January 16, 2015 • Friday Webcast with Jeff Steinberg
Jeff Steinberg addresses many questions in this hard hitting webcast, from the renewed push for the release of the 28 pages, the mass rallies in France, Tony Blair’s attendance at the Republican party retreat, and the insane statement from Ukraine Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, that Russia invaded Ukraine and Germany in World War II.
MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening. It’s January 16th, 2015. I’d like to welcome you to our weekly broadcast here from larouchepac.com of our Friday night webcast. My name is Matthew Ogden, and I’m joined in the studio tonight by both Megan Beets from the LaRouche PAC “Basement” team, as well as Jeffrey Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review.
Now, the three of us have had a number of discussions with both Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche over the last 24 hours, and what you hear tonight will be reflective of their outlook on the strategic situation currently.
So, I’m going to begin with our institutional question for the evening, which I will direct to Jeffrey Steinberg. It reads as follows:
“Following the two terrorist attacks in Paris last week, there was a mass demonstration and other actions by the French institutions that suggest they recognize not only the danger of terrorism, but the danger of backlash in the form of violent reprisals against Muslims, a surrendering of basic constitutional rights, and a revival of right-wing extremism and potential terrorism. Please give us your updated assessment of the French terror attacks, and your recommendations on how nations can deal with this threat which will likely persist into the future.”
JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thank you, Matt. So, we’re now a little over a week into the aftermath of the now two attacks that took place in Paris last Wednesday, and then a second attack later in the week. And in both of these instances, there was the danger, the potential for a very harsh anti-Muslim backlash—the kind of thing that we saw in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks here in the United States, where we had the Patriot Act. We had other, now much more well-known violations of basic constitutional rights of American citizens, and you had, of course, ultimately a completely illegal and unjust, fraudulent invasion of Iraq, which has basically brought about the conditions where you have a growing and spreading phenomenon of global asymmetric warfare that has always been a top-down phenomenon, run by a combination of the British and the Saudi empires.
So, what happened in France at the end of last week was an indication of the approach that should and must be taken to not only deal with the threat of these further asymmetric warfare attacks, but to also deal with the equally grave danger also being engineered and manipulated by the British, of a kind of backlash that can very much lead to the sort of modern expression of fascism that we have among certain Wall Street circles among the Republican Party in the United States, and that we’re seeing in a slightly different expression in Germany as well.
In Germany there is an overwhelming fear being demonstrated in the behavior of, among others, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, at the end of last week, met in Berlin, both privately and then publicly, with the Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatsenyuk. (Remember, this is the famous “our man Yats” who was installed in power by an Anglo-American color revolution, in which Victoria Nuland was one of the principal players on the U.S. side on behalf of the Obama White House.) So, in this instance last week in Germany, Yatsenyuk made an outrageous statement, essentially blaming the “Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany” as a critical event in World War II, which basically turns history completely over on its head, and amounted to simply an apology for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Now, the idea that such an incident could take place, and go without any official-response denunciation from the German government, is indicative of something that Mr. LaRouche sees as a creeping phenomenon, where in Germany there is a deep, underlying fear that the kind of re-emergence of neo-Nazism that we see in Ukraine with the emergence of the Right Sector, Svoboda party, and other remnants of the World War II Banderist networks—the fear is that this can very easily cross into, and creep into Germany.
Now, in contrast to that, the French institutions, working through an otherwise very weak President, responded effectively. They issued a call for national unity, a defense of the French nation. And underlying those actions was a clear understanding on the part of the French that the choice of Paris, and the timing of these attacks was not something that was isolated from major political initiatives that the French government was taking. In effect, [President François] Hollande broke with the British, and broke with those others in Europe and in the United States who have been following the British lead and pushing for a direct strategic confrontation with Russia—a confrontation that could very, very easily shift all the way into a general war that becomes a thermonuclear war of extinction.
So, Hollande basically said, “No more sanctions against Russia. We’ve got to strive to re-normalize relations with Moscow, and we’ve got to resume the kind of cooperation that’s the only basis for dealing with exactly the kind of problems that we saw in the two attacks, the terrorist incidents in Paris.” Namely, unless you have coordination with Russia, and also with China, you will not solve the problem of international terrorism; you will not have the effective combination of forces, free from the controls of the British and the Saudis, to be able to actually prevent this from happening.
