The American People Are Needed
Again To Save the World from Fascism
[PDF version of this transcript]
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
This is a transcript of Helga Zepp-LaRouche's keynote address to an international conference of the Schiller Institute held in San Francisco on June 29, 2013 titled "A New Paradigm for Mankind: The Second American Revolution." Video of her address.
I think we all are aware of the fact that we, right now, are finding ourselves in the middle of a world drama which is so gigantic, that if Shakespeare or Schiller were here today, even they would be challenged to put something onstage, bigger than the present world-historical moment. Because if you look at the world situation, in the totality of what is going on, it is mind-boggling. We are on verge of a blowout of the financial system, which could happen any moment, and would make all previous financial crises look like peanuts—and that includes the Great Depression of the '30s.
The financial system could evaporate overnight, in what the CEO of a large consulting firm has called a supernova: That is, when a star comes to its end, and just goes up in a huge burst of light and energy.
The financial oligarchy which is in control of this present financial system, plans to establish nothing less than a world dictatorship. They are clearly intending to eliminate all leftovers of national sovereignty. In Europe they have succeeded already very far, and in the United States, the Constitution will be almost gone, if this is not reversed.
They want to eliminate, and have already done so pretty much, all accomplishments of international law of the people. They want to return to a feudal order, which is based on a population density that goes with a feudal order, and that means a severe reduction of the world population—who knows?—from 7 to 1 billion, or no people at all.
They risk the existence of civilization by playing around with a thermonuclear war, and they're pushing regime-change policies against every country on the globe which is not agreeing to submit to this world order.
So therefore, we are looking at a policy which, at best, would throw civilization into a new dark age, and bring about misery for generations to come; and at worst, we are looking at the complete extinction of civilization, wiping out all the works and creative contributions of all our forebears. Even the memory of it would be eliminated.
On the other side, we have the potential to end oligarchism forever; and to fulfill the promise of the great American President John Quincy Adams, of forming an alliance of perfectly sovereign nation-states on the globe. We could create a peace process among these nations through development, eliminating the poverty and misery of billions of people who are suffering from it now, for good! And that could be done in a very short period of time.
We consciously could initiate the next era of history in human civilization which could be so dramatically different, as it was with the Middle Ages and the new era which was initiated by the great mind, Nicholas of Cusa, who laid the foundation for modern times.
So we could initiate a new era of mankind, which would leave behind this unworthy oligarchical system, and put in its place the identity of mankind, the true nature of man, that is, creativity; of creating a mankind where people are grown up. They would be united through the common aims of mankind, and stop being greedy for foolish, virtual money which soon will evaporate anyway.
Restore the Greatness of America
Now, to contribute to the second version, to the better outcome of present history, we have initiated these Schiller Institute conferences, and naturally, a fight around the world. But it is very clear that whatever we do in Europe or in other parts of the world, the decision of which way this present historical branching point will go, lies with the United States. Because it is the United States which has the power: It's a huge country. I reminded myself by traveling from Washington to California, that it's really a very big country! And it has tremendous richness, which if you don't travel, you may not be so conscious about.
It's a great country; it has made a tremendous achievement in world history. But, right now, I can assure you that this is not the image people have of the United States around the world. Because the legacy of three Bush administrations and more than one Obama Administration, has blurred the image of the United States, and people forget about the great tradition of the United States.
So, let's have a solemn oath, to restore the great America, to rebuild the United States after all of these years of destruction since the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The United States must go back to what it used to be with the Founding Fathers, with Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy. It must become again, for the whole world, a beacon of hope and a temple of liberty. It must be what the aspiration of the Founding Fathers was, that it becomes the place where all the republican forces of the whole world want to go. It must be again, what it was under FDR, a liberator of the world against fascism. It must be again the image of hope, as it was represented by John F. Kennedy and the Moon landing, which created a whole generation of optimistic children, who thought everything was possible, if you apply science and technology.
We must have again the cultural optimism associated with the idea that mankind is capable of exploring and colonizing outer space. And that by realizing another of John F. Kennedy's great projects, NAWAPA, that we can continue the civilization and colonization of the West, which stopped somewhere with Teddy Roosevelt.
