Wall Street and Glass-Steagall Are the Issue for the Democratic Party

November 13, 2013 • 11:16PM

The entire environment in Washington, D.C. around the Glass-Steagall issue has been created by the dogged organizing work over years by Lyndon LaRouche personally and by LaRouche PAC. That process continued and escalated this week, with the deployment into Washington today of LaRouche PAC organizers with LaRouche's latest statement on "Worse than Weimar!" some 400 copies of which were distributed on Capitol Hill to congressmen, their aides and others.

The media has taken note of some of the refractions of that LaRouche leadership, as seen in the broad coverage of Sen. Elizabeth Warren's strong speech yesterday promoting Glass-Steagall. Much of that came in the context of the news media already speculating about the 2016 presidential elections. Warren's speech followed on a couple of days' worth of such articles as "Elizabeth Warren: Wall Street's Nightmare" in Politico, and "Hillary's Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren" in the New Republic. A similar article in The Hill, before Warren's speech, quoted Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), saying that Hillary Clinton should state clearly that she opposes cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and arguing Clinton could inoculate herself from a challenge from her left flank if she endorsed Warren's proposal to re-establish the Glass-Steagall Act.

Harold Myerson's column in today's Washington Post says that the major issue dividing Democrats internally is economics. He says this is obvious at the state and local level, with Democratic officials going against unions), and also in the Summers-Yellen fight. "To the liberals, Summers's sin was his central role in deregulating derivatives when he served as Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary as well as his support for repealing the Glass-Steagall Act... the opposition to Summers signaled the growing Democratic opposition to Wall Street liberalism — the free-trade, deregulatory perspectives that dominated Democratic economic policy during Clinton's presidency and Robert Rubin's tenure as Treasury Secretary and that had enough sway during Obama's first term, partly through the influence of such Rubin protégés as Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, to block a serious crackdown on Wall Street." Meyerson declares that this is the challenge for Hillary; the surest way to alienate large sections of Democrats, and maybe to enable someone like Elizabeth Warren to enter the race, would be to surround herself with the same old Rubinomics crew.

The Hill today notes that "Warren's remarks came 14 years to the day that President Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach- Bliley Act, which repealed chunks of a law that kept a firewall between traditional and investment banking," and cites her bill to restore Glass-Steagall.

And, perhaps reflecting Wall Street's view of Obama, Marketwatch's coverage of Warren concludes with: "Earlier Tuesday, a top banker said that the banking industry is getting along much better with Washington than it used to. 'I think we're a long way from 2008,' said Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs."