February 20, 2015 • Friday Webcast with Jeff Steinberg

Transcript Now Available

MATTHEW OGDEN: Good evening; it’s February 20, 2015. My name is Matthew Ogden, and I would like to welcome you to our weekly webcast here from larouchepac.com. I’m joined in the studio today by Jeffrey Steinberg from Executive Intelligence Review and Jason Ross from the LaRouche PAC Basement Team. And the three of us had occasion to meet with both Lyndon and Helga LaRouche earlier this afternoon. Now the first question tonight is going to be our institutional question for the evening, which is on the subject of the developments happening in Greece; and it reads as follows:

“The German and Greek finance ministers held talks with IMF and Eurogroup chiefs ahead of a meeting of Eurozone finance ministers which happened today. The talks were aimed at striking a deal on the request made on Thursday by Greece for a new six-month bail-out. Germany rejected the request, despite it being welcomed by the European Commission. The existing bail-out deal expires at the end of the month, and Greece could run out of money without a new accord. Mr. LaRouche, what is your advice for the Greek government?”

And I’d like to ask Jeff to come to the podium to address this.

JEFFREY STEINBERG: Thanks, Matt. We did have an opportunity to speak at some length this afternoon with Mr. LaRouche, and at that time we did not yet have the results of the meeting that took place between the Greek government and the Eurozone finance ministers [eurogroup] this afternoon. What came out of that meeting was basically a decision to kick the can down the road.

The decision was to not make a decision at all; and in effect, the request, the terms presented by the Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis, were accepted, with the difference being that since Germany rejected a six-month extension of the existing arrangements with major modifications — meaning cancellation of the austerity requirements — they changed it now to four months rather than six. But the basic point is that, nothing was settled; nothing was resolved, and there are certain very fundamental things that must be understood to properly gauge the significance of this showdown that’s not going on.

The first point that Mr. LaRouche emphasized, is that there is no legitimate Greek debt to the Troika. When you do a detailed analysis of how those debts were established and incurred, you realize that virtually none of the money that was supposedly provided to the Greek government actually went to Greece. The money went directly from the Troika into the hands of the major European banks that were the creditors of loans that were, from the very outset, illegitimate, and had nothing to do with any kind of recovery of Greece — full employment, job creation, any of the kinds of things that a normal legitimate loan would go towards. And this is not the only instance where this kind of looting under the guise of debt was carried out.

Greece is, in fact, only one of the more recent examples of what has been a persistent and long-term pattern of behavior by the IMF and more recently by the European Central Bank. And so, you have a persistent history — a track record — of sovereign governments being blackmailed and threatened with financial warfare, and succumbing to conditionalities that were intended to create fraudulent debt, and loot countries of their most basic rights to develop.

That’s the situation here; there are many, many details that could be fleshed out and in fact, indeed there should be a thorough criminal investigation into the circumstances around which this fraudulent debt was established in the first place. We know that there were significant international players — Goldman Sachs, Crédit Suisse, Deutsche Bank — a whole collection of U.S.- and European-based hedge funds which basically took short positions on Greek government debt to jack up the risk premiums, jack up the payments that had to be made to roll over those debts, and created a synthetic mountain of illegitimate debt. So, while the Greek government has come out and openly said that there has to be a debt renegotiation, a write-down, Mr. LaRouche’s point is much more dramatic than that. His point is simply that the debt is criminal, the debt is illegitimate; there is no legitimate reason for Greece to pay a penny.

And in fact, the best course of action for Greece is to force a default, a write-off of that entire debt, and move at that point towards an investment policy that actually begins the process of rebuilding the Greek economy. The Greek economy is facing 40% to 50% unemployment by official statistics. The collapse of household savings, the collapse of the real economy of Greece, has been an extraordinary scandal over a number of years. It preceded the Troika deal, but the Troika deal was merely the icing on the cake of a prolonged period of looting of Greece. So, you’ve got to have a completely different approach.

