Author: Alicia

The American people have recently shown an unusual and most welcome courage and optimism in crushing Obama’s open support for the sponsors of terrorism, overturning his veto of the JASTA bill allowing legal suits against the Saudis for their roll in the 9/11 assault on the US. Now, there is a concerted effort to crush that optimism and courage, by Obama and by the British, using their spokesmen and the whorish press to terrify the population into accepting a war on Russia and China. That effort can and must be exposed and defeated.        

A mad dash for war has been launched since the JASTA victory, from Defense Secretary Ash Carter calling for a $1 trillion modernization of the US nuclear stockpile to prepare to combat “Russian aggression,” from the British Defense Secretary and members of the House of Commons ranting that we must begin shooting down Russian planes in Syria now, to Obama personally pulling the rug out from under the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire plan in Syria.        

But Obama is finished, exposed as a failure in every way — the collapse of Obamacare, the collapse of productive employment, the exposure of his support for Saudi-sponsored terrorism, his role as a mass killer through his illegal “regime change” wars and his drone assassinations of men, women and children. Will he now take us to nuclear war, or will the American people regain their courage and optimism to remove him from office?        

Russian And Chinese military leaders, meeting today at the 7th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, sent out a bone-chilling warning that the Obama Administration is far advanced in preparing its forces for a first strike nuclear war against both nations. Naming the operative US war doctrine, Prompt Global Strike, and pointing especially at the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems along both the Russian and Chinese borders, Lt. Gen. Viktor Poznikhir of the Russian General Staff said: “Russia’s military experts say that the US hopes to get a chance, due to possessing it [the missile defense system], to deliver a surprise missile-nuclear strike in any region of the world, including Russia and China, with no punishment.” Prompt Global Strike, he explained, is based on the fantasy that the new missile systems can take out the opponents capacity to respond to a first strike, by imposing disarming strikes on their nuclear forces.        

At the same forum, Chinese Maj. Gen. Cai Jun of the Central Military Commission Joint Staff, said: “The implementation of the plans for developing the missile shield is destroying the strategic balance and stability and also aggravating the situation in the sphere of global security. At present, the United States has powerful forces of general designation and also has considerable qualitative supremacy in the sphere of strategic nuclear forces. In aggregate, these components comprise modern armed forces, making it possible to implement the concept of a ‘Prompt Global Strike.'”     

Gen. Poznikhir added: “Russia is forced to take adequate response measures in order to prevent the US and its allies from influencing the existing balance of forces in the sphere of strategic weapons. As far as we understand, our Chinese partners are acting in the same way.”

Is Obama such a narcissist that he believes he can demand that nuclear-armed Russia and China must back down to his war threats and his ongoing regime-change crimes across the globe?        

Only the British could match Obama in war-mongering hysteria. The British House of Commons today held a special session on Syria, with Blairites and Torys alike demanding a war on Russia over Syria, comparing Russia’s war on terrorists in Syria to be the equivalent of the Nazi holocaust.        

Waiting for the imminent financial collapse before implementing Glass-Steagall is equally insane. The ongoing demise of the western banking system is now the front page story in every western financial newspaper, to the point that leading “econoquacks” such as Ken Rogoff of Harvard are proposing negative 6% interest rates, looting the depositors and destroying what is left of honest commercial bankers. Such madness would succeed in fulfilling the IMF’s proposal over the past weekend to simply shut down all small and medium size banks, letting the Too-Big-To-Fail investment bankers run roughshod over the nation and the western world.        

Lyndon LaRouche identified this strategic and economic insanity as a concerted effort to confuse and demoralize the American population which has recently acted with courage and pride in overriding Obama’s veto on the JASTA bill.        

Add to that the “induced degeneracy,” as LaRouche called it, being foisted on the population through the filth of the presidential election. Even China’s official news agency Xinhua is shocked at the degeneracy of the campaign, writing in an editorial that the last debate “reflects the decay of U.S. politics and a deeply divided society.” Referencing the preoccupation with the Trump sex tapes and the parading of Bill Clinton’s sexual conquests during the debate, Xinhua concludes that the “energy of U.S. politics is being consumed by some drama and entertainment and cannot be used to deal with core issues.”

