Author: Alicia

Tune in tonight at 8pm for our weekly Friday webcast. As the stress tests in Europe reveal the utter bankruptcy of the entire transatlantic financial system, typified by Deutsche Bank and Monte dei Paschi in Italy, the urgency of initiating an entirely new era is staring us in the face. Glass-Steagall is now the official policy of both major political parties in the United States, and is on the agenda among prominent institutions inside Europe as evidenced by the Handelsblatt endorsement last week—however, this is merely the critical first step. Lyndon LaRouche’s invocation of the legacy of Alfred Herrhausen is paradigmatic of the solution necessary, which is contained within his “Four Laws” for a revival of productivity and progress. These measures which must be taken now can only be understood if viewed as a single coherent conception, premised on the fundamental principle of economic science: man is a creator, and only man creates. The past is never a logical antecedent of the future, but rather the future is only the product of creative genius, as typified by Albert Einstein, Krafft Ehricke, or Johannes Kepler. Only by ushering in this new conception of mankind as axiomatic of the new paradigm among nations, can we address and resolve the root causes of the current crisis which are driving us ever nearer the outbreak of world war.

Global Systemically Important Banks (GSIBs) have vast exposure as counterparties to post-Herrhausen Deutsche Bank’s huge derivatives portfolio, and will incur sweeping losses if Deutsche Bank defaults.

Schiller Institute chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche has made an urgent call for Deutsche Bank to be saved with a one-time financial infusion, and be reorganized to return to its original function as an exemplar of the German industrial bank, whose major purpose was to make low-interest loans for long-term global physical infrastructure building. This was exemplified in Alfred Herrhausen’s program to issue such loans to rebuild Poland in 1989.

Today, if Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s urgent proposal is not taken up, not only will Deutsche Bank fail, but widespread financial carnage will result in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. banks, and some will not survive.

A diagram in ZeroHedge, based on the June 30 IMF Report which called Deutsche Bank the most systemically risky bank, quantifies the exposure to Deutsche Bank’s risk, of banks on three continents, as highest, higher, and high, as follows:

* In Asia, most exposed to potential Deutsche bank defaults are, with largest exposure, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Mitsubishi; medium exposure: Bank of China, Sumitomo, and Mizuho Banks.

* In Europe, the largest exposures to Deutsche Bank are: HSBC, BNP Paribas, Barclays; medium exposure: Santander, Societe Generale, Credit Agricole, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Credit Suisse

* In the United States, the largest exposure is JPMorganChase; medium exposure: Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley; and lesser exposure: Bank of NY Mellon and State Street Bank. 

The net profit of Germany’s biggest bank is down to almost zero: in the second quarter of this year, the bank made only EU18 million of profit. In the same quarter a year ago, it was EU796 million. This implies a loss in profits within one year by 97.5%.  At the Frankfurt exchange this morning, Deutsche Bank’s shares dropped by 6%.

In the first quarter of 2016, the bank still made a net profit of  EU236 million; against that, Q2 brought a loss by 94%. The sector “global markets” had most of the losses in Q2 with 28%, followed by asset management with -18% and other wealth management with -12%; the only profitable sector was Postbank, with a net profit of 13%.

The said Q2 mini-profit, however, is due to relatively low legal expenses of EU120 million from April to July; a year ago, the bank had to shoulder EU1.2 billion during the same period. CEO John Cryan, a British banker from the investment branch, said he is content with the performance of the bank to the extent that it is going through a “rather difficult period,” but he did not give any indication that a fundamental change of strategy is considered. Should the bank’s performance not improve, even more streamlining and cost-cutting would be on the agenda, Cryan said in the context of the Q2 figures.

As for “Project Jade,” which, according to recent media leaks, is a new strategy of Deutsche Bank to survive by separating investment and commercial activities from each other, a bank spokesman declared: “Project Jade is not about splitting the bank. It is rather a project that has been running for quite some time, to simplify the bank as such and in its structure.” A similar denial of separation plans was made by Marcus Schenck of the board, saying in a conference call with select media this afternoon, “Some people believe that we are forced to sell Postbank in 2017, but that is not the case.” 

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The author is chairwoman of the German political party Civil Rights Movement Solidarity, BueSo.