Now, we spoke at some length last week in this broadcast about a critical event that took place in Washington, D.C. a week ago Wednesday, which was the Capitol Hill press conference by Sen. Bob Graham, by Representatives Walter Jones, Stephen Lynch, and representatives of the 9/11 families. They basically escalated the campaign to demand the declassification of the 28 pages from the original Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11—an inquiry that was actually chaired by Senator Graham. Those 28 pages that detailed the direct involvement of the Saudi royal family, particularly the Saudi ambassador in the United States at that time, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, in the financing and logistical support for the 9/11 terrorists.
Had those 28 pages been released as part of the original Joint Congressional Inquiry that was completed during the latter part of 2002, the United States could not have possibly continued with the policy of condoning the role of the Saudis and the British in promoting the spread of not just jihadist terrorism, but every other form of terrorism and asymmetric warfare that we’re confronted with today around the globe. That includes the scourge of the international drug trade, which could not exist without the top-down collusion of the major City of London financial institutions that have been caught over and over again laundering drug money and actually providing a controlling factor over the flow of $1 trillion in illegal drugs that spread around the world, and spread poison on an annual basis.
So, you have the problem of the City of London and their allies and flunkies, including those in the Obama Administration, who have perpetuated the cover-up of the 9/11 truth, namely the direct hand of the Saudis and the British in supporting and sponsoring and promoting the 9/11 attacks. If that truth is fully revealed to the public through the releasing of those 28 pages, this will begin the process of completely overhauling the international approach to dealing with terrorism. It will no longer be seen as a bottoms-up phenomenon. It will be seen as a top-down form of imperial asymmetric warfare run by London and its allies; and once that exposure has been accomplished, then it will be impossible for those forces to continue to operate.
That’s how you defeat terrorism. You don’t take it on on a local-by-local basis. You go for the jugular, you go for the head of the problem, and that head resides in London and in Riyadh with a very large cast of accompanying allies and assets and dupes, including in the Obama Administration here in Washington. People scratch their heads and say, “What’s the political motive for Obama to be refusing to release the 28 pages? After all, this is a scandal of the Bush era, and it’s a scandal that particularly will be devastating at this moment to the Bush family at the point that Jeb Bush, the former Governor of Florida, has announced that he’s running for President, for the Republican nomination. So, why in God’s name would Obama be withholding the release of that?”
The answer is that there is a deeper control over Obama. It’s Wall Street, and, by extension, it’s London. And therefore that’s what’s being protected: the Anglo-Saudi control and authorship of international terrorism.
Germany has refused to break and to join with France and Italy and other countries that are demanding the full exposure, top-down, of the problem. The Russians are fully conscious of it; they’re fully conscious of the role of the British and the Saudis in sponsoring global terrorism. The United States, on the other hand, is so-called involved in a military action to defeat the Islamic State in partnership with who? in partnership with the British, with the Saudis, and a number of other smaller Gulf Cooperation Council Sunni countries of the Persian Gulf, who are all allies and really subsidiaries of Saudi Arabia.
So, there is only one solution, and that’s to wipe out the power of the City of London, to wipe out the power of Wall Street, and to bring down those in Saudi Arabia who have been the sources of support and funding for the kind of terrorism that we saw play out on 9/11, that we saw play out in Benghazi on 9/11 in 2012, and that we saw last week in Paris. So, the only viable approach, the only workable serious solution, is to get serious about ending the reign of tyranny of this Anglo-Saudi apparatus.
OGDEN: Great. Thank you very much. Now, really right along the same lines of what you just stated about the role of the British being behind the Saudi terror apparatus, Mr. LaRouche has emphasized in discussions this week, that the same enemy which is behind this Saudi terror system is the enemy which is behind Wall Street. It’s one and the same, and that enemy is the British Empire. That’s the enemy that must be identified, and that’s the enemy that must be destroyed.
The breaking news for this week is the re-introduction of the Glass-Steagall bill into the House of Representatives. Marcy Kaptur is the primary sponsor, along with Walter Jones. The bill is H.R.381, and there are 15 other co-sponsors. And the people who are watching this broadcast know perfectly well the role that the LaRouche Movement played in the last session of Congress to accumulate over 80 co-sponsors on the previous bill.
