This article appears in the October 18, 2013 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

LaRouche PAC Ad Hits D.C.:

Pass Glass-Steagall Now!

[PDF version of this article]

Oct. 16—While President Obama and most members of Congress continue to negotiate over ever-more-draconian cuts in the living standards of the American population, the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee has determined to cut through the insanity, with a clarion call for the only policy which would begin to resolve the current crisis: the re-enactment of FDR's Glass-Steagall law.

LaRouche PAC has taken out an ad in the Washington, D.C. Hill newspaper (http://thehill.com/), which tells Congress in no uncertain terms to find the courage to act. "It is time for Congress to break with the Wall Street banksters, their stooge in the White House, and their stooges on Capitol Hill." The ad appeared in print today, and will appear in digital form Oct. 17.

Within less than a week, 41 political and constituency leaders across the United States, plus 4 international officials, have endorsed the ad, which is headlined: "We Stopped Obama's Unconstitutional War in Syria, Now Stop Obama's Wall Street War on the United States of America, Pass Glass-Steagall Now!"

Ten state legislators are joined by local elected officials, trade union leaders, and some prominent personalities—such as Peace and Freedom Party Presidential candidate Roseanne Barr, and economist Lyndon LaRouche—in signing the ad. The ad is available at http://archive.larouchepac.com/node/28553.

The Hill tabloid appears in both print and digital form. Over 23,000 copies circulate in Washington. and copies are e-mailed to 60,000 digital subscribers.

The Genocide Agenda

While the government shutdown and debt ceiling talks have gone back and forth for the past two weeks, an underlying agreement among all parties to the negotiations has been in place from the beginning: The banks will be bailed out through a continuation of quantitative easing, while the American people will be subjected to killer austerity to feed that banking bailout. The theatrics of the government shutdown and the last-minute fear-mongering around a potential debt ceiling default have been used by both the White House and the Congress to conceal the fact that they have agreed upon a hard assault against the living standards of a majority of Americans.

What's on the agenda are cuts in both Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, along with cuts in other vital programs, under a continuation of the sequestration. Senators Susan Collins (R-Me.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are openly discussing a budget/debt ceiling deal that would extend the sequestration through March 2014, and referring to the infamous Simpson-Bowles Commission proposals of 2010, which were rejected by Congress at that time, as a potential "bipartisan" model for resolution.

The Simpson-Bowles Commission, which included equal bipartisan representation from both the House and Senate, and a number of Presidential appointees known for their predilection for budget-cutting, was established by Presidential decree in early 2010. It soon became known as the "Catfood Commission," in reference to its open advocacy of cuts in social safety-net programs such as Social Security, which cuts would drive senior citizens into a diet of catfood. Indeed, Presidential appointee and co-chair Alan Simpson, a former Senator from Wyoming, let it all hang out, when he said in an interview in the Summer of 2010: "I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too.... We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits!"

Not surprisingly, the Simpson-Bowles recommendations were heartily endorsed by top Wall Street bankers such as JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon. While they were opposed by "liberal" Democrats, those same Democrats have refused to take on the real authors of the genocide policy by ramming through Glass-Steagall, which was high on the agenda in 2010, as well as today. Thus, they didn't "kill the beast," which is now again at our door.

Obama's Role

Talks between President Obama and Congressional leaders have gone through a roller-coaster process throughout, and, as of this writing, the prospects of a U.S. default and a general breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system loom large. In dialogue with colleagues on Oct. 12, LaRouche warned that the United States has no chance of survival unless President Obama is removed from office, and Glass-Steagall legislation, pending in both the House and the Senate, is passed immediately.

The bottom line, LaRouche warned, is that President Obama has no intention of negotiating any agreement, because he is singularly out to destroy the United States. There is no other explanation for his behavior during the government shutdown. This is, LaRouche noted, what he warned about as early as April 2009, in his now-famous webcast in which he declared that President Obama was a dangerous narcissist and an agent of the London-Wall Street financial oligarchy. It should be recalled that in the past ten days, Obama met at the White House with leading representatives of the international banking establishment, and was told, point-blank, that he was to stop Glass-Steagall at all costs. Stopping Glass-Steagall is tantamount to subjecting the American population to genocide.

