April 12—American statesman
and physical economist
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr
shocked his international webcast
audience on July 25, 2007,
when he proclaimed that the
world monetary system was
already then crashing, and that
nothing short of reorganising
the entire system could stop
that process.
“The world monetary financial
system is actually now,
currently, in the process of disintegrating”,
LaRouche told his
listeners, among whom were
members of the U.S. House of
Representatives and U.S. Senate
and their staffs, along with
many state and local elected officials.
“There’s nothing mysterious
about this; I’ve talked
about it for some time, it’s
been in progress, it’s not abating.
What’s listed as stock values
and market values in the
financial markets, internationally,
is bunk! These are purely
fictitious beliefs. There’s no
truth to it; the fakery is enormous.
There is no possibility of
a non-collapse of the present financial
system—none! It’s finished,
now! The present financial
system can not continue to
exist under any circumstances,
under any Presidency, under
any leadership, or any leadership
of nations. Only a fundamental
and sudden change in
the world monetary financial
system will prevent a general,
immediate chain-reaction type
of collapse. At what speed, we
don’t know, but it will go on,
and it will be unstoppable!”
Within two weeks of that webbcast,
the so-called “subprime
lending crisis” exploded, followed
by existential crises in
one sector of the global financial
system after another. By
year’s end, no reasonable person
could deny LaRouche’s assertion
that the entire system itself
is finished.
LaRouche, or the City of London?
To deal with this otherwise
uncontrollable, chain-reaction
collapse, LaRouche drafted the
Homeowners and Bank Protection
Act 2007 (HBPA). As a
legislative “firewall” between
the population and the banking
system, on the one side,
and the collapsing speculative
bubble, on the other, the HBPA
would stop millions of Americans
from being thrown from
their homes within months,
devastating the United States,
and taking down the entire U.S.
dollar-denominated international
system.
These are the three points
of the HBPA: 1) it establishes
a Federal agency to place the
Federal- and state-chartered
banks under protection, and to
freeze all existing home mortgages;
2) it freezes all foreclosures,
and permits homes to
be retained with monthly rentequivalent
payments to designated
banks; and, 3) it gives
state governors the administrative
responsibility for implementing
the program, while the
Federal government provides
the necessary credits and guarantees
to ensure the transition.
(See p. 7 for full text.)
Any attempt to bail out the
tens or hundreds of quadrillions
nominal value of mortgage-
backed securities (MBS),
asset-backed commercial paper
(ABCP), collateralised debt
obligations (CDO), and the rest
of the alphabet soup of speculative
paper, could only lead to
a hyperinflationary explosion
like that in Weimar Germany in
1923, LaRouche warned. This
time, it would be worldwide,
because there is no “lender of
last resort” to step in and stabilise
the system. Yet, spurred
by panic and following dictates
from the City of London,
the U.S. Federal Reserve and
the European Central Bank,
in concert with other central
banks including our own Reserve
Bank, have poured untold
trillions into the abyss.
With the U.S. Congress under
the thumb of the London
financier oligarchy and
its appendages in Wall St., the
LaRouche Youth Movement
(LYM) and the LaRouche
Political Action Committee
(LPAC) launched a nationwide
organising drive to secure support
for the HBPA in city councils
and state legislatures.
Australia is also in the midst
of a devastating housing crisis
(see p.2), so the LaRouche
Youth Movement here, together
with the Citizens Electoral
Council, launched a campaign
to force the Federal Parliament
to pass LaRouche’s legislation
as the Homeowners and Bank
Protection Bill 2008 (HBPB)
(p. 7), which is entirely consonant
with Australian State
and Federal precedents going
back to World War I, though
more sweeping—in order to
deal with the worst global financial
crisis in centuries. (See
pp. 3-6.)
To date, the LYM and the
CEC have phoned some 3,500
of Australia’s 6,566 councillors.
