November 2, 2007 (LPAC)--In the spirit of LaRouche's Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, former French presidential candidate Jacques Cheminade drafted a national call to protect "our living standard," since "the financial crash is not any longer limited to bank accounts and speculative funds, it descends on our tables, and hits the price of the energy we consume and the cost of our housing."

Cheminade's call could not arrive at a better moment: 35,000 to 50,000 Frenchmen got hooked up into "negative amortization" due to adjustable interest rates while prices of oil, agricultural goods and food are skyrocketing. Over a one year period wheat increased (+ 140%), soy (+67%), powder milk (+67%), corn (+50%) and butter (+48%). "The world's inventories of cereals are at a thirty year low in the same way as inventories of wheat were at its lowest at the eve of the French Revolution," noted Cheminade while adding the worst has still to come: "Inventories will run out, prices will skyrocket and human suffering will worsen." "Sarkozy does not want to hurt the financial interests which are the cause of the catastrophe" says Cheminade, but something can be done in the name of those principles of "natural law" that are "inscribed in our fundamental laws":

1) "The preamble of the French Constitution states that: "The nation guarantees the individual and the family the necessary condition for their development" including "health protection, material security, rest and leisure." "That basic principle is above any other legislation. It is part of the 'inalienable and sacred rights' established by our victory against Nazism and also written in the program of the National Council of the Resistance of March 15, 1944."

2) The French commerce legislation "stipulates in article 410-2 that if prices of goods and services are freely determined by the interaction of competition, 'the provisions of the two first indents do not forbid the government, by decree of the State Council, to undertake temporary measures motivated by a crisis situation, under exceptional circumstances'"

From that standpoint, Cheminade defines three immediate measures of regulation (shields) and seven offensive measures (swords):

-Consumption: Price regulation according to a "household basket of goods";

-Housing: Evictions will be frozen and payments of monthly rents and amortizations of credits will be capped below twenty percent of people's income.

-Transport: gasoline and other fuel prices will be kept down by reintroducing a regulation tax (TIPP).

Beyond protective measures, Cheminade outlined seven political tasks to win that battle:

1) Reject the European "simplified" treaty, which blocks productive credit.

2) Fight of a Eurasian landbridge perspective of mutual development insuring world peace;

3) Issue sufficient amounts of credit for physical and human infrastructure expansion;

4) Fight for a new Bretton Woods that puts the current financial system officially in bankruptcy reorganization;

5) Create a new institution to develop and regulate a fair use of natural resources;

6) Return to a parity price system in agriculture;

7) Scrap all fiscal advantages for bio-fuels.

Cheminade concluded that "Without this willingness, the cupidity of a minority will destroy the resources of the future of all. The choice is between the collapse of life in a organized form of society or unprecedented development with modern technologies, equipment and social justice. That choice depends on us. And on you who just read this."