And the reality of the situation — we’ve discussed this over the recent weeks here on the LaRouche weekly webcast — is that it’s not Greece that is bankrupt. Greece can simply stand its ground and say, this debt is illegitimate; we’re not going to pay it, there’s no justification for paying it. But the bigger issue is that the entire banking system of the trans-Atlantic region is hopelessly and irreversibly bankrupt. That’s why you have the phenomenon of certain European financial officials like Schäuble, the Finance Minister of Germany, being absolutely hysterical about the need to maintain a hardline against Greece. The simple reason being that they are caught up in a massive criminal Ponzi scheme that’s now about to blow up in their faces. If the Greek situation is simply put on hold for the next four months, as has been apparently agreed to at this meeting today — and it needs to be ratified on Monday — the fact of the matter is that there are many, many other triggers that could bring about a blow-out of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system long before this Greek question comes up. So, there is no legitimate Greek debt; that issue should be put squarely on the table.

The entire banking system of the trans-Atlantic region is irreversibly and hopelessly bankrupt; and the only recourse — which is part of what Greece is calling for — is the convening of a conference like the 1953 London debt conference to write off the entire fraudulent debt, the gambling debt. Isolate out the legitimate commercial banking debts, work out a method of payment; but cancel the entire $1.7-$1.9 quadrillion derivatives and related financial swindle gambling bubble. Put that out of the way, and redirect credit towards the rebuilding of the real economy, starting in the trans-Atlantic region, where the collapse has been most pronounced. The danger we’re dealing with — and I know we’ll be taking this issue up separately a bit later in this broadcast — is that it’s the bankruptcy of the system; it’s the hysteria over that crisis coming to a head, that is the main factor driving the world toward a war centered around the Ukraine crisis, but which could easily become a thermonuclear war confrontation with Russia.

So the hysteria over the fact that London and Wall Street are doomed, is the principal reason why you have the kinds of provocations that are leading us dangerously close to war. Now, given the current circumstances, Greece has another escape avenue; a viable alternative to the death and bankruptcy of the trans-Atlantic system, and that’s the BRICS countries. This week, you’ve had a high level delegation from the [chinese] PLA Navy doing a port-of-call visit to the Greek port of Piraeus. And the Chinese have made very clear that they’re prepared to invest in the real economy of Greece. They see the port of Piraeus as a terminus on the Mediterranean for the entire Chinese Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road.

So Greece has enormous potential in a universe defined by the kinds of policies that have been adopted by the BRICS countries — namely, cooperation for real physical, economic development, scientific development and technological advancement, and cooperation among these leading nations. So, there is an alternative; the alternative is coming together in a system centered around the BRICS initiatives. And already half of humanity is being drawn into that alternative. So, it’s time to basically put the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system to rest; and the fear around Greece is that the actions that have been taken by the Greek people — they cast out the government that had cut the suicidal deal with the Troika. They brought in the Syriza-centered government, and now they’ve made it clear; the austerity policy is unacceptable, paying this fraudulent debt is not in the cards. And so therefore, this is one of the factors that is putting this entire situation into a real moment of existential showdown.

So, the European governments punted for four months; nothing was resolved today, but yet the same issues remain on the table, and will have to be resolved at some point in the very near future, one way or the other. It’s either an alliance with the BRICS countries, a writing-off of the gambling debt all together, and an alliance with the BRICS, or war. And the kind of war we’re talking about is a war of extinction.

OGDEN: Well, I think in light of what you went through with the situation in Greece, it couldn’t be more clear that what we’re dealing here in terms of Wall Street, the City of London and so forth, are not banks in any conventional sense of the word, but rather, front companies for what’s really a huge international network of organized crime; an organized crime ring.

And this was identified in exactly those terms earlier this week by a woman who was the former chief of protocol for UBS in France — a woman named Stephanie Gibaud — who is currently collaborating with the Argentine government in prosecuting crimes that were committed by UBS. And she did an interview with the press down there in Argentina in which she said, “We have to understand that what we’re dealing here is a {criminal} industry. That the entire thing is one dirty business; and that all the kinds of tax evasion schemes by UBS, now HSBC, and so forth that are coming under investigation, these are not some kind of aberrations.