As in the U.S., the LYM
is spearheading the fight, making
presentations on the HBPB
to numerous councils, five of
which passed resolutions calling
for its immediate enactment,
while dozens more are
debating it and 260 councillors
across the country have given
their personal endorsement. Following
one such presentation,
the council CEO wrote to the
LYM, “On behalf of Council,
I take this opportunity to thank you
for your deputation on Monday February
4, 2008. Council was impressed
with your presentation and resolved
to ‘…support the Homeowners and
Bank Protection Bill of 2008, as initiated
by economist Lyndon H. La-
Rouche, Jr to enact emergency legislation
to keep people in their homes
and avert social chaos.’ To this effect,
I enclose a copy of Council’s resolution
and wish you and your colleagues
every success in progressing the issue
further through the Citizens Electoral
Council of Australia”.
The HBPB has also met opposition,
usually from Councillors and
even Federal MP’s who don’t have a
clue of how severe the global financial
crisis is, nor even how devastating the
rates of foreclosures and homelessness
already are in Australia. Other institutions,
typically of State or Federal
government, have chosen to defend
the financial bubble, rather than the
people, such as the Queensland Local
Government Association, which
has been intensely lobbying against
the HBPB. Typical of the callous indifference
of Federal officials thus far,
is the Reserve Bank’s recent housing
report which said that “Australians
should resign themselves to the fact
that housing will never be affordable”.
(Herald Sun, 2 April). A Treasury official
acknowledged that, even though the
housing crisis is “the worst on record”
and 750,000 homeowners will be under
mortgage stress in coming months
by paying over 35% of their income for
housing, they are “not necessarily struggling”
(The Australian, April 3).
Kevin Rudd’s pathetic, corporativist
solution to the problem is to hand
over government subsidies to the private
sector to build a measly 50,000
houses over five years, with only
3,000 in the first year. Not surprisingly,
his own Treasurer Wayne Swan is
personally deep into the bubble, borrowing
on margin to speculate in financial
markets; Swan also has money
in a cash management trust run by
Macquarie Bank.
The Strategic War
The present severe housing crisis
in Australia, as in the U.S. and
elsewhere, is no “natural occurrence
of the business cycle”, but a calculated
onslaught by the City of London-led
financial oligarchy as part of their
“globalist” assault against nation
states. Though they created this
speculative bubble in the first place,
they are now terrified that, under crisis
conditions, populations will respond
to competent, dedicated leadership by
reasserting sovereignty over their own
banking and financial systems as the
only pathway out of the crisis.
Australian history itself is one
long struggle between the forces of
nationalism and sovereignty, against
the City of London, as exemplified by
the following events:
- the establishment of the Australian
Labor Party as a response to London’s
pulling all its funds out of the property
bubble London had created in the
early 1890s, resulting in the severe
recession of 1893 and the crushing of
the maritime workers and shearers;
- the ALP’s adoption of a National
Bank as a central plank in their
original program, which, under King
O’Malley’s leadership, resulted in the
establishment of the Commonwealth
Bank in 1911, against severe financier
opposition, followed by the oligarchy’s
destruction of it in the 1920s;
- the financial oligarchy’s
mobilisation of mass fascist armies in
the early 1930s, against the possibility
that the Scullin Labor government
would reassert control over the
nation’s finances (documented in the
New Citizen of April 2004);
- the 1937 Royal Commission
investigation of private financier
control over the country, during which
Labor MP John Curtin proclaimed, “If
the Government of the Commonwealth
deliberately excluded itself from all
participation in the making or changing
of monetary policy it cannot govern
except in a secondary degree”;
- a terrified oligarchy’s re-mobilization
of a mass fascist army, and a
press campaign to whip up hysteria,
to try to stop Labor PM Ben Chifley
from passing legislation to keep the
wartime banking controls, in order, he
explained, that “the banking system of
this country shall work in the interests
of the people as a whole”; instead, our
anglophile High Court and Her Majesty’s
Privy Council combined to secure
the continued dictatorship of the
private banks.
Profound as those crises were,
today’s is far more severe, and only
a mass mobilisation and outcry by
average Australians against this City
of London assault on us can save this
nation, by ramming the Homeowners
and Bank Protection Bill 2008 through
Federal Parliament.