GLASS-STEAGALL NOW
No Recess for Congress
Until Obama’s Impeached!
Special to EIR
July 22—Diane Sare of the LaRouche PAC Policy Committee, in her opening statement to the group’s weekly webcast discussion of July 21 (www.larouchepac.com), defined the sharp focus of activity which Lyndon LaRouche has determined should be pursued singlemindedly until it is accomplished.
“What Mr. LaRouche wants made very, very clear,” Sare said,
“is that the Policy Committee, in collaboration with him, is going to make sure that the organization is on a single, focused trajectory to get done in the immediate short term, the implementation of Glass-Steagall and the Four Laws.... Obviously, we can not rely on President Obama to do anything of the sort. He is absolutely dysfunctional and has to be removed from office.
“But given the state of the world at the current moment—and we are at the breakpoint—these Four Laws are the No. 1 priority, starting with the implementation of Glass-Steagall. And as soon as Glass-Steagall is passed, what immediately is put into question is, what do you do next? Which is the question of National Banking, credit, and a science-driver for thermonuclear fusion.
“But there can’t be any other secondary issues, side issues, lack of focus on this; this is absolutely the course of action that’s necessary in the United States for the future of mankind.”
Putting It to Congress
With this focus, elaborated in a leaflet that can be found at www.larouchepac.com, members of LaRouche PAC and citizen delegations from New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Virginia began an intensive intervention into Washington, D.C. on July 22. Congress, which, with rare exceptions, has dragged its feet on all the life-and-death issues facing the nation and humanity, had just returned for what they intend to be the first of two more partial weeks before their August break. Without an uncompromising, successful offensive by LaRouche PAC, backed up by citizens from around the country, when the Congress leaves town, it will leave the country defenseless in the face of two mortal threats—financial blowout and possible thermonuclear war.
That the trans-Atlantic financial system is on the very edge of a new, more devastating blowout is patently obvious. Recent bank failures in Europe have put financial experts into a panic, and led various nations to rush to activate their “bail-in” mechanisms to try to deal with the insolvencies. In Austria, this led on July 8 to the confiscation of the life insurance policies of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, whose money had been invested in bonds of Hypo Alpe Adria bank, which got into trouble. At the same time, there have been prominent warnings, including by such as the Bank for International Settlements, of the unsustainable nature of the asset bubble which has kept the banking system on life-support over the past six years, that the next inevitable crash will be worse than the last.
The only way to stop this prospect is Glass-Steagall, which sequesters and cuts off the phony speculative debt—and permits a focus on saving the real economy.
The related threat, thermonuclear war, derives from the financial one—as the British imperium seeks to save its bankrupt system by fomenting wars. President Obama, just as he has followed the British line to block Glass-Steagall, is toeing the British line for war—as his provocations against Russia and China, and support for extremists on both sides in the perpetual genocidal war in Southwest Asia, demonstrate. Left alone, with Congress out of session, Obama’s next foreign policy step could be fatal for mankind.
Those two threats can only be eliminated by the measures LaRouche demands—impeachment of Obama, and implementation of LaRouche’s Four Laws.
Congress, therefore, must be forced to rise to its Constitutional responsibility to protect the nation. As the LaRouche PAC leaflet demands, Congress must not recess, until Obama is impeached and the first of the Four Laws, Glass-Steagall, is put through.
Glass-Steagall, or Die!
Legislation to restore Glass-Steagall has been before Congress since 2010—but has never come to a hearing, much less a vote. Wall Street control over both political parties has kept it off the agenda, even as the real economy’s collapse has taken a greater and greater toll on the American population. Meanwhile, support for the law’s restoration has grown exponentially, thanks heavily to the organizing by LaRouchePAC. The latest grassroots initiative was a petition by 162 organizations which was signed by 600,000 people, which urged the Senate to take immediate action on S. 1282, the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act introduced last Summer by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Angus King (I-Me.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and John McCain (R-Ariz.).
On July 17, Warren and her original co-sponsors published an opinion piece on CNN’s website that raised the urgency of the issue. It said, in its concluding paragraph, that five years after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the severe economic downturn that followed,
“with another financial crisis a very real possibility, why isn’t this a more urgent issue? We urge our colleagues to support our bill.”