While France has been hit by five horrendous terror attacks since the beginning of 2015, and brutal attacks have occurred in the same time frame in more than 30 countries (often more than once) in Europe, Asia, the United States, and Africa—the reality of the terrorist threat has now been experienced firsthand in Germany, with the attacks in Wuerzburg and Munich,^{1Nine Germans were massacred in a Munich shopping area on July 22 by an 18-year-old German-Iranian. The attack came just days after a 17-year-old Afghan refugee attacked and wounded passengers with an axe, on a train in the city of Wuerzburg.} whatever the biography or description of the perpetrators turns out to be (whether political Islamists or “self-radicalized” lone assassins). Without a doubt, the problem of international terrorism is one of the major threats to humanity as a whole.

In a situation in which a whole array of crises is coming on thick and fast—the growing war danger in Europe, Southwest Asia, and the Pacific; an attempted coup and subsequent consolidation of state power in Turkey, a NATO state; Brexit and the erosion of the European Union; and a new imminent financial crisis, to name only a few—it should be obvious that we can only solve these crises if we discard the old ways of thinking and geopolitical rancors, and if the most important states work together on an international level.

CSU parliamentarian Hans-Peter Uhl was right, in the wake of the night of horror in Munich, to call for improved, preventive measures and heightened cooperation among the relevant authorities, both domestically and abroad. But given the history and international operating mode of radical Islam, that obviously implies cooperation with Russia, the victim that has the most expertise on the networks in Chechnya and their links to the Right Sector in Ukraine and to ISIS, and which has proven, through its military intervention in Syria, to be the only country that has successfully pushed back the power of ISIS.

It is therefore urgent to take up the offer extended by President Vladimir Putin in his speech to the UN General Assembly in 2015. After pointing to the fatal consequences of the West’s policy of training allegedly “moderate” rebels to combat secular governments in the Middle East, who then defected in droves to ISIS, Putin stressed:

Especially since the newly released Chilcot Inquiry report in Great Britain spotlights how Tony Blair orchestrated the war of aggression against Iraq on the basis of conscious lies, and the disclosure of the suppressed 28 pages of the official Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 has left no doubt as to the role of Saudi Arabia in financing terrorism, a “more of the same” policy is tantamount to complicity in any new terrorist attacks.

The German authorities can no longer hide behind the usual sociological sophisms. The credibility of Mr. Uhl and Interior Minister Thomas de Maziere, of the members of the Bundestag’s domestic affairs committee, and of course of Chancellor Merkel, will depend on whether they initiate an official investigation to elucidate as quickly as possible the implications of these two documents—the Chilcot Report and the 28 pages—and draw the conclusions from them. It is unacceptable, under any circumstances, to use the attacks in Wuerzburg and Munich as the excuse to build up a police state as Turkish President Erdogan is doing, and to cooperate with precisely those governments that are exposed and implicated by the Chilcot Report and the 28 pages.

The Next Financial Crisis: Italy

A dramatic change in policy is also urgently necessary with respect to another existential crisis, the financial one. The word is out everywhere that Italy is the new Greece. But unlike Greece, it doesn’t represent just two percent of the European Union’s GDP, but is the fourth largest industrial nation in Europe. Yet the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the German Finance Ministry are pursuing the same brutal and incompetent policy which has already ruined Greece and eroded the European Union (EU). Italy’s GDP has shrunk by about 25 percent as a result of the EU’s murderous austerity policy since the 2008 financial crisis, leading to horrible consequences for the healthcare system and pensions, an increase in unemployment, the shutdown of many small and medium-sized businesses, and a dramatic rise in suicides. One result of this shrinking of the real economy by about one quarter is that the Italian banks are now sitting on 360 billion euros of non-performing loans.

The medicine that ECB head Mario Draghi, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, the Bundesbank, and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaueble intend to administer to the “sick man of Europe,” is poisonous. They all agree, with minimal differences, that Italian savers and investors should pay for the rescue of the sick banks, as the EU’s bail-in law prescribes, thus accepting the Cyprus model—in the event that the stress test results for the Italian banks, to be made public at the end of July, show—as expected—that these banks are undercapitalized.

In that case, Italian savers and investors would have their money expropriated, and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, as a result, would be threatened with a revolt. He would most likely lose the upcoming referendum for constitutional reform in October and he would lose the subsequent elections. The Five Star Movement would then set in motion Italy’s exit from the euro and the European Union.

While various media, among them Die Welt, describe Italy as a “failed state,” putting it for all intents and purposes in the same category as Somalia or Iraq, the so-called EU political leadership is doing nothing—absolutely nothing—to remedy the crisis. What these soulless EU bureaucrats—such as Juncker, ECB head Draghi, and other politicians and bankers who have made their careers by passing through the revolving door between politics and the major banking houses several times—have not for one moment taken into account, is that their policies in support of the casino economy are ruining entire nations, the lives and fortunes of many millions of people.

