In this issue:

LaRouche Associates Reignite 1989 Leipzig Freedom Rallies

Monday Rallies Spreading Throughout Eastern Germany

LYM Teaches German PDS How To Organize

Rising Unemployment Afflicts Saxony

Critical Review of Hartz IV Devastation

British Prime Minister Is Acting Like a Dictator

IMF Demand for Austerity in France, Is Creating Poverty

Crisis in French Medicine: Shortage of New Surgeons

Italian Media Cover Launch of LaRouche Campaign PAC

From Volume 3, Issue Number 32 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Aug. 10, 2004

Western European News Digest

LaRouche Associates Reignite 1989 Leipzig Freedom Rallies

Veterans of the 1989 Monday-night candle-lit vigils in East Germany, which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are reviving them today to demand economic recovery of the East.

In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung daily, Aug. 5, Christian Fuehrer, a priest at the Leipzig Nikolai Church, where the initial Monday rallies started in 1989, said that new rallies "make a lot of sense, as people feel powerless against the drastic social breakdown."

Insisting that protests remain peaceful, Fuehrer said that for a "new big movement like that, we need the second part of the peaceful revolution, which is still not realized, namely, reconciliation within Germany." From Aug. 30 on, the Nikolai Church will be the center of new rallies, Fuehrer announced.

Fuehrer's remarks are all the more important, as just two weeks ago his office was not even aware that such rallies had taken place on two preceding Mondays, nor the role of the LaRouche-allied BueSo party in reviving these rallies during the customary August vacation period.

Also Hans-Jochen Tschiche in Magdeburg, one of the original co-founders of the New Forum, a group of prominent eastern German dissidents in late 1989, told an interviewer Aug. 4, that new Monday rallies make sense, because citizens' social rights are threatened, just as democratic rights were threatened in eastern Germany in 1989. The new Monday protests in Magdeburg and other cities are a real citizens' movement, Tschiche said. He quit the Forum in 1990, and held a seat for the Greens for eight years in the then Saxe-Anhalt state parliament.

Monday Rallies Spreading Throughout Eastern Germany

As of Aug. 4, rallies have been announced for the following eastern German cities: Hamburg, Gera, Jena, Schwerin, and Poessneck, in addition to Magdeburg, Senftenberg, and Dessau. In Neubrandenburg, rallies will be held on Thursdays.

Other groups are getting into the act, Attac is discussing holding rallies also in Berlin and Leipzig, but first they will confer with their supporters, which leaves the Bueso as the as the exclusive driver of the rallies in Leipzig, for now.

In Halle, the DGB labor federation plans a bigger event on Aug. 16.

LYM Teaches German PDS How To Organize

Germany's Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which came in second in the last Saxony elections, is getting stirred up by the organizing drive of the LaRouche Youth Movement and the BueSo, especially with the renewed Leipzig Monday rallies. All of a sudden, PDS state chairwoman Cornelia Ernst announced she wants to do an intense campaign, get in contact with the "normal voter," especially with deployments at unemployment offices, where the LYM is already organizing.

Rising Unemployment Afflicts Saxony

Joblessness in Germany's Saxony region is visibly increasing. From June to July, unemployment increased from 17.4% to 17.9%, with a corresponding increase in long-term unemployment. Of the total 394,000 jobless Saxons, almost 50% are in the category of long-term unemployed.

This trend also effects labor union membership, because people are either frustrated with labor union policy, or they cut expenses generally, including membership dues. The labor federation of Saxony reports a 9.5% loss of members during the past 12 months—the highest loss in all five eastern states of Germany.

Critical Review of Hartz IV Devastation

In an interview with Germany's national public radio station DLF (Deutschlandfunk) Aug. 6, Friedrich Schorlemmer, who for the past few years has headed the Protestant Academy in Wittenberg (state of Saxe-Anhalt), said that, "If confidence in the future is lost, a society breaks apart. What is planned with [the austerity plan] Hartz IV, could create mass poverty."

