PRESS RELEASE
Helga Zepp-LaRouche Calls for
Reconstruction Program for
Mediterranean Region
April 30, 2012 (EIRNS)—"We need to have a Marshall Plan for Southern Europe—Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal... as a clear alternative to the present, failed system," German political leader and International Schiller Institute chair Helga Zepp-LaRouche proposed, in an April 27 "Dialogue with Spain and Portugal" [transcript available at http://archive.larouchepac.com/node/22504]. In that webcast, Zepp-LaRouche called upon the engineers, scientists, students, trade unionists, and others of Spain and Portugal, as well as other countries, to collaborate in assembling the bold reconstruction program required to survive the disintegration of the present global financial system.
"There is an alternative," she emphasized. Bury the current system by imposing Glass-Steagall bank separation; establish Hamiltonian-style national credit systems; and develop Southern Europe as part of the "World Land-Bridge" reconstruction program the LaRouche movement has developed, with others, over decades. The development of Southern Europe must serve as the springboard for the development of the entire Mediterranean area, including the water-desperate Middle East, and down into Africa. She elaborated how, "with rail and infrastructure corridors" extending across the globe, Lisbon and Madrid would be connected to Vladivostok, Russia by maglev train lines, "and that maglev train corridor should then be the connection through the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa."
She dismissed the oligarchic lies which created the crisis:
"The present monetary system, and the present political structures of the so-called globalization, assume a world, an image of man, which really do not exist. Because they assume that a small, privileged elite can rule over masses of ignorant people, over people who are kept deliberately ignorant, and that that is in a fixed universe. The Club of Rome wants to come out, in the beginning of May, with another atrocity, calling for a total shrinkage of the world population, a shrinkage of the world economy, with the absurd argument that the 'peak' of world development has long been surpassed.
"Now, that is absurd! Because, if you look at the world as it really is, we, with our small planet Earth, are not in a vacuum, somewhere in the universe, but we are part of a developing galaxy; our galaxy is only one of billions of galaxies; all of these galaxies continue to expand. There is a continuous increase of energy flux density in the universe at large, and man has a very specific role in this universe....
"If we stick with the oligarchical system, we will not make it as a civilization. ... But I believe that man is completely different from all other living species by being capable of creative reason, by being able to write poetry, to compose beautiful, Classical music, to discover scientific principles of an ever more astounding depth and profundity....
"What you need to do, is go back to the brightest moments in your history and basically say, 'We will not be a people of slaves, but we will design, in the context of the World Land-Bridge reconstruction, some high-speed infrastructure projects, some high-energy flux density energy production. We will build some new city as a science-city, we will repatriate all the scientists and students who have left; we'll give them an incentive so that they come back to build their country,' and there is no reason why that cannot become the subject of a broad citizens movement...
"If then, the next time the trade unions are opposing the cuts, if the scientists are opposing the emigration and the brain-drain, rather than just being against something, that they can come forward and say, 'we demand Glass-Steagall, we demand a World Land-Bridge, we demand a Marshall Plan for Southern Europe,' and then this fight has a totally different character," she argued.
"We are at a crossroads. Mankind has reached a point, where if we continue with this policy of globalization, the policy of empire, the policy of geostrategic conflict, we will probably lead to our own destruction in either a thermonuclear war, or we will destroy the economic basis to a point where billions of people are not going to make it.
"But the human being is a creative human being. We are the only species which can willfully change the order of their existence. We have the creative powers, we have the free will, and we have proven many times in universal history, that if man so wills, you can end a Dark Age, and you can start a Renaissance period.
"Now, I want to invite you into a dialogue, to do that, because you have, right now, a growing opposition against the present policies. In all European countries, you have motion for Glass-Steagall, but we need to discuss: Are we as mankind, fit to give ourselves a government which takes care of the well-being of its people? And I think, yes! We should discuss it, and we should do it."
