Author: Alicia

The Republican Party convention’s passage Monday of a Glass-Steagall plank for its platform, featured by Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort at his press conference, following upon the Democratic Party Platform Committee’s unanimous vote to include passage of Glass-Steagall in its platform, has set bank lobbyists into high gear, and generated a wave of teeth-knashing in Wall Street’s press. Every outlet from the Wall Street Journal to Barrons, to The American Banker, and in-between, ranted against the proposal to reinstate FDR’s Glass-Steagall law. After all Wall Street had done to rig arguably the worst presidential election in U.S. history!

Amidst the refrain that political platforms are non-binding and often don’t get implemented, Wall Street has to acknowledge that restoration of Glass-Steagall has been adopted by both parties, not because of the parties, and certainly not because of their candidates, but because it is a burning national sentiment.

The Hill wrote: “The embrace of Glass-Steagall by both parties is a telling indication of how unpopular Wall Street remains with the public, years after the financial crisis…”

Bloomberg, too, admitted that the Republican Party plank should not come as a “total surprise, given there’s little love of global investment banks in Washington right now.”

Barrons acknowledged: “The Democrats and Republicans are in agreement on one thing in this presidential election, and of all things, it’s about banking regulations. Both parties, it seems, are calling for a return of Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era banking law whose repeal in 1999 is credited by some for causing the financial crisis.”

Politico quotes two reporters from the Financial Times on how Wall Street is now “on edge… Presidential candidates do not have to follow party platforms, but big banks will be troubled by the cross-party support for legislation inspired by the 1933 Glass-Steagall act because such ideas can gain a life of their own once in official documents. Any prohibition barring investment bankers from operating under the same roof as federally insured deposits would pose an existential challenge to Citigroup, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and, to a lesser extent, Goldman Sachs.”

So, too, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods investment bank’s Brian Gardner issued a note warning that Wall Street should not dismiss the possibility of Glass-Steagall being adopted: “There could be a unique political coalition forming to make changes to Dodd-Frank while at the same time reinstating the old separation between commercial and investment banking… There is an unappreciated risk that Glass-Steagall might be reimposed in 2017 or 2018… regardless of who wins the presidential election.”

Meanwhile, take note that with the July 14th addition of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) as a co-sponsor of S1709, one tenth of the U.S. Senate is now co-sponsoring the Senate bill to restore Glass-Steagall. 

In the midst of the LaRouche campaign to save Deutsche Bank, close down its casino, and turn it back into Alfred Herrhausen’s bank, a very long article appeared July 18 in the Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung, “Deutsche Bank’s Last Chance,” a discussion of what has happened to the bank since Herrhausen’s assassination in 1989.

LaRouchePAC in Manhattan organizing for a controlled reorganization and recapitalization of Germany’s leading bank.

The article, by the FAZ‘s financial markets editor Gerald Braunberger, does not discuss the European bank crisis, the world economy, or the threat of Deutsche Bank’s immediate insolvency, but has a different purpose: recapping the debate within and around the bank over the past 25 or more years, as to what it should be.

Herrhausen, as Deutsche Bank’s CEO, reports Braunberger, referred to the “Anglo-Saxon financial culture” as “what we do not have” at his bank. Mixing that culture with German industrial bank culture since Herrhausen’s death has created great tension, he writes, and has had very bad results.

Immediately after Herrhausen’s death, Deutsche Bank under Chairman Hilmar Kopper still wanted to acquire a large share in the big Bavarian commercial lender, Bayerische Vereinsbank, anchoring it as a German industrial lending bank. The Bavarian government, instigated by Allianz Insurance, which was moving in on BV, blocked that. Instead, during the 1990s Deutsche Bank acquired the Wall Street investment firm Bankers Trust — which launched it massively into manipulation of mortgage-backed securities and their casino derivatives — and the London investment firm Morgan Grenfell. By 2000 the investment bankers “were strong enough to stop a planned fusion with Dresdner Bank,” and an acquisition of the postal savings institution, Postbank.

“Deutsche Bank in the following years divested itself of its numerous industrial investments in [germany]. Global investment banking achieved more and more dominance.”

Braunberger’s point is that the associated strategy of becoming “the world’s number-one investment bank — publicly stated most often by Hermann Ackermann as CEO — failed miserably, and has now brought Deutsche Bank to an absolute nadir. “The public no longer judges the investment bankers as the heroes, but as the plunderers of a weakened, internally divided bank.”

And, he concludes, from 2005 through 2015, “splitting” Deutsche Bank by hiving off the investment bank divisions has been always debated within it, but always rejected by its CEOs. The current, British CEO, John Cryan, has doubled down and wants to concentrate entirely on the investment bank side of the bank, although it is the side which lost 5.8 billion euros in 2015.

