One Minute After Midnight…The Crash is On!

Past issues

by Diane Sare and Jeff Steinberg

On July 25th, 2007, in a Washington, DC address, Lyndon LaRouche shocked his audience by stating, “There is no possibility of a non-collapse of the present financial system—none! It’s finished, now! The present financial system can not continue to exist under any circumstances, under any Presidency, under any leadership, or any leadership of nations. Only a fundamental and sudden change in the world monetary financial system will prevent a general, immediate chain-reaction type of collapse.”

One year later, the U.S. Congress convened in emergency session, not to carry out LaRouche’s advice, but to ram through, under threats of martial law from then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the first $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) agreement, to be followed by trillions of dollars of quantitative easing until the present.

In 2013, in testimony before the U.S. Congress, Thomas Hoenig, the Vice Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and former President of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, warned that a new financial crash, worse than 2008, was inevitable unless the entire financial system was overhauled—starting with the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. He pointedly told the assembled Members of Congress that if they waited to act until {after} the crash, it would be too late—as they would collectively cave in to pressure from the Treasury Department and the Fed to enact yet another suicidal bailout.

The failure of America’s nominal leadership to respond to LaRouche’s and Hoenig’s warnings has led to the devastating immiseration of the American people who are committing suicide in record numbers: both physically as measured by heroin and alcohol addiction and death, and mentally, as evidenced by their choice, or non-choice, of Presidential contenders.

The moment of truth has now arrived, and the American people, following the example of the recent crushing defeat of President Obama, with the veto override of the JASTA bill (Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act), must act now to force Congress to reconvene immediately to pass the Glass-Steagall legislation, which is already before the House and the Senate.

The CEO of Deutsche Bank has been in Washington making a beg-pitch to the Department of Justice, to reduce the penalty for the bank’s widespread mortgage securities fraud, hoping that by paying $5 billion instead of $14 billion, the management can postpone the bank’s collapse. The International Monetary Fund, in releasing its annual Autumn “financial stability” report, acknowledged that Deutsche Bank is at the epicenter of a looming global financial crash, but proposed a series of psychotic austerity measures, more aimed at blocking China’s Eurasian infrastructure investments, than at addressing the reality of the imminent evaporation of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system.

That imminent blowout is also the key factor, driving the lunatics in the Obama White House and Office of the Secretary of Defense to push for an open confrontation with Russia. A meeting on Wednesday of the Principals Committee was taking up a series of escalating military options in Syria that would all amount to a direct provocation of World War III. And Defense Secretary Ashton “Strangelove” Carter has been running around, threatening first use of thermonuclear weapons against Russia, as he pushes for a $1 trillion modernization and expansion of the U.S. thermonuclear triad.

What is needed, first and foremost, is a passionate commitment to the future of the human species. That means economics as Lyndon LaRouche has long defined it: increasing man’s dominance over nature through the power of creative discovery of universal physical principles. This qualitative increase can be measured quantitatively by the measured increase in the number of people newly {sustainable} at higher and higher standards of living, in a given land area, as a function of increasingly higher applications of new technologies based upon those newly discovered principles. Contrary to the Satanic outlook of today’s environmentalist movement, there are no limits to the growth of mankind.

This was the conception of German space pioneer Krafft Ehricke who believed that our planet Earth was only the biological center of an ever-expanding mankind into the far reaches of the galaxy.

In order to achieve this God-given human potential, certain laws must be put in place immediately, in order to protect people from the hemorrhaging monetary crisis. The first of these laws is a global Glass-Steagall Act. Commercial banking, upon which the lives and productive activity of the population depend, must be protected. Gambling, as in derivatives, does not need to be protected. Reinstating Glass-Steagall would wipe out trillions of dollars of gambling obligations. Bloated investment funds would collapse into nothing, But, under a Hamiltonian system of national banking and credit, as well as fixed international exchange rates, credit can be generated which will enable investment in urgently needed great projects, putting billions of people into productive employment worldwide, with a commensurate improvement in the standard of living globally.

Under these conditions, where the worship of money is replaced with a proper respect for the value of human life, scientists from all nations can collaborate in solving some of the most pressing challenges facing mankind, and develop new forms of technology not yet even conceived. This conception of human economy, as understood by Alexander Hamilton, and developed into the highest of sciences by Lyndon LaRouche, is the only means available to address the existential crisis facing humanity today.

Take Action Now!

Every House Member and one-third of the Senate are up for re-election in a matter of weeks. They are all back home in their districts campaigning. They must be told, in no uncertain terms, that they must return to Washington—before Deutsche Bank, or the Italian, British, or French banks, or Wall Street, trigger the biggest financial blowout in modern history. Those institutions that have endorsed the reinstating of Glass-Steagall must be mobilized to act decisively now. Both the Democratic and Republican party platforms call for the reinstating of Glass-Steagall. The AFL-CIO is pushing for Glass-Steagall. It’s time to pony up.

This fight can and must be won—and that means winning before the whole system blows up. This has now reached the point that we are all in a life or death situation, and that, unfortunately, is not an exaggeration.