The Solution

There is a solution: The Bueso is working with many collaborators in Europe and the United States in a campaign to avert the threatened insolvency of Deutsche Bank through a return to the banking philosophy which underlay the policy of the assassinated chairman of the bank, Alfred Herrhausen.^{2“Webcast with Zepp-LaRouche: Bank Rescue Plan Is Last Chance,” EIR, July 22, 2016, pp. 5-20.} This campaign has generated a good deal of attention from the financial sector, since everyone knows that the trans-Atlantic financial system is hopelessly bankrupt. In this context, the report that Deutsche Bank is preparing for an in-house separation of its business and investment sections, is of interest.

The fact that the demand for a return to the Glass-Steagall banking separation law has been incorporated into the party platforms of both the Democratic and Republican parties—the result of many years of campaigning by the LaRouche Political Action Committee—has so far had two interesting results: It has produced screams from Wall Street, which fears Glass-Steagall more than the devil fears holy water, and it has discredited all those who constantly claimed that it couldn’t be done.

In these turbulent days there is a simple measure at hand, which will allow anyone to see whether leading politicians are championing the general welfare of the people they are supposed to represent, or whether they are lobbyists for other interests. This measure is their readiness to seize the existing solutions—that is, to accept Putin’s offer, and to return to an economic policy based on serving the general welfare. Politicians who fail to measure up should be hounded out of office for just that reason.

The US system of political parties is disintegrating. Lyndon LaRouche has identified what he calls the “potty system” as being at the root of the dumbing down of the American population, forcing people to choose between two evil forces, both controlled by Wall Street. Now, after the romp by the British/FBI asset Donald Trump over the shattered Republican Party, the Democrat Party is following suit. Tens of thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters flooded into Philadelphia, trying to somehow turn the tide against Wall Street’s darling Hillary Clinton, only to see their phony hero call for unity behind Hillary. At a pre-convention meeting with his supporters, Sanders was met with heckling and booing, followed by a march to the convention with chants such as: “Donald Trump is a racist bore, Hillary is a corporate whore.”         

On Monday Bernie’s army was breathing fire, yelling “Goldman Sachs” and “We trusted you” when Sanders, as well as Elizabeth Warren, called for unity behind Hillary. But by Tuesday afternoon, although Sanders supporters disrupted several state caucus breakfast meetings, observers said that the convention was like a morgue, both inside and out.

The hysterical effort by Hillary’s campaign to blame the leak of Democratic Party emails (which led to the resignation of Party chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz for sabotaging the Sanders campaign) on Vladimir Putin, is backfiring, due to its incredible stupidity. Foreign Minister Lavrov, asked about the charge, said he didn’t want to use four-letter words, and cartoons appearing everywhere are mocking the effort to call anyone not committed to the nuclear destruction of Russia (and the world) as “Putin’s useful fool.”

What will replace the broken parties? This must be determined by Americans mobilized around LaRouche, to create the required new institutions and policies which allow the restoration of the Hamiltonian American System, and to bring the nation into cooperation with Russia and China for global development and peace.

Bloody mass killings now fill the headlines on a daily basis in every part of the “advanced sector” nations:        

* A crazed former employee of a Japanese mental facility attacked the facility and slit the throats of 19 patients and seriously injured 26 more, after writing a letter to the parliament explaining what he intended to do, as an act of “beneficial” euthanasia;        

* Two terrorists attacked a church in France, slitting the throats of the priest and a nun, before being killed by police. IS took credit for the attack, feeding the anti-Muslim frenzy in the press.        

* Two suicide bombers from al-Shabaab exploded their vehicles at a UN peacekeeping base in the capital of Somalia, killing 12;        

* Two teens were killed and 16 others wounded in Ft. Myers Florida, when three other teens opened fire at a crowd outside a nightclub;        

* And in Germany, the fifth killing in a week, as a man killed his doctor and himself in a hospital.        

This is just today’s toll. These are not all terrorist assaults, as some are by people driven mad by their hopeless state in society, or by the violent culture, or by the psychosis-inducing video games and popular “entertainment,” or by drugs, or by all of these.        