"Naked existential fears" have caught all those who are faced with the prospect of long-term unemployment, Schorlemmer said, adding that "the social-welfare state of European tradition is being unrooted," and that with Hartz IV, "the deepest cuts in social pay since the founding of the Federal Republic [of Germany]" are being threatened. In addition, a new division between East and West can be seen in Germany: "And that, too, can be sensed everywhere: The German partition is deeper than ever, 15 years after the end of the GDR [German Democratic Republic]. It will get even deeper with Hartz IV. The East is being turned into a territory of the unemployed, the retired, and the sick."

"That is why in times of the rule of neo-liberal ideology, state intervention is required," said Schorlemmer.

British Prime Minister Is Acting Like a Dictator

There is nothing in Britain now to stop Prime Minister Tony Blair from doing what he wants, a leading City of London analyst told EIR Aug. 3. The opposition Tories have not done well over the past months. Their leader, Michael Howard, is acting and speaking like a lawyer, which is what he is. You cannot convince, or lead, the population with legal arguments on vital political issues, such as Europe or Iraq.

The only good thing for Britain right now, is that all the politicos have fled for their holidays to Tuscany or the south of France, at least relieving Britain of their presence.

IMF Demand for Austerity in France, Is Creating Poverty

The IMF praised "reforms" in France July 6, but pressed for further reductions in the minimum wage and jobs in the public sector. In reality, the French economy is far poorer than it was 30 years ago, as several recent studies show. The crucial change came in the 1970s, followed by the austerity plans in 1984. Over 20 years, France has lost no fewer than 1.7 million jobs. The result is the emergence of a hard-core impoverished class, aggravation of social disparities, and concentration of power in the hands of 5-10% of the population.

Several studies show that 7-12.5% of the population, or 4-7 million people, live below the poverty line. There are 1 million French children living below the poverty line, according to the national statistics institute INSEE, but European statistics put the number at 2 million.

The minimum wage in France is $1,000 per month, which the IMF considers too high, but 22% of the population earned the equivalent of $1,200 in 1996; in 2000, 30% were at that level. In 1996, 36% of the population earned the equivalent of $1,400; by 2000, 50% lived at that level! Moreover, what the minimum wage buys has been drastically reduced. In 1980, the minimum wage could buy a square meter of housing in Paris. Today five times the minimum is necessary to buy the same square meter.

Crisis in French Medicine: Shortage of New Surgeons

Once the most prestigious field in medicine, surgery is now being abandoned as a profession. Today, the cost of a minor surgical procedure is quite low, and hasn't changed for 15 years: 10 euros to close a cut, 20 for a broken leg, 80 for a torn Achilles heel.

However, at these wages, a surgeon works from 6:30 AM to 10:30 PM, and earns the same as a general practitioner, roughly 45-55,000 euros per year. As in the U.S., malpractice insurance costs have exploded in recent years, from 1,500 euros in the early 1990s, to 16,000 euro per annum now.

Only 50 surgeons graduated in France in 2003, while France needs at least 125 per year. In 2004, there will less than 30 heart surgeons. In Marseilles and Lyon, two major cities in southern France, no one applied for the position for abdominal surgery, and only two abdominal surgeons took positions in Paris. Doctors are also calling for modernizing operating rooms, and improving the pay of nurses, who are also leaving the profession.

Italian Media Cover Launch of LaRouche Campaign PAC

Rinascità, the official organ of the Italian Communist Party (PdCI), which is part of the parliamentary opposition coalition of the "Ulivo" (Olive Tree), published Aug. 6 an article written by Paolo Raimondi, President of the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity, on the recent Democratic Convention in Boston. Under the title "To win, Kerry has to follow the New Deal road of FDR," the article reports that Lyndon LaRouche, with the support of other Democrats and Civil Rights leaders, has created a Political Action Committee (PAC) to get the party back on the track of Roosevelt's economic and political approach and to mobilize the "forgotten man" to win the elections in November.

Raimondi also reports that the LaRouche Youth Movement will be deployed in crucial states to make a critical difference in the November vote. The article also details the antiwar sentiment in the party, the dirty role of Nader and Soros in attempting to sabotage a Democratic victory in November, and the necessity to overcome Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe's opposition to LaRouche's "Impeach Cheney" campaign. A longer version of the same article was published by the Rome based press agency Osservatore Politico Internazionale (OPI) in the past days.

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