Obama’s chosen successor Hillary Clinton was exposed today stating the obvious as early as 2014 — that the Saudis and Qatar were “providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups.” And yet she, like Obama, continues to call for war on Russia and Syria — not the nations which support terrorism, but those being attacked by terrorists.        

Obama could be removed now by a conscientious Congress, which would also transform the degenerate election process. The question is, will the failure to do so allow him to take the world down with him.

Sign me up, I’d like daily updates.

In what may well have been the only sane public comment uttered by participants in the just-concluded Oct. 7-9 IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C., World Bank President Jim Yong Kim responded as follows to a journalist’s question about the role of China in achieving the stated goal of ending extreme poverty by the year 2030:

“Well, first of all, without China we’d have no chance to even think about ending extreme poverty. China lifted 700 million people out of extreme poverty over the last two to three decades. So there’s still people living in extreme poverty, but not very many. China, itself is determined to bring that number down to zero in the very near future. In terms of our work in Africa, well, of course, this is one of the place that we have to focus the most in terms of ending extreme poverty.”

Otherwise, an editorial published by the Jamaican Observer accurately summarized the proceedings: “IMF, World Bank Have No Solution for Global Economic Malaise.” The IMF did manage to issue a final communiqué: but to the degree that their gobbledygook is intelligible at all, their policy proposals read like an anti-Hamiltonian manifesto: “Monetary policy should remain accommodative”; “structural reforms are key to raising potential growth and would benefit from synergies with other policies”; and “we will monitor potential financial stability risks associated with prolonged low or negative interest rates, systemic market liquidity risks, and nonbank intermediation.”

The creme-de-la-creme of the bankrupt international financial elite gathered Friday in Washington, D.C. for the opening of the IMF/World Bank fall meeting—with absolutely zero idea of what to do about the onrushing collapse of their entire trans-Atlantic financial system, including the high-profile bankruptcy of Deutsche Bank, which could be the trigger for the general collapse.

They don’t know what they are doing, Lyndon LaRouche commented on Friday. They have no way to create the institutions of a secure international banking system, which can only be done by implementing LaRouche’s Four Laws, along with the Hamiltonian approach to credit that underlies those Laws. Adopting that policy, beginning with the immediate reenactment of FDR’s Glass-Steagall, would set the standard to define productive credit, and foster science-driver policies such as the space program, which would increase the productive powers of labor.

The only trace of sanity within a mile’s radius of the IMF meeting, was provided by a squad of LaRouche PAC organizers, who distributed 120 copies of the latest issue of the Hamiltonian— with its lead headline, “One Minute After Midnight… The Crash Is On!”—to conference participants, and found much serious concern with the global crisis, and significant support for Glass-Steagall and the policies of Herrhausen at Deutsche Bank.

Inside the event, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “worries about Deutsche Bank AG and other potentially troubled European banks are casting a pall over the autumn meetings of the IMF and World Bank this week.” Similarly, the New York Times ran a lengthy article fretting that “Deutsche Bank might be the next Lehman Brothers.” The bulk of the article cited numerous experts arguing unconvincingly that things really aren’t so bad, and that “there won’t be any contagion episode” related to Deutsche Bank. But the article had to admit, in conclusion:

“Should Deutsche Bank precipitate a financial crisis, it’s not clear how it would be resolved. It’s a European bank, so the Federal Reserve’s powers would be limited. ‘I hope there’s a global game plan,’ [Harvard University Law Professor Hal] Scott said, ‘because that’s what it would take. If Deutsche Bank set off contagion, it would start in Europe. Who would be next? This would require global coordination.'”

Meanwhile, there is frenzied activity behind the scenes, to stitch together some sort of a bail-out for Deutsche Bank. The German daily Handelsblatt reported that a number of “blue-chip” German companies are prepared to offer a capital injection of a couple of billion dollars. And Bloomberg reported that “senior advisers at top Wall Street firms are speaking to representatives of the German lender about ideas, including a share sale and asset disposals,” to the tune of some $5.6 billion.

