Verden er et bedre og tryggere sted uden Wall Street
Helga Zepp-LaRouche-pressekonference i Kina: “Den Nye Silkevej bliver til Verdenslandbroen” udgivet på kinesisk. Wall Street er dømt til snarlig undergang, færdig; Indfør omgående Glass-Steagall, forebyggende! LaRouche om koalitionen mod ISIS: Gør det! Der er en global, strategisk alliance: En Geneve III-politisk løsning på krisen i Syrien vil nu være mulig. Engelsk udskift.
LaRouche PAC Webcast, October 2, 2015
[proofed against the audio]
The World Is a Better and Safer Place Without Wall Street:
Dump Wall Street, Get Glass-Steagall, Bring Back Hamilton
MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening. It’s October 2, 2015. My name is
Matthew Ogden, and you’re joining us for our weekly webcast here
from larouchepac.com. We are recording here a few hours before
live show time, just to let you know, in case anything drastic
changes, but we are fresh from a discussion which we had with Mr.
LaRouche earlier today. I’m joined in the studio by Jeffrey
Steinberg from {Executive Intelligence Review}, and Benjamin
Deniston from the LaRouche PAC Scientific Team.
Obviously, we’re convening here at a very momentous time in
history. This is a week which began with the events at the United
Nations General Assembly meeting, most significantly, the
speeches on Monday by both Vladimir Putin and President Xi
Jinping of China. Now that was happening on the inside of the
United Nations building. On the outside, and in the entire
general area of Manhattan, the LaRouche movement was making a
very significant intervention which had a significant impact on
the proceedings of the United Nations, and the discussions around
that. And those of you who listened to, or had the opportunity to
listen to the 20th Fireside Chat with Mr. LaRouche that occurred
last night, Thursday night, you heard a short report by one of
the LaRouchePAC activists about what those interventions have
been. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkd4v0hiiY]
Now, simultaneous with the United Nations General Assembly
meeting in New York City, another significant leader of the
LaRouche movement, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, was in China. She was
participating in a series of meetings, and very significantly,
got to participate in a press conference announcing the
publication of the {Executive Intelligence Review} Special
Report, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge,” which
was now published in Chinese, and is available in the Chinese
language, and we can be sure is already beginning to circulate
widely in China.
[https://larouchepac.com/20150930/eirs-silk-road-report-chinese-
presented-beijing-press-conference]
In the days subsequent to the beginning of this week, we’ve
seen a very significant, dramatic shift in world events, and I
know this is something which will be elaborated a little bit
later in our broadcast. But obviously we’ve seen the Russian air
strikes against ISIS in Syria, and this has created really a
chasm, a schism, inside the United States, where Obama himself is
finding himself completely edged out, and isolated, whereas
significant leadership inside the senior leadership of the United
States, including John Kerry and others, and also other members
of Obama’s own Democratic Party–Congressman Tulsi Gabbard is one
significant example of this–have distanced themselves, and
distinguished themselves, from Obama, and have said, this is a
necessary action on the part of Vladimir Putin, and one that
should be supported.
Mr. LaRouche was also clear to point out that Europe is
beginning to realign itself as well vis-à-vis these actions by
Russia.
Now, the primary point that Mr. LaRouche wanted us to begin
tonight’s broadcast with, was the implosion of the Wall
Street-based financial system. And this is what I’m going to ask
Jeffrey Steinberg to elaborate on, to begin our broadcast here
tonight.
Let me just paraphrase a little bit of what Mr. LaRouche had
to say in our meeting earlier, before I ask Jeff to come to the
podium. What Mr. LaRouche emphatically stated was that this
financial system is on the verge of a total implosion. It’s not
just a crash, but the entire thing is about to cease to exist.
And that means the entire system must be changed. What do we say?
Dump Wall Street! We need a total reorganization of this entire
bankrupt system, because we’re experiencing a general breakdown
of both the U.S. and the European financial systems. Therefore,
action must be taken to shut this thing down. Nothing can be done
to save it, he said.
The United States, as a nation, isn’t bankrupt, but Wall
Street is, and there’s no solution within the current form of
this financial system. The entire system must be put into
receivership. He said, either way, Wall Street is finished.