It is a symptom of a dying culture. While millions are driven from their homes in Southwest Asia by Obama’s policy of perpetual “regime change” wars, and as the media in the West hypes Obama’s lie that Russia and China are “aggressors” run by dictators who must be confronted militarily, the population is told to join in the Roman Circus of the political conventions, and unite behind leaders who offer only more economic destruction and global warfare.        

But the brainwashing is falling apart. Both political party conventions have been fiascoes, producing candidates hated by the majority of the population, and leaving their party structures in disarray. The only thing left standing is the demand for Glass-Steagall, which is recognized in Congress and internationally as the result of Lyndon LaRouche’s unrelenting campaign over the past decades to educate and mobilize the population and the political institutions, that only a return to Franklin Roosevelt’s war on Wall Street can reverse the ongoing collapse of the western economies.

Roosevelt’s famous statement that the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is the operative principle in mobilizing the population to end the madness — together with LaRouche’s warning against any kind of pragmatism. No partial measures are possible in a world facing thermonuclear war. The leaders of the United Kingdom and the United States have been shown by their own governments to be war criminals, through the release of the Chilcot Report in England and the 28 pages of the Joint Congressional Investigation on 9/11 in the US. Blair, Bush and Obama have been shown to be guilty of launching illegal wars of aggression, and of collaboration with (or control over) terrorists to prosecute those wars. And yet they remain out of jail, and Obama still sits in the White House with his finger on the trigger.        

The Obama drive for war on Russia and China is also in danger. Putin and Lavrov have pulled Turkey out of the mobilization for war on Syria and Russia, while China has pulled the entire Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) out of the mobilization for war on China. The world is turning to Russia and China for leadership and development, rather than the West’s austerity and war. Even the European nations are beginning to see the insanity of the drive for war on Russia, and the benefits of peace and development through cooperation.        

The New Paradigm posed by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, based on the common aims of mankind, is within our grasp, if the citizens of the West have the courage to follow the Schiller Institute’s lead for a “New Silk Road” development of the entire world, and to follow the wise words of Friedrich Schiller that we must be both patriots of our nations and citizens of the world.

Send me daily updates

That is the meaning of the two releases this month, the one of Britain’s long-delayed Chilcot report into Tony Blair’s criminal responsibility for the illegal Iraq war, and the other of the long-suppressed 28 pages of the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, documenting the Saudi hand behind that butchery. It means that time is up at last for those blood-drooling dinosaurs Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Barack Obama, after fifteen years of wars based on lies. They have destroyed the Middle East, drowned Europe in desperate refugees, and caused blood to be spilled on the streets across Europe and the U.S.,— all based on lies.

And don’t believe that Tony Blair was merely the “poodle” of the non-functional George W. Bush.  In fact, he instigated Bush on behalf of the British Queen who was really giving the orders. For example, the documentation Chilcot released included a note from Blair to Bush on Sept. 12, 2001, urging him to act immediately on “weapons of mass destruction.” Although he did not yet single out Iraq in particular, Blair wrote, “Some of this will require action that some will balk at.  But we are better to act now and explain and justify our actions than let the day be put off until some further, perhaps even worse catastrophe occurs.  And I believe this is a real possibility.” [emphasis in original]

Their fifteen years of wars based on lies, their fifteen years of terrorism, have been a Dark Age of civilization.  It is time to discard all of this; it is time to institute a human direction of human affairs, even if there are only a few people who actually know what it is to be human, and actually conceive themselves as human beings rather than as smart talking animals. At this moment, at the time of the threatened breakout of an uncontrollable financial collapse, perhaps beginning with Germany’s Deutsche Bank, Lyndon LaRouche has put forward an emergency initiative to forestall that collapse by fostering the productivity of labor, which is human creative discovery, or true humanity.  He has proposed an emergency rescue of Deutsche Bank, on condition that it immediately and drastically alter its policy back to that of its former Chairman Alfred Herrhausen, who was murdered by still-unidentified killers on Oct. 30, 1989.

At that moment, Herrhausen was one of those, like Lyndon LaRouche and his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who were moving to insure that the then-ongoing fall of the Communist system, lead to high-technology, high-productivity joint development of the countries which had been on both sides of the so-called “Iron Curtain.”  In October, 1988, Lyndon LaRouche already know that the Berlin Wall would fall, and Germany could be reunified, before virtually anyone else did. At that time, he spoke publicly in Berlin to urge that Germany assist in the agro-industrial development of Poland, to launch such a unified East-West process of development. Within three months, LaRouche was framed and thrown in prison by George H.W. Bush.  One year later, Herrhausen, in his turn, was assassinated five days before he was scheduled to give a speech to precisely the same effect, calling for the establishment of a development bank for Poland, modeled
on Germany’s postwar reconstruction bank, itself modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

See: LaRouche’s 40 Year History for a New Economic Order

This whole subject is far deeper than can be indicated here, and its implications far broader.  But the dinosaurs have had their day.  Make way for the human beings.