Abraham Lincoln had said that infrastructure development is deepening the society through modernization and urbanization, instead of a simple horizontal expansion. And therefore, we have to have great infrastructure projects in the tradition of the TVA, as a stepping stone to the realization of the World Land-Bridge and the reconstruction of the world economy.
The Fight for Glass-Steagall
But the most hopeful momentum, which we see right now to go in the direction of the second option I mentioned, is the fight for the reinstitution of the Glass-Steagall Act in the United States, which is the absolute, indispensable first step. Because we face the danger of a new fascism, and only if we turn back to this Glass-Steagall tradition do we have a chance.
Now, Glass-Steagall is one of these things which the United States owns, and all the Europeans are telling us, "Well, that's an American thing. We don't have that tradition; we have universal banking." Which is not quite true, but, I think Glass-Steagall is an American property, in the same way as the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to which all great minds and Presidents have always turned back. In the same way as Lincoln went back to the Declaration of Independence; so did Martin Luther King.
And so, we have to revive Glass-Steagall today, because that was the dividing line, where, in the '30s, Europe went in the direction of fascism, and Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the danger of fascism, by applying Glass-Steagall and going for the separation of the banks.
He added the Pecora Commission, putting these bankers in front of hearings; and most of them, or many of them, were put in jail, which Pecora described so inspiringly in Wall Street Under Oath, the book he wrote about that.
Now, the U.S. population, contrary to the Europeans, has in its memory, in its sort of collective, genetic memory, that with the policy of Glass-Steagall, you can bring the country out of the depression. And if you look at the long process of undoing the FDR measures, which unfortunately started immediately with Truman—who allied with Churchill and really was a traitor to the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had defeated fascism—that was then followed by Nixon, who repealed the Bretton Woods system in 1971; this, as a prophetic prognosis, was recognized by my husband, Lyndon LaRouche, who forecast that it would lead to a situation where the world would be faced with either the danger of a new depression and fascism, or a new world order.
Then, the next step of this repealing of the FDR legacy was what the Trilateral Commission did in 1976, with its policy of "controlled disintegration of the world economy," which is the reason why the hopeful development of many Third World countries was interrupted. "Never again, a Japan" was the slogan of these people—"Japan," meaning to turn a feudal country within years, into a higher industrial country, on the basis of the method of the American System.
Then, in 1984, you had Alan Greenspan, who worked at that time for J.P. Morgan, already plotting to undo Glass-Steagall, together with Mr. [William] Dudley, who is presently the head of the New York Fed.
In 1987, when Alan Greenspan became the chairman of the Federal Reserve, he started to undermine Glass-Steagall, by giving more powers to the banks to speculate.
Then, in 1999, the repeal of Glass-Steagall occurred, and since that time, you have had an orgy of deregulation in the United States and in Europe. And a casino economy developed worldwide. Step by step, out of the financial system, a monster developed! Now, that formulation, "monster," is not from me, but it comes from Horst Köhler, the former President of Germany, and he was the head of the IMF at one point. And we are dealing with a monster.
John Perkins, who wrote the autobiographical work, Confession of an Economic Hit Man, described with what method this system is operating toward the Third World. And if you look at the long list of crimes which the banking system has, for a long time, engaged in, you see that it long ago stopped being the servant of industry, which is what a banking system should be. They're not working in the interest of the general welfare, as it is demanded in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution.
The bankers have cheated their customers, again and again: The Libor scandal, which went on for decades, cheated customers in the three-digit billions; the "too big to fail" banks, the so-called G-SIFIs—global systemically important financial institutions; they have swindled their customers by selling worthless paper, like Goldman Sachs and many others; they have cooked the figures to cheat to get Greece into the euro; the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. laundered the Mexico drug money, and made $80 billion profit—and when they were hit with a $1.9 billion fine, and they had calculated that based on their operating costs, this was nothing but a slap on the wrist.
So, Viktor Ivanov, who is the Russian drug czar, together with Antonio Maria Costa, who was the UN drug czar, both made, repeatedly, the point that the entire banking system would have long gone bankrupt, but for the influx of money laundered from the international drug trade.