Meanwhile the bank’s “economic strategists” energetically promote helicopter money as an economic recovery policy. 

Would raising the minimum wage to $15/hr fix the economy? How about making it $100/hr? Don’t start with money — the economy starts from the human ability to make and implement discoveries, as measured through energy flux density and potential population density. Jason Ross gives a short introduction to these two concepts of physical economic value, as seen in the works of Lyndon LaRouche.

The world is facing a Drama Infernale, the lead article in the economics section of Sunday’s edition of Germany’s Welt am Sonntag stated in its headline. Not only is the Italian banking system about to blow apart, with EU360 billion in non-performing loans, but the entire European financial system is bankrupt as well—with derivatives-laden Deutsche Bank at the top of the list—they report nervously.

But the reality is far worse than even that alarmed account suggests. The entire trans-Atlantic financial system has come apart, Lyndon LaRouche noted in a discussion with associates this weekend, and reported at the outset of the July 16 Manhattan Project Dialogue. As LPAC’s Dennis Speed summarized LaRouche’s comments: “The system does not allow for any one point of safety. Don’t depend on rational responses from some group. This thing is on the verge of a general global crisis. Therefore, the behavior of people is that they are absolutely panicked; you aren’t going to get a rational response at this point. Don’t try to depend on anyone, don’t try to select any individual. This is an emergency situation, with an emergency problem and we have to address it from that standpoint.”

That emergency action centers on LaRouche’s call to use a one-time rescue reorganization of Deutsche Bank, based on the principles of the assassinated banker Alfred Herrhausen, to ignite a bankruptcy transformation of the entire trans-Atlantic financial system and unleash actual human productivity.

In further discussion on Sunday, LaRouche stated:

“We have to have an affirmative policy of hyperactive productivity. You have to create productivity, real productivity, not somebody holding their money, or their betting money. And the question is: Are we going to create the elements of productivity which are needed in order to get free of what has happened to us by the people who have tried to suppress things and avert things all along? That’s where the problem comes. And therefore if you don’t assert a policy based on those principles, you are just going to find yourself in the same old mess again.”

“We’ve got to affect all persons,” LaRouche continued, “because if they are not in concert in terms of what they are concerned about, then you have anarchy. And that’s going back to zero, or less than zero. That’s the problem. This is the issue. This is what you have to respond to. If you are not responding to that, you are nothing, you have completely thrown away all kinds of rationality. And that’s the only way you can deal with it.”

In our international campaign to implement LaRouche’s dramatic Deutsche Bank initiative, Helga Zepp-LaRouche noted, we are running into unexpected levels of rage in the population across Europe against Deutsche Bank and all bankers, rage which gets in the way of their comprehending LaRouche’s call.

“In Germany we had an unprecedented, really unexpected wave of hatred against Deutsche Bank,” Zepp-LaRouche noted. “Conservative industrialists, long-term supporters (whom you had never expected to say something like that), they had a completely violent reaction and said: ‘Let them go bankrupt! Shut them down! Why should we spend another penny to save these criminal crooks?’ And I think that is what people are not fighting through.

“Because the Herrhausen principle is not just saving Deutsche Bank; it’s with a gun to the head saying: Either you accept the paradigm shift or you all go under, we all go under with you. But if you want to survive, you have to accept this shift. And if we had an international campaign—which we have a little bit—but if we had a real campaign, the pressure would get greater on the German government, which is the place where the pressure has to end up.”

Lyndon LaRouche likewise stressed the importance of the Deutsche Bank reorganization policy: “Emphasize that again, because that’s the story. That’s exactly what you have to deal with, and that’s what you have to fight against.”

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Anyone carefully reading the just-declassified 28-page chapter from the original Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, with any degree of intellectual honesty, must conclude that the Saudi Royal Family and the Saudi government were up to their eyeballs in the promotion of al-Qaeda, including the nineteen 9/11 hijackers.  Substantial portions of the chapter contained details about the Saudi official collusion that were never made public before.

Considering that the Joint Inquiry report was finished and issued to the public in December 2002, it is clear that the suppression of the crucial chapter, detailing Saudi official support for the 9/11 hijackers, was very much related to the Bush-Cheney Administration’s drive for war against Saddam Hussein, which was just months away. That war drive was built upon lies: That Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, and that he was an architect of 9/11. Had the chapter been made available in late 2002, Bush and Cheney and Tony Blair would have had a near-impossible task to sell the Iraq war, launched in March 2003.

