While there are conflicting reports in media worldwide about the fierce fighting around East Aleppo in Syria, one thing is clear. The jihadi force currently encircled in East Aleppo by the Syrian Arab Army, and also attacking that army from the Southwest to try to break the siege, is simply al-Qaeda.

A grouping of Arab-Americans called Ikras, whose intelligence is politically incorrect but accurate, reports that 85% of the “rebels” currently fighting in East Aleppo belong to the al-Qaeda formation which — until a few moments ago — called itself Jabhat al-Nusra, as do the jihadis fighting to break the SAA’s siege from the outside. The remaining 15% belong to 22 other, often-shifting groups who fight alongside al-Nusra. The great majority have not previously lived in Aleppo, and half are not Syrians.

This then is the al-Qaeda terrorist force, the encirclement and siege of which the Obama State Department, through spokesman Adm. John Kirby, is calling on Russia and Syria to lift. Obama’s discredited fraud of a UN Ambassador, regime-change war devotee Samantha Power, has been calling the Syrian government encirclement of al-Qaeda in Aleppo “chilling,” and “an entrapment of 250-300,000 civilians.” She has demanded those civilians not leave East Aleppo through corridors established for that purpose; and has demanded that Russia cause the Syrian government to lift the siege.

Obama said on Aug. 6 that he does not trust anything Russia does in Syria, and also said the siege of East Aleppo should be lifted.

U.S. weapons such as TOW anti-tank missiles continue to go to these al-Qaeda fighters, along with Saudi-supplied weapons, although the New York Times reports today that this flow has slowed in recent weeks as supply roads have been cut by Syrian Army and allied forces.

As the veteran NATO Military Committee Chairman Gen. Harald Kujat (German Bundeswehr, ret.) warned on Deutschlandfunk radio recently, anyone talking about defending “rebels” fighting the al-Assad government in Aleppo, is talking about supporting al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS.

Precisely what Obama is now doing, with calls to do much more of the same from media which strongly back Hillary Clinton, such as the Washington Post today.

And as Lyndon LaRouche observed Aug. 6, at this point “Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself for being herself.”

According to new estimates by EIR, the four largest central banks in the world have taken just under $16 trillion in assets off the books of private banks and onto their own, since the U.S. Federal Reserve began the great money-printing game known as “quantitative easing” in 2009. The Fed, European Central Bank (ECB), Bank of England (BOE) and Bank of Japan (BOJ) now own about one-quarter of all government debt in the world, and have dragged one-third of all government debt in the Europe, Japan and the United States into the unprecedented territory of negative interest rates.

Moreover, these central banks are continuing to increase “quantitative easing” at a rate of about $2.4 trillion/year, a higher rate than at any prior point after the 2008 bank panic and economic crash. And although the Fed is no longer “easing,” U.S. banks and large corporations are continuing to suck up new central bank money through their London, European and Japanese branches.

Sunday’s Financial Times, in “The End of the World as We Know It?” by Michael Power, says that the central banks “have turned the norms of finance on their heads.” It notes that one very serious effect of this is that capital investment by business is at or near record low levels across the trans-Atlantic.

“Some 30% of the global issuance of sovereign bonds have negative yields,” Power reports. And, “As Morgan Stanley has noted, ‘Over the past 17 years, 10-year government debt in the U.S., Germany, the U.K. and Japan has produced a better return than the local equity market, with lower volatility.'” This is because as bond interest rates have gone surely and steadily downward for a decade, to zero and below, and to near zero even for the bonds of large corporations, the market “price” of those bonds has just as surely and steadily increased, making a perfect speculative market “outside the economies.”

This fatal effect on the banking system has become clear since the 2008 crash. Big Wall Street- and City of London-centered banks have reduced their commercial lending into the economy, concentrated on investment-bank speculation in the bond and securities markets, and slipstreamed the central banks in the government bond markets to make reliable “profit” — and then store it as excess reserves at the same central banks. And their speculations in government debt securities have provided the collateral they’ve used and/or loaned for financial derivatives bets and the so-called third-party repurchase or “repo” markets. The big bank holding companies have all moved toward the model of Deutsche Bank, for which loans make up just 15% of its EU1.6 trillion in “assets” — and which is now effectively bankrupt.

For the fourth consecutive Sunday, Germany’s leading financial newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has run an analysis of the perilous and declining state of its largest bank, Deutsche Bank. This Sunday, the FAZ interviewed a very prominent German economist who says, “Nationalize Deutsche Bank on an emergency basis! It is in worse crisis than in 2008” in the global bank panic.

That Martin Hellwig of the Max Planck Institute in Bonn would make this call — in a country where nationalizations were never discussed even at the depth of the 2007-09 panic and collapse — indicates that Deutsche Bank is nearing a real implosion unless it is “saved.” And the IMF has already formally found it to be the one giant bank which “radiates more risk” to other banks and banking systems, than any other in the world. Its implosion will signal a general economic crash, which will exacerbate the confrontations being pushed by the Obama Administration and NATO against Russia and China.

Schiller Institute founder and Germany’s BueSo party chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche only weeks ago issued a public call to She and Lyndon LaRouche said the bank’s investment policies must be completely redirected in the process to industrial and infrastructure development, the policies of its CEO Alfred Herrhausen, who was assassinated on Nov. 30, 1989.

Hellwig declares to FAZ that “investment banks have sucked out Deutsche Bank” for more than a decade, so that its terminal crisis does not even stem from the 2008 global panic. It must be nationalized, Hellwig says, because any attempt to “wind it down” — i.e., to “resolve” the megabank by bailing in bondholders, etc. — would radiate that risk out to the whole banking system. The same thing, he notes, is true of France’s BNP Paribas. When asked if Deutsche Bank has an internal plan to avert implosion, Hellwig says the bank’s plans are insider trading, speculation, mergers and acquisitions, etc.

Finally, asked whether he himself could step in and run a nationalized Deutsche Bank, Hellwig demurs that he is not fit for the job because he takes time to think through decisions and for Deutsche Bank, there is no time.

Zepp-LaRouche stressed how rare any proposal for nationalization is in Germany, and that it signals that, in fact, there is no time; her proposal to save the megabank but to make it effectively a development bank, must be carried out. “This system is doomed. Don’t kid yourself and don’t become complacent; it could blow out at any moment,” she said.