We must become adult, as a human mankind

The following is the transcript of an address to a private meeting of diplomats in Washington DC on Wednesday, January 25, by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the head of the political movement in Europe associated with her husband, Lyndon LaRouche, and the founder of the International Schiller Institute. Mrs. LaRouche presents the stark danger facing mankind of global economic collapse and the threat of near-term global thermonuclear warfare, but also presents the pathway out of the crisis and the potential for both a new economic paradigm for the world, and a new Renaissance. The discussion following this address was off the record.
Mike Billington

We must become adult, as a human mankind
Helga Zepp LaRouche

The problem is that mankind is presently confronted with two
existential crises, which we have to solve if there is supposed
to be continued existence of civilization in the form as we have
known it so far. One of these existential crises is the fact that
we are in the absolute last phase of a financial disintegration
of the global monetary system. Now the second related crisis is
the fact that we are right now maybe millimeters away from the
danger of a global thermonuclear Third World War, which could be
triggered by a whole number of problems, but obviously, right
now, it's focusing on Syria and Iran.
But let me first speak on the financial crisis.
The problem is that when the secondary mortgage crisis
erupted in the July 2007, my husband, Mr. LaRouche, had a
proposal which would have stopped that crisis right there. It was
the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act. It was a kind of
introduction of Glass-Steagall by eliminating the usurious
element of the casino economy, the so-called derivatives
speculation and the entire bubble. Now, unfortunately, this
proposal, even if it had a lot of traction in the United States
Congress, among hundreds of city councils, and state legislators,
it was defeated because of massive pressure from financial
interests.
And what the G20 did instead is to have, for four and a half
years, one bailout project, one bailout package, after the other.
Altogether, even though these figures are somewhat blurred, we
are probably talking about anywhere between $30 and $40 trillion
of bailouts of bankrupt banks.
In these four and a half years, the G20 countries have
failed completely to re-regulate an out-of-control financial
system, and what they have done, the only thing they have
accomplished, is to tranform private speculator debt, gambling
debt, into state debt, through the mechanism of these bailout
packages.
If you talk to some financiers, they would say, "Oh,
no, there is no problem with the financial system. It's a state
debt crisis."
Now, the state debt crisis has been the result of these
bailout packages, entirely.
This has reached a situation where the euro is collapsing. I
think it could collapse, actually while we are sitting here
eating lunch, or it could collapse in February, March, April, but
even renowned economists like the chief economist of Deutsche
Bank, Thomas Mayer, recently said that he would be surprised if
the euro still exists on the first of May.
This situation has reached the situation where the
effort to maintain the euro, through vicious austerity policies,
is alienating the European nations, the populations of the
European countries, against their governments, and against the
EU, in such a way that we are truly talking about a mass strike
process; we're talking about a revolutionary situation; and we're
talking about potential civil war.
Now, the country where the brutality of the present EU
policy is most obvious is Greece. Greece has been imposed with
austerity packages one after the other, and the country is in
despair. The people of Greece are right now really looking at no
future: All the young people and the academically trained people
are leaving the country; you have parents who are giving away
their children because they cannot any longer nourish them; and
people are dying as a result, because the pharmaceutical concerns
are no longer delivering certain medicines to hospitals, because
there is no money to pay. Now, you can draw your own conclusion
what that does for the life-expectancy of the people who don't
get these medicines, because obviously they're not in the
hospital for luxury purposes.
This thing is coming to an explosion. The negotiations
with Greece are not moving forward. They cannot move forward,
because you cannot squeeze a lemon which has been squeezed to the
last drop.
A similar situation exists in Italy, where you have a mass
strike, involving taxi drivers, truck drivers, all kinds of
pharmacists, doctors, lawyers, so that basically what is called
the "pitchfork strike," which first started in Sicily, has now
spread to the entire country of Italy, and this was all triggered
by a decree of the Monti government -- which is, after all, a
technocratic government imposed by the EU, and not elected -- by
basically refusing to respond to all of this protest, by simply
making a decree of these brutal cuts in all areas. And the
population is not accepting it.
Now one member of our organization is a leader of this
strike movement. He was repeatedly covered on national TV as a
leader. He has had meetings with the Monti government, and this
thing is heading toward a complete confrontation. Because you
cannot deprive populations of their life earnings in the way the
present policies are doing this.
After the downgrading of nine EU members, through the
Standard & Poor's rating agency last week, you have practically a
situation where you have a deleveraging of all the major banks in
France, but also in many other countries, so there is a frantic
effort right now by IMF Managing Director Mrs. Lagarde, to
increase the money for the EFSF, the European Financial Stability
Fund, by another EU500 billion. They are pulling up the ESM, the
European Stability Mechanism, which is supposed to be the
permanent bailout fund, to July of this year. Mrs. Lagarde
demanded another several hundred million contribution from
Germany. Zoellick from the World Bank also demanded that Germany
must pay more, to which Mrs. Merkel responded that the German
capacity to pay all of that is not limitless.