A Giant Ponzi Scheme
I could go on with that list. I just wanted to identify what we are dealing with: that we are not dealing with bankers and a banking system which is not legitimate, or nice; we're dealing with a system which has become systemically criminal. For example, the Madoff scandal, in which the former chairman of Nasdaq stock exchange swindled his customers in a Ponzi scheme, whereby they lost $50 billion.
Since the deregulation of the system, I have repeatedly made the point that the entire international financial system is nothing but a big Ponzi scheme. They deliberately create bubbles, appealing to the greed and the profit hunger of the people through gambling; they lure small investors into this, and then cheat them, so you have a gigantic system of transfer from the poor to the rich. They create bubbles: the New Economy bubble, the so-called dot.com bubble, which popped in March 2000, where only $16 trillion were wiped out, and a lot of people were cheated. Then, the secondary mortgage bubble which popped in July 2007, and where, again, prophetically, my husband had warned one week earlier, that this would happen, and that all we would see after that would be the disintegration of the world financial system—and he was absolutely on the mark.
Then, on the 15th of September in 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, this, for a very short period, sent a shockwave around the world. And they invented the so-called bailout instrument, which was essentially a way of transforming private gambling debt into public state debt, and making the taxpayer pay.
That was combined with brutal austerity through the Troika—the IMF, ECB, and the EU Commission—and they destroyed about 30% of the real economy in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal; they ruined health systems, increased the suicide rates—in one year alone in Greece, more than a thousand people committed suicide out of desperation, and these were figures from 2010. In Greece, you have today, 64.2% youth unemployment; 60% in Spain! These countries are being turned into Third World countries.
This has been named by the United Nations, a "human rights violation." Manuel Alegre [of Portugal] has said that what the EU policy is doing to all of Europe right now is turning it into a concentration camp, where those who are not yet going to the slaughterhouse should not rejoice, because they will be next.
So, it is a big mistake to think that all of this does not affect you. Because, in the United States, you already have pockets like Greece: Look at Detroit. Detroit used to be the fourth-largest city; it had the highest per-capita income in the 1960s, and since 1960, it has lost 63% of its population; 40% of the street lights don't function; 60% of the children are living in poverty; less than 50% of the people living there work; 47% of the population in Detroit are functionally illiterate. The murder rate is 11 times higher than in New York, and only 10% of the crimes are being solved because the police force has been cut back so much.
The bailout instrument which has been used for five years—and somewhere between $24-30 trillion has been pumped in, to keep this afloat—has come to a certain end, because we are looking at the potential of immediate hyperinflation. So, [Fed chairman Ben] Bernanke has announced that he would slow down quantitative easing, which immediately led to an extreme volatility in the markets; the emerging market figures collapsed, and the markets reacted with extreme nervousness.
Morgan Makes It Official
Now, if you look at the permanent bailout fund which has been created in Europe, the ESM [the European Stability Mechanism], there is a only a ridiculously small amount of €500 billion in it; the Financial Times just had a column by Wolfgang Münchau, where he said that this is ridiculous, because this bailout fund is standing against €2.5 trillion of probable bad debt in European banks alone.
So the European crisis is fully coming back. Italy will soon need a new package; Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, and then, the next big one will be France. So therefore, this can not be done with normal means. So, recently J.P. Morgan published a research paper with the title: "The Euro Area Adjustment: About Halfway There," meaning halfway toward a banking dictatorship which has already been established—no national sovereignty any more—but saying that the obstacle is still the so-called political legacy of countries of the southern periphery—meaning Greece, Italy, Spain, and so forth: that they still have constitutions which were made in the postwar period, and therefore have anti-fascist guidelines in them, so that has to be broken. And because the political systems of these countries typically have such features as "weak executives; weak central states relative to the regions; constitutional protection of labor rights; consensus building systems which foster political clientalism; and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo." Meaning the right to demonstrate against unjust policies.
"The shortcomings of this political legacy have been revealed by the crisis. Countries around the periphery have only been partially successful in producing fiscal and economic reform agendas, with governments constrained by constitutions (Portugal), powerful regions (Spain), and the rise of populist parties (Italy and Greece)."