Now, the re-introduction of Glass-Steagall coincides directly with the total showdown that’s going on against Wall Street being led by the LaRouche Movement. Wall Street is desperately trying to utilize their new Republican majority in both the House and the Senate to repeal whatever little bits and pieces existed or remained within Dodd-Frank of regulations, ramming through H.R. 37 on Wednesday, rolling back yet another regulation on derivatives speculation. However, this is yet one more of the pyrrhic victories that Wall Street has rammed down the throat of Congress, which really serves only to underscore exactly what LaRouche PAC has been saying for years now: It’s Glass-Steagall or nothing. There’s no middle ground.
Now, certain people are beginning to recognize this reality quite clearly. If you recall at the end of the previous session of Congress, when Jamie Dimon teamed up with Obama and John Boehner to try to steamroll Congress into passing the so-called “swaps push-out clause” as a rider to the Budget Bill. In response to this, we saw an initial mobilization by a certain faction of Democrats led by Elizabeth Warren and others on the House side, who identified this as “a Glass-Steagall moment,” in those words. Now, over the last few days we’re seeing a number of major leading U.S. newspapers writing that: Look, instead of fighting a series of rear-guard actions within the Democratic minority to try to preserve the scraps of an already gutted and impotent Dodd-Frank, there is discussion on the inside of the Democratic Party that they’re beginning to recognize that their strategy may be, perhaps should be what Mr. LaRouche has said all along: to “go big” and do what they didn’t do following the 2008 crisis under the influence of Wall Street lobbying who prevented the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall at that time.
I think the column in USA Today was actually very clear. They said: “The hodgepodge of measures and regulations adopted in Dodd-Frank were a convoluted way to avoid the simple and obvious solution to the problem—forcing the banks to reduce their size and reinstating Glass-Steagall separation between investment and commercial banks. To the extent that the bank lobby and their advocates in Congress are successful in chipping away at Dodd-Frank, they will only make it clearer that a more radical solution is needed”—namely Glass-Steagall.
You’ve also got Jamie Dimon delivering a conference call with reporters earlier this week, in which he was extremely defensive in the face of what he called an “assault” on his bank and calls to break up JPMorgan.
Now, Mr. LaRouche made the point this week that we’re in an absolutely revolutionary situation. It can be seen by the events in France over the weekend. But what this is being driven by is these efforts by Wall Street to bail out their utterly bankrupt system. He said that “This is the enemy’s weak flank, and we have to find ways to exploit that weakness.” He said “the goal is to unleash something that will ignite this entire process and set off a revolutionary process which will grow and become an overwhelming force of influence.”
And if you think about it, this is precisely what Mr. LaRouche has done over the recent several years and the recent decade on the issue of the 28 pages: identifying a weakness in the enemy, and setting in motion the process needed to exploit this weakness. And it’s now coming into fruition at the crucial moment, as we saw with this press conference last week.
And so this is also what Mr. LaRouche has emphasized he is now doing with his operations into New York City—the so-called “Manhattan Project”—by taking limited capabilities and concentrating those capabilities on achieving a breakout of the Hamilton Principle in New York City. This is what we’re going to be doing with the event that is upcoming tomorrow, Saturday, in New York, which will be streamed live for everybody who’s watching this webcast to participate in. And the major subject of this event will be the necessity of forcing a revolutionary change in policy within the United States along the lines of LaRouche’s Four Laws, in order to allow the United States to fully integrate into the dynamic which is being led now buy the BRICS.
So, Jeff, I know you’re going to be one of the featured speakers at this event in New York this weekend. Can you say more about the urgency of achieving a victory in the fight against Wall Street, especially with an escalation around the reintroduction of Glass-Steagall now this week, and the central role that this event this weekend is going to be playing in New York City in rallying the whole country around this Hamilton principle?
STEINBERG: Well, not only is Wall Street and the City of London bankrupt, but the bankruptcy itself is reaching a critical mass, where you could expect to wake up almost any day in the coming weeks, and see some kind of dramatic event, beyond even the scale of the quote “Lehman Brothers moment” of September 2008. Yesterday, for example, in Switzerland, the Swiss National Bank announced that they were formally decoupling the Swiss franc from the euro. The Swiss National Bank had been buying up large volumes of euros in order to keep approximately a 1.2-1 parity with the euro.
