January 3, 2008 (LPAC)--A crucial driver in the building ferment for a mass strike in Germany, and in other parts of Europe, is the personal experience of deep cuts in their household budget which millions of citizens and labor union members have, with the beginning of hyperinflation. Especially the lowest-income layers of the population like the Hartz IV recipients, those that maybe have been able to a build a monthly flexibility of 20, 30 or 40 euros, for some extra expenses, see that margin wiped out by the price increases for food and gasoline within only one or two weeks. It is estimated by social care agencies, many of which also run soup kitchens in the bigger cities, that about 600,000 Germans, many of them children, no longer have enough money to cover their daily needs, faced with the weekly price increases.

Now, in the midst of the global chaos crisis, calls for a minimum wage have become popular, and also for substantial improvements of Hartz IV pay (a version of what in the U.S. is a type of welfare and unemployment compensation), even among the otherwise neo-con, pro-austerity Christian Democrats. This impoverishment issue may become, in Germany, the equivalent of the foreclosures issue in the United States, and the labor unions have made it a central issue in their ongoing mobilization for substantial wage increases.

The challenge is, of course, for nations to see beyond what appears to be their own, apparently localized, "chaos potentials," to see the greater issue, the collapse of the entire world global system. As LaRouche succinctly posed this issue two days ago, "The whole is not the sum of its parts."

That's not to say that the German labor movement is not attempting useful interventions, the fact that sections of the German labor movement are using a postcard with the quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the necessity of a minimum wage, presents us with a definite basis of an approach to solving the crisis. Firewall real productive economic activity from the speculation madness; fix the U.S. Dollar, and you may be well on your way to preventing global hell.