So, this thing will not function, and the financial press in
Europe is already using a language which I prided myself to have
been the only one using these words, but now the headlines of the
popular press are saying, "The ECB Has Become a Money-Printing
Machine," "We Are Looking at Hyperinflation like 1923 in
Germany," and this is, if you think a couple of years back, the
"H word," meaning hyperinflation, was one of the absolute taboo
words which were not allowed to ever be mentioned.
My best inclination is to say, the euro will collapse,
simply because some of the countries have no other choice than to
leave it. And this is a good thing. The euro was a
misconstruction from the beginning. It's a failed experiment. I
predicted that before it came into being. If you go into the
archives of our newspapers, I have written about it immediately
after '89, '90, when it was decided, because it {could} not
function.
The EU zone, the Eurozone, was never a so-called optimal
currency space, because it united completely agrarian countries,
like Greece, Portugal, and others, with highly industrialized
countries like Germany, and for ten years, you had the illusion
that this would somehow function, but all it did was to develop
bubbles in the so-called secondary, moving-up countries, like
Greece and Portugal, Spain, while the domestic market in Germany
has shrunk. Real wages in Germany in these 10 years have gone
down. They're being eaten up right now, already, by that
inflation, so you have a de facto reduction in the living
standard. So this thing is not functioning.
You all remember, or some of us remember, and have
written about it, that the euro had never had an economic sound
basis, but it was purely political. It had a geopolitical
intention, to keep Germany contained after the German
reunification, to prevent Germany from playing an important
economic role -- for example, in the cooperation with Russia --
by forcing Germany in the straitjacket of the EU.
At that time, Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, and
President Bush Sr. decided to impose the introduction of the euro
as the price for the German unification.
If you have a political intention, which is not
economically sound, you should not be surprised that such an
experiment fails, and that is what is happening right now.
If the euro collapses in an uncontrolled way, obviously this
brings immediately into danger the entire global financial
system: first, the trans-Atlantic system, because of the
entanglement of the banking system. If the euro collapses in a
disorderly way, then naturally all the U.S. banks will go
bankrupt also, and the collapse of the trans-Atlantic system will
immediately spread into Asia, and other areas of the world.
So, this is the situation.
The irony is that, right now you have the Davos meeting
going on in Switzerland, where a large part of the world economic
elite is meeting -- 40 heads of state are there -- and they are
discussing the collapse of the capitalist system. They're
discussing about, where is the way out. They are clueless, and
it's not a surprise. Because all of these people are guided by
axioms which contributed to the emergence of this crisis.
There is a solution. The solution is very simple: to go
back to the Glass-Steagall standard, which Franklin D. Roosevelt
introduced in the 1930s, and with which he brought the United
States out of the Depression. We are campaigning in Germany, and
France, in all European countries, for a Glass-Steagall. The
French Socialist candidate, Mr. Hollande, just came out for a
Glass-Steagall solution for France. We have very important people
in Switzerland, Italy -- Mr. Tremonti, the former economic
minister, just published a book that Glass-Steagall is the only
way. We have important parliamentarians in Denmark, in Sweden, in
Belgium, in Holland, we have important people in Germany -- all
fighting for Glass-Steagall.
So, it is an option. If the United States would put the
Glass-Steagall law back on the table, which they already did
repeatedly, this could immediately lead to a reorganization of
the financial system.
However, that is not enough. We need to draw the lesson out
of the fact that the euro has failed. We need to go back to the
national currencies. This may be a short shock for some
countries, or actually, all countries, but if you go back to
sovereignty over your own currency, and are in charge of your
economic policy, your currency, and you can, especially then,
issue credits for industrial investment, after a short shock, all
of these countries would do much better.
So, that is part of the solution.
Now, let me briefly touch on the war danger. Now, the war
danger comes from the fact that, when the Soviet Union and the
Comecon collapsed in 1989-91, we -- that is, the LaRouche
movement -- we had the proposal for an international peace order,
which was first called the Productive Triangle. And then, when
the Soviet Union had disappeared in '91, we enlarged it to the
Eurasian Land-Bridge, which was the idea to integrate the entire
Eurasian continent through large infrastructure projects,
transport corridors, an integrated system of fast trains, maglev
trains, waterways, highways, building so-called development
corridors with energy production and distribution, with
communications, so that you would have uplifted the land-locked
areas of Eurasia to an infrastructure situation like, for
example, you find in Germany.
We proposed this in really hundreds of conferences. We
had such meetings in Moscow, Beijing, New Delhi -- just all over
the world. And as you can see, Russia and China and many other
Asian countries are moving in this direction, but naturally, it
was not accepted by the Atlantic countries.
Now, instead of going with a peace order for the 21st
Century, which would have been very easy, because there was no
more enemy -- you could have said, we now have the chance to make
a peace order for the 21st Century, which allows the living for
all nations on this planet -- unfortunately the reaction of
Anglo-American elite was different. They decided to go for a
policy of empire, to basically get rid of every government which
would be in their way.