And they concluded that in the immediate, literally, days ahead, the euro is very likely to blow up. You’ve got two events coming up in the immediate next week, that either one of which could be devastating to the whole financial underpinning of Europe. Number one, a week from yesterday, on Thursday of next week, the European Central Bank will be convening and they promised, Mario Draghi, the president of the bank, has promised that they will do “anything necessary” in order to preserve the European banking system and to preserve the euro. And so they are expected to announce the unleashing of the same kind of massive quantitative easing, printing press hyperinflation, that was carried out by the Fed and the Treasury here in the United States after 2008.
Secondly, a week from Sunday are the elections in Greece, where the current government, that is despised because they went along with the Troika policy of the looting of Greece, is very likely to be voted out of office, and replaced by the Syriza party which has campaigned around the idea of cancelling the Troika agreement, meaning, demanding a fundamental renegotiating of the entire Greek debt situation. It’s now widely expected, that Greece will ultimately, over a short period of time, pull out of the euro. Either of these events, themselves, next week, can be the trigger of the kind of panic effect, that brings down the entire European and trans-Atlantic banking system.
You’ve got similar concerns being expressed by Jamie Dimon in this rather hysterical and defensive press conference, or press discussion that he held earlier this week, when JPMorgan Chase announced their earnings for the quarter and their earnings for the year. All of the too-big-to-fail banks in the U.S. have taken big hits during this last quarter, because of the instability introduced by the Anglo-Saudi game of driving down oil prices internationally to below breakeven costs, has created an immediate danger of a $20 trillion derivatives bubble tied to the oil and gas sector, blowing out at any moment. This is why Jamie Dimon and the other Wall Street barons went to such desperate lengths to repeal the few remaining elements of the Dodd-Frank Act that had any actual meaning whatsoever.
So there is now a two-year delay in selling off the proprietary trading desks of the major banks, and other measures have been taken. There’s no longer any kind of capital reserve requirement for the banks’ derivatives portfolios, that’s what H.R.37 did, among a number of other things.
Now, any sane banker in their right mind, anybody looking at the political situation out there in the United States, and recognizing the swelling hatred for Wall Street, that’s building up and has been building up for some time in the American population, would not have gone flight forward, and pushed through H.R.37 just days after it had been defeated in a narrow vote in the same Congress. But the level of desperation is clearly evident, and therefore, the situation that we’re looking at, is that the greatest liability of London and Wall Street is their own behavior. The fact that they are so desperate about the fact that their system is bankrupt, and is reaching a potential breakpoint at any moment. So as a result of that, they are acting in desperation and they’re further driving the hatred.
Now, Mr. LaRouche’s point about the significance of tomorrow’s event in New York City: New York City is the power center of the United States. Historically it was the home of Alexander Hamilton, one of the absolutely critical architects of our Constitutional republic, and the idea of Federal-directed credit and national banking. So that’s one side of New York City: that history, that tradition is rich, and still exists. And then you’ve got the history of treason associated with Wall Street that goes all the way back to the time of Aaron Burr who was the assassin of Alexander Hamilton and who was part of the British treason on Wall Street that has continued to exist, has grown, and is now the dominant political factor in the United States until it’s removed.
So, we’re at one of those moments, very much reminiscent of when a series of candlelight vigils in Leipzig, Germany, at a point where the system was about to come undone, small steps, seemingly inconsequential actions, but reflective of a swelling mood in the population can be the catalysts for dramatic change. So Benjamin Franklin famously said in Philadelphia, during the midst of the Constitutional Convention, that the drafters of the Constitution were giving the American people “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Now, the sad news is that we’ve actually lost that republic already. That republic has been overcome by the last two Presidencies, by the tyranny and power of Wall Street, with London behind it, and so, we’re now at a point where we’ve got to take our republic back, which means a revolution of the sort that was carried out by people like Alexander Hamilton, during the founding days of our republic. We have a mood in the population that is ready to go for the jugular against Wall Street, and the critical element is leadership and a clear understanding of what must be done to restore the core principles of our Constitutional republic.
Now, the fact of the matter is that the world, to a very large extent, is moving in that Hamiltonian direction. You’ve got the developments among the BRICS countries, and a large and growing cluster of other nations, from Ibero-America, to Africa, to Southeast Asia, to South Asia, who are grouping around the BRICS initiative. The BRICS have established a series of nested development banks, on a Hamiltonian model for the purpose of launching great projects. And Mr. LaRouche has emphasized that what we’re dealing with here, is something that is a new phenomenon in world history. We not only have governments reasserting national sovereignty, but we have governments recognizing that they cannot survive, they cannot defeat the power of the British Empire, unless they work together. So you’re seeing an emergence of combinations of nations, that are redefining relations among the peoples of this planet, and you’ve got more and more of a drive towards working together through a system of credit, through a system of scientific research, to pursue the common needs of mankind.
