August 6, 2007 (LPAC)--Today in France, Jacques Cheminade, head of Solidarite et Progress, the organization of LaRouche co-thinkers in France, released the following statement. The original, in French, can be found on the website, http://www.solidariteetprogres.org/spip/sp_article.php3?id_article=3176. Cheminade writes:
The trip by Cecilia Sarkozy and then [President] Nicolas Sarkozy to Libya met with real success: not only were the Bulgarian nurses freed, but France became involved in Libya with its most important strategic asset, nuclear energy. Moreover, a new concept was developed there, desalinating seawater by means of the atom. For a long time, Lyndon LaRouche and Jacques Cheminade have defended this concept, with the idea of generating enough usable water to avoid depleting groundwater reserves and fossil water resources, over exploited by Tripoli, Libya's capital, so far.
Nothing is served, as the French Socialists are doing, by questioning whether the overture is opportunistic.....
More important, for once, the President of the French Republic is calling into question the theses of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the American neo-conservatives -- according to a July 26 Reuters wire -- that a policy which begins with the principle that the Arab world "is not intelligent enough to use nuclear energy" would threaten the long run to set off a "war of civilizations."
In addition, the French nuclear giant, Areva, the world's leader in nuclear energy, is also financing two modern EPR nuclear power plants in China. In Niger, thanks to a renewed agreement with the Niamey government, Areva will continue mining some of the largest uranium deposits in the world. Also in the energy domain, the oil company, Total, was chosen to take a 25% share in Russia's Shtokman natural gas field in the Barents Sea, one of the most important in the world. In Sudan, Total won out over Britain's White Nile for the right to exploit "Block B" concession. Hence, France's position in these fundamental domains is solid and that is good news for the interests of France, and also for world economic development.
But, a fundamental issue remains. Talking about new energy resources, necessarily implies considering economic development, and talking about economic development, necessarily implies talking about great infrastructure works and industrial strategy. To bring those about, one has to emit massive credit, on a long-term basis and at low interest. But the current financial and monetary systems forbids recourse to this type of credit and the European Central Bank's announced interest rate hike for September 6 is not of the nature to reverse the general trend, quite the contrary. Especially, the current disintegration of the international financial and monetary system raises the question of any prospect for growth in the real economy.
For that reason, while we might rejoice in the French efforts in the energy domain, we cannot but acknowledge that the financial backing for their fulfillment does not exist, for lack of political vision and because of the pressure exerted by the European and international financier groupings that brought Sarkozy to power. The domestic policy of our government is radically opposite to the policies carried out by Harry Hopkins during his first week in the Roosevelt Administration, which gave a strong impetus to employment, especially productive employment, around the great project of the New Deal.
Don't we have to tell Mr. Sarkozy to find his inspiration there, with FDR, as also in the planning of Louis Armand and Pierre Massé, rather than in submitting to rentier-finance capital and to the logic of the hedge funds? Nuclear power, indeed, cannot be reduced to the construction of third-generation power plants, but requires the development of the fourth generation--the high-temperature reactors--and of controlled thermonuclear fusion power, together with the physical and human transformation of the economic environment around the power systems as such. That requires a new mode of financing, the one we propose to study in the framework of a new international economic order, a "New Bretton Woods" and a "Global New Deal." That is what we are fighting for.