The article says at the outset:
“The chances of another financial crisis will remain unacceptably high as long as there are financial institutions that are ‘too big to fail’.... But over five years after the crash, the big banks are more concentrated and more interconnected and their appetite for excessively risky behavior is unchanged. The biggest banks are substantially bigger than they were in 2008. In fact, the five biggest banks now control more than half the nation’s total banking assets.”
The Senators say that their bill, which they introduced a year ago last week, takes a “proactive, structural approach to reducing bank risk [which] should be far preferable to risk-management through over-regulation.” They note, “It’s been four years since Congress passed, and rule-making began on, the Dodd-Frank Act. The regulators have so far missed more than half of their statutory rule-making deadlines and many rules remain unwritten.” They say that Congress must step in to address the problem, as their resolution requires.
Officially, S. 1282 has 10 sponsors in all, and there are 13 sponsors for a companion bill (H.R. 3711) in the House. In addition, H.R. 129, a bill which also calls for reinstating Glass-Steagall, has 82 sponsors, plus 1 sponsor on a companion Senate bill (S. 954).
It’s not the numbers that are lacking, but the understanding of what’s at stake, and thus the willingness to go against the London/Wall Street moneybags who have fought tooth and nail to prevent Glass-Steagall from being restored.
Impeachment Ripe
Only a Rip van Winkle would not have noticed how the movement for impeachment of Obama has taken off over the recent weeks. From both sides of the political spectrum, Obama’s determination to act in defiance of the Constitution—both its principles and its formal separation of powers—has become a rallying cry for action. Yet Congress has, for the most part, refused to act.
One exception is the move by Congressmen Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.), and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) to try to force the Congress to fulfill its constitutional responsibility, by discussing and voting on whether troops should be deployed to Iraq (see Documentation). Yet, not even these Congressmen, who are passionately opposed to the President’s unilateral decisions for war, in cases such as Libya, have been willing to put impeachment on the table.
The Republican House leadership is trying to staunch the tide for impeachment with an impotent lawsuit against Obama, for not “faithfully executing the laws,” as the Constitution requires. At a hearing before the House Rules Committee on July 16, witnesses debated the merits of the proposed lawsuit, but even that hearing made it clear that only impeachment would adequately address the President’s offenses.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley presented the most principled and non-partisan view of Obama’s abuse of power, in a way that implicitly demanded impeachment, not a lawsuit.
“Today’s hearing is a historic step to address the growing crisis in our constitutional system—a shifting of the balance of power within our tripartite system in favor of a now dominant Executive Branch,” Turley’s written statement said. “While both Congress and the courts have lost authority over the decades, the Legislative Branch has lost the most with the rise of a type of über-presidency.... Our system is changing in a dangerous and destabilizing way. We are seeing the emergence of a different model of government in our country—a model long ago rejected by the Framers....
“The President’s pledge to effectively govern alone is alarming, but what is most alarming is his ability to fulfill that pledge,” Turley continued. “When a President can govern alone, he can become a government unto himself, which is precisely the danger that the Framers sought to avoid in the establishment of our tripartite system of government. In perhaps the saddest reflection of our divisive times, many of our citizens and Members [of Congress] are now embracing the very model of a dominant executive that the Framers fought to excise from our country almost 250 years ago.”
“What we are witnessing today is one of the greatest challenges to our constitutional system in the history of this country,” Turley declared. “It did not start with President Obama.”
Turley noted that one of the Democratic witnesses on the panel, former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, had warned during the G.W. Bush Administration that the encroachment of Executive power had become a threat to the separation of powers, and had called upon the next President, Obama, to respect the Constituition’s safeguards. However, Turley noted, Obama has not followed Dellinger’s advice, and “the aggrandizement that we saw in prior administrations has continued unabated and, as I have previously stated, it has reached a constitutional tipping point that threatens a fundamental change in how our country is governed.”
Whle Turley made a clear case for impeachment on the broader issues of abuse of power, he acknowledged that the small-bore issue chosen by the House GOP for the lawsuit, does not merit what he termed “the extraordinary remedy” of impeachment. What does merit it, is the fact that Obama’s continuation in office, carrying out economic and foreign policies that represent a clear and present danger to both the Constitution per se, and the general welfare of the population, means the destruction of the United States, if not humanity as a whole.