Either finished on its own accord, or finished because of a
decisive action that’s taken by patriots within the United States
government. It’s intrinsically bankrupt, according to any
rational physical economic standard of measurement, and all you
have to do is look at the facts. It’s happening now, and that’s
not a bad thing. It’s actually good, and we should make the point
that Wall Street disappearing is good for the future of the
American people. It should have happened a long time ago; it
just needs to be cleaned up. The garbage has to be taken out, so
that we can get our people back to productive work.
So that was a short paraphrase of what Mr. LaRouche had to
say. I’m going to ask Jeff to come to the podium, elaborate a
little bit more on the context of this, to begin our broadcast
here tonight.
JEFF STEINBERG: Last week a number of leading figures in
both Wall Street and the City of London were bracing themselves,
waiting to see whether the Federal Open Market Committee at the
Fed was going to begin the process of normalizing interest rates,
by raising them for the first time in seven or eight years by
one-quarter of 1%. There was {absolute} panic and pandemonium
over the prospect of that taking place, and statements were
issued from the City of London, the IMF Managing Director
Christine Lagarde, saying that if the Fed raises rates, it may
very well trigger a blowout of the entire system, and then the
Fed will be holding the bag, taking the blame for a financial
blowout.
Well, the simple fact of the matter is that the Wall Street
system is bankrupt, and by Wall Street system, I mean the
extended system of gambling that exists on Wall Street, that
dominates the City of London. You would got around the globe.
You’ve got Frankfurt. You’ve got Paris. You’ve got Dubai in the
Middle East. You’ve got Macao and Hong Kong in the Pacific region.
These are all centers in which there is virtually no connection
any more between the activities in the real economy, and the
gambling and churning of gambling money that’s going on in the
financial sector.
So there is nothing that can be done to avoid the fact that
at some point very soon, there will be a trigger incident. It
could be virtually anything. And it could be the beginning of a
very rapid, total evaporation of this entire mountain of debt,
and what Mr. LaRouche has also been emphasizing, is that the
danger in this situation is that if there is not immediate
pre-emptive action, before that blowout occurs, then what you’re
likely to see is a period of total chaos, in which the bankruptcy
of the financial bubble creates a system of chaos in the real
economy, where you wind up with very destructive developments,
with social chaos, in which the real people of the United States
and other parts of the world become once again, but on a much
more dangerous scale, the victims of this kind of chaos.
So the point is very simple. There’s got to be pre-emptive
action now to put Wall Street in its entirety out of its misery.
And the simple first step to be taken in that direction is to
reinstate Glass-Steagall. By reinstating Glass-Steagall, and
making it clear, that this mountain of gambling debt will never
again be bailed out by taxpayers’ funds.
The simple fact of stating that means, that the entire Wall
Street system will immediately blow out. Someone is going to
panic; someone is going to make a margin call, because so much of
this gambling debt, is built on borrowed money that the whole
thing will evaporate. But the crucial thing is that you’ve got
to first create a clean and total separation between commercial
banking, which does impact on the real economy and this gambling
debt; this mountain of gambling debt that’s sitting there as a
parasite on the real economy. If you make that separation by
passing Glass-Steagall in the United States, this will be the
basis for immediate action in other parts of the world. So in
effect, by acting here in the United States, we will create the
conditions for a global Glass-Steagall separation, and then all
of this gambling debt can just evaporate.
Now, an illustrative case of this: Back in 1998, when you
had the beginnings of a whole sequence of debt blow-outs, in
Japan, you had a large number of Japanese banks that were
basically bankrupt and were going to have to be put through
bankruptcy reorganization. Under those conditions, those banks
posed a systemic risk, not just in Japan, but globally. There
were some people in the Japanese Finance Ministry who understood,
and still had a memory of the difference between productive
investment, legitimate commercial banking activity, and the
gambling activities that had infected the whole international
banking system.
And so, those banks were basically audited, and all of the
derivative contracts, all of the international gambling
contracts that those banks had were simply cancelled. The
counterparties were contacted and given the option, of netting
out those contracts; or facing the consequences of losing those
funds, those gambling debts that nobody had sufficient funds to
be able to even remotely cover. So, in the case of Japan, the
gambling debts were cancelled, and then the banks were put
through reorganization; there was no systemic risk.
