Schiller Institute on YouTube Schiller Institute on Facebook RSS

Home >

Merkel Backs Surveillance State; EU Drives for Financial Fascism

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
July 2013

v1-Helga_SF_schiller_conf_6-29-13.jpg
EIRNS/Daniel Platt
Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

July 20-In Washington, D.C., today a battle is taking place, the result of which is expected to determine whether the global crisis will lead to deadly financial fascism and speedy thermonuclear extinction of the human species, or whether it will be possible in the short term, first in the USA, and then in Europe and other parts of the world, to push through a two-tier banking system in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the coming days and weeks, in which all insiders expect to soon see the next mega-crash, it is crystal clear, on both sides of the Atlantic, which politicians and which media are on the side of the common good, and which have allowed themselves to be made the lackeys of the financial oligarchy and the Anglo-American surveillance state.

The LaRouche Political Action Committee (LaRouche PAC), supported by groups of voters from the U.S. East Coast, led discussions with a large number of congressmen and senators and their staffs about the urgent need to immediately adopt the Glass-Steagall standard of bank separation on the basis of the already introduced bills. The political landscape in Washington was thereby transformed into an arena that has been dominated by a single theme: Can the power of Wall Street-where the J.P. Morgan Chase Bank openly calls for fascist solutions to the crisis-be broken, and can the Glass-Steagall-separated banking system and a credit system to revive the real economy be introduced, in time, before the next crash?

During this intervention, some members or their assistants proved to be outright stakeholders in Wall Street. The revolving door policy, through which many bankers enter Washington politics, then go back to the bank and then again to Washington, the exorbitant sums that certain members receive in campaign contributions from the banks, the army of Wall Street lobbyists that marches every day through Congress, the fact that of course Congress is spied upon by the NSA-all these conditions illustrate that the struggle for the re-introduction of this law, which was instrumental in Roosevelt leading the U.S. out of the Depression in 1933, is more like a guerrilla war in the jungle than a democratic process.

The Detroit/Cyprus Model

v1-Helga_SF_schiller_conf_6-29-13.jpg
Cypriot depositors line up at the Laiki Bank ATM, in hopes of withdrawing funds before they are frozen, by order of the Troika.
The Troika at work.
If you want to see what’s in store for every American city, look at Detroit: Since 1960, it has lost 63% of its population; 47% of the people are functionally illiterate. Shown: the former Detroit Public Schools Book Depository.

But the momentum of Glass-Steagall is growing, to a certain extent in direct relation to the collapse of the real economy, especially manifested in the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the simultaneous record profits on Wall Street in the second quarter. The procedure, which is now being demonstrated in Detroit, should be understood as a warning shot around the world, for how the oligarchy intends to dump the no-longer-affordable debt: The emergency financial manager for the city, Kevyn Orr, negotiated an agreement in which the pensioners will receive only pennies on the dollar from their pension funds, cheated of the secure retirement they earned with their lives’ work, while debts to Bank of America and UBS are rewarded with 75-80%. In the event that Glass-Steagall does not pass, then the proposed Cyprus model-the so-called bail-in, which is already available in the form of Article II of the Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S. and is currently up for deliberation in the European Parliament-given the huge outstanding debt of the banks, there will be a very much larger theft against the deposits of bank customers than was the case in Cyprus. The planned use the Cyprus model throughout the Atlantic region would result in the death of many millions of people, because with it would come shortages of food, health care, and other vital needs.

It is the very existence of the United States that is at stake. It was in this sense that Thomas Hoenig, the deputy head of the FDIC and an important representative of the pro-Glass-Steagall group in the United States, appeared on July 18 at a briefing in the U.S. Senate that was organized by the “Main Street Alliance” and the “Americans for Financial Reform,” and passionately called for the passage of Senate bills S. 985 and/or S. 1282 to prevent the FDIC’s deposit insurance from extending its safety net to high-risk transactions by banks, sticking the taxpayers a second time with gambling debts. The former chief economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, supported Hoenig and also called for the separation of the banks into one safe category that needs to be absolutely supported, and another relatively dangerous one, where investors can decide for themselves whether they want to make money or lose it.