None of these schemes, however, will work, nor do they address the underlying bankruptcy of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system, to the tune of a $1.5 quadrillion speculative bubble which can never be paid, and which must be written off and the economy reorganized as per the specifications of LaRouche’s Four Laws.

“Obama and company are trying to intimidate the world into submission — but it’s not likely to work. There are many nations and forces in Asia and even in Europe who can’t be convinced by this.” That was EIR Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche’s judgment in discussion of the strong Russian Defense Ministry warnings Thursday against any U.S. attack on Syrian and Russian forces in Syria, and the furious threat to “beat Russia down,” delivered by U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley in a Washington, D.C., speech Oct. 4. Milley’s outburst coincided with a “leak” to Josh Rogin of the Washington Post that active options for U.S. attacks on Syrian (and inevitably Russian) armed forces are under discussion in the White House.

LaRouche added that “Obama would like to say that Russia is his number-one enemy, but his threats are not true. General war is beyond anything Obama can understand. He’d like to have almighty power, but he doesn’t have it anymore. He’s more like just a British royal family agent with a bad smell.”

Nonetheless in drone killings, in Libya, in Iraq, in Syria, now in Yemen, etc., Obama is a “lying mass murderer,” LaRouche concluded. “When you say those three words — ‘lying mass murderer’ — you’ve got him.” 

In testimony before the U.S. Congress several years ago, Thomas Hoenig, the Vice Chairman of the Federal Depositors 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 reinstating 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 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 Supporters 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. Passing Glass Steagall is the necessary first step in a total overhaul of the U.S. economy, as spelled out by Lyndon LaRouche in his Four Laws, which includes the launching of a massive capital investment of Federal credit into major infrastructure projects, that create millions of productive, good-paying jobs, and a crash effort to revive the near-dead U.S. space program and related frontier scientific areas.

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, they can postpone the bank’s collapse. The International Monetary Fund, in its annual
autumn economic forecast, 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.

Every House Member and one-third of the Senate is 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.

I want to help make this happen.

Tune in live at 4 pm eastern today for more on the genius of Albert Einstein. “A large part of history is … replete with the struggle for … human rights, an eternal struggle in which a final victory can never be won. But to tire in that struggle would mean the ruin of society.” —Albert Einstein

Einstein’s commitment to the development of the human species, to each generation surpassing the previous one, extended beyond the realm of science to the domain of politics. Known in his day as an outspoken opponent of racism and McCarthyism (read: Trumanism), Einstein demonstrated that a commitment to humanity transcends fields of thought.

Headlines in the leading press in Europe and the U.S. make it very clear that the Financial Lords of Wall Street and the City of London can no longer hide the impending, and inevitable, collapse of their financial system. Consider today’s Die Welt: “Deutsche Bank threatens US government with systemic collapse.” Or Bloomberg: “Existential Threat to World Economic Order Clouds IMF Talks.” The Bloomberg article is reporting on the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, the annual overview of the world economy which was released today ahead of the annual IMF meeting which takes place this weekend in Washington DC.        

It would be best to refer to the current crisis as “One Minute After Midnight,” rather than one minute before. “They can’t cover it up,” said Lyndon LaRouche today. “They are hopelessly bankrupt.”        

The problem with the pronouncements by the IMF on the crisis, however, is that their proposal of what to do about it is simply more of the same policies which caused the break down in the first place. To justify this, they have to lie about the cause. The transformation of the major western banks into unregulated gambling casinos by the take down of Glass Steagall in the 1990s is never mentioned, while the panicked implementation of massive money printing and negative interest rates to hold the Too-Big-To-Fail banks together over the past years, at the expense of the real economy, is prescribed as the solution rather than the cause.        

Ironically, the emergence of populism across Europe and the US is described as the cause of the crisis, rather than the result. “Fed by stagnant wages and diminishing job security, the populist uprising threatens to depress a world economy that International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde says is already ‘weak and fragile,'” writes Bloomberg.        

