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There Is a Limit to a Tyrant’s Power!
The Fate of Humanity Is at Stake

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Printable version / Version imprimable

A drama is being played out before the eyes of the world, which involves nothing less than the existence of human civilization, at least as we know it. Like in a giant earthquake that has affected the entire planet, freedom struggles are spreading everywhere, with mass demonstrations, destabilizations; the system of globalization is crashing—with an uncertain outcome.

Mankind is now being submitted to a test of whether we have the moral fitness to survive. The question is whether we will act in time to strip away what Pope John Paul II once called "the structures of sin," and replace them with a political and especially economic order that is in harmony with the order of Creation, with the laws of the physical universe.

Given the threat of national bankruptcy of the United States, of many countries in Europe and the so-called developing countries, which have long been prevented from developing, and the increasingly widespread foreboding in the population that the world financial system is only a few centimeters away from a collapse, the political class is acting with crass incompetence. Unable to free themselves from the axioms of the present system, they are sticking to well-trodden paths, as though they were afraid even to perceive the reality of the collapse.

Ordinary citizens, however, feel connected worldwide by the knowledge that they have no future with the Ancien Regime, neither in North Africa, nor in the United States. Messages of solidarity are being sent from Wisconsin to Egypt and from Ireland to Tunisia. And whether people are taking to the streets against a despotic U.S. governor who wants to smash the trade unions, or for the right to affordable bread prices in India, no one has expressed the prevailing spirit better than our great poet of liberty, Friedrich Schiller, whose famous Ruetli Oath was itself inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence:

"No, there is a limit to the tyrant’s power!

When the oppressed can find no justice,

When the burden grows unbearable—he appeals

With fearless heart to Heaven,

And thence brings down his everlasting rights,

Which there abide, inalienably his,

And indestructible as stars themselves.

The primal state of nature reappears,

Wherein man confronts his fellow man;

And if all other means shall fail his need,

One last resort remains—his own good sword.

The dearest of our goods we may defend

From violence. We stand before our country,

We stand before our wives, before our children!"

These days, government officials and politicians are revealing whether they are on the side of the common good and republican freedom, or on the side of the casino economy and the speculators, who decided to defend their right to mega-profits and related privileges. The first category includes, for example, Icelandic President Olafur R. Grimsson, who has now refused, for the second time, to sign an Act of Parliament involving compensation for British and Dutch banks, over the bankruptcy of Iceland’s Landsbanki. Instead, he supports the referendum that the majority of the people are demanding. A referendum can likewise be expected after the Irish election. The second category includes such blockheads as IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet, who want to fight against the inflation that results from their own policies, by driving down the real income of the population.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble can definitely claim the honor of being the first finance minister from the G20 countries who now fully supports the findings of the U.S. Angelides Commission; he even rejected the dissenting opinion of the four Commission members from the U.S. Republican Party, in a speech today at the University of Frankfurt’s Center for Financial Studies. Schaeuble explicitly confirmed that the excessive pumping of liquidity—meaning, excessive bailouts for the banks and excessive deregulation; meaning, the abolition of the Glass-Steagall standards—are to blame for the crisis. This is an important first step, for which Schaeuble deserves credit. Unfortunately, however, he could not bring himself to endorse the only realistic solution, which is the reintroduction of a two-tier banking system—the Glass-Steagall system—on the global level; instead, he pointed to the planned restructuring law and the Eurosystem, both of which remain within the domain of monetarism.

The fact that times are changing was also shown by a poll of more than 200 economists from the German-speaking countries, of whom 189 said that the purchase of toxic government bonds by the ECB aggravated the euro crisis and led to (hyper) inflation; 7 voted in favor of the purchases and 11 abstained. Global inflation has already long been out of control, such that a growing number of the poor in Germany and in many developing countries, where people have to spend up to 60-70% of their income on food, are paying with their lives for the results of this policy.

Unfortunately the never-ending saga of Defense Minister zu Guttenberg’s doctoral dissertation also partakes of the habits of the Ancien Regime. Apart from the light cast on him by the scandal itself, the question also arises of how a university, which after all has to worry about its academic reputation, could accept a doctoral thesis with the the award "summa cum laude," which is then exposed as containing probably 270 cribbed pages. Now, Bild-Zeitung reports on a cooperation agreement between the University of Bayreuth and the Rhoeun Klinikum AG, from 1999 to 2006, during which EU750,000 made its way over to the University to fund a new department of medical management.

Now, the Rhoenklinikum Clinic AG, on whose board Guttenberg sat from 1996 to 2002, and whose hospital had previously belonged to the Guttenberg family, is known for the conception of privatizing health care, which leads directly into a three-tier system. And the course of study of medical management includes so-called health economics, in which cost-accounting efficiency comes to the fore—which naturally has fatal results under conditions of a breakdown crisis. Now this cooperation agreement might have been totally legal, just as health economics has unfortunately become acceptable. But if Guttenberg’s thesis advisor had an eye as blind as that, then something is at least fishy. To put it clearly once again: The privatization of health care belongs to the paradigm of globalization, which is currently collapsing, and to which we owe the fact that the Federal Doctors Association now intends to permit a weakening of the Hippocratic Oath, according to which the doctor is only dedicated to healing people.

Even more serious, however, is the fact that the whole political Establishment has allowed Guttenberg to palm off a reform of the Bundeswehr (Army) that virtually amounts to privatization, and which likewise belongs to the axiomatics of globalization. Furthermore, the reform deprives the social welfare sector of important manpower, and, as has now emerged, it has results in an enormous lack of technical capability, whose important consequences were simply ignored. And Die Welt already gave it the headline: "The lower class takes over the national defense," because it’s expected that the only people who will henceforth want to go into the Bundeswehr, are those with no other opportunities. The Bundeswehr reform is definitely not in the national interest of Germany, and should be stopped.

No one who thinks the situation through will be able to deny that the continuing attempt to save the thoroughly bankrupt financial system by means of further "rescue packages," creates more liquidity, therefore more speculation, especially in raw materials and food prices, and that this leads in turn to more food riots, to more waves of refugees who naturally want to come to a place they think they might have a chance to survive—to Europe. The Italian government is obviously correct in not wanting to be left alone to deal with this potentially gigantic problem. And it is also correct when it demands a Marshall Plan for North Africa; but we need a reconstruction plan for the entire world!

The reality is, that mankind has only a short window of opportunity within which we could carry out the necessary reorganization of the financial system, and could replace the monetary system with a credit system in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Glass-Steagall standard. In Germany, the Kreditanstalt for Wiederaufbau [Reconstruction Finance Bank], which was modeled on Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, brought us the closest to such a credit system, and thus successfully brought Germany out of a rubble field, making it, within a very few years, into the land of the German economic miracle. We must take up this tradition.

A credit system has nothing to do with money; the state, through the allocation of credit for future production, makes sure that the domestic market, and with it the living standard of the population, is raised. It also means that sovereign states conclude long-range treaties of cooperation for concrete industrial and development projects, which go exclusively for raising the productivity of the workforce through the development of the creative potential of mankind. Either we accomplish this, placing mankind again at the center of politics and economy, or we collapse into a dark age.

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