 97% of the population—according to the most recent UN estimates.

Haiti, another bankers’ success story, has 80% poverty. Lebanon now has 75% poverty, thanks to the IMF’s policies and the global energy breakdown. And Syria, the victim of endless imperial warfare and looting, now has a 90% poverty rate.

But there is another reality, which every nation on the planet also knows about. Back in 1984, China had a poverty rate of 77%—not unlike what we see today in the four cited nations. And yet over the following 37 years, China lifted over 850 million people out of poverty, reducing its extreme poverty rate to 0%.

Hard reality is also asserting itself in various other ways. Try as they may, the British utopians have not been able to banish reality entirely, which is making itself felt forcefully on a number of fronts, as recent developments indicate:

• A British parliamentary commission report was issued blasting British policy on COVID in the early period of the pandemic, for adopting “herd immunity” as policy, and for making “a serious early error in adopting this fatalistic approach and not considering a more emphatic and rigorous approach to stopping the spread of the virus as adopted by many East and Southeast Asian countries”—i.e., by China.

• Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang presided over a meeting of the National Energy Commission, and announced that China would not blindly de-carbonize its economy, and that instead “the capacity for energy self-supply should be enhanced,” and that China would “build advanced coal-fired power plants as appropriate in line with development needs.” The British rightly read this as a kick in the teeth to the Green Malthusian agenda for the upcoming COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.

• The U.S. Labor Department issued a jobs report on Oct. 12, which says that 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August, a record pace, mainly in the food, retail and health sectors. The report considers that this is largely due to the continuing COVID crisis and that people don’t feel safe working in those sectors. So, contrary to the media propaganda, it is not vaccine mandates and the like which are hurting the economy, but the opposite.

• Oil shock: How does $580 per barrel of oil grab you? So far in 2021, the price of oil in the U.S. has gone up 65%, and natural gas by 112%. It’s worse in Europe, where natural gas is projected to reach $30 per million BTUs later this year, and Citigroup is even warning that it could rise as high as $100 per million BTUs, if it’s a very cold winter. They proclaim that would be the equivalent of $580 per barrel of oil.

Such reality has a way of impelling people, and especially their leaders, into action—action that they might have previously dismissed as too radical or impractical.

On Oct. 14, the Schiller Institute will be holding meetings and rallies around the world to “expose and denounce a crime” against all humanity, and demand: “Release the Funds of the Afghan People!” The call to action concludes: “We, the undersigned, call on President Joe Biden to act in the spirit of the 2020 Doha agreement, signed by the U.S.A., and lift all unnecessary sanctions against Afghanistan, including the use of malign pretexts to prevent its control over the assets of its own central bank as well as its normal access to the international financial markets. The urgency is now!”