So that’s going on: It’s going on with China, with Russia, with India, those three countries in particular, joined by Brazil and South Africa in the BRICS countries; but many others: Argentina, Egypt, other countries in Asia and Southeast Asia are aligning. Twenty-one Asian countries have already signed on as initiating members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [aiib]. These are nothing short of revolutionary changes, in the nature of man’s relationship to this planet, to one another, and to the universe as a whole. And that idea, stems from the Hamiltonian traditions, that were born here in the United States, and those ideas have to be reinstated here in the U.S., which means, Wall Street and the British Empire are put to an end, taken out of their misery, and the world benefits from the result of that.
So, Saturday’s event in New York City will be a critical moment in that process of assembling and organizing and educating a certain leading minority stratum of our fellow citizens. And I urge every single one of you to be involved in that meeting: If you can be there, or otherwise monitor it on the LaRouche PAC website. It will be streamed live, and then also posted afterwards. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v= ivoERRNPc5E]
So this is a process of taking our republic back, and aligning it with forces around the world that are allied to those principles. We had that at the time of the American Revolution, particularly with Russia and the League of Armed Neutrality, which was a critical factor in defeating the British Empire in the American Revolution. And now we’ve got a larger correlations of modern forces around the world, marching on behalf of these American System principles. So there’s no reason why the United States is not once again taking a leading role in that effort.
OGDEN: Well, I think it’s very clear, from what you just elaborated, that the distinction, the clear distinction between what the BRICS represents, and what Wall Street and the City of London represents is, as Mr. LaRouche has always said, two contrary views of man: The Promethean view of man, versus the view of man associated with the Olympian Zeus. And as can be seen clearly from even their behavior, Wall Street believes that man is nothing but a beast. Why else would the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party be supporting Jeb Bush for President, in the upcoming 2016 elections? And I think that gets directly at what Mr. LaRouche has identified that the Wall Street-owned Republican Party is nothing but the party of fascism inside the United States, and has always been, going back to Jeb Bush’s grandfather’s support for Adolf Hitler. Prescott was one of the principal financiers for Hitler, coming right out of Wall Street. And his assets were seized, rightly, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, by Franklin Roosevelt during World War II.
Now, on the subject of the British Empire, and perhaps on the subject of man as beast, Tony Blair was the principal speaker this week at the Republican Party retreat in Pennsylvania on Wednesday. Now, Jeff, as you have indicated, Tony Blair was instrumental in covering up the role of the British in brokering the Al Yamamah deal, between BAE, the big British arms supplier and Saudi Arabia, which, as we’ve documented, was the source of the slush fund which provided the black financing for Anglo-Saudi terror operations worldwide. Now, at the point that an official investigation was being run by the Serious Fraud Office, inside Great Britain, into this agreement, Tony Blair personally came in and shut it down under the Official Secrets Act. Blair was also the origin, of course, of the falsified intelligence having to do with so-called weapons of mass destruction which became the premise for the invasion of Iraq.
Now, last week, actually on the same day that the press conference here in Washington, D.C. was occurring, with former Sen. Bob Graham, who, by the way, was a major voice of opposition during his time in the Senate, to the Iraq War, on the same day that this press conference was happening, leading newspapers inside Great Britain were reporting that members of the British House of Lords were warning, that Tony Blair could very well be facing war crimes charges over Iraq, in anticipation of the release of the so-called Chilcot Report.
So, Jeff, I want to know from you, what do you think the implications are of the Republican Party inviting a known war criminal, to be the principal speaker at their retreat this week?
STEINBERG: I guess you’ve got a British idea of what bipartisanship is all about, with Tony Blair from New Labour, going to be the keynote speaker for the Republicans in their retreat at Hershey, Pennsylvania, and then, a few days later, [tory] David Cameron coming over to meet with Obama.