This policy was called regime change, and this had been
lingering even in the period where President Clinton was there.
It was called Clean Break; it was pushed by such people as
Richard Perle, Netanyahu. It was a counter to the Oslo Accord.
And naturally, we saw it in the form of the war against Iraq,
Saddam Hussein. You look at Iraq today, which is in much worse
shape than with Saddam Hussein.
It was later continued with the war against Libya. You look
at Libya today, it's eaten up in civil war and chaos, in much
worse shape. And now, regime change is on the agenda for Syria
and for Iran.
We have made interviews with very influential
representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency, like
the former head of it, Hans Blix, and others, who have
maintained, Iran does not have the bomb in the near future. I
cannot say this one way or another, but in any case, there are
always possibilities to negotiate something. There were Russian
offers to Iran, to assist them in the development of peaceful
nuclear energy. In any case, there is no reason -- and there must
be no reason -- to go for a military strike against Iran.
Because many European experts and others know, that once you
start a military strike against Iran, in this situation, where
the world is already disintegrating, this could very well be --
and probably will be -- the beginning of World War III.
Now, this is just one picture. You have to see also the fact
that what was started with the Bush Administration, the European
Missile Defense program in Poland and the Czech Republic, which
Russia always looked at as part of the encirclement policy of
NATO against Russia, and unfortunately, contrary to his election
promises, President Obama has continued this policy. And more
recently, both President Medvedev and the Russian Chief of Staff,
General Makarov, basically said that this policy could trigger a
regional war in Europe, in which nuclear weapons could be used.
Now, if you then take, in addition, the expansion of the
British and U.S. policy into Asia, which China has also already
said that they are not going to accept a violation of their vital
interests there, you can see that we are looking at a potential
World War III deployment.
And if you then look at the incredible amount of military
forces being massed right now in the Indian Ocean, in the Gulf,
in the Eastern Mediterranean, this is a very, very hot situation.
We have basically said: Look. If this war would ever
erupt, a nuclear war, especially with the use of thermonuclear
weapons, could make the human species extinct in any form worth
talking about.
Obviously, this comes all at the end of an era, at the end
of a system, and I think what we have to do, is to basically call
upon people to come up with ideas for a new order of mankind
which fits the interests of all nations on this planet.
The obvious thing would be to respond, as a collective
assembly of nations, to the existential threats we all face. One
of the threats is the collapse of the financial system. The other
threat is the danger of war.
But we also have larger threats, namely, threats coming from
the galactic cycles, which have caused tremendous weather
changes, which have caused earthquakes, tsunamis. In the case of
Japan, we had the events from Fukushima, which had much more
effects in Germany than in Japan, because of ideological problems
in that country. But there is no question, there is heightened
solar activity; there is right now, today and tomorrow, huge
solar storms, with warnings that satellite systems may be put out
of communication. Flight routes, routes of airline companies over
the North Pole, have been shifted because of that. So, there are
real questions, where obviously, our point of view is that the
answer to that, is that we should do what mankind always did when
confronted with existential dangers: namely, to use the human
ingenuity and creativity, and define the next step of human
development.
And, for a whole variety of reasons, that has to be manned
space travel, because as one friend of ours, the great
German-born scientist Krafft Ehricke, once termed it, that
mankind will only become adult when we respond to the
extraterrestrial imperative, i.e., when we start talking about
industrialization of the Moon, of Mars, and from there, to other
planets. Because it will force civilization to act rationally,
and to become truly human.
We have since a long time, proposed a reconstruction
program for the world. We call it the World Land-Bridge. It's the
idea to not only have Eurasia connected through infrastructure
corridors, but to take these corridors, through great
infrastructure projects like NAWAPA, all the way down to Chile.
To take the Eurasian Land-Bridge all the way through Egypt,
through a bridge or tunnel from Sicily to Tunisia, and through
the Strait of Gilbraltar, into Africa. And I've said many times
that the great moral test, especially for people in Europe, is to
develop Africa. Because if we cannot manage to save a continent
which right now is threatened by hunger and starvation, then we
are morally not fit to survive ourselves.
All of these polices are eminently feasible. Nothing of
what I have said is an insurmountable problem, except you need to
mobilize the political will to do it. And I think that the
decision, if we are able to solve these problems, and work
together for the common aims of mankind -- for example, the
former Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, just had an article
yesterday where he criticized the American Ambassador McFaul, the
new ambassador in Moscow, who is meeting with the opposition,
extraparliamentary opposition, people who are financed by the
same people who have done the Orange Revolution, or the Rose
Revolution in Georgia. And Mr. Ivanov said, why not have Russia
and the United States working together in the development of the
Arctic; and other proposals, where we have to work together, in
the joint development of space, manned space travel.
And I think that that is the task. Can we at this point,
where we are threatened with extinction as a species, get our act
together, and say, this old paradigm, which led to this crisis,
must be finished, and we must become adult as a human mankind,
and work together for the common aims of mankind.