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The EU Bailout Is Illegal and Unconstitutional!
EIR at Press Conference of Anti-Euro Professors

The four “anti-euro professors” in Germany – Wilhelm Hankel, Wilhelm Nölling, Karl Albrecht Schachtschneider, and Joachim Starbatty – held a press conference in Berlin July 7, to announce that they have expanded their complaint before the German Constitutional Court, challenging the “super-bailout” which was rammed through the German parliament.

The professors argued during the conference, transmitted live on the Internet at www.pressekonferenz.tv, that the EU bailout goes beyond even the Lisbon Treaty into a sphere of illegality that is not based on any treaty agreement. The German vote authorizing participation thus violates three basic articles of the German Constitution: Article 2 – the right to a state of law; Article 14 – protection of property by the state, and Article 38 – parliamentary representative democracy.

Therefore, the original complaint they filed at the Constitutional Court has been expanded by 11 complaints on 11 different accounts, ranging from the Lisbon Treaty's own Art. 125, the famous anti-bail-out clause, to the ECB's illegal purchase of Greek state bonds at a price far above their actual "market value."

The very constitutional identity of Germany is threatened, and since that breaches conditioins laid out in the three basic Court rulings on EU policies and competencies in 1993, 1998 and 2009, the four professors are confident that the Court will uphold their position. During the discussion period in particular, the professors used strong language to condemn the illegality of the EU policy.

Should the Court not strike down the law, Starbatty said, it would commit treason against the German nation, and Nölling pointed out that the euro was the biggest mistake in the history or currencies.

The high point of that discussion came in reponse to a question by a journalist for Neue Solidarität, Stefan Ossenkopp, who asked about the emerging of a patriotic impulse here in Germany, similar to the mass strike ferment developing in the USA. Schachtschneider replied that “in the last instance, the people are the sovereign, it is the citizens who have to decide that 'Wir sind das Volk'!.” Whatever the outcome of the compaint at Constitutional Court, he went on, “that is not the end of history,” and political changes will have to come from the citizens themselves.

For Wilhelm Hankel, while the euro system should have been equipped with functioning brakes against erosion and inflation, it received two additional fuel tanks: ECB money-printing and taxpayers' blood. The only ones being bailed out are the same banks that caused the disaster, not the countries or the citizens. As a result, he went on, we have inflation and the ruin of public finances. That has led to a flight from the currency, comparable to what Hankel in his many advisory jobs for third world governments has witnessed there.

As proof of the “cold coup”, Starbatty quoted France's European Affairs Minister Pierre Lellouche, who stated outright that the “Lisbon treaty has been changed” – with no prior discussion in the relevant parliaments. Starbatty attacked in particular the Luxembourg-based conduit that runs the EU's super bailout fund outside of any political control like a private entity, in an outsourcing of political sovereignty. Moreover, Luxembourg knows no such thing as banking supervision.

Representatives of this news service were able to ask three questions altogether: two on the need to introduce a Glass-Steagall type legislation in Germany, pointing to LaRouche's proposals in that direction, and the other on the mass protests in the U.S. against austerity.

Hankel pointed out, in response to the Glass-Steagall issue, that that Act, as well as the German credit law (Kreditwirtschaftsgesetz, KWG), which have been eroded by globalization, should indeed be updated and improved.

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