The IMF calls for three policy solutions: more loose money (negative interest rates), more government spending (quantitative easing), and structural reforms (a euphemism for anti-labor policies). Indeed, that is what is already happening across the trans-Atlantic. The Finanacial Times Tuesday acknowledged that “In the final three months of the year, the UK, Japan and Europe are expected to mint a combined $506bn to purchase assets — the largest quarterly sum created since the early days of the US Federal Reserves QE programme in 2009.”

Just as the reality of the collapse can not be hidden from the public, so also the only possible solution can and must be brought before the people and the legislators across the U.S. and Europe — putting the current bankrupt system out of its misery in precisely the method implemented by Franklin Roosevelt upon assuming the Presidency in 1933. The immediate restoration of Glass Steagall is the only means to save the commercial banking system of the Western nations. It will mean the demise of most of the Wall Street and London TBTF banks — but the only way to salvage the lives of the real people caught up in that massive bubble is to oversee it’s collapse in an orderly, legal fashion, allowing emergency regulators to distinguish between the gamblers and those who were fooled into trusting the criminal institutions with their savings and pensions.        

Then the real work begins — the joyful work of nation building. Through the restoration of the “American System” of national banking developed by Alexander Hamilton, and the issuence of credits through that system to create productive employment and an increase in real productivity through increased energy throughput, the nation can be restored. Restoring America’s lost commitment to the frontiers of science, through fusion power development and a revival of our space program, will provide the necessary future for our children, freed from Obama’s drug infested counter-culture, and re-introduced to classical music and classical culture, both our own and that of our natural allies in China, Russia, India and the Middle East, as well as the newly prosperous nations of Africa and Ibero America.        

It must be addressed, however, that the failure to achieve these developments now, before the insane election process is completed in the U.S., will lead us rapidly to global war. Never has the world been closer to nuclear war, as Obama and his Defense Secretary “Nuclear Ash” Carter are moving the world’s most advanced military weaponry up to the Russian and Chinese borders, while launching a $1 trillion program to rebuild the entire US nuclear arsenal. Carter insists that the US must maintain a “first strike” nuclear capacity to meet the threat of an imagined conventional invasion of NATO by Russia. In fact, Obama and his war party are now making preparations for war on Russian and Syrian forces in Syria, which could provoke world war immediately.        

This madness has nothing to do with the non-existing threat of military aggression from Russia or China, but the very real “threat” to the Anglo-American financial empire being created by Russia, China, India and their BRICS partners. With the support from nearly every developing nation on Earth, these nations are creating a new paradigm for the world, centered on China’s New Silk Road development policies and cooperation on crushing drugs and terrorism world-wide.        

The exposure of Obama’s open support for terrorists and their sponsors in his (overridden) veto of the JASTA bill opens the path to his removal from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”        

The US and Europe can and must end the madness, and join the new paradigm.

I’m interested, tell me more

Deutsche Bank officials arrive in Washington this week in the hopes of finishing off a deal with the DOJ to reduce the pending fines for mortgage-backed securities fraud, from $14 billion to $5.4 billion. News coverage of DB’s woes includes www.cityam coverage of the “Fall of the House of Merkel,” as her failure to act on the DB crisis is now losing her support and destroying her reputation as the anchor of European stability. Even if she wins re-election, it will be due to a laughable lack of alternate candidates, rather than her continuing popularity.

A DB bailout is seen as inevitable, with some proposals calling for the German government to recapitalize the bank by buying a 20-percent stake. Jeremy Warner of the Daily Telegraph headlined his article on Monday, “Deutsche Bank woes reveal a new financial crisis,” which he says is different from that in 2008, because government regulators have made matters far worse by their zero- interest-rate policies, which make banks unprofitable; by boosting reserve requirements under Basel IV; and by imposing fines for past misdeeds that are a new form of indirect taxation.

The NY Times’ Dealbook has a sober assessment of DB’s appetite for high-risk transactions out of its London offices as the root cause of the crisis, which can bring down the entire banking system, due to all the big Wall Street and other banks that are counter-parties to the derivatives portfolio built up by Deutsche Bank’s London center. The Times claims that DB is leveraged at 25:1—$75 billion in equity supporting $1.8 trillion in assets, but this is a significant understatement. Using the tangible capital measures and International Financial Reporting Standards, Deutsche Bank is leveraged at 37:1. This is also the figure cited by the FDIC. By comparison, JPMorgan’s ratio, is 18:1 using the more accurate international measures.