At the same time, in the Summer of 1998, Alan Greenspan —
who was in the final phases of the elimination of Glass-Steagall
as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and formerly a senior
partner at JP Morgan when the plan was hatched in the mid-’80s to
wipe out Glass-Steagall. Instead what Greenspan did was, he
called in all of the counterparties of Long Term Capital
Management [LTCM], a relatively small, offshore hedge fund
located in the Dutch Antilles. But they had derivative contracts
tied to the Russian debt, which the Russians defaulted on, the
famous GKO scandal of 1998.
And so, LCTM, rather than being put through an orderly
reorganization by netting out those derivatives contracts;
Greenspan called in all of the counterparties, and wouldn’t let
them leave the room until they bailed out LTCM. So, on the one
hand, you had a cancellation of the derivatives; on the other
hand, you had a hyperinflationary bail-out. Really just the
beginning of a hyperinflationary process that went off the charts
a year later, when Glass-Steagall was repealed. And then it was
really off to the races; with everything invested in gambling
and virtually nothing going into the real economy.
So now here we are, it’s October of 2015. We had a
shake-out of the bubble in 2008, and now it’s back once again
with a vengeance, because there was no change in policy. The
Dodd-Frank bill with the Volcker Rule was a sick joke; it did
nothing to change anything. So now, the too-big-to-fail banks
have accrued a greater amount of gambling debt than they
previously had. That debt cannot and will not ever be paid.
So, by any scientific measurement, all of Wall Street is
hopelessly bankrupt; and so long as you remain in the trap of the
current system, nothing can be done about that. And we’re headed
very soon — perhaps in a matter of days or weeks or months — to
a point where the entire system blows out; the entire
trans-Atlantic system evaporates, literally overnight. And then
you’ve got social chaos on a very, very broad and dangerous
scale.
So, there is no money. Your money, your personal
investments in mutual funds or Wall Street stocks, or anything
like that; there’s nothing there to protect. It can’t be
protected; and in fact, what’s going on right now on the eve of
the annual Autumn meeting of the IMF, scheduled to take place in
the next few weeks in Peru, are calls all over the place for a
new surge of hyperinflationary quantitative easing. You’ve got
the European Central Bank about to extend its QE program towards
the end of 2018; in other words, a massive hyperinflationary
bail-out that will further erode the real economy.
So, Wall Street is dead; the funeral should have already
taken place long ago. And now we’re at a point where that system
must be completely shut down. Cancel out all the derivatives;
separate the banks under Glass-Steagall, into commercial banks
and let everything fall off the edge of the cliff. Because it’s
unpayable, it’s illegal, it’s commingled with massive amounts of
criminal money; it serves no purpose whatsoever. The world is a
better and safer place without those Wall Street activities;
without the City of London, without the activities in Frankfurt
and Paris and these other parasitical financial capitals.
Glass-Steagall right now, immediately. And we’ve got a
political context in which President Obama, although he is not
down all together, is greatly weakened. And you can put a {fait
accompli} on his desk and force the signing of Glass-Steagall.
If he refuses to do that, then he’s out under the 25th Amendment;
because to not do it, in the face of this imminent blow-out of
Wall Street, would be an act of criminal insanity that warrants
his removal from office.
So, that’s the story. Wall Street is doomed. If you listen
to idiots like Christine Lagarde, or Ambrose Evans-Pritchard over
at the London {Daily Telegraph}, they’re saying, “Gee, we’re not
sure if this is a systemic crisis, or some minor cyclical problem
that we can just weather by printing a bit more money.” They’re
either idiots, or criminal liars, or both.
The fact of the matter is, Wall Street is dead; it’s dead in
the water. Nothing can be done to save it. And the question is,
do you want that doom to spread to the real economy; to the real
population that’s already suffering enough? Or, are you prepared
to fight to insure that the right preemptive measures are taken
now? Because a week from now may be too late; we don’t know how
close we are to the edge. Well-informed insiders from London and
Wall Street thought that we were about to blow out a week and a
half ago, had the Fed gone through the small step of simply
raising interest rates and shifting the directionality. There’s
a million and one potential small triggers out there, but the
triggers are not the real issue. The real issue is that the
entire system is doomed; and we’ve got to take the right remedial
action before the doom spreads into the real world of real
people, and then it’s too late.
