There Is a Limit to a Tyrant's Power!
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
This article was translated from German.
Feb. 25—A drama is being played out before the eyes of the world, which involves nothing less than the future existence of human civilization, at least as we know it. Like a giant earthquake that has affected the entire planet, freedom struggles are spreading everywhere, with mass demonstrations, destabilizations. The system of globalization is crashing—and the outcome remains uncertain.
Mankind is being submitted to a test of whether we have the moral fitness to survive. Will we 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.
Listen to Schiller
Ordinary citizens, however, feel connected worldwide by the knowledge that they have no future within the Ancien Régime, 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 freedom, Friedrich Schiller, whose famous Rutli Oath was itself inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence:
No, there is a limit to the tyrant's power!
When the oppressed man finds 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. In Ireland, a referendum can also be expected after the 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.
A Shift in Germany
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble 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 [Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, FCIC]; he even unambiguously rejects 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. Schäuble explicitly confirmed that the excessive pumping of liquidity—meaning, excessive bailouts for the banks and excessive deregulation; meaning, the abolition of the Glass-Steagall standard—are to blame for the crisis.
This is an important first step, for which Schäuble 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 context 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. Only 7 economists voted in favor of the bond 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 already paying with their lives for the results of this policy.
Guttenberg's Privatization Schemes
Unfortunately the never-ending saga of Defense Minister zu Guttenberg's doctoral dissertation also partakes of the habits of the Ancien Régime. Apart from what the scandal itself says about him, 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 designation "summa cum laude," which is then exposed as containing probably 270 cribbed pages. The daily Bild-Zeitung now reports on a cooperation agreement between the University of Bayreuth and the Rhön-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 Rhön-Klinikum Clinic AG, a hospital on whose board Guttenberg sat from 1996 to 2002, and which 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 considered 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 dedicated only to healing people.
Even more serious, however, is that the whole political Establishment has allowed Guttenberg to palm off a reform of the Bundeswehr (Army), which 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, has resulted in an enormous lack of technical capability, whose important consequences were simply ignored.[1] 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.
A Window of Opportunity
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 where 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 für 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 country of the 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 the economy, or we collapse into a dark age.
Join us in the most important mobilization of our lives!
[1] The reform included an end to conscription (officially, a "suspension"). As a result, many conscientious objectors who were doing mandatory alternative service in the social services sector are now free to leave. The draft was ended so abruptly, that technical capabilities have also been affected.