[The calculations are: Deutsche Bank’s tangible capital is 2.68% of assets. So the leverage ratio is 100/2.68 = 37 in the case of Deutsche Bank. JP Morgan Chase’s tangible capital is 5.49% of assets; it’s leverage ratio is 100/5.49 = 18].

DB’s assets are heavily concentrated in Level 3 securities, which are near impossible to sell in a crisis and also nearly impossible to properly value. 32 billion euros, or half of the bank’s equity buffer, is in Level 3 securities.

Bloomberg adds another piece to the Deutsche Bank scandal, reporting that the U.S. Department of Justice and the UK Financial Conduct Authority are probing DB’s role in a $10 billion money-laundering scheme, engineered by DB’s former chief trader in the Moscow branch, Tim Wiswell. Using a technique called “mirror trading,” involving offshore entities, Wiswell helped Russians illegally launder their money overseas—until he was caught and fired. In a wrongful dismissal suit, Wiswell made clear that his bosses back in London were fully aware of everything he was doing, and had signed off on all of the new clients he had served through his money-laundering actions.

Marketwatch reported Monday that a Milan federal prosecutor has indicted three DB executives, along with Nomura International officials and top management of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, on fraud charges, based on BMPS’s fraudulent reporting on its financial well-being. Judge Livio Cristofano acted off of findings of a one-and-a-half year probe by Italian prosecutors of stock price manipulation and false accounting by the Siena bank, in partnership with DB and Nomura. A plea deal was requested by the bank in July, and the court will soon decide. But 13 executives from the three banks were formally charged on Saturday and face criminal trial. This includes six current and former DB executives.

Yesterday’s Colombian plebiscite for “peace” with the FARC narco-terrorists—which all along was a thinly-disguised British plan for shameless drug legalization, and which was widely expected to pass by a margin of 2 to 1—was soundly rejected by the Colombian population, with 50.21 percent voting “No” and 49.78 percent voting “Yes.” A shocked Washington Post Monday reported that “Colombians voted against the peace accord, in a Brexit-style backlash that defied pollsters’ predictions and left supporters of the deal in tears.”

Among those crying hardest today are Tony Blair, the long-time political godfather of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who risked everything on the peace deal, and lost. Also in tears today is Barack Obama, whose administration sponsored, organized, promoted, and lobbied for the deal at every turn, going back years. The final accord was signed a few weeks ago in the smiling presence of Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry, Cuban President Raul Castro, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

“Sunday’s outcome,” the Washington Post moaned, “also amounts to a setback for the United States and the Obama administration,” which had gone so far as to offer to remove the FARC, which is the world’s largest cocaine cartel, from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, allowing American banks and businesses to deal with them.

Back in June 1999, then New York Stock Exchange president Richard Grasso met in the Colombian jungle territory run by the FARC, with the narco-terrorist group’s chief financial officer, Raul Reyes, to discuss “mutual investments.” The two men were photographed in a tight, fraternal embrace—which the LaRouche movement made infamous internationally as the “Grasso Abrazo.”

In Feb. 5, 2016, EIR summarized what was really behind the “peace” deal:

“In 2014, the FARC leadership, which controls extensive marijuana, coca, and poppy plantations in the Colombian countryside, proposed at the negotiating table that the government agree that the State identify possible industrial and artesanal uses of these narcotics, and then `regulate the production and market for coca leaf, poppy, and marijuana.’ Last December, Santos took the first steps towards that, signing a decree legalizing the cultivation, processing, R&D and export of `medical’ marijuana. The plan is to turn marijuana exports into as big an `industry’ as flowers or food, Colombia’s Health Minister told Bloomberg news in January. On Feb. 3, PharmaCielo—a Canadian company run by former executives of Britain’s notorious Philip Morris company and speculator James Rogers, co-founder of George Soros’s Quantum Fund—filed their application to start farming and producing marijuana in Colombia. George Soros held a `very long meeting’ with Santos in 2012 to coordinate the operation.”