Look, I think that one of the critical things, I am sure, that’s at least on the table in the private discussions on the sidelines of the Tony Blair visit with the Republicans, is suppress the 28 pages. Because not only is the role of the Saudis squarely on the line in the 28 pages, the role of the Saudis in the 9/11 attacks, but as Blair very well knows, the 9/11 attack is not unrelated to his own involvement with Prince Bandar, in the continuation of the Al Yamamah project. And so, if you dig deeper into 9/11, the 28 pages, the Al Yamamah project, you get a much deeper and more comprehensive picture, of how this entire Anglo-Saudi operation has been a dominant and destructive force in the world, for a very, very long time.
People look at the British-Saudi deal and they look at the 1985 date, when Prince Bandar and Margaret Thatcher worked out the original Al Yamamah arrangement: this was a barter deal in which British weapons were given to the Saudis, and in return the Saudis provided crude oil, basically one supertanker a day. That oil was immediately sold on the international spot market, and EIR‘s unique contribution and Mr. LaRouche’s unique contribution to unearthing the real Al Yamamah story is that we “crunched the numbers” so to speak, and found that there were hundreds of billions of dollars, in excess cash from the spot market sales, that were in fact set up as offshore slush funds, black operations funds, for financing things like the Afghan mujahideen, out of which al-Qaeda, and now the Islamic State, have materialized.
So Blair knows perfectly well, if the 29 pages are released and the spotlight is placed on the Saudis and on Prince Bandar, then the same spotlight will shine very brightly on the British, and particularly, on Tony Blair personally, who was of course Prime Minister of Britain at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and who knows perfectly well, why, in fact, he ordered the cover-up of the Al Yamamah investigation. It occurred exactly at the point that the British were about to receive from the Swiss government, certain sensitive records of some of the Swiss bank accounts, where some of the Al Yamamah funds were being hidden, and were known to have been used for not only support for the mujahideen operations but for a number of coups and other actions that were British strategic policy moves in the African continent and elsewhere.
So, this spotlight cannot be lifted. We’ve got to get the bottom of this, and the most efficient first step right now, is to get the 28 pages released. Remember, last Wednesday, as we showed on the LaRouche PAC webcast a week ago, Senator Graham, at the press conference in Washington, drew the connection very clear: He said, the events that took place earlier in the day in Paris, would not have happened, had the 28 pages been released, had the truth about 9/11 been revealed.
So when we talk about the Wall Street crisis, the London crisis, the bankruptcy of this entire system and we talk about the Anglo-Saudi operations typified by 9/11 and by these recent attacks in Paris, you see that we’re dealing with one and the same phenomenon. It’s the phenomenon of the British Empire and its assets spread around the globe, and one of the most important assets of that London apparatus, is Wall Street, the Wall Street of Jamie Dimon.
So, this is where we are, Tony Blair being in Hershey, Pennsylvania, is a bit of poet irony, that he’s there, gathered with Republicans, to lay down the law that if Jeb Bush is to be anointed as the next President of the United States, then the 28 pages have to by buried. So I think that we’re going to find in the coming days, as more and more leaks out from Hershey about what actually happened behind closed doors, that we’re going to have yet, another naked exposure, of the methods and the desperation of the British Empire at this point.
MEGAN BEETS: This will be the final question of the evening. Earlier this week, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Igor Morgulov gave an important interview to the Chinese news agency Xinhua, on Russia’s vision for the BRICS for 2015. And for those who don’t know, Russia will be assuming the rotating chairmanship of the BRICS in April of 2015, and will host the next BRICS summit in July in the city of Ufa.
So in the interview, Morgulov focussed on Russia’s commitment that the BRICS transform from what he called a “dialogue-based forum” to a “a full-blown mechanism of interaction on the key issues of the global economy and politics.” He prioritized the formation by the BRICS of a new financial architecture, saying, “Among the strategic interests that unite the members of the BRICS, Id like to note their desire to reform the international financial and economic system in accordance with the current realities of the global economy, their interest in strengthening the legal framework of international relations, and their willingness to make greater use of the complementary nature of economies in order to accelerate the development of our countries.”
Now, after naming several areas of joint development, such as agro-industry, metallurgy, health care, and promoting research activity, he zeroed in on Russia’s key intention for 2015, with regards to the BRICS bank. He said, “One of the key goals of the Russian chairmanship will be the implementation of the BRICS decisions to establish its own financial institutions (the New Development Bank and the Contingency Reserve Arrangement) that are designed to help stabilize the capital markets of participating countries in the event of global crises, as well as to deepen the integration of our states and strengthen their trade and investment capabilities. We are actively cooperating on these issues with China.”