I’m interested, tell me more

Immediately after the release on July 15 of the finally-declassified “28 pages” of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attack on the United States, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) issued this hard-hitting statement urging immediate follow-up Congressional action:

“These new revelations are a chilling description of Saudi ties to terrorists, Saudi payments to terrorists, and Saudi obstruction of U.S. antiterrorism investigations. While the pages do not reach a conclusion regarding Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks, they provide more than enough evidence to raise serious concerns. These concerns should be addressed and proved or disproved in court, but loopholes in America’s antiterrorism laws make that impossible. Congress must immediately pass the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, introduced by Senators Schumer and Cornyn and myself, to ensure any nation that conspires against the American people can be brought to justice.”

JASTA, as the bill is known, was passed by the Senate in May. On Tuesday, Sen. Blumenthal, joined by representatives of families who lost loved ones in the bestial 9/11 attack, held a press conference on the steps of the New Haven Federal Courthouse, to demand that the House of Representatives also pass it now so that it can become law. “Saudi Arabia sponsored and supported terrorism, according to some of these recent revelations. There’s evidence of it, and these families deserve their day in court,” said Blumenthal.

Mary Fetchet, founder of “Voices of September 11th,” with her husband Frank, who lost their 24-year-old son that day, spoke in support Senator Blumenthal’s call for the House of Representatives to pass JASTA, “so that all Americans can feel confident that those who are funding terrorist acts are held accountable.”

She situated the urgency of this action in light of the wanton “carnage” spreading across the world:

“Acts of terrorism are happening regularly, innocent lives are lost, families are destroyed, communities are damaged. The recruitment of young people to ISIS and other terrorist groups is happening, both here and abroad,” Fetchet said. “I ask, how are these operations funded? Who is supporting the operatives as they plan, recruit and carry out these horrific events? We can capture, kill, and investigate the trail of evidence, but I am convinced that unless we hold those accountable for funding terrorism, our communities and countries, both in the U.S. and abroad, will be constantly dealing with the carnage.”

Florida Sen. Bob Graham summed up the situation after the public release last Friday of the long-classified 28 pages of the report by the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, in an admonition reported by Florida Public Radio station WFSU Monday evening:

“I’ve described it as being like pulling the cork out of the bottle. You’re happy that you’ve opened the bottle, but we’ve got a lot of work to do with the liquid that’s inside that bottle.”

Florida Bulldog intrepid editor Dan Christensen Tuesday published a new article, pointing to yet more “liquid inside that bottle.” Christensen draws attention to a one-page “Executive Summary” of a September 2005 “joint FBI-CIA intelligence report assessing the nature and extent of Saudi government support of terrorism,” which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released last Friday, along with the redacted 28 pages.

According to Christensen, the existence of the 2005 assessment was previously unknown; Congress had required it be produced in a classified annex of the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2004. Not only were significant sections of the released one-page summary blacked out, but so was half of the one-paragraph, accompanying transmittal letter for the annex signed by FBI’s Robert Mueller and CIA director Porter Goss!

‘s attempted whitewash of the Saudis (“there is no evidence that either the Saudi government or members of the Saudi royal family knowingly provided support for the attacks of 11 September 2001 or that they had foreknowledge of terrorist operations in the Kingdom or elsewhere”—emphasis added), is followed by the admission that:

“There is evidence that official Saudi entities, [blacked out] and associated nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), provide financial and logistical support to individuals in the United States and around the world, some of whom are associated with terrorism-related activity…. The Saudi government and many of its agencies have been infiltrated and exploited by individuals associated with or sympathetic to Al-Qaida.”

Christensen’s article, “28 Pages Connect Saudi Prince To Al Qaeda Leader, Supporters Of 9/11 Hijackers,” otherwise features new leads to Florida contained in the 28 pages, and rubs in the Saudi Royal Family to the Bush family.

“The Saudi ambassador who met with President George W. Bush at the White House two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 had connections to a major al-Qaeda figure and other Saudis suspected of helping two of the suicide hijackers while they were in the United States,”