Why Glass-Steagall Can Cripple the British Empire by Jeffrey Steinberg

is the audio of a telephone presentation to LaRouchePAC activists, delivered by EIR Counterintelligence Editor Jeffrey Steinberg on May 23, 2013. The national activists call was moderated by John Ascher. Below is an edited transcript of Steinberg's remarks.

Why Glass-Steagall Can Cripple the British Empire
by Jeffrey Steinberg

It's critical, from a political-military standpoint, that everybody on this call recognize that last week, the action taken by Sen. Tom Harkin represented a very significant political blow to the British Empire, directly. The fact that we now have a Glass-Steagall bill introduced into the Senate, as well as into the House, means that this is now a very serious proposition. The strategy of the London crowd, of Wall Street (which is almost synonymous with the City of London), and the Obama Presidency, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of that apparatus—their strategy was to prevent a bill from being introduced into the Senate. And they had concentrated on a number of Senators, to put excruciating pressure on them—direct bribery, you name it—to make sure that they did not take the step of introducing Glass-Steagall.

And it was genuinely the mobilization that we have been involved in over these past months, that was the decisive factor in getting this bill introduced. There are anecdotal details that may be written up in reflective history books if we survive this crisis, but suffice it to say that this is not speculation, this is not hyperbole, this is the straightforward truth: that our efforts directly produced a major tactical defeat for the British Empire last week, and that's exactly why Mr. LaRouche said that we've got to expect extraordinary reactions from the British, and from Wall Street, and from the Obama White House, to what we've accomplished.

John Ascher quoted from Ben Bernanke's testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress the other day1—and just bear in mind, that nobody asked him a question about Glass-Steagall. Nobody asked him what his opinion was. It was a prepared message, coming directly from the top down, of this British-controlled world financial system that's on its very last legs. And the message was, "No to Glass-Steagall."

Now, this is not a new message. Back in the Spring of 2010, when the original work was underway to produce what became the Dodd-Frank Act, many of you who've been active for a longer period of time will remember that Sen. Maria Cantwell and Sen. John McCain introduced an amendment to the Senate version, the Dodd bill, which would have fully reinstated Glass-Steagall. There was an enormous brawl at that time over the issue, and the White House and Wall Street—Senate Majority leader Harry Reid on the orders from the White House and Wall Street—moved heaven and earth to make sure that the Glass-Steagall amendment was never brought to a vote.

We were in direct contact with the people in the Senate who were counting the votes. That amendment required a simple majority of 51 votes, and we had a solid commitment from 59 members of the Senate that they would vote in favor of reinstating Glass-Steagall. And so it was only through a vicious parliamentary trick that that bill was prevented from being added as a poison pill to what became Dodd-Frank.
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