Now, along these lines and along the lines of cooperation and integration with China, it was confirmed earlier this week that the President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, along with a large delegation, will make an official state visit to China in early February of this year, where she will have meetings with her counterpart, President Xi Jinping, along with other government officials, along with many side meetings to consolidate the economic agreements that were reached last year, during the visit of President Xi to Argentina.
However, in what the Finance Minister of Argentina Axel Kicillof called a “war without weapons” waged from the legal arena with political objectives, the British have recently renewed their attempts to destabilize and undermine the authority of both Argentina and Brazil, as part of their desperate efforts to minimize the authority of the BRICS nations and their partners. In the case of Argentina, most recently, this has taken the form of an attempt to hand down an indictment of President Fernández de Kirchner in the Argentine courts, related to events occurring in the 1990s, and to use that to create a scandal around the Presidency.
In Brazil, the same vulture funds which attacked the government of Argentina last year, are attempting now to destabilize the government of Dilma Rousseff, after they failed to stop her reelection last year, by stirring up a corruption scandal surrounding Petrobras oil, of which Rousseff was chairman of the board of directors from 2003-2010. Now, again Axel Kicillof of Argentina clearly identified exactly what this is, an interview he gave on Ja. 4th, where he said, “A simultaneous attack against Argentina and Brazil is attempting to unleash financial upheaval in the region, as part of a strategy that uses the financial issue as the battleground against specific political processes.”
So, Mr. LaRouche’s response to this has been to emphasize the importance of our role in the United States in giving backup to these nations, centered particularly in the process which we have unleashed in New York City, as Matthew referenced earlier with the “Manhattan project” and the very important conference coming up this weekend. Now, Mr. LaRouche has pointed, in Manhattan, to the crucial role, as Jeff referenced, of Alexander Hamilton, the legacy of Hamilton in his crafting of the principle of the Constitution, and the principle of the unity of the nation as against the legacy of empire.
Now, I think it’s worth mentioning that this was echoed last week in the press conference, by Bob Graham, who raised the specter of the “Lincolnesque standard for government of truth and transparency.”
So what I’d like to ask you, Jeff, is if you could come to the podium and elaborate further what you mentioned earlier, which is, what is the uniqueness and the importance of Alexander Hamilton in this context, and how can that be used by us in the United States, to support, and shape, and contribute to the success of the efforts of the BRICS?
STEINBERG: Megan, let me just start by making another point, before I get into this Hamilton issue, because I think you raised something extremely important, because Mr. LaRouche has been emphasizing that the exclusive source of the danger of war is the desperation of the British and their Wall Street allies, over the imminent bankruptcy of their entire system. There’s a flip side to that, which is, that there is an alternative system that is already in place, in at least a rudimentary form in the various initiatives that have been taken by the BRICS countries. I should add that the head of the section of the Russian Academy of Science dealing with Latin America, who is also part of a special research agency on the BRICS process in Moscow, gave an interview to the Russian media Jan. 15, in which he said that the attacks that are going on in Russia, including a vicious campaign against President Putin from the international media, the sanctions against Russia, he said, this is actually an attack against the entire BRICS process.
So you not only have the desperation of London and Wall Street, flowing from the fact that their system is hopelessly, irreversibly bankrupt, but you have the second grave danger which is that the alternative to the chaos that the British would be prepared to unleash on the world, is already in existence in the form of the BRICS alliance. Which already represents about half of the population, half of the land-mass, and half of the combined wealth of this entire planet.
Now, for a very, very long time, Mr. LaRouche has been emphasizing that the alliance that is both necessary and feasible to defeat the British Empire, is the United States, Russia, China, and India. Obviously, many other countries would align with that combination, including South Africa and Brazil which are already members of the BRICS; Argentina, Egypt, Japan, South Korea, the list is quite extensive. If the United States were to be brought into this process, then the ability of the British to even contemplate, waging the kind of war that could become a war of extermination would be finished once and for all. Glass-Steagall alone wipes out the power of Wall Street and the British Empire, because minus the guarantee of a taxpayers bail-out and bail-in of their bankrupt system, you would have a complete collapse of their massive derivatives and other speculative bubble.
