British faction aligns with LaRouche on Glass-Steagall

In a development of utmost strategic significance, an important group within the top echelons of the British Establishment have come to the conclusion that Glass-Steagall is the only survival option open to them.

(Glass-Steagall signifies the absolute separation of retail banking from investment banking, to protect that part of the banking system that services the real economy, i.e. deposits, checking accounts, mortgage loans etc., from the still-unfolding consequences of the speculative investment banks running up hundreds of trillions worth of derivatives obligations and other debts that are melting down the global financial system.)

A July 3 Financial Times editorial endorsement of Glass-Steagall has been followed by a series of further endorsements by leading figures, from Peter Hambro, of the old British merchant banking family; to Lord Myners, former Financial Services Secretary in the Gordon Brown government and a Rothschild-sponsored banker; to Terry Smith, a leading City banker who had called for a return to Glass-Steagall at the time of the September 2008 Lehman Brothers and AIG blowout. In Italy, the newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, came out Friday with a big push for Glass-Steagall by leading financial correspondent Massimo Mucchetti, who is known to have, in the past, been close to former Prime Minister Romano Prodi and the powerful De Benedetti interests.

Those calling for Glass-Steagall are acting in the full knowledge that it is U.S. statesman and physical economist Lyndon LaRouche who from the beginning has led the fight for Glass-Steagall in the United States and in Europe. As LaRouche noted in a July 5 statement, he is the only person qualified to engineer the return to Glass-Steagall and a system of fixed-exchange-rate sovereign currencies in the trans-Atlantic region with all that that entails, in particular the shift from a mere monetary system to one anchored in the science of physical economy. In discussions with colleagues on 6 July, LaRouche emphasised that, if leading figures in the trans-Atlantic governments do exactly what LaRouche has prescribed, we can go into an immediate economic recovery. “London has delivered a shot across the bow, and we are the world leaders on Glass-Steagall,” LaRouche declared. “A group of responsible people in Britain has decided that the fate of everything that is important to them requires an immediate Glass-Steagall reform.”

Up till now, the British have (correctly) viewed Glass-Steagall as a threat to their oligarchical system of private financial power enshrined in the City of London, which operates under the protection of the Crown and outside of the authority of the elected Parliament. It was the 1999 repeal of the U.S. Glass-Steagall Act that removed the final barrier to the City’s “globalisation” operation—the wholesale economic looting of nations through deregulation, privatisation, and free trade that Lord Jacob Rothschild’s Inter-Alpha Group of Banks, and other City institutions such as Hill Samuel and its Australian spin-off Macquarie Bank spread around the globe. (Macquarie was central to virtually all major financial looting policies imposed on Australia from Hawke/Keating onwards: the dollar float; bank deregulation; compulsory superannuation; national competition policy.)

The LIBOR rigging scandal lays bare the whole dirty story of how the City of London operates. On July 6, the British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced a criminal investigation into the fixing of the rates that determine virtually all adjustable-rate mortgage and credit card rates worldwide. The investigation will be coordinated with law enforcement agencies in the United States, Japan, and throughout continental Europe. This is potentially the Pecora Commission (the 1932-34 Ferdinand Pecora investigation of Wall Street), but on a global scale. The LIBOR scandal is so big, and involves so many of the worst of the trans-Atlantic banks, that it will be difficult to suppress, and many bankers may soon be frog-marched off to jail.

LaRouche also noted that the British shift on Glass-Steagall indicates a shift on the British support for Barack Obama, who has been a British puppet in the White House, to bail out the banks and instigate imperial wars. This opens the way for the Constitutional removal of Obama, and the reenactment of Glass-Steagall in the U.S., followed by the restoration of America’s unique public credit system based on national banking, and large-scale infrastructure development beginning with the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) to rebuild the world economy.

Australia must also adopt the Glass-Steagall principle, which is the centerpiece of the CEC’s resolution, “The Future of Australia: Develop or Die”, featured in the latest issue of the New Citizen newspaper. Support that resolution today, and demand that every elected official, community leader and concerned citizen in your area do the same.