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The Glass-Steagall Fight In the United States

by Diane Sare

Conference Program


Diane Sare.

Diane Sare of the LaRouche Policy Committee, and LaRouche candidate for Governor of New Jersey, addressed the Schiller Institute conference on April 14, 2013.

I would like to start with the greetings from Congressman Walter Jones, which I think is very important, because Walter Jones is a Republican Congressman. He is an important figure on two bills in the Congress: One is that he was the first Republican co-sponsor of Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s bill to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. He also introduced HCR 3, a bill which says that a President who goes to war without consent of the Congress has committed an impeachable offense.

And what I hope to make clear in my presentation, as Mr. LaRouche has said, is that the fight for Glass-Steagall-and as my fellow panelists have said-is an absolute war, and one aspect of the war is the necessary removal of Obama from office, since he is functioning as the tool of the Queen to block all of this.

So, we’ll start with the greetings from Congressman Jones [see below].

What I wanted to do, is to give you a picture, because I think it’s hard to grasp the nature of the battle, if you start simply from right now, and don’t look at a little bit [of the history] of this fight. And Helga brought up yesterday the forecast that Lyn made July 25, 2007, when he said that this is not a mortgage crisis; that this is the end; it’s over, it’s finished.

So, he made a very shocking forecast. And then he wrote the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, and we mobilized across the country. In the state of Pennsylvania, dozens of city councils passed resolutions in support of this. We had maybe seven states, or so, that passed resolutions in their legislatures. We were not able to get it introduced into the Congress because of pressure, explicitly from George Soros, Felix Rohatyn, and others, as Helga mentioned.

But I think, after that, the really big and really ugly shift was the election of President Barack Obama. And Lyn has referenced repeatedly, this question of the poison of the party system in the United States. What happened was, Obama came in, and first, of course, we wanted to hope that maybe there was something that could be done. Maybe some of the people from the Clinton Administration could be prevailed upon, such that the guy wouldn’t be as horrible as we knew his profile had him likely to be.

Off to London To Visit the Queen

But by April of 2009, after Obama’s first two foreign visits-and I don’t know if people remember where they were: The first one was to London, to visit the Queen! And Michelle Obama had the famous incident where she touched the Queen, but it was okay, because the Queen loves the Obamas, so nothing bad happened.

And then his second visit was to Saudi Arabia [June 2009].

So immediately, he was paying homage to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Lyn made a forecast in April of 2009, saying that this guy was a malignant narcissist, a failed personality, like Nero or Hitler, and shortly thereafter, Obama began to ram through his health-care bill, which I know was promoted in the European press as being some kind of European-style health care. It was actually a Hitlerian scheme to get rid of the useless eaters by turning the entire health-care system over to the private insurance companies, and then setting up boards of statisticians to determine whether it was too expensive, statistically, to keep you alive, and to give you medical care. And the bill itself called for $750 billion in cuts from Medicare, for the private insurance.

So, we began the campaign with the Hitler mustache.

Now, what happened at this point, is that all of these people who had worked with us on the Homeowners and Bank Protection Act, to maintain party loyalty, disappeared. They ran under the bed, they hid under their desks, they slammed their doors, they said, “Never call me again. Don’t meet with me again. I can’t believe you’re saying this-you’re over the top, you’re over the top.”

Then what happened? Well, we had this genocidal health-care bill. Then Obama did the “humanitarian mission”-you might remember the humanitarian mission, where we bombed Libya for 250 days, without Obama ever going to the Congress for consent, but it was “humanitarian.” And it wasn’t a war-and I was told this by one of the people I ran against in the Democratic primary, a Marine-the reason that this was not a war was because no Americans were killed. So, if we were just killing other people, this did not qualify as military action.

And then, of course, we found out since, that there were American boots on the ground, and the whole thing was a lie, not surprisingly. And then Obama had Qaddafi killed, while he was in custody.

Then, later, as Congressman Jones referenced, around the Benghazi question, you had the peculiar case of our U.S. Ambassador repeatedly requesting security. We get an attack on our consulate, and Obama gets a briefing for 15 minutes, and then goes to bed, and sleeps for 8 hours, while four Americans are killed, because he has to prepare to do a fundraiser in Las Vegas the next day, which obviously was much more important to him than dealing with this emergency.

Now, while Obama was presiding over all of these wonderful things, and as each one of these developments occurred, some of the people who had scurried away because of the mustache, would begin to come out from under their beds, and out from behind their desks. And it was beginning to dawn on them that perhaps Mr. LaRouche had not been “over the top” in his comments about the malignant evil nature of this Presidency, this puppet of the Queen, who wants to depopulate the planet.

Glass-Steagall Introduced

While all this was going on, what else was going on was Quantitative Easing. Quantitative Easing, number one, number two, number three, number four-I’m not sure what number we’re up to now. And whereas, when Obama had come in, we had under George W. Bush, and Paulson, the beginning of the bailout, the $700 billion TARP, by the end of Obama’s first term, the amount of money in all of these various bailouts was something around $29 trillion.