The 28-page chapter detailed many channels of support, running from the Saudi regime to al-Qaeda operatives; made clear that the CIA and FBI had failed to properly assess the danger that al-Qaeda represented prior to 9/11, and cited links between Saudi officials and 9/11 hijackers in other parts of the United States, like Portland, Oregon, that were not previously made public.

The reaction of the 9/11 families and survivors to the release was to further condemn President Obama and his top intelligence officials, James Clapper, the DNI, and John Brennan, the CIA Director, for their efforts to minimize the contents of the chapter.

Kristen Breitweiser penned an article, published Saturday in Huffington Post, that was co-signed by other 9/11 survivors and family members, blasting Obama, Clapper and Brennan.  She wrote, in part:

Jacques Cheminade, French Presidential candidate and founder of Solidarité et Progrès party issued the following statement on his official candidacy website. The translation was provided by his staff.

France has been hit, once again, by criminal terrorism.

And once again the President of the Republic, the Interior Minister and the Prime Minister expressed their sadness in grave tones and their willingness to fight terrorism, without, however, attacking the real causes of this barbarity.

The main cause is their complicity with a policy of supporting jihadism aimed to bring about the fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad government, devised by the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, a policy which is now turning against us.

What is going on in Nice? Since 2014, it was known that the city had become a recruitment center for jihadists going to Syria.  A report from the domestic security agency DGSI (General Direction for Domestic Security) even noted that Nice has become a “laboratory city” to identify and deal with “radicalization.”

It was from Nice that Omar Osman, a Franco-Senegalese gangster who converted to Islam, recruited his brigade of 50 to 80 Frenchmen, to fight in Syria within the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria), about which in 2012 our then Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius said, with inappropriate enthusiasm that it was “doing a good job” fighting Assad.

It is also in Nice that it was revealed that potential jihadists were coming and going, travelling with Saudi Arabian diplomatic suitcases.  On April 7th, Mayor Christian Estrosi, told to RTL radio’s Olivier Mazerolle in an interview, that in August 2015 two people listed on the S-file of radicalized individuals requiring the highest-level surveillance, had entered France “in a Saudi Arabian convoy” and “that they benefited from a total exemption of inspection” at Nice’s international airport. Asked by his host whether the airport security police had been forced to let them through, Estrosi responded: “Yes, and I know that some of them are very upset, and they let be it known and had to suffer consequences.”

The government can no longer drag its feet on this question, at the risk of ending up like Tony Blair, today or tomorrow, where they will have to explain their actions before a Chilcot Commission, or worse, before a court of law.

The time has come to rapidly reestablish our relations with Bashar al-Assad to undertake the rebuilding and reconstruction of Syria; to work alongside Russia to fight the terrorist threat together; and to strongly induce the United States to do likewise.

Our police, our military, our reservists, and medical caregivers taught Nice a lesson in solidarity and of civic-mindedness. Let us be worthy of their attachment to the values of the Republic and respect for the victims, in order to stop the sinister train of attacks and to avert the specter of division in our country, a rampant radicalization which would overturn the deep balance of our desire to live together.

It is a powerful irony that France has suffered the tragic sting of its close embrace of Saudi Arabia — and with it, al-Qaeda in Syria — just as the Obama Administration has been compelled to release some evidence, secret for 15 years, of Saudi Arabia’s role in the “al-Qaeda” attacks on 9/11/2001.

French Presidential candidate and leader of Solidarité et Progrès, Jacques Cheminade, makes the case in his strong statement, below, on the Nice disaster. France’s government cheered on the al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria) against Syrian President Assad. It prioritized relations with Saudi Arabia which it knew to be providing weapons going to al-Nusra and its offshoots in Syria — until al-Nusra’s large and notorious recruiting cell in Nice, triggered a deadly strike at home.

The same tragedy occurred with the Bush Administration’s original suppression of the “28 pages” finally released on Friday, which show years of Saudi assistance to al-Qaeda while the 9/11 attacks were planned and prepared. Had that secret chapter been released with the rest of the Congressional 9/11 report, in late 2002, the United States could not have been taken to war with Iraq “to avenge 9/11.”

Now the “28 Pages” have finally been forced out by public pressure, and their release is getting extraordinarily wide and prominent media coverage around the world. This provides a tremendous opening to change the whole trans-Atlantic policy of fighting terrorism and avoiding war, as Cheminade emphasizes — and to win justice for jihadism’s victims as well.

The Obama White House claimed, as the 28 Pages were released — still with some 150 redactions — that they contained “nothing new.” But in fact, the totality of the picture in that chapter is new; a much fuller intelligence picture, of a much more many-sided Saudi operation to assist al-Qaeda in avoiding U.S. operations against it.

