EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 2022

NATO and EU Are ‘Self-Sanctioning’ Into an Economic Collapse

March 21, 2022 (EIRNS)—Joined by many thousands worldwide, the Schiller Institute’s call for a conference to design a new strategic and economic development architecture against this crisis, is letting the Institute organize an April 9 international conference at the level necessary. For the first time in decades, severe crisis is opening the eyes of many people around the world to the principles of Lyndon LaRouche’s “Four Economic Laws” and his design for a New Bretton Woods credit system; it’s the only pathway now back to durable peace, through economic development of every nation.

The NATO countries’ unheard-of monster economic sanctions and financial confiscations are, deliberately, forcing the world toward two blocs; the media in those countries portray Russia as being economically, permanently crushed, with China and India unable significantly to help it. They claim the Eurasian development corridors of the Belt and Road Initiative have been broken.

But the growing number of thinking people who have learned or followed Lyndon LaRouche’s economic principles, know that this banishment from dollar-euro finance could catalyze a new gold reserve-based credit system. It will, if it emerges, be centered in those Eurasian powers but open to the United States and Europe, as the Belt and Road development projects have been. It could use the great productive powers of those powers, which the NATO nations are now trying to “wall off” and destroy with sanctions, to lead a global economic recovery. And from this terrible war could come a peace rooted in the future benefits of that credit and monetary agreement to all nations’ economic development. That is the purpose of the Schiller Institute’s petition and conference.

An article dated today in Markets Insider’s Oil & Commodities News reports that Russian oil exports have dropped by about 1 million barrels per day since late February due to a larger drop of exports to Europe, of about 1.5 million bpd. This means about one-third of European imports from Russia have stopped; the situation with natural gas imports by Europe is similar. Oil & Commodities News quotes a Morgan Stanley “chief commodities strategist” that although oil exports from Russia are not formally subject to the economic warfare sanctions of the NATO nations, a large number of European companies are “self-sanctioning” and not buying oil or natural gas from Russia—as the United States has banned it.

This expert forecast the price per barrel of oil staying at $120 “or it could go higher” for 12-18 months. Less than one month of oil, gas, metals, fertilizers and food commodities shooting up in price, on top of the raging inflation underway beforehand, has been enough to start shutting transportation, driving down agricultural yields, triggering strikes, blowing all liquidity out of the commodities markets and setting off shortages of all kinds. Bloomberg News headlined on March 18, “The World’s Biggest Commodities Markets Are Starting To Seize Up.”

There is even a macabre Wall Street euphemism for this deep austerity: “demand destruction.” But it is the productive lives of millions in Europe, the United States and many developing countries that are being destroyed.

A typical example: The International Energy Agency (IEA) put out an estimate March 18 that oil markets will lose 3 million barrels per day in 2022, having already lost 9 million bpd in the past two years. But with the estimate came the IEA’s roster of recommended cutbacks in driving, heating, flying, eating, and so forth which could supposedly “save” just about exactly 3 million bpd year-round, overwhelmingly in the United States and Europe. That deep austerity—“self-sanctioning”—is precisely what was intended all along by the Green New Deal. “Crushing” the Great Reset’s opponent nations Russia and China was seen all along, by Wall Street and the City of London, as necessary to impose that austerity.

The unintended result may be, that the major Eurasian nations, though set back by war and the NATO nations’ all-out financial warfare, agree on a new monetary and credit system and recover strongly—and the trans-Atlantic nations’ economies collapse in hyperinflation and a financial crash, while ballooning their military budgets!

To avoid that, is also the mission of the Schiller Institute’s unique international petition and its coming conference, which sees a new strategic and economic architecture for the strategic interests and economic development of all nations.