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The New Citizen    Vol 6 No 7
April/May 2008

Only LaRouche's Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill Can Save Australia

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.

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Only LaRouche's Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill Can Save Australia

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