With the Jan. 19 publication by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of “Drug Poisoning Mortality: United States, 2002-2014,” public attention has been focused on the nationwide epidemic.  Local authorities have been battling the massive increase in heroin addiction in every part of the country.  A Google News sort on “heroin epidemic” turned up over 133,000 news articles, mostly from local and state publications facing the alarming increases in deaths and crime.

New York State has released data showing the skyrocketing of heroin deaths, which went from 923 statewide in 2003 to over 2,300 in 2014.  Staten Island has the highest rate of heroin deaths of all of the five boroughs of New York City.

Ohio State Attorney General Mike DeWine convened an emergency statewide meeting last week, in which he warned that the state is now seeing 3-4 overdose deaths from heroin every week.

In New Hampshire, where the first presidential primary election will take place soon, voters say that the number one issue on their minds is the drug epidemic, trumping the major other concerns, including jobs and the overall economic collapse.

Huffington Post reported that Mexican drug cartels are flooding with heroin those areas of the United States where the documented rates of prescribing OxyContin and other doctor- prescribed opiates are the greatest.  The Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, was recently listed on the Forbes magazine richest families list, with a personal fortune of $14 billion, almost exclusively based on domestic and foreign sales of the opioid. 

Quite unexpectedly for most, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble took the occasion of a panel discussion on “Europe’s Future” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21, to propose that a “coalition of the willing” invest “billions” in the development of the Middle East and Africa. This comes less than a week after Zepp-LaRouche’s recent article on the subject, with the headline: “Germany Needs a Liberation Coup: A Silk Road Marshall Plan.”

We will have to “invest billions in those regions,” in fact, “much more than we thought,” in order to stem the flow of people fleeing to Europe, he said. “We need a Marshall Plan for the regions that are being destroyed,” Schäuble stated. And given the refusal of a number of European countries to accept imposed quotas on refugees, he proposed a “coalition of the willing” to finance the development plan, and pledged support from Germany. He even agreed with Greek PM Tsipras that it would be shameful for Europe to turn itself into a “fortress” and refuse entrance to all those outside the borders.

Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche has long proposed a Marshall Plan approach to Southwest Asia and Africa, and is the co-author of an EIR Special Report on the World Land-Bridge project which includes those same regions. In an international overview article written Jan. 22, she asked what one should think of the German Finance Minister’s apparent about-face on the issue.

“Has Schäuble of all people—the super-EU European and the bankers’ man, the one who demands discipline from Greece, the Troika’s spokesman for austerity—suddenly discovered that he has a soft spot for the development of these countries? In any case—France’s King Henry IV believed long ago that, for the sake of a good cause, everyone need not be motivated by the highest ideal; some people won’t achieve a goal until they feel their own shirts burning. Because Schäuble knows that without Schengen—the agreement to abolish border controls wtihin the EU—there is no euro, and without the euro there is no EU. Since there is no solidarity in the EU, then it’s better not to exert pressure, which only makes the failure of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty more obvious,  but just count on ‘the willing.'”

Helga Zepp-LaRouche goes on, in her article, to stress the importance of Chinese President Xi’s recent visit to the Middle East and his offer to have those countries join the New Silk Road policy. That, at a time when the overindebted financial system is headed toward a new mega-crash. Schäuble, as Finance Minister, is well aware of that fact. Therefore, if he is serious about a Marshall Plan for the Middle East and Africa, he has to promote Glass-Steagall reforms in all of Europe, as the only way to organize an orderly write-off of the toxic debts and to develop the real economy.

That, concludes Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is the test of whether Saul has really converted to Paul.

It is well-known that four of the too-big-to- fail (TBTF) U.S. banks—Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America—are sitting on 91% of the $192.2 trillion in derivatives “officially listed” on the books of FDIC-insured commercial banking units. When the derivatives on the books of their holding companies are added, these four have 93% of $242 trillion in nominal exposure to derivatives.

But a column by Pam and Russ Martens warns that the exposure of a fifth TBTF institution, Morgan Stanley, poses an even greater risk to American households. Morgan Stanley holds $31 trillion in derivatives, including $1.6 trillion in credit derivatives.  But unlike the other banks holding the lion’s share of derivatives, Morgan Stanley is far more involved in retail brokerage accounts and has 15,771 retail brokers as of July 2015 data from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. With $404 billion under management, Morgan Stanley has more “mom and pop” clients, investing their retirement and other personal savings, which means that a blowout of its derivatives portfolio can have devastating consequences for an unspoken number of households.

During the 2008 blowout, Morgan Stanley got more than $2 trillion in bailouts from the Fed (they got one lump sum bailout of $107.3 billion on Sept. 29, 2008 alone).  Since July 2015, Morgan Stanley stocks have plunged by 38%.