These are not some sort of illegal operations that the banks engaged in on the sidelines of what were otherwise legitimate business practices, normal business. But what these actually are is the only reason why these banks even exist; and she made the point “You have to understand that this is the primary business of offshore banking; and that efforts by these chief executives to scapegoat lower level employees every time they get caught committing illegal acts” she called “disgusting” and that it’s these executives themselves who are the heavyweights. And they are the ones who belong in jail.

Now obviously, this is the polar opposite of what Obama’s policy, Eric Holder’s policy — now we see Loretta Lynch’s policy has been — that these bankers, these chief executives so-called, are too big to jail. And that to prosecute these banks would threaten the entire financial system. Now, I don’t think you could really make it more clear that if our financial system depends on non-prosecution of criminal acts, that means that this financial system itself is a criminal enterprise. Now this is really coming to a head right now with the Senate confirmation hearings over Loretta Lynch, who is Obama’s nominee to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General.

And there’s been a hold that’s been placed on this nomination by Senator Grassley, I believe; Senator Vitter has a whole list of very relevant questions that she needs to answer, which pertain to why she [lynch] wittingly neglected to prosecute gross crimes committed by HSBC — which by the way, stands for The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation — the historic British opium bank. And I have an Exhibit A here. (shows a copy of Dope, Inc.) I think Jeff can elaborate on the situation a little bit, since he’s uniquely qualified, since he’s literally the one who write the book on HSBC. This is called Dope, Inc., which originally was released in the 1970s, has been updated continually ever since. As you can see here, the subtitle is “Britain’s Opium War Against the World.”

I think there’s also a much broader aspect to this, which I know, Jeff, you can elaborate more in depth; which coincides a lot with what we’ve been discussing recently, pertaining to the 28 pages. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was the Levin-Coburn Committee, published an entire investigative report on HSBC a few years ago — this is Exhibit B. (Displays copy of Levin-Coburn report) As you can see, this is just one volume of a very extensive report which was titled U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History. And it contained an entire chapter which was called “Saudi Arabia and Terrorist Financing.”

Now, this connection has been even more clear and explicit in the past week, now that you’ve had the exposé that among the account holders that were exposed at HSBC’s branch at Switzerland was none other than Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States during 9/11, whose bank account at this branch of HSBC was an active account at the time 9/11 occurred, and persisted well after 9/11. Also, a number of the other account holders were members of the so-called “Golden Chain.”

I’ll let Jeff elaborate on that. But my question is, Jeff, with all of this taken together, there’s obviously been extensive coverage in the recent weeks around the 28 pages, the role of Saudi Arabia in financing terrorism. But what I’d like to ask you to address is not only this entire criminality of the banking system itself, but also, how can this HSBC angle potentially open up the story in regards to allowing people to understand the true role that the British play as the ringleaders of this entire apparatus, and what the true extent of the criminality we’re dealing with here actually represents.

STEINBERG: I think the problem here starts at the White House. In contrast to what happened during the 1930s from the moment that Franklin Roosevelt came in as President, he proudly declared that he was happy to be the enemy of the “financial royalists” — meaning Wall Street and London in particular. And you had the Pecora Commission back in 1933. A number of leading bankers did in fact go to jail; and it was only on the basis of acting against their criminality that you had the ability to push through things like the Glass-Steagall Act.

Now, the situation today is one in which the magnitude of criminality of the too-big-to-fail banking system is light years beyond what existed back in the 1920s and into the 1930s. The entire international too-big-to-fail bank apparatus is one gigantic criminal enterprise. I’ll tell you a brief anecdote. Going back quite a number of years, there was a Congressman from Texas — Henry Gonzalez, now deceased — who was the chairman of the House Banking Committee. And he wanted to find out — this was in the mid-1990s — whether or not there was any complicity on the part of certain American banks in laundering drug money and being involved in facilitating terrorist funding. And he had a number of his staff people who had appropriately high security clearances make some inquiries with U.S. government agencies.

