Lyndon LaRouche's associates in Australia, the Citizens Electoral Council, published a full-page advertisement in Rupert Murdoch's The Australian newspaper on Tuesday, December 3rd, under the title "Don't seize our bank accounts: pass Glass-Steagall!"

Featured prominently on page 8, and signed by over 450 local government officials, political party leaders, trade unionists and community leaders, spanning the country and the entire political spectrum, the ad blasts the plans being secretly prepared by the Australian Government's Treasury Department, and its financial regulator APRA (Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority) at the direction of the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements, for the next eruption of the Global Financial Crisis.

The Australian has a daily print circulation of 160,000 with a total readership reaching up to 450,000. It is the major national daily newspaper in Australia, is distributed to all Australian embassies around the world and is provided free on most airline flights leaving Australia.

The ad opens, "We, the undersigned, are unalterably opposed to the legislation now being drafted to enable the 'bail-in' (seizure) of Australian bank deposits as happened in Cyprus in March of this year. The stated purpose of such legislation, in Australia and internationally, is to save the 'Too Big to Fail' megabanks whose unbridled speculation has caused the present financial crisis in the first place."

Then, under the subhead "Solution," the ad calls for the Australian Parliament to immediately pass two pieces of legislation: Glass-Steagall, and a bill for the re-establishment of a National Bank in the tradition of Australia's Alexander Hamilton-inspired Commonwealth Bank founded in 1913. A bill for such a National Bank has been drafted by the CEC and is ready for immediate implementation. Australia's "Big Four" banks rank among the world's largest 50 banks, sit on top of the world's worst mortgage bubble, and hold some $23 trillion in derivatives.

The ad hit two days after Australia succeeded Russia as chair of the G20, for 2014, and just as the new Australian Parliament convened for its first serious working session. Bank of England Governor and FSB head Mark Carney in a 24 October speech had demanded that all of the FSB's fascist "Key Attributes" be implemented in all G20 member cuntries by the time of the G20 Brisbane summit in November 2014. The new chairman of the G20 Finance Ministers, Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey, is an unabashed flunky for the City of London and Wall Street, who gave his recent inaugural overseas speech at JP Morgan Chase headquarters in Lower Manhattan. His wife was for years a top derivatives trader for Deutsche Bank (the world's leading derivatives cesspool), and Hockey himself is supervising the secret legislation now being drafted for bail-in in Australia, along with the BIS's genocidal demands against all G20 nations.

The ad concludes with a bite: a pledge to "drive from office" any MP supporting bail-in, but, alternatively, "to do all within our power to support any MP who sponsors or votes for an Australian Glass-Steagall bill, and for a National Bank."

A PDF file of the ad can be viewed here

Nothing has been learned nor done; global deregulation of the financial markets, the ludicrous mantra of "self-regulation," and the culture of "breaking the rules," continue as before, Spanish economist Juan Laborda wrote in his regular Voz Populi column on Nov. 27.

Laborda, who advises the CCOO trade union federation and teaches portofolio and hedge fund management at the University of San Carlos III, pointed to Glass-Steagall as the remedy, as he has before. He concludes his article, "Ethics and Financial System: Incompatible," warning that "the systemic banks, true enormous monsters, completely dominate our economy, and when they make a mistake, such that others are harmed, even when they flagrantly violate the law, the fact that they are never seriously punished means they have no incentive to hold themselves back. Until governments correct this problem, the rest of the economy is going to suffer, and the risk of future financial crises will continue to grow.

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an exceptional politician, made the right choice in his day, by means of an avalanche of executive decisions. But the most important thing he did was not launching the New Deal, but clipping the wings of the financial industry through the Glass-Steagall law. Will we learn someday?"

Laborda's article has been posted in other media as well.

Old Socialist Party leader Mario Soares, formerly two-time Prime Minister and then President of Portugal, came under tremendous fire when he warned two weeks ago that Portugal's government should resign, before their Troika austerity policy leads to an outbreak of violence. Cabinet ministers charged he was inciting violence, darkly intimating that he might be held responsible, should anything occur.

"I am a great admirer of the Pope," Soares said, in presenting his new book, Hope Is Necessary, on Nov. 27. "They called me a scoundrel and said that I had called for violence," but Pope Francis said the same thing a few days later, in his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Soares remarked.

Soares's remarks calling attention to the Pope's Exhortation are important, given how much of the European media has attempted to bury coverage of Pope Francis's incisive indictment of today's economy of exclusion "which kills" and leads to violence.

As Soares charged at his book launch: "Who rules today are the usurious markets."

Portugal is being depopulated under those economic policies "which kill," but the Troika government is only concerned with satisfying "the markets" before it might have to renegotiate terms of a new bailout next year. The government today got some bondholders to exchange their part of the debt coming due in 2014 and 2015 for bonds which come due later — by offering even higher interest rates, and thus increasing the debt. It also sold 70% of the national postal service to private investors, the latest in a series of privatizations since 2011 which have raised 4.5 billion euros — 90% of which was channeled straight into debt payments, hardly a drop in the bucket of its 78-billion-euro loan-shark "bailout" from the Troika.

That this unending, only growing looting is indeed leading to violence is reflected in the mass unrest in the nation's police forces. The chief of the Public Safety Police was forced to resign on Nov. 28, after thousands of police officers from all four police forces in the country (traffic, immigration, public safety, etc.) demonstrating against the government's budget austerity, broke through police barricades, entered the parliament in Lisbon, sang the national anthem, and then left. More police protests are planned.