From Volume 4, Issue Number 35 of EIR Online, Published Aug. 30, 2005

This Week You Need To Know

LaRouche Comments on Professor Hankel and Himself

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

August 13, 2005

On July 16, Professor Wilhelm Hankel, former chief consultant of Germany's Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, conducted an interview, on the subject of the current unsustainability of the "Euro" system, with EIR's Lothar Komp and Michael Liebig. It was intended that I should respond to that interview by about the end of August. I do so here and now, presenting my argument in the form of a criticism of my own and Professor Hankel's expressed views.

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We today are living within a failed system of world economy, a system which, so to speak, hovers now on its virtual death-bed. Thus, were there no revolutionary changes from what have been recently considered proven standards of practice by leading institutions, this civilization would soon disintegrate into a planetary new dark age. There is no way to fix this system, without removing the characteristic, principled feature which has transformed the once-successful and promising U.S.-led world economy of 1945-1946, into this miserable rotting dump of our ruined heritages today.

Essentially, this virtually global European system, as best exemplified by the design of the U.S. constitutional system, is a successful "model" which would have succeeded, for the benefit of the planet as a whole, had its principled features of 1945 persisted in their shaping of world development. However, influences alien to, hostile to the Franklin Roosevelt design for the post-war world, have reigned increasingly within the reach of the presently reigning international monetary-financial system. especially since the 1971-1972 change to a floating-exchange-rate monetary-financial system. This, thus-reigning element is the root cause of the presently onrushing destruction.

Remedies exist, even now, but they are available only at a certain kind of price. The rotten element in the world's presently reigning monetary-financial establishment must be removed quickly, or else time will soon have run out for civilization for a protracted, and awful lapse of time to come....

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