German High Court Ruling Hits Bank Bailouts—End the British Empire’s Entire City of London System

When Germany’s highest court ruled this week that the European Central Bank’s constant bailouts of the biggest banks in Europe were illegal, for transferring wealth from the people to those banks, it made just a step, but an important step, toward ending a British Empire policy which has ruined industrial economies for 50 years. This points to what EIR and LaRouchePAC have been organizing for—to end the City of London banks’ imperial financial control over the global financial and economic system and replace it with people-serving policies of the American System of economics from Alexander Hamilton and Lyndon LaRouche.

Immediately after the great financial crash of 2008—when those banks collapsed the whole world’s nations’ economies with their wild speculations—at the G20 meeting in April 2009 in London, the City of London dictated the response to the crash. No new system—all major nations must organize financial bank bailouts, and contribute $500 billion to the IMF in addition to expand that bailout. These 11 years have seen huge transfers of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the biggest banks—now far bigger—and the wealthiest corporate owners. No court has interfered in any meaningful way with this robbery—in fact, some have actively abetted it against developing countries—until now.

Already 50 years ago the City of London banks destroyed President Franklin Roosevelt’s post-World War II Bretton Woods system, the only system which looked to real economic growth and human productive employment and the elimination of poverty. Roosevelt’s was the American System of productivity, scientific and technological progress. In its place, the City imposed the “floating-exchange rate” global casino of speculations, bubbles, crashes, and bailouts of the last half-century. In London in 2009, they insisted on another decade, of the most enormous central bank bailouts ever seen. And in March of this year, an even more enormous bailout began as a “response” to the coronavirus pandemic.

The banksters and economists of globalization have reacted as though powerfully stung, to the German high court’s May 5 ruling against the European Central Bank. The ECB itself protested that “The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in December 2018 that the ECB is acting within its price stability mandate”—as if it were just keeping prices stable when it prints €750 billion a year to buy bonds from the big banks. A globalist Member of European Parliament Guy Verhofstadt, and former Prime Minister of Belgium) opined in Twitter: “If every constitutional court of every member state starts giving its own interpretation of what Europe can and cannot do, it’s the beginning of the end… Clearly, now that the German Constitutional Court tries to cut the wings of the ECB, the European Commission has to take its political responsibility….” George Calhoun bemoaned yesterday in the pages of Forbes: “Yesterday, the German Constitutional Court (the Bundesverfassungsgericht, if you like)—Germany’s closest equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court—essentially struck down the ECB’s entire quantitative easing program.”

But we have to end not just the ECB, but the entire 50 years of ever-growing, giant, speculation-fed banks, unpayable debts in the Global South countries, deindustrialization, low wages and austerity which have put the City of London back at the center of world finance. This system closed down the hospitals and public health capacities we need now. It increased extreme poverty throughout the Global South even while China was eliminating that poverty for 850 million people. It thus has left the Global South nations without public health defenses against the rapid spread of COVID-19—unless the major powers mobilize to build them.

The United States, Russia, China, India—the powers the British Empire’s intelligence has constantly worked to tear apart—must do that building now or millions more will die. That means they must create a new world credit system; or, in reality, go back to FDR’s intended Bretton Woods “American System,” which the City of London destroyed.

This is the task, again, of this Saturday’s online commemoration of V-E Day by the Schiller Institute. This time, the adversary is the British Empire.