Franklin Roosevelt had an understanding of the kinds of
measures that have to be taken. On the one hand, the
Glass-Steagall Act and other measures that secured depositors
funds in the commercial banks; shut out the gambling debt. But
then Franklin Roosevelt also moved on for massive credit
emissions into the real economy. He did the TVA; he created a
massive number of jobs through various public works programs,
much of which became the kind of infrastructure-building
projects, major dam projects, municipal buildings, roads; all
the kinds of things that were the necessary preparations and
foundations for what became the “arsenal of democracy,” the
enormous economic surge that occurred, when the United States was
on the verge of entering into war, against Nazi Germany and
Japan. So, Roosevelt had the formula.
The situation today is far more dangerous, far more severe,
than it was at the time of Roosevelt. But the principles, the
American System principles, that Roosevelt understood and acted
on, are the recipe for success today. But the starting point is
to simply face the reality and act preemptively on the fact that
Wall Street’s dead. Give it a decent funeral, but pay no respect
whatsoever to this quadrillions of dollars, of strictly gambling
debt that have been built up since the repeal of Glass-Steagall
in particular.
What Mr. LaRouche has emphasized, is that this process goes
back–really the beginning of the decline in actual productivity
in the U.S. economy, started with the death of Franklin
Roosevelt. It accelerated tremendously after the assassination of
John Kennedy, and particularly after Nixon took the world off the
Bretton Woods fixed- exchange-rate system. That was the era when
people like George H.W. Bush and his underlings began to come in
and greatly accelerated the process of take-down of the real
economy.
So, we’re at the point now: Wall Street’s doomed; it’s
finished. So, let’s do the right thing.
BENJAMIN DENISTON: Thanks, Jeff. Now for the second element
of our show today, I’m going to shift to the dramatic and ongoing
change in the world strategic framework, specifically with the
situation in and around Syria, as the major focal point for this
shift.
Now, this is the subject of the institutional question which
has been posed to Mr. LaRouche this week. But before posing that
question and asking Jeff to deliver Mr. LaRouche’s response, I’d
like to add just a little bit of background.
Over the recent few weeks, we have been seeing the
development of a very clear and decisive break with Barack Obama.
This has been coming from, really, around the entire world,
coming from Russia, coming from China, coming from Europe, and as
Matthew mentioned in the opening, as well as from within
institutions of the United States. And I think it’s important to
recall, that it was just a few months ago, in late July, that the
former director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Gen.
Michael Flynn, in an interview with Al Jazeera, had said that for
years President Obama has been willfully ignoring the DIA’s
warnings about the growing threat of radical jihadist-terrorist
networks in Iraq and Syria, the forces which have subsequently
become what we now call ISIS. General Flynn made it absolutely
clear that this was not just negligence or a failure, but this
has been the conscious policy of the Obama White House, in effect
protecting and supporting the growth and the solidification of
ISIS.
Now, at the same time, in this recent period, there’s been
an increasing recognition that this massive surge of refugees
fleeing into Europe, are actually running from the effect of
Obama’s policies; that Obama’s policies have been responsible for
driving this refugee crisis.
In this context, just this past Wednesday at the United
Nations Security Council, there was a meeting to discuss how to
combat the growing threat of terrorism. And both the Chinese and
Russian foreign ministers have made very clear, that in this
fight against terrorism–what’s happening in the Middle East–the
sovereignty of the Syrian nation must be respected, obviously in
direct contradiction and conflict with Obama’s calls for regime
change in Syria, and the removal of the government there.
Also this week, we saw more signs of support of this shift,
also coming from Europe, with the Swiss foreign minister saying
that the Syrian government needs to be included in a broad
dialogue to settle the conflict there, and the president of the
European Parliament calling for the inclusion of Russia and Iran
in an international coalition to resolve the conflict in Syria.
