World War III Looms;
Put Criminal Bankers in Prison
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
July 21—As it became clear just how thoroughly rotten the collapsing trans-Atlantic financial system is, from the threat of criminal investigations of the Libor scandal, including by American prosecutors, the British establishment had two fundamentally opposite reactions. One faction, for which the Financial Times, Peter Hambro, and Lord Myner are spokesmen, stated publicly that only a return to the two-tier banking system, in the full tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Glass-Steagall standard, could prevent total collapse into financial and political chaos. The second faction, which includes British Foreign Secretary William Hague, proceeds from the standpoint that a confrontation with Russia and China could distract people from the criminal and dramatic situation of the bankrupt financial system; they would rather risk a military catastrophe than accept the rise of the Asian countries, while the trans-Atlantic region goes down.
Given that on the single day of July 18, there were three terrorist attacks—in Syria, Bulgaria, and the Russian Republic of Tatarstan—we know we are not dealing with three separate events, but with an expression of the strategic conflict within the Anglo-American establishment over how to respond to the disintegration of the financial system.
The Obama Administration did not even see fit to condemn the terrorist attack in which the Syrian defense minister, security chief, and two generals were killed, or to express condolences to the Syrian government. Instead, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, backed by Great Britain, France, and Germany, tried to push through a UN resolution that would have allowed stricter economic sanctions and military action. The veto by Russia and China in the UN Security Council signifies a red line, beyond which thermonuclear confrontation with these two powers is on the agenda.
Hague then announced that "humanitarian aid" and material support for the Syrian opposition could be increased, even outside the framework of the UN Security Council. It is well documented that the opposition is infiltrated by Libyan terrorists and al-Qaeda fighters, and is funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin mocked the "humanitarian aid" from the self-described "greatest humanists in the world," the United States and Britain, giving as an example, the invoking of non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which resulted in 150,000 civilian deaths, millions of refugees and displaced persons, and the destruction of the entire country.
In a security conference in St. Petersburg earlier this year, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev clearly explained the Putin Doctrine, which means the absolute defense of the inviolability of national sovereignty rights as laid down in the UN Charter, and that military intervention under the pretext of humanitarian assistance could itself lead to the use of nuclear weapons. This clash between the so-called Blair Doctrine, which allows military intervention anywhere in the world, and the Putin Doctrine, shows that in light of the Syrian situation, the world is a hair's breadth from World War III, and demonstrates how irresponsibly the Western media is acting, parroting British war propaganda.
After the attack on a bus in Bulgaria, in which five Israelis were killed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately charged Iran with responsibility, and said that Israel would respond with force. Former CIA officer Paul Pillar warned on July 19 in the foreign policy journal National Interest of the danger that the West could very easily be drawn inadvertently into an escalation to war, by the combination of economic warfare and the massive military buildup of the U.S. Armed Forces in the region. War with Iran "would be a really bad thing for the United States," Pillar wrote, adding that it would not be surprising if Iran were behind the attack in Bulgaria, given Israel's assassination of Iranian scientists, which, Pillar said, "entailed terrorism in the purest sense of the word." Netanyahu's bellicose statements should be taken seriously, since "he may be looking for excuses to up the ante and the heat no matter who ultimately turns out to be responsible for the attack in Bulgaria."
The third terrorist attack, that on high-level Islamic religious leaders in Kazan, in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, also bears the earmarks of the masterminds from the British war faction. A spokesman for the Russian secret service accused the organization Hizb ut-Tahir of responsibility; it is propagating the ultra-orthodox version of Saudi Wahhabite Islam in Tatarstan, and its headquarters is located in London.
Sources close to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who reject the strategy of confrontation, are urgently warning that the moment of maximum danger of being drawn into a war that can no longer be stopped is being reached, and this will continue throughout the month of August, when the U.S. Congress goes on its Summer recess, if someone tries to prevent the consequences of the Libor scandal from endangering Obama's confirmation as the Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party National Convention in early September.
The political action committee associated with Lyndon LaRouche has therefore launched an extraordinary mobilization for the coming week throughout the United States and especially in Washington, to work for impeachment of President Obama and the immediate implementation of Glass-Steagall by the Congress.
A Strategic Battle
It is also clear to various other patriotic forces that what is at stake is nothing less than the existence of the United States. A number of prosecutors, Congressmen, and Senators are firmly committed to exposing the systemic criminality of the trans-Atlantic financial system, as it is now being revealed with the Libor scandal and the huge amount of drug-money laundering in the case of HSBC bank.
The strategic battle is taking place between those who want a return to Glass-Steagall, which will ultimately restore the character of the United States as a republic in the tradition of the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, and those who consider paramount the interests of Wall Street as a subsection of the British Empire. After Roosevelt's death, these circles immediately set out to block the power that FDR had used to curb Wall Street.
To get to the beginning of the Libor scandal and thus to the biggest fraud in the history of the financial markets, look at a paper that Alan Greenspan wrote in 1984 as director at JP Morgan, entitled "Rethinking Glass-Steagall," and in particular the role that Greenspan, and before him, Paul Volcker, played as Federal Reserve chairmen, in eliminating regulation of the financial markets, piece by piece, eventually leading to the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, and the full deregulation of the markets. The manipulation of interest rates such as Libor, which was created in 1986, and probably also of Euribor and the Japanese Tibor, was from the outset left undisturbed by any bank supervision, and extensive investigations will have to determine how this scam could have occurred, in which there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of victims.
Banks and Drugs
The investigation of HSBC in the U.S. Congress for laundering of the profits of the Mexican drug cartels is likewise just the first step toward exposing another aspect of a banking sector for which breaking the law is standard operating procedure. By the late 1970s, as documented in the book Dope, Inc., the annual liquidity inflow from drug money was approximately $800 billion. It's more than an order of magnitude larger now.
Antonio Maria Costa, the former executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and Victor Ivanov, the Russian anti-drug chief, have both emphasized repeatedly in recent weeks that the entire international financial system would have collapsed long ago without the massive liquidity from the illegal drug trade. On July 21, the British Guardian wrote that the global banks are just financial service providers for the drug cartels, citing Costa that the four pillars of the international banking system are: drug-money laundering, evasion of sanctions, tax evasion, and weapons trafficking. The politicians were afraid of a serious legal attack on this reality, for the simple reason that the sums involved are too large ("too big to fail"), and that they themselves have been promised lucrative consulting contracts after their political careers are over. Thus the British government had just signed on a former chairman of HSBC as Trade Minister, at the very moment that the drug-money-laundering scandal broke.
Looking at the dark side of an obviously thoroughly criminal financial sector which has lost any sense of justice, the bottom line is that there must be immediate implementation of a two-tier banking system as the first, indispensable step. That would cut off the power of the imperial faction committed to military confrontation with Russia and China.
Under these circumstances, to create the European Union's permanent rescue fund, the ESM (European Stability Mechanism), a lawless zone in which all the members of its directorate will enjoy lifetime immunity, and will be able to speculate on the primary and secondary markets without banking supervision, with no accountability to any parliaments, would mean that the nations of Europe are giving themselves up in favor of the mafias of the world, to whom they are handing an engraved invitation.
This article was translated from German.
