To the consternation of the financier oligarchy, new British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has put at the top of his Shadow Cabinet John McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer; in the U.K. government, the Chancellor of the Exchequer heads the Treasury. McDonnell is not only Corbyn’s closest associate, but is the outspoken supporter of Glass-Steagall bank separation.

In a profile, Monday’s Financial Times wrote that the Corbyn-McDonnell team will advocate a more effective regulatory regime for banks with a “full-blown ‘Glass-Steagall system'” to separate retail and investment banking.

“The auditing regime will be shaken up and a new financial transactions tax would be introduced to rebalance the economy towards manufacturing. The new shadow chancellor has also promised to facilitate a wider range of company and enterprise ownership and control, including public, co-operative and stakeholder ownership.”

The Guardian pointed out Corbyn had former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis standing by his side at the Labour Party victory event. Some people tried to compare him to Varoufakis because of his anti-austerity views, quoting Corbyn, “Someone said to me: ‘Are you going to be Britain’s Yanis Varoufakis?’ And I said: ‘I could never be that cool,'” drawing laughs from the audience.

The Guardian wrote that many MPs will find the appointment of McDonnell “very hard to stomach.” The Blairites and establishment types in the Labour Party are not happy over the choice of McDonnell, having pushed for Angela Eagle, who had been a cabinet member under both Blair and his successor Gordon Brown. Charles Clarke, a former Home Secretary, said Monday that he was “aghast” at the appointment of McDonnell, and told the BBC’s Radio 4 “Today” program that centrist Labour MPs would probably begin to form their own shadow Treasury policy.

Other members of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet include Hilary Benn as Shadow Foreign Secretary, who held that position before Corbyn won. Benn is the son of the late left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn; notably, Hilary Benn was educated as a Russian and East European expert.

Andy Burnham, who came in second in the leadership race is now Shadow Home Secretary. Angela Eagle, the new Shadow Business Secretary, was also named Shadow First Secretary of State. Heidi Alexander will be Shadow Health Secretary; Lord Falconer, who at one time shared a flat with Tony Blair, will continue as Shadow Justice Secretary. Other appointments include: Seema Malhotra shadow chief secretary to the Treasury; Diane Abbott shadow minister for international development: Shadow Northern Ireland secretary Vernon Coaker; Rosie Winterton to continue as chief whip; Ian Murray to continue as shadow Scottish secretary. 

The truly disastrous, still worsening results of the last 15 years’ Bush and Obama wars and economic crises—including perhaps 50 million refugees now fleeing war and immiseration—have now finally been met by a decisive change. To the expressed great anger of Obama operatives in the White House, State Department and the media, the primary movers of the change are Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, acting together, especially since their recent celebrations of the defeat of fascism in World War II 70 years ago.

Flanking the Obama drive for confrontation and even nuclear war, first in Europe and now around Syria, Putin has moved, with China, to set up a dynamic process internationally. The new dynamic includes both the possibility of ending the genocidal wars ruining the Mideast, North Africa and in the center of Europe; and the offer of a new system of economic cooperation striving for productivity and development, not geopolitical power. That dynamic is the only, though difficult, prospect for solving the crisis of millions of refugees fleeing and dying in the entire Mediterranean region.

This has been responded to by Germany, and by France, and in that context Germany changed its policy to align itself with cooperation what that process.

They recognized that the whole system they’ve been operating on, was potentially relieved by what Putin did, and what China did. It is not national; this process is a matter of change in the condition of the planet.

This new dynamic was discussed in a Sept. 12 public dialogue in Manhattan, directed toward the approaching United Nations General Assembly session, by EIR’s Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche, former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Senator Gravel immediately moved to give a packed press conference at the United Nations Sept. 14, featuring EIRSpecial Report on the BRICS dynamic, The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge. He specified to the international press: China’s offer of economic development in particular, is the solution to the wreck of U.S. foreign and economic policy under Obama.

September 12, 2015 International Schiller event featuring Lyndon & Helga LaRouche, Ramsey Clark and Mike Gravel.

The new dynamic means that Obama is in deep trouble, flanked by Putin as his Administration is belatedly realizing. As Lyndon LaRouche stated in Monday’s LPAC Policy Committee show,

“Obama is probably doomed, to be thrown out of office, one way or the other. Wall Street will be shut down. It will not be paid off. It will shut down, absolutely! Because there’s no future for Wall Street. The whole money system as it’s so far defined, as you see in the case of the British case. The British system economically is a farce; Wall Street is a farce, absolute farce.

“So we’re going to have to operate on the discovery, of agreements converging on different parties, converging on the idea of a new view of the planet as a whole. And the discussion of that process, the process as a process; don’t pay any attention to the facts, because the facts are going to change so rapidly, that they won’t count for much. We’ve already seen and experienced that ourselves. We’ve experienced it in the world as a whole. There is no fact which is fixed in this process. It’s a process.”

And we are going to have to operate on the discovery of agreement among different parties, converging on the idea of a new view of the planet as a whole.