Schiller Institute Chair Warns Of Deindustrialization
In her weekly lead column for the newspaper Neue Solidarität, Schiller Institute founder and chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche sounds the alarm over the onrushing destruction of Germany due to its adherence to the policy insanity of the trans-Atlantic financial Establishment. The German economy being the locomotive of economies in the EU, the saying “if Germany catches a cold, the rest of Europe catches pneumonia” applies.
“Deindustrialization is in full swing,” Zepp-LaRouche states, “and with it, not only our prosperity, but also a our social systems—health, education, pensions, etc.—is being demolished. We face a future with the standard of living of a failed state. We will be fully entangled in a ‘rules-based’ foreign policy designed to perpetuate hostility to Russia and ruin relations with China. In the process, all policies are being streamlined to suit the interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex, which is ruining us economically and threatening an escalation into World War III.”
She warns that “all of this will worsen dramatically as central banks are unable to find a way out between the Scylla of inflation triggered by liquidity injection to bail out failing banks and energy price increases, and the Charybdis of raising interest rates. The neoliberal financial system is hopelessly indebted with quadrillions of outstanding derivative contracts. Conclusion: a massive screw-up, across the board! Anyone who, in view of this overall situation, counts on the ‘self-healing powers of the market,’ ” Zepp-LaRouche writes, is ignorant or evil, or both.
She cites data showing how the deindustrialization is proceding at a dramatic pace: the Association of chemical industry (VCI) has forecast a drop of 14% in production and 16% in sales this year. VCI Vice President Markus Steilemann warns: “The house is on fire!”. The German Economic Institute (IW) reports that last year, 125 billion euros more direct investment flowed out of Germany than was invested from abroad, and that these are the “highest net outflows ever recorded in Germany.” Production in the automotive industry is now only two-thirds of what it was in 2018, and the trend is declining. The German Association of Industry (BDI) reports that 16% of medium-sized companies are already in the process of relocating production abroad, and another 30% are considering doing so.
“We need a fundamental change in the direction of policy,” she states. “To do this, we have to put behind us the entire neoliberal, green paradigm, into which we have been maneuvered step by step since the early 1970s, along with the false Malthusian dogma of the alleged ‘limits to growth’ from the Club of Rome. We must remember our identity as the people of poets, thinkers, and inventors, and our capacity to increase our efficiency in the universe through scientific discoveries of universal physical principles. Growth does not mean quantitative increase, as the Greens want us to believe, but it means the systematic qualitative advancement of mankind, the increasing dominance of the noösphere over the biosphere in the sense of Cusanus, Kepler, Leibniz, Einstein and Vernadsky.
“It is also in our sovereign interest,” Zepp-LaRouche concluded, “to work together with the global majority of humanity, i.e. the nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, that are now in the process of building a new economic system together with the BRICS-Plus countries, where the common good of all is the basis of cooperation.”