And one of those staff people told me, that, you know, well, I can’t give you the details, the details are classified, but I was completely shocked to find out that there’s knowledge within the U.S. government, that every single one of the big Wall Street banks is engaged in fierce competition among themselves for the business of well-known and well-documented drug cartels and other international criminal and terrorist syndicates. That goes back 20 years ago. The situation has become profoundly more devastating and now, as I say, we’re looking at a situation in which the Obama Administration not only looked the other way or turned the other cheek — they had an explicit doctrine, it was actually codified in a letter by Attorney General Eric Holder, called “the Holder letter,” which basically said that all of the “too big to fail” bankers are to be given a free ride. Were there to be a prosecution of them, then this would result in a collapse of the entire system.

Now, I mean, that concept in itself is completely fraudulent. There’s no basis for making that argument. But that’s been the basis, systematically, since the beginning of the Obama administration, and things were not much better under the Bush-Cheney administration at all. But in the case of Obama, you have one instance after another, where major New York and London banks have been caught in massive criminal activity, and in one case after another, the Department of Justice signed what are called “deferred prosecution agreements.” In other words, if you promise that you won’t do it again, you will be slapped on the wrist, given a civil fine, which is a tiny fraction of the massive profits garnered from engaging in international criminal fraud.

And, as long as you don’t get caught again, then you don’t go to jail. In the case of HSBC — and as Matt indicated, HSBC was for decades, for centuries, known as The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation — it was openly established in the second half of the 19th century as the central clearinghouse bank for the British opium trade in China, in India, and in other parts of the Far East. And so, this is a bank that from its earliest inception, has been involved at the center of some of the biggest criminal activity in the world. So back in 2012, as the result of several whistleblowers coming forward, there was a Senate investigation into HSBC, and the report that Matt just showed you — over 300 pages — documented the fact that HSBC was responsible for laundering 60 to 80% of all of the drug cartel — Mexican, Colombian — money, into the United States, through corresponding relationships between HSBC Mexico City and HSBC New York.

The Indian government is investigating evidence that HSBC in Dubai and Mumbai was responsible for laundering the money that was used to finance the 2008 Mumbai attack, the mass killing spree carried out by jihadist terrorists tied to a notorious diamond and drug smuggler named Dawood Ibrahim. So everywhere you look, there is evidence dripping from the trees about the criminality of HSBC. So in 2012, the Senate produced this report. The report documented what had been presented by the authors from EIR of the book Dope, Inc., beginning in 1979. When Senator Levin was asked, what would he recommend, will there be criminal prosecutions, he said: Well, number one, I do agree that bankers at the top of this criminal syndicate should be prosecuted and should go to jail.

But he said, my own view is, it’s much more important, that banks that are engaged in this kind of criminal activity should immediately have their charters removed so that they can no longer do business here in the United States. And he said, all I can do as a Senator, is pass the evidence that we’ve accumulated on to the Department of Justice. And that’s exactly what was done. Now, it turns out, that prior to the investigation by the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, a whistleblower from the Swiss private bank branch of HSBC, basically confiscated extensive computer records, and passed them on to the French authorities, who in turn, later shared them with both British and American and other law enforcement agencies.

The evidence was that HSBC was carrying out tens of billions of dollars in illegal tax evasion for something like a thousand citizens from virtually every country around the world — Prince Bandar being one of them. And so, that information was already in the hands of U.S. federal prosecutors when they considered what to do about the Senate evidence of HSBC’s laundering drug money, and colluding with the Al Rajhi Bank in Saudi Arabia to help finance al-Qaeda. And, the person who was in charge of negotiating the sentence and making the decision about whether to criminally prosecute, is Loretta Lynch, who was and still remains the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

And Loretta Lynch is now President Obama’s nominee for Attorney General. She basically cut — I wouldn’t even call it a sweetheart deal — it was far worse than that. You had bankers involved in poisoning the streets of the United States with cocaine, with heroin, with marijuana, who were basically given a free pass to stay out of jail by the woman who is now being put forward to be the top law enforcement official in the United States. This is typical of this Obama Administration. The President lied to the families, the victims of 9/11, and told them that he would declassify the 28 pages. He never had any intention of doing that, and that’s why six years into his Presidency, it hasn’t happened. Every major banker that has been subject to criminal prosecution was given the same kind of deferred prosecution deal, and the banks paid fines that were tiny fractions of the profits they made. HSBC paid $1.9 billion in fines for the issue of the drug-money laundering that they carried out over a period of decades.

