4-19 Glass-Steagall: British bankers’ greatest fear again before U.S. Congress

The City of London is in panic following last week’s bipartisan reintroduction into the U.S. Congress of the Glass-Steagall law to choke-chain speculative investment banks so they are completely separated from commercial banks which hold people’s deposits.

Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, a Democrat, introduced H.R. 1489 last Tuesday, entitled: “To repeal certain provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and revive the separation between commercial banking and the securities business, in the manner provided in the Banking Act of 1933, the so-called ‘Glass-Steagall Act’, and for other purposes.” Her two cosponsors were Congressmen Walter Jones, a Republican from North Carolina and James Moran, a Democrat from Virginia.

Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separated the pirates of Wall Street from America’s savings banks. Its repeal in 1999 exposed America’s enormous deposit base to looting by Wall Street and City of London banks, to fuel their parasitical monster derivatives bubble.

The 2007 implosion of the derivatives bubble prompted the widespread recognition that American physical economist Lyndon LaRouche was right to call for the re-enactment of Glass-Steagall; however similar bills put to the Congress last year were blocked twice by Barack Obama, after the British government, on behalf of the City of London, warned him they would regard it as a declaration of war!

Greeting the reintroduction of the Glass-Steagall bill, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood declared it would protect the welfare of the people from the brutal austerity being demanded by the banks:

“There is absolutely no reason for the brutal budget cuts being imposed by Barack Obama in the U.S., and Julia Gillard here in Australia, except to kill people so bankrupt bankers can keep their financial power,” he said.

“These governments forked over hundreds of billions in the case of Gillard, and tens of trillions in the case of Obama to bail out the private banks, and now they are making the people pay by slashing their living standards.”

In another blow to Wall Street and the City of London, the day after the introduction of H.R. 1489, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released its 639-page study of the financial crisis, which excoriated the “rampant conflict of interest” between Wall Street and complicit regulators, and called for criminal investigations into the use of financial derivatives to identify the strongly suspected violations of law.

Also bipartisan, Investigations Subcommittee Chairman, Democrat Senator Carl Levin and ranking member, Republican Senator Tom Coburn, blasted high risk mortgages, complicit regulators, the credit rating agencies, such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, and the investment banks, singling out Goldman Sachs (the company of media-revered Australian politician Malcolm Turnbull, which is also the main promoter of the carbon trading scam) for making huge profits by betting against structured financial products that at the same time it was selling to customers—one of the areas requiring criminal investigation.

Mr Isherwood concluded, “Glass-Steagall will make the criminal, parasitical banks accountable for their own gambling losses, which will be the end of most of them, but it will protect the financial affairs of the people and the real economy from the fall-out.”

To find out about the original Glass-Steagall Act and how it was dismantled, click here for a free copy of the feature DVD, The Takedown of Glass-Steagall.