Perhaps most dramatic, as, again, Matthew referenced in the
beginning, and as I’m sure all of you have seen, Russia has now
initiated a series of coordinated air campaigns and strategic
bombings against ISIS and other terrorist elements which have
been otherwise, frankly, operating under the protection of
Obama’s policies.
So, in this context of a whole array of moves indicating a
shift in the world situation, around this pivot in Syria, the
following institutional question was posed to Mr. LaRouche:
“At the special UN Security Council session on terrorism
this week, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for the
convening of a Geneva III conference on Syria, with no
preconditions, and with participation of all interested parties.
What are your thoughts on China’s proposal at the UN Security
Council?”
I’d like to invite Jeff to deliver Mr. LaRouche’s response
to this question.
STEINBERG: The short answer that Mr. LaRouche gave to the
question, was two simple words: “Do it!” I’ll elaborate a bit.
You’ve had a policy, as Ben just indicated, of tolerance for
the growth and expansion of the Islamic State, of the Nusra
Front, of other similar jihadist-Salafist organizations; you’ve
got the so-called Army of Conquest, of which Nusra is now a
part–all of them operating inside Iraq and inside Syria. Despite
the fact that there’s a supposed coalition of 60 countries waging
combat against these organizations, they seem to miraculously
continue to expand their territorial holds. Despite the fact that
they’re under attack and under surveillance and scrutiny, they
keep managing, somehow or other, to get new recruits slipping
across the international borders, into Syria, into Iraq, to the
point, that several months back, the CIA estimated that the
Islamic State had 15,000 fighters total; and just in the last
several weeks, they’ve revised that number up to at least 25,000,
perhaps 30,000.
In other words, if you factor in the fact that some of them
are being killed, through the bombings, through combat
operations, — particularly the Kurds have been quite effective
against ISIS–they’ve obviously been swelling their ranks, with
very little to stand in the way.
Now, here you have a coalition. Some of the leading players
in the, quote, “U.S.-led coalition,” are Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, Kuwait; and it’s well-known, that the major entrée point
for foreign fighters coming into Syria, is across the border from
Turkey. There’s a very lucrative black-market smuggling route,
that runs between Turkey and Raqqa , which is the capital city of
the ISIS area in northern Syria. The Turkish government, the
ruling party, the AKP, and particularly, the immediate circles
around President Erdogan, are making money hands-over-fist
through these black-market dealings with the Nusra Front, with
the Islamic State, and with these other Salafist terrorist
networks.
So, a simple question is: What coalition against ISIS? It
doesn’t exist! It’s been a fraud from the beginning.
So now the Russians have stepped in, and they’ve done it
within the framework of international law. There was a formal
authorization for the use of military force, that the Russian
Federation Council voted up unanimously to President Putin. So,
in other words, unlike President Obama, who never went to
Congress, the Russian state structures have given authorization.
The Syrian government of Bashar Assad formally invited Russia to
participate. Russia has established an information-sharing center
that will be up and functioning within a matter of days or weeks
in Bagdad, with Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Russia participating. So,
in other words, all the elements are being put in place for an
actual serious assault against this terrorist infrastructure. And
last night overnight, Russian bombers carried out 18 sorties
against Raqqa, which is the province and the capital city of the
entire ISIS-controlled area inside northern Syria and Iraq.
So, in other words, you’re seeing a serious military
operation for the first time. And the Syrian armed forces have
been depleted dramatically by four years, four and a half years,
of combat against a force that’s been continuously beefed up,
armed, supplied with new recruits, from an entire jihadist
apparatus from around the world.
And the Russians know, by the way, that there are now an
estimated 5,000 Chechen fighters in the ranks of the Islamic
State, fighting inside Iraq and Syria. And so this poses an
immediate serious, really grave security threat to Russia.
So Russia is not sitting back, is not running a phony war.
Russia is in there. They’re serious, and this is a strategic
game-changer.
The reason that the White House is hysterical over this is
that there is this so-called coalition. The United States is
protecting Saudi Arabia, and by extension, protecting the
British-Saudi Arabian dirty deals that have created this jihadist
problem in the first place. Qatar, Turkey, all supposed members
of the Obama-led coalition, are all on the other side. They’re
all actively supporting the spreading of the Islamic State and
the Nusra Front.