So to the average citizen who’s impoverished, $1.9 billion sounds like a lot of money, and sounds like a big punishment. But fact, it’s chump change compared to the massive profits that HSBC makes off of the illegal drug trade, the profits they make off of evading taxes for wealthy citizens of every country in the world. So, this is what we’re dealing with. The entire international banking system, when you get to the level of the too-big-to-fail banks, is one gigantic criminal syndicate. And, you know, if you’re going to deal with the Mafia, if you’re going to borrow money from the Mafia, don’t expect that you’re going to be able to walk on two legs for very long, if you’re lucky.

And that’s what you’re dealing with, with the current leadership of this too-big-to-fail banking system, centered in the trans-Atlantic region, particularly centered on Wall Street and in London. The only reason that I’m not standing here for three hours, going through case by case of HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Chartered, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, is because there are no serious Federal investigations that have gone on, and there have been no criminal prosecutions. Going all the way back to the savings and loan scandal that was not all that long ago — the late ’80s, early ’90s — over 1,000 bankers, small-scale bankers, none of them big Wall Street players, went to jail for criminal fraud that’s small scale compared to what’s been going on on behalf of these major international banks. So no wonder they are in a desperate plight right now.

Their gambling debts are coming due, they’re unpayable, and now you’ve got a very large, and very appropriate target: You have HSBC, the oldest and biggest dope-money laundering bank on this planet, and HSBC is now being exposed for such a wide range of criminality, that anybody who dares to be involved in the cover-up is going to go down. So the Senate has indeed temporarily put a hold on Loretta Lynch’s nomination for Attorney General. Today, there were interviews with a number of the HSBC whistleblowers. Senator Vitter has submitted nine questions to Loretta Lynch, all pertaining to her role in the decision to not criminally prosecute HSBC and until those questions are answered fully, basically she’s not going to be put up to a vote for her nomination.

So this is an issue that is now right in the forefront, and it’s very much related to what’s going on in Greece and in other places around the world. The simple fact of the matter is, that not only is the Greek debt completely illegitimate and unpayable and it should {not} be paid, but now we’ve got a clear picture of the international criminal banking syndicate that imposed that debt in the first place. You’re dealing with a global, white collar mafia and that system has got to be shut down if there is any prospect of both avoiding war and having a serious economic recovery in the trans-Atlantic region.

JASON ROSS: All right, this’ll be the third and final question for the evening and it’s about Ukraine. Last weekend the Normandy Four, meaning Russian President Putin, Ukrainian Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Hollande, they hammered out an agreement in Minsk with provisions for a ceasefire, and a multistep program towards calming down the situation in eastern Ukraine towards a survivable peace. The ageement’s for the most part been largely upheld, thanks in part to the continuing efforts of those leaders, however, some of the directly Nazi groupings in Ukraine, supporters of Bandera, the Right Sector, etc., they’ve warned that they will not accept the Minsk agreement and that they will continue to fight, independent of whatever Kiev may say.

LaRouche warned last weekend that,

Other leading voices also spoke to the urgency of ending the threat of war. For example Edward Lozansky, the President of American University of Moscow, a signer to the BRICS petition of the Schiller Institute, he coauthored an op-ed stating that the Minsk agreement provides,
“a brief, fragile window of opportunity for the world to step back from the brink of a nuclear confrontation that would destroy the entire northern hemisphere of the Earth.”

And he concluded by warning that,
“It is not too late for the voices of reason and sanity to be heard. But the alarms on the Doomsday Clock are already ringing.”

Another voice, our former ambassador to the Soviet Union, James Matlock, he spoke last Wednesday at the National Press Club about the incredible danger of full thermonuclear war with Russia. He said: “As I see debates now as to whether the U.S.should supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, I wonder what is going on.