The New York Times, which tried hard to agree with Obama, couldn’t:

This referred to the final six pages of the chapter, which were completely unknown publicly until now. The Times headline was “View of a Saudi Effort To Thwart U.S. Action on al-Qaeda.”

Nothing new? The U.K. Guardian assessed:

A full, new investigation now can help the American public see a new paradigm, one by which the United States and all of Europe, including France, can escape the last 15 years Hell of regime-change wars and terrorism.

This means an investigation which goes well back, to the now-exposed 9/11 facilitator Prince Bandar’s famous “Al Yamamah deal” with Britain, which provided the slush funds for so many destabilizations and terror actions.

That’s what we have now demanded. So have the 9/11 victims’ families, who yesterday blasted Obama for trying to close the door on the truth now that it has begun to open.

The Obama Administration waited until the final hours of the Congressional session before a six week recess to release the slightly redacted 28 page chapter from the original 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11.  Despite the timing, the release was a tremendous victory, that now puts the entire Anglo-Saudi Empire in the cross-hairs for their now-documented role in the worst terrorist atrocity on US soil. Furthermore, a careful reading of the partially redacted 28 pages makes clear that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) was absolutely correct when he said last year that the 28 pages force a total rethinking of everything that has happened over the past 15 years.

The level of evidence of Saudi Monarchy involvement in the 9/11 attacks is far beyond what was previously publicly known. Scores of Saudi officials and members of the Royal family were intimately involved with al-Qaeda, and many had close links to the hijackers directly.  U.S. agencies had evidence of deep Saudi sponsorship of al-Qaeda years before the 9/11 attacks, but any serious crackdown was suppressed and investigators were fired or transferred for asking too many of the right questions.

What is now urgently needed is a new top-down investigation, that starts with the Anglo-Saudi hand behind 9/11, but which extends far beyond those events of 15 years ago, to look into all of the subsequent terrorist atrocities and events like the Iraq and Libyan invasions, the ongoing regime-change efforts against the Assad regime in Syria and much more.

Lyndon LaRouche emphasized today that the momentum must be maintained for a new investigation that explores the depths of the Anglo-Saudi complex.  Nothing short of that will root out the terror disease.

The release of the 28 pages, coming just days after the release of the Chilicot Commission Report in Britain is a deadly one-two punch to the heart of the British Empire and its Saudi partners.  On the release of the 28 pages, Rep. Walter Jones, who led the Congressional fight, extended his thanks and congratulations to the LaRouche Movement for our pivotal role in forcing the release.  He vowed to now move to the next level of investigation and not stop until the full truth is out for all to see.

In February 1990, Col. Fletcher Prouty (USAF-ret.), a legendary figure within the U.S. intelligence community, who was the first whistleblower on the corrupting of the American intelligence establishment with his Secret Team expose book, wrote a chilling essay on the recent assassination of Deutsche Bank Chairman Alfred Herrhausen.  Prouty directly equated the Herrhausen assassination with the assassination in 1963 of President John F. Kennedy, and he made clear that he did not buy the idea that Herrhausen was killed by “terrorists,” arguing instead that the assassins were pawns of a major state intelligence service.

Prouty wrote: “It is absolutely astounding that the subject of the savage murder of this man… Alfred Herrhausen… has been dropped so suddenly from the news.  The Deutsche Bank of Germany is undoubtedly one of the most important banks in the world. and its Chairman Herrhausen was one of the most important spokesmen of the banking profession around the world.  He would have been a key man in all developments.

“His loss at this time… and the startling nature of his loss are without question… for our day… the equal of the loss of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

“Considering the time… the enormous train of events taking place in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe and particularly in East Germany… the murder of Herrhausen is an act of enormous significance.  It can not be, and must not be swept under the rug as just ‘another act of terrorism.’  True terrorists do not murder bank presidents without some special reason.  Most terrorists are actually the paid pawns, and `mechanics’ of great power centers.  Some major power center wanted the Chairman of Deutsche Bank removed on that day, in that manner for some reason, and as a lesson to others.  There has to be a great message in the act of his death.”

Prouty’s seven-page essay went on to quote from the speech that JFK was slated to deliver in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963, and the speech that Herrhausen was slated to deliver in New York City on Dec. 4, 1989—four days after his assassination.

Friday morning, Deutsche Bank’s Chief Economist David Folkerts-Landau, in an interview on CNBC TV, again made his call for a bail-out/recapitalization for European banks, saying that the central bank policy is a failure, and is destroying the channel for credit into the SME sector (small and medium-sized enterprises). LaRouche, briefed on this, noted that the topic is very rational, but of the elements involved, some are known, and some are in doubt. He made a point of the significance of Alfred Herrhausen, chairman of Deutsche Bank from 1971, until November, 1989, when he was assassinated.

