The Biden White House celebrated “Dearth Day” by dragging together world leaders for a shared discussion about committing suicide by forcing the world to engage in a carbon-dioxide hunger strike. As the EU, UK, and US tried to outdo each other by cheerily announcing yet earlier dates to achieve various goals of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, John Kerry insisted that even carbon neutrality was too limited a goal. We’ll have to “suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” he gravely informed his bored audience.

While general statements about loving nature and living in harmony with it came from all attendees, some of whom represent countries with true pollution problems that have very real health impacts, when it came time to drink the Kool Aid, many demurred. Xi Jinping pointed out that the responsibilities of the world’s nations are “common but differentiated,” continuing a theme of nations from the BRICS and the global south insisting that their growth would not be sacrificed to meet climate goals set by the trans-Atlantic nations.

But the real threat to the future of the people of this planet is not climate change. It is nuclear war.

Ukrainian President Zelensky, who met for hours with the head of MI6 last year, insists his nation is ready to stand up to Russia and should become a member of NATO. American think-tank lunatics insist on sending additional troops to Ukraine to counter the purported Russian threat. A thwarted coup attempt in Belarus is followed by the U.S. Ambassador to that nation meeting with the opposition leader. A Greek diplomat implores President Biden to prevent a new war by participating in a summit of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

The situation with Taiwan remains intense, with numerous hawks pushing for additional support for Taiwanese independence, an impossible course and far worse for Taiwan than to move towards negotiations on resolving the cross-Strait relations to create a single China with great autonomy afforded to Taiwan.

Driving the urgency of these military provocations, suicidal climate arrangements, and domestic U.S. fascism imposed by controlled-mob rule, is the exploding trans-Atlantic financial system, whose eruption backed by endless money-pumping is being treated euphorically as a period of immense growth. But as the upper part of the explosion propels finance upward, the detonation destroys the physical economy on which actual life depends.

To reverse it, the reigns of power must be seized from Wall Street, which must be put under strict control and allowed a salubrious visit to bankruptcy court. National credit towards productive (read “anti-green”) investment in science, infrastructure, and manufacturing can carry the United States—and the world—towards the kind of economic paradigm largely being implemented presently by China, informed both by the previous success of the American system and the ongoing organizing of Lyndon LaRouche, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and the LaRouche movement.

The Schiller Institute Conference of May 8 will bring together a thoughtful and active discussion on charting a course towards a Renaissance, to escape the war, banality, and ugliness of a culture which, though having abandoned the outlook that drove its past glories, insists on maintaining a now-unearned supremacy through crushing the rise of others.

We must work to collectively outgrow this infantile identity.