Glass-Steagall or Fascism

But the fact is that the casino economy is definitely over-either through an orderly banking separation (whereby most, if not all investment banks are declared bankrupt and the monetary system replaced by a credit system directed toward production), or by fascist coups in which, as in the cases of Cyprus and Detroit, the debt is brutally passed on to the population, whose standard of living and life expectancy are drastically reduced. Given the already massively shrunken productive capacity in the United States and Europe, the planned bail-in, i.e. the expropriation of deposits, threatens to initiate such a clear cut in the real economy, that the basis of life for a very large part of the population would disappear-and this is well known to the bankers as well as to the leading politicians, who incessantly parrot the mantras of “market stability” as the highest good, and of “more Europe,” meaning greater power for a supranational European Union.

The battle lines are clear: Glass-Steagall separation of banking or the financial fascism of the mega-banks.

This requires not only J.P. Morgan “solutions as in the thirties.” One of the co-authors of the oligarchy’s notorious book issued by the Club of Rome in 1972, entitled The Limits to Growth, Joergen Randers, said in an interview with Corriere della Sera this Spring that the EU Commission is the “best example known to him” of the enforcement of the “necessary” austerity measures. He views the EC as an “elitocracy” of very competent people who will not be controlled by the European Parliament, and who have managed to push through resolutions, to which the individual democratically elected national parliaments would probably never have agreed. Randers praised Italy as a model for successful population reduction, because a society has been created there that does not allow women to have both a job and a child, and therefore Italy has reached a birthrate of 1.3 children per woman, the lowest birthrate in the world.

The storm warnings are up, it’s five seconds before 12:00, and high time that people wake up and fight back. “Solutions like in the thirties” means fascism. The global financial system is facing disintegration, and the “financial elitocracies” know that the policy of bailouts has been exhausted, and that seizing all the deposits of account holders is not enough to finance the total debt of the banking system. Therefore it is the declared objective to eliminate the costs of the welfare state and, of course, to reduce life expectancy.

v1-Helga_SF_schiller_conf_6-29-13.jpg
WEF/swiss-image.ch/Moritz Hager
Angela Merkel.

It should not surprise anyone that the same governments that showered the banks with “rescue packages” for almost six years and led the charge for “market stability,” those that consider the interests of London and Wall Street as an absolute priority, are the same ones that remain mute in the face of the biggest surveillance scandal in history. If Chancellor Merkel and her unspeakable Interior Minister, Hans Peter Friedrich, still pretend, six weeks after the revelations by Ed Snowden, that the Internet is “uncharted territory” and that there is a “trusting relationship” with the American and British intelligence, then one can only agree with the magazine Cicero that this is a blatant case of “bullshitting the population” (Volksverarschung).

After a long delay, Der Spiegel woke up and discovered, in the article “America’s Delusion,” that the American government, in its global spying, is behaving “pathologically” and placing itself omnipotently above the rule of law. The Spiegel commentator finds it “dismal” that it is now Obama who is acting like this, and not just Bush; he then comes to the conclusion: “There is only one America.” But precisely this is a fallacy.

The truth is that both the U.S. and the EU have come within millimeters of fascist regimes. In America, the vast majority of Obama’s former supporters have come to the realization that Obama has continued and worsened all the evils of George W. Bush. But, fortunately, there is a growing bipartisan opposition, especially in the struggle for the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, which is being led by Lyndon LaRouche and LaRouche PAC.

For all of those who were initially taken in by Obama and are now oh so “disappointed” with the unmasked Messiah, consider my article “Obama the Soufflé, or the Gullibility of the German Masses” (EIR, Aug. 1, 2008), in which I pointed out Obama’s character during the ongoing presidential campaign. And how great was the outrage when Lyndon LaRouche, on April 11, 2009, after Obama had shown his true intentions during his visit in London, described him as a new Emperor Nero in an international webcast on Obama’s psychological profile!

LaRouche and the Civil Rights Solidarity Movement (BüSo) in Germany were not only absolutely correct in their analysis of the financial crisis, Obama, the euro and many more aspects-we have proven ourselves to be the only party that presents constructive positive solutions to the crisis, such as Glass-Steagall, a credit system, rebuilding of world economy, return to sovereignty over the monetary and economic policy, and a renaissance of Classical culture, to mention only a few core ideas.


Translated from German by Daniel Platt