LaRouche said that capitalization, as such, is not an effective instrument for the situation. The values in question should be cancelled out. There is no way to get out of the mess by doing otherwise. It is like, trying to get a sick person into being a sicker person, and calling him a “sicker achiever!”

The approach itself is the problem. Deduction is always the problem. You have a swindle, a fake of a system. So, you have to go back to “go” and start again. You can’t try to “fix it.” It is not a “fix it” problem.

Consider: What is the system of economy. You have to follow what Herrhausen was establishing. He was assassinated to cancel this effort, to create the wreckage that followed. That was the purpose of the assassination. Any idea of “negotiating” some change, is a fraud.

There must be cancellation of so-called wealth, which is not fit to be called wealth. Then look at what remains. Figure out what to do. There must be a self-developing program of productivity. NOT a bargaining’ process. Go with something else. You can’t go with negotiations. You have to generate productive power, and generate increasing productivity, on a permanent basis.

The productivity ratio is the primary creation. You can’t “adduce” something by adducing it. Build something new, as a start. Cancel all forms of negotiation. You have to accept that program—of Herrhausen. Accept “his,” not “something like his.” The motive of killing him, ostensibly—by the French and British networks—was to stop this system. We must proceed by not talking of “negotiations by adjustments.” We must eliminate the present concept of finance, not “improve” the system of finance. We don’t want a “softer system.” Forget money, and think of economy, what it does for economy.

What was done by the British/French system to assassinate Herrhausen, was to prevent escape from the fraud. You can’t “fix-up” what was a fraud from the beginning. Today, we must come up with a good instrument. End what was wrong then, and today.

It’s simple: 1) Herrhausen was killed; and 2) the British and other systems were involved. They did it to shut down anything connected to him. The perpetrators intended to prevent Herrhausen, or anything like him, to ever take control. Look who is still around—George Soros, a leading problem, and British.

Tune in Thursday evening at 9 pm eastern for a live Q&A Fireside Chat with EIR’s Bill Jones. Jones recently participated in a on the so-called “South China Sea dispute”, along with Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Get the real story on the South China Sea issue—and more—from Bill Jones, tonight at 9 pm eastern.

Forty-eight hours ago, we changed everything in our entire approach globally,—but many of you missed it. Think! Remind yourself that it’s no use complaining about the immediate danger of a panic-collapse of the world economic system into deadly chaos. And mere warnings against a war of thermonuclear annihilation will not prevent it from happening anyway—any more than mere warnings ever prevented war in the past!

What Lyndon LaRouche has just done is to point to the one, unique link in the chain, which, if you grab ahold of THAT, and pull THAT, you may just then barely be able to pull Europe back from the precipice,— and, at the last possible moment, turn aside the mindless, automaton-like march of history over the abyss.

Put that off to think it over tomorrow, and you’re done for! There will be no tomorrow,— for you or anyone.

All these considerations are laid out Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s statement of July 12, “Deutsche Bank Must be Rescued, for the Sake of World Peace.” But many have not taken that statement to heart, and undertaken the immediate turnabout which is required.

Zepp-LaRouche’s statement must be studied and re-studied in detail. But to recap some points for our purposes here: France, Italy, and the other European states are wholly bankrupt; Europe is heading for a blowout within days, which under present circumstances will lead to war. Germany’s derivatives-laden Deutsche Bank may likely be the trigger-point for that European-wide blowout. But, paradoxically, it is precisely Germany which still has the potential economic productivity which could lead Europe back towards safety. And Deutsche Bank, if it were saved from collapse and immediately turned back towards the policies of Alfred Herrhausen, would be the lead agency in organizing such a German upsurge.

Lyndon LaRouche called for a government augmentation of Deutsche Bank’s capital base, accompanied by an immediate reversal of its policies back to the Hamiltonian policies of Herrhausen. Simultaneously, a management committee must be appointed to sift through and reorganize the bank’s assets.

During the past two days, many of our friends have exploded in rage at this life-saving proposal of Lyndon and Helga LaRouche, sputtering that the big banks are our enemies, and that we oppose bailouts. But as Diane Sare of the LaRouchePAC Policy Committee pointed out yesterday, it’s really easy to recite a list of correct “positions.” But what does that get you, other than a passport to Trotskyite Heaven? Far harder to understand and to seize the one last chance offered by history, as we must do now.

Those who murdered Herrhausen created an ongoing atrocity which has never ended to this day; those who did it have to be removed, or there is no solution. Sooner or later, something you hadn’t done will come back to hit you.