He said,

He detailed some recent history. He said, after 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to call, he gave support to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, he gave Russia’s vote at the United Nations, he removed a base in Cuba. The U.S., in return, walked out of the ABM Treaty, which he said was “the basis of all out arms control treaties.” NATO was expanded, and ABM systems are being placed in eastern Europe, supposedly aimed at Iran, which of course, is nonsense. Matlock contrasted Reagan’s attitude of respect for the people of the Soviet Union, and the need to cooperate for the good of the world to avoid extinction, to the last 15 years of a reckless push for unipolarity.

Now, on Ukraine, over the weekend, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnynk appeared on a very popular German television where he was questioned about some photos. It was a photo of a band of SS rune-bearing, swastika-displaying thugs, being part of the Ukrainian security structure. The ambassador, a little bit flustered, said that such forces, as the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, etc., he said they were needed to fight against the Russian army. (Sound familiar?) And he said that there’s no need to worry, because these forces are under the control of Kiev. The host said, are you willing to bet your right arm, that they’re not doing anything bad? So in this whole situation, the question has been posed: Will Russia feel the need to react preemptively, before the balance is totally overthrown? So, I’d like to ask you a few questions: First, if you could comment and help us make sense of this, and help us understand what can we do? How can we internalize this threat, and act on it in a useful way? What do we do?

STEINBERG: In the discussion with Mr. LaRouche and Mrs. LaRouche this afternoon, we went back to the fact that you’ve got to pull this whole picture that we’ve been discussing all evening tonight, together. Let’s not forget that the trigger event for the coup d’état, the Nuland Nazi coup d’état that was carried out between November 2013 and February 2014 in Kiev, the so-called Maidan revolution, was triggered by the fact that the legitimately elected President of Ukraine, Yanukovych, came to the conclusion, in fact a very wise conclusion, that it was a bad idea for Ukraine to sign the Eastern partnership agreement wedding it economically to a European Union that we now see very clearly is completely bankrupt, is collapsing economically, and is sitting on top of an absolutely enormous, criminal, unpayable financial bubble. It was when Ukraine refused to be drawn in, to the European Union/NATO web that was to be used against Russia, that all Hell broke loose.

And so, we’re dealing with a situation right now, where there are very few legitimate options left. Right now, because of the fact that President Obama has played the role that he’s played, and has allowed Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, to run wild and to give full U.S. backing to these neo-Nazis from the Right Sector, from the Svoboda Party, who are now part of militias that are running rampant all over Ukraine, under control not of the government, but under the control of oligarchs, who’ve been in some cases appointed regional governors, you’ve got a situation where the role of the Obama administration in fomenting this situation, means that the only way that you can genuinely have a real, serious war-avoidance, war-prevention policy, is by bringing this administration to an end, by removing President Obama from office.

Or, at least curtailing his ability to operate, to such an extent that he serves out the next few years as literally a captive in the White House. Now, the first step in that is that Nuland has got to be removed. She’s got to be taken away from the position where she can run around and carry out the kinds of provocations that she carried out. She was running around the Maidan square with these neo-Nazis openly celebrating the overthrow of a legitimately elected government. She boasted in December of 2013 at the National Press Club in Washington, that the U.S. had so far spend $5 billion, in efforts at regime change in Ukraine, and now they were all coming to fruition.

So unless you remove some of the major sources of the danger of war, then that situation is going to persist. It’s the bankruptcy of the British Wall Street, trans-Atlantic financial system that’s creating the desperation that’s driving this situation towards a war. Now, what has happened in the recent weeks, what led to the agreements that were reached a week ago in Minsk, is the fact that certain European leaders, initially Hollande in France and later, begrudgingly, Merkel in Germany, at least came to realize that the consequences of continuing with these U.S.-led provocations against Russia, was a danger of exactly the kind of thermonuclear extinction that Ambassador Jack Matlock warned about last week at the Press Club. So, we’re at a critical moment right now. There was an agreement reached between Hollande, Merkel, Putin, and Poroshenko, that they would work to de-escalate the immediate crisis on the ground inside eastern Ukraine.