The most blood-curdling admission of this genocide agenda was presented in Congressional testimony last week by Frank Keating, the president of the American Bankers Association and a former Federal law enforcement official and governor of Oklahoma (see following article). LaRouche, addressing the nation in his weekly webcast on Oct. 11, reiterated his warnings that the United States is being steered under Obama to policies that are a mirror of the euthanasia program of Hitler.

The appropriate response to this crisis, LaRouche reiterated Oct. 15, is to do immediately what Wall Street fears: that is, pass Glass-Steagall. What we will do, LaRouche stated, is audit their books with the Glass-Steagall principle, and challenge the bankers to demonstrate any value to the piles of paper they have on their books. They won't be able to do it. Their "assets" are all worthless speculation. They will be cut off, and exposed as the bankrupt entities they are; that must be done, because continuing their system means killing off the population.

People Opening Their Eyes

On Oct. 15, a prominent Democratic Party insider confirmed to EIR that President Obama's true colors have now been revealed in his deal with Congressional Republicans to enact murderous austerity cuts under the guise of solving the government shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis. The source freely acknowledged that LaRouche's longstanding warnings about Obama, which had been dismissed by many as "over the top," were now proven totally correct all along.

The Democratic insider noted that it was now clear that the massive cuts to social safety-net programs, along with continuation of the Wall Street bailout, and now the bail-in looting, were all fully set as policy dating back to the Simpson-Bowles Commission operations of the first Obama Administration. From that point on, it was clear that the magnitude of the cuts could never be passed through Congress, and that various forms of technocratic dictatorship had to be imposed to ram through the killer austerity measures. Obama was fully on board with this murderous program from the outset, and had no qualms whatsoever about ripping up the Constitution and turning Congress into a bunch of guilty bystanders.

A second source, also close to the leadership of the Democratic Party, confirmed that the view expressed above was becoming more prevalent among a larger group of policymakers, and that the Democratic Party wing that opposed the austerity policies has been too fragmented to fight effectively, so far, against the combined efforts of the Congressional Republicans and the Obama White House. LaRouche's April 2009 webcast assessment of Obama, the second source confirmed, is now resonating among a larger network. No matter what the immediate outcome of the shutdown/debt-default battle in the coming hours and days, the American people are going to exact electoral revenge on everyone associated with this murderous policy.

The spectacle of the government shutdown and the debt ceiling showdown, however, will be a short-lived phenomenon. The American people are fighting mad and fed up with the Washington scam. In polls this past week, President Obama's approval rating is slipping, while the Congressional approval rating fell to single digits. In one poll, 60% of the people said they are so fed up with both the Democratic and Republican parties that they want to see a genuine third party emerge, and everyone turned out of Washington. Members of Congress seeking re-election next year are about to see the wrath of the American people come down on them for the murderous austerity policies, and for the continuing collapse of the conditions of life. EIR has recently documented the actual hyperinflation in food prices, housing costs, and other necessities (see "Wall Street and the Fed Are Killing with Inflation," EIR, Oct. 11, 2013).

Reverse the Rot!

As LaRouche emphasized in his Oct. 11 webcast, the destruction of the United States has been ongoing for the past dozen years, over the course of the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. But the starting point at which that the United States went into a collapse phase, was 50 years ago with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the shutdown of all of the genuine growth policies that JFK had revived (see this week's Feature.

Behind that decline has been the deliberate intent of the British financial empire to destroy the one nation which has the historical tradition, and the power, to actually reverse the devolution of the world economy—the United States. The credit system of the United States, upon which its actual industrial and technological success was based, is unique among nations, and vital for adoption internationally. To prevent that expansion, the British Empire, through various instrumentalities, has been determined to eliminate those leaders of the United States, such as Lincoln and Kennedy, who were on their way to wiping out their power. If the Empire is not destroyed, it will fulfill its evil vision of a returning to a depopulated feudal world.

Now, the United States and the world have reached a moment of truth: Either Glass-Steagall is reinstated, leading to a program of directed Federal credit for genuine development projects, starting with NAWAPA and a crash program for thermonuclear fusion power as the great energy source of the future, or the United States goes down, and the rest of the world follows. This is the genuine issue underlying the still-unresolved soap opera around the government shutdown and the debt ceiling/default.