General David Petraeus, the so-called hero of the surge, who
is now an official adviser to the Obama White House and the
National Security Council, has called for the United States to
openly support the Nusra Front. That’s to say, openly support
al-Qaeda, the same al-Qaeda that did 9/11; the same al-Qaeda that
in 2012 killed the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, and three other
American diplomats. But fortunately, that noise, that policy from
the Obama White House, has been substantially suppressed.
There are other elements in the U.S. military that are
prepared very much to work with the Russians. Secretary of State
John Kerry has become the point person for a different U.S.
policy, a policy that he’s been working out for months in
coordination with the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, and back
during his meeting in the spring in Sochi, directly with
President Putin. So Kerry in a CNN interview several days ago,
made it clear: He said, there is a new policy. And the new policy
is, we are not insisting on instantaneous regime change. We’re
not going to go there. We’re not going to do a Saddam Hussein.
We’re not going to do a Muammar Qaddafi. There’s going to be a
transition. The governing institutions are going to be preserved.
We’re going to be patient. We’re not going to allow Syria to fall
into chaos, and we’ll work with the Russians militarily.
So the Russians are making it clear. They’re carrying out
real combat operations, and they are out for blood. They’re going
to wipe out the Islamic State, and increasingly, China, India,
Germany, France, many of the countries in Europe that are now
overwhelmed by the refugee flow from ISIS, from Nusra, they’re
onboard.
So you have a global strategic realignment, which means,
yes, the prospects of a Geneva III political solution to the
Syria crisis is now viable, and feasible. You’ve got China,
Russia, India, Germany, France somewhat more reluctantly, all
ready to go on this, and you’re got Iran, Syria, and elements
within the United States who have basically sidelined, but not
yet eliminated the Obama presidency, who are ready to go with
this.
Again, as Mr. LaRouche said very simply, “Do it!”
OGDEN: Thank you very much, Jeff. So with those two
elements of the current strategic picture presented to you here,
before I conclude this webcast, I just want to go back and
re-emphasize what Mr. LaRouche asked us to open this broadcast
with. And I want to do so by reading a short passage from what
Mr. LaRouche had to say last night on the National Activists’
telephone call, the so-called Thursday night Fireside Chat. And
this is what Mr. LaRouche said about Wall Street:
“The United States economy is about to collapse, and it’s a
real collapse. All of Wall Street is bankrupt, and worthless. If
the United States were to try and go along, and try to do
business with Wall Street, and Wall Street institutions, that
would be a disaster. Because Wall Street would itself collapse,
since it’s already in a rate of collapse. If we let Wall Street
go ahead, and do its own collapsing, the result would be a
disaster for most of the people of the United States on a very
large scale.
“So we have to get rid of Wall Street, immediately. We have
to junk it. Point out the fact that it’s worthless, that it’s
only a complete fraud. It has no economic value whatsoever,
except that of trash. And so therefore, we’re going to have to
get a radical change in the organization of the financial system
of the United States for two reasons: first of all, to maintain
an economy that will function for the United States population;
second of all, to protect the United States {against} the
influence of Wall Street. Because if Wall Street goes on its own,
and takes the dive that it will take, automatically, under those
circumstances the people of the United States may be starving all
over the place. Because if the United States collapses, then the
U.S. economy will itself be in a disastrous condition. That is,
the financial system will collapse.
“And therefore, we have to get rid of the Wall Street
system, and {we} have to collapse it in a controlled way. And
then use that method of controlled action against Wall Street, in
order to make the kind of re-organization that Franklin Roosevelt
did in dealing with Wall Street in an earlier period. And that’s
what has to happen.”
So, with that said, I’d like to encourage everybody, if you
haven’t heard it yet, go back and listen to this discussion with
Mr. LaRouche last night. This is the 20th Fireside Chat. Mr.
LaRouche will also be engaging in his weekly discussion with
activists in New York City tomorrow, and the intervention of the
LaRouche movement on the streets of Manhattan is continuing, as
we come out of this week, and into the following.
So, I’d like to thank you for joining us here tonight, and
please stay tuned to larouchepac.com.