Almost instantly, the Right Sector battalions, the armed paramilitary battalions of this neo-Nazi apparatus, the legacy of Stepan Bandera-Hitler collaboration during World War II, immediately said, we reject the ceasefire, we will continue to fight at all costs. So you’ve got a difficult situation on the ground, but you’ve got the four heads of state recognizing the immediate danger and the potential consequences of a further escalation, leading towards a general war and a thermonuclear war. So this is an extremely fragile situation, and you’ve got to be willing to take decisive actions. President Obama has provided a recipe of impeachable crimes, that he could be brought down for. Just this past week, when the Europeans were struggling to deal with this crisis in Greece, Jack Lew, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, put in a call to top officials of the Greek government and directly threatened them, that if they did not capitulate to the demands of the Troika and the Germans and others in Europe, to continue to go with the murderous policy of austerity, real genocide policy, that there would be a price to pay coming from the U.S.

You’ve got Obama, basically providing aid and comfort through Victoria Nuland, to outright neo-Nazis. You’ve got the crimes of the illegal wars that were carried out from Libya onward, that were not approved by Congress. So now, finally, big deal, President Obama is actually going to Congress to get authorization, after the fact, for what’s going on in Iraq and Syria. So all of these things are right there, on the table. The American people are to a very large extent, clueless, about the magnitude of the danger that the world is facing, because we’ve gone through four successive Presidential terms, two under Bush and Cheney, and now almost two full terms under Obama, in which the United States has been a driving factor towards a global confrontation that could very well go thermonuclear around this Ukraine crisis. So you have the European leaders frankly scared to death, because they’re on the front lines of a conflict that could lead to nuclear Armageddon.

And don’t forget, there are large numbers of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons throughout western Europe right now, and they are being modernized and updated, with longer-range capability, with greater accuracy, so Europe is not immune from a thermonuclear conflict involving the U.S. and Russia: All of mankind is wiped out if this happens. And the Ukraine situation, like the Greek situation, are just indicative of the fact that the existing trans-Atlantic system has reached a point of absolute breakdown. And if the desperate people in charge of that situation have their way, they will potentially bring down the entire mankind with them. You have the alternative in the BRICS. You have the alternative in the trans-Atlantic region to align with the BRICS. But certain very critical things have to happen right up front:

We cannot have another two years of an Obama Presidency, with any credible expectation of coming out of that process alive. So the starting point right now, immediately, on Ukraine, is force the removal of Victoria Nuland. Wash the U.S. hands of collusion with neo-Nazis that are on the cutting edge of trying to provoke world war. And by doing that and by taking other steps to either remove Obama from office, or greatly restrict his mobility, essentially rendering him powerless as President for the duration of his term in office, we can avoid war. If we don’t do those simple things, if we don’t do those critical things, then there is all bets off for the survival of mankind over this next immediate period ahead.

OGDEN: Thank you very much. Let me just say in conclusion, if you haven’t seen it yet, the live coverage that LaRouche PAC did of the Schiller Institute conference up in New York City last week, which featured a keynote address by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, very thorough, very important, this is archived on the LaRouche PAC website, and we encourage you to watch it in full, but also circulate it as widely as you can. This is part of the ongoing “Manhattan project” of the LaRouche movement focussing on New York City.

Also last night Helga LaRouche was featured on the LaRouche PAC activists’ call, which a weekly telephone conference call of close activists from all over the United States with LaRouche PAC, and one of her major points of emphasis was to continue the circulation of the petition which was mentioned earlier this in broadcast “The United States and Europe Must Have the Courage To Reject Geopolitics and Collaborate with the BRICS.” This petition continues to circulate and accumulate signatures, very high-level, prominent individuals from both inside the United States and internationally, and it is having an effect, especially, particularly from the standpoint that this represents a growing voice of sanity from within the United States, that nations around the world can see.

But we need you, who are watching this broadcast, to do everything you can to continue the circulation of this, continue doing outreach on your own part, reaching out to people from all different communities, universities, business communities, diplomatic circles, politicians, everybody that you can think of, and use this petition to mass effect. So that’s what I wanted to say in conclusion to our broadcast. Thank you very much for tuning in. I’d like to thank Jeffrey Steinberg for joining us here, tonight, and thank you very much, Jason, for being a part of our show. So please stay tuned to larouchepac.com. Good night.