So in other words, a return to a Hamiltonian approach is exactly what is urgently needed here in the United States. Hamilton understood, that to create a single, unified nation, you had to have instruments of power at the Federal government level that would be responsible for providing for the general welfare of the American people, as an entirety. One of the most critical things that Hamilton accomplished was the agreement that the Federal government would assume all of the debts that the states had incurred during the American Revolution, because Hamilton understood that having Federal government debt, and not having separate incurred debt by each of the individual states, that you would establish a principle of a Union that is the binding glue of the Republic. The states were in effect, secondary instruments of local governance, but the United States was united as a single Federal Republic, a single Union. And in standing up the First National Bank of the United States, Hamilton established a principle, where the overall economic benefits of the country would be the defining characteristics of how credit would be deployed. In other words, local revenue would not necessarily be exclusive spent and deployed locally: Under a national banking system, credit could be disbursed to areas that were necessary that would build up the overall economic foundations of the Republic as a whole.
In the 19th century, in the aftermath of the Civil War, where President Lincoln revived the Hamiltonian principle through his greenbacks policy, the United States exported the Hamiltonian principles around the world. You have Friedrich List, who was the author of the National System of Political Economy, who lived in the United States and studied with the Careys and other followers of Hamilton; went back to Germany, wrote a critical book that was basis for the establishment of the German nation-state, under, particularly, the period in which Bismarck was in power. You had American engineers in Russia, basically working with the Russians on buidling the Trans-Siberian Railroad, based on the experience in the United States in completing the Trans-Continental Railroad. We had American economists in China, working with Sun Yat-sen who designed a plan for the national integration of China, based on building up east-west and north-south rail grids to integrate the country as a whole. Same thing in Japan, during the Meiji Restoration: E. Peshine Smith and a number of other American economists were there, conveying this Hamiltonian idea of the role of the state as a source of directed credit, to build up the nation, and that basically the improvement in infrastructure, the investment in scientific and technological research, these were the factors that actually made for the establishment of viable and sovereign nation-states.
The alternative system, back in the 19th century, there was the American System and there was the British system. The American System was a system of national credit, national banking, and protective tariffs to build up domestic industry, agriculture, and infrastructure. The British system was a system of free trade looting. Free trade was a joke, because it was always a policy of the biggest, British cartels in modern history, including the British East India Company.
I should say that the origins of the Anglo-Saudi combination didn’t begin in the 19th and 20th centuries but went back to the 1700s, when the British East India Company needed ports of call along the way to India, to secure their routes to India. And for centuries, the foreign and national security and defense policies of every one of the Emirates in the Persian Gulf region was controlled by the British by formal treaty agreement. The British selected the specific clans and families and tribes that would be in power in each of the countries of what’s today the Gulf Cooperation Council.
So the British relationship with these so-called nation-states of the Persian Gulf region, goes back centuries and involve the British East India Company’s free trade policies which were the enemy of mankind and are the enemy of everything that the United States historically stood for. The reason that we have a vestige, still today, of a sovereign republic, as weakened and as nearly destroyed as it is, is because of the legacy of what Hamilton was able to establish. Our Constitution makes it very clear that we are a nation, that is based on a system of directed Federal credit, not of private oligarchical finance, as exists under the British Wall Street system.
So Hamilton is the key, and New York City is the key, because in New York City you have both the Hamiltonian tradition and the tradition of Wall Street treason. So in effect, the Battle for New York, the Battle for Manhattan is the battle for the revival of the United States in its Hamiltonian Constitutional Republic form. So the documents that Hamilton produced, the Report on the National Bank, the Report on Manufactures, the Report on Credit, these were official Treasury Department documents, that were presented to the U.S. Congress, these documents represent the cornerstone principles of the American System and that’s the system that Lyndon LaRouche has been fighting to revive for the past 40-50 years. And now we’ve reached a moment where we can accomplished that.
So I hope that all of you will each, in your own way, be participating tomorrow in this New York City event, because I think you’ll get a very clear idea of this call for a revival of the American Revolution and what it means for the survival of the country and the world, today.
OGDEN: Thank you very much. Again, the event will be live-streamed on larouchepac.com, live coverage starting at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, so everybody who’s watching this webcast, make sure not only you tune in, but make sure everybody in your networks knows about this event. Jeff will be a featured speaker; there will be a whole panoply of other speakers. So we look forward to you joining us tomorrow.
That’s going to bring a conclusion to our broadcast tonight. I’d like to thank Megan very much, and Jeff as well, and thank you for joining us. Please stay tuned. Good night.