Now, this is unbelievable! If you eliminate the bankers' talk from what they're writing here, what they're saying is, when people are demonstrating to keep their jobs, that has to go. Trade union rights have to go. Human rights have to go. Democracy has to go. And I can assure you, much of this has already been eliminated in Europe!
The BIS, the Bank of International Settlements, at their annual meeting on the June 23, went even a step further, and said quantitative easing has to stop. Instead, there should be brutal austerity combined with the bail-in policy. The bail-in instrument has been worked on since 2009, by the Financial Stability Board, which is located in the building of the BIS in Basel, Switzerland. And the line with which this is sold is to say, "Oh, no longer should we have bailout packages, the taxpayer should no longer pay. But the banks themselves, the stockholders, the rich people, they should now pay."
That's obviously a whole bunch of baloney, because if you look at what the bail-in does—the so-called "Cyprus template"—at a certain point, when it was clear that Cyprus was reaching a point of insolvency, they gave a "haircut" of 60% to the two largest banks; and in the three months since that happened, the real economy of Cyprus has shrunk by 70%. This country is flat: bankruptcies, unemployment; already there is a reduction in the life-expectancy. And this is just finishing off Cyprus! Cyprus under the present regime has no chance to come back!
So, the EU Commission, which, together with the Financial Stability Board, worked on the legislation for the bail-in, admits that this law was written by the ISDA, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association. And if you look up what that is, it is made up of the 28 too-big-to-fail banks! So they write a law that the politicians are supposed to carry out, and the bail-in simply means that there will be a hierarchy of creditors who will have to pay, but derivatives are exempt. Because, as they write in their explanation, some people are mistaken in thinking that derivatives are a normal form of capital, and therefore, think, for reasons of fairness, that they should also have a haircut, but this is not so; the derivatives should be exempt. And then the bondholders, the shareholders, the people who have deposits, should all be asked to contribute.
The Intention: Shorter Lives
Now, the EU finance ministers this week agreed on this legislation of the EU Commission, and this will now go to the European Parliament to be voted on by the end of the year. So this is supposed to be the first step in the direction of a banking union, where the European Central Bank would be the bank supervision, and then the European Stability Mechanism would be put together with the cross-border resolution authority in one institution.
That means that the German savings banks would have to pay, and therefore, the people who have little deposits in these banks, pay, if, for example, a big French bank goes belly-up—and that will happen fairly soon, as we are absolutely certain of.
The Belgian online publication Express.be just reported that the EU finance ministers meeting which took place this week, based itself on a paper from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which is the second-largest management consultancy, a paper they wrote in 2011, which is basically a game-plan for wiping out large chunks of the financial assets at a stroke. They say that the financial system is so overindebted, that you have to have a drastic haircut, 34% across-the-board in Europe, 26% in the United States, 27% in the U.K., 47% in Greece, 56% in Spain, 57% in Portugal.
Now, if you do that, in the highly industrialized parts of Europe in the same way as the agricultural regions, you are, on the spot, killing people on a mass basis. Because this goes along with cuts in health care, cuts in pensions, and destruction of the real economy.
Then they say in this paper from the Boston Consulting Group, "There would have to be a clear commitment by the European governments to address the pressing issue of age-related spending increases." Now, what that means, as you know, you have a demographic development—in Germany for example, where a lot of people are now above pension age, and you have a very slow birth rate, and therefore, there is a certain problem—which you could easily solve: If you had 3% economic growth, you could solve this problem with no trouble. But if you have zero growth, or negative growth, as we have it now, naturally these people, they think instead of a Nazi-style euthanasia, by wiping out pensions, social security, raising the retirement age, which for some people may function because they want to work, but some people who have worked very hard, who have creaky bones when they get into pension age, it is shortening their lives! And that is intended.
So this measure, this sudden haircut, would cause a deleveraging, and would risk social unrest, they say. It would cause a social explosion.
Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, at this recent meeting, proposed an 8% across-the-board cut, which was rejected, but, the BCG says, 30% and more will be needed to get out of this crisis.
This is totally insane, because it would lead to mass deaths in Europe and in the United States, and it would not even address the fundamental problem, namely the $1.4 quadrillion outstanding derivatives contracts, which according to the ISDA are to be exempt from the