So, there was a fight for Glass-Steagall. There was a bipartisan attempt from Senators Maria Cantwell, a Democrat, John McCain, a Republican, to add it as an amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill, which I find humorous, because it basically would have nullified all of the garbage in the Dodd-Frank bill, and we would have had the votes to pass it, but Obama, Rep. Barney Frank, and others went on a war to stop it.

Then we got a bill introduced in the Congress by Marcy Kaptur-Walter Jones was a co-sponsor-and over this period of a couple of years, we got about 84 co-sponsors.

Now, what’s happening is a revolutionary shift in the United States. It is a result of the fact that the population is not suicidal, and over the years, LaRouche and our organization, for decades, have been providing a certain quality of leadership which people can see is right. And when people sign on to Glass-Steagall, it is not because they are not aware that we have six-foot tall posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache in front of their offices. They are very aware of this. It’s a topic of discussion, and they are deciding to sign on.

What has happened to push this along-people have heard of the sequestration. You may remember Standard & Poors and Moody’s decided to downgrade the U.S. debt; we had to cut $4.1, 4.2 trillion out of the budget. This is Obama’s policy. In the last week, what’s been effected, is a loss of 750,000 jobs. Medicare is no longer being accepted by many doctors, because Medicare is not in some cases reimbursing the doctors and the hospitals. So, many senior citizens, people with serious illnesses, including cancer, are being turned away, not being treated, and we are picking this up all the time in our organizing. Our own supporters are telling us horror stories of their family members going to get their regular chemotherapy, and being told, “We’re sorry, this is no longer covered. If you want the treatment, put it on your credit card.”

There was a cancer treatment facility in New York City which had 16,000 patients receiving chemotherapy; they just had to tell 5,000 of them, “We will not treat you anymore.” They also are starting a new policy-or an old policy-of debtors’ prisons; now the collection agencies are coming after the people, and if you can’t pay the fines, you can go to jail.

So, what’s happened is that this crisis, and the fact that we have been present with the solutions over decades, have created a momentum where there’s now a fight. As Congressman Jones says, we’re up to 53 sponsors of the Glass-Steagall bill in the House. We are going to have a spectacular war to get it introduced into the Senate. We have had it introduced in 15 states. As Walter Jones said, North Carolina is the latest of the 15, and the two that have passed it, are the states of Maine and South Dakota.

And in the state of Maine, it passed in the House and in the Senate unanimously. And then, the legislator who was moving it knows we have to get the U.S. Senate to do this, so he wrote a very sharp press release about this, targeting Angus King, who is the newly elected Independent Senator from Maine, who made a big stink about the financial blowout. He was very aggressively calling for Glass-Steagall all the way up until he was put in the Senate-and now he’s been silent. So, the Maine state legislature is using the fact that they passed this, to target him.

The other state where it passed is South Dakota, and that’s the legislator we’re going to hear from now. You should know it passed in the House by a vote of 67-2, and we [LaRouchePAC] do not even have an office in that state, as we don’t in Maine. This was done by a group of longtime LaRouche activists and supporters, who are largely farmers. This is from [South Dakota State Rep.] Patty Miller [see below].

She was motivated enough that she went to Minnesota to help us get it introduced there as well. We have another state legislator, Tom Jackson [from Alabama], who came to our Schiller Institute conference in Virginia [March 23], who not only met with members of Congress, but when he got back, he got on the phone to organize other legislators.

So what you have in this fight now, is the quality of passion, because it’s clear that we don’t have forever. We have days, weeks. I think what Jacques [Cheminade] said at the beginning [see his speech elsewhere in this issue]-it’s a moment where things can change overnight, and the world is a different place-is the way that we have to act.

A Shift in the Population

I want to give you a sense, a few of the details of the various interventions we’ve been making, to give you a sense of the qualitative shift in the American population, which is driving the shift in the legislatures, and the Congress-and hopefully, soon, the Senate.

Sen. Ron Wyden was the one Democrat who joined Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster, when he was demanding an answer to the question of whether Obama thought it was constitutionally legal to kill Americans with drones in the United States, without due process. And you might wonder-it took the Administration six weeks, and a filibuster, to answer that question. So, Ron Wyden, you would think, has some guts. He joined the filibuster as a Democrat-he broke party ranks.

So, what happened was, he was having a town hall meeting in Oregon, and it was a couple hundred people, and 200 more high school students. And we had organizers-Dave Christie, one of my fellow candidates, was present, and someone on the phone in Seattle just got a list of everyone whom we’d met in the street in that area of Oregon, to see if we could find some other people who would go to this meeting. So, just on the spur of the moment, we got two people who said, “Yes, I’m going to go to this meeting.” And both of them went, and what happened was, it was clear, to get your question asked, it was a lottery. You might have a chance of 1 in 400 that your question would be picked. And this was too much for the activist.

So, here’s a guy who had only met us once, and he decides to take matters into his own hands. So, when Wyden gets to the end of his speech, the guy jumps out of his seat and says, “Wait a minute! I want to know. You supported Dodd-Frank. You didn’t support Glass-Steagall. Do you know that Dodd-Frank says they can steal our money like they did in Cyprus? Do you support them stealing our money?”

At that point, Dave Christie gave a very cogent briefing on Glass-Steagall, and so on. Then, of course, the security guards would not allow Dave to get anywhere near the Senator at the end, to give him the literature, but that worked out okay, because the other supporter, who had been called that day, had the sense to run up and get in line to talk to Senator Wyden personally.

So, what you have is a degree of self-activation, where people don’t have to be told in detail what to do.

We have a similar situation right now in the state of Connecticut, because a supporter, an inventor, who met us in the street, came to a couple of meetings. Then he came to my campaign-launching meeting where we had all this music at the beginning, and he said, “You know, I am in heaven. This is the organization I’ve been looking for for my entire life.”

He went back to Connecticut, and decided he was going to organize a town hall meeting. And he worked his butt off going to, I don’t know, 150 family members and friends; and he said to us, “God, you guys do a lot of work. I had no idea it was this hard.” So, we helped him, and we organized a very good town hall meeting, and there were other people there who had met us recently in the field. They have now become a core force to organize the state of Connecticut.

This slimy little Congressman Jim Himes was speaking [at his town meeting] and slithering around about why we don’t need Glass-Steagall. There were eight of these people, plus my husband [Chris Sare] and another organizer at this meeting, who were able to keep hammering him on the question of Dodd-Frank, and Glass-Steagall, and he said, “Well, we’re doing something now about Too Big To Fail. We’re going to break up the banks.” And then Chris, who was in the back, yelled, “It’s not about size, it’s about function.” And then the whole audience applauded.

And then, the local newspaper coverage of the town hall meeting with this slimy little Congressman was all about Glass-Steagall. The press coverage was, well, the whole town hall meeting was about Glass-Steagall. So, that didn’t work so well for him.

A Different Dynamic

We have an activists’ phone call every Thursday night, across the continent. And this is because there are so many areas where we don’t have full-time offices, but we have people who want to be active. And this call is growing and growing-it’s gotten to be over 200 people. We had to get a new conference system, so we can hold now at least 1,000.

So, right after this Cyprus situation broke, we decided we had to have an emergency conference call. And the e-mails started going out to all these different places. And 500 people tried to get on the conference call. Unfortunately, the system has this really obnoxious beep when each person got on, so when Paul Gallagher was trying to give the briefing, all these beeps were going-so we had to cut it at about 340. But you can see the potential for just the explosion of activism.

Also, on the shift with Obama, an African-American Congresswoman, Karen Bass, in California, was holding a town hall meeting, and when the question of Glass-Steagall came up, and the sequestration, she was forced to say, “Look, this is the policy of Obama. This is Obama’s policy.”

So you’re getting a shift from these people. We sent a team to deploy at Wall Street, in Manhattan, which is typically already a somewhat difficult site. Last week, an organizing team raised $700 at Wall Street, and they said that it was extremely polarized: that the bad people were really bad, and really nasty, and that organizers would get invigorated from yelling at them. And the good people were very good, and really wanted to fight.

And we deployed in midtown Manhattan, and a person who worked at Citibank came running down from the bank with a copy of large internal Citibank report, which was still warm from the xerox, because he wanted us to have the secret information about what the Citibank policy is for this crisis.

So, this is a really different dynamic.

Confronting Pelosi

I got a report last night from the Democratic Convention in California, where we have organizers. Mr. LaRouche had made the point that the political parties have so disintegrated, they’ve so destroyed themselves with this stupid re-election of Obama, that they don’t have a quorum to kick us out any more. So, at the Democratic Convention, we had a meeting with Nancy Pelosi, and the entire discussion that Pelosi wanted to have, was on the subject of gay marriage. So, one of our organizers asked: “Why are we discussing this? They’re cutting Social Security; they’re cutting Medicare. We’re all going to be dead. Can we talk about something real?” The entire room burst into applause, and people came running after her afterwards, to videotape interviews with her to put her on their Facebook pages, saying this.

Then, in the Labor Caucus, Michael Steger, another member of the LaRouche Policy Committee, was invited to speak on Glass-Steagall. And then we got a report that in the senior citizens’ meeting, someone who was not with us said, “How come we’re not here to talk about the impeachment of Obama? He’s cutting Social Security. He’s going to kill us.”

So, these are just a few snapshots of the changed dynamics. But I think it is why Lyn said during a recent policy discussion, not that we have won, but that we could win. We have a lot of work to do, but we could win. The fight in the U.S. right now is that we have to build up critical mass to break up this ugly logjam in the Senate. And the key to that, I think, is to get these Senators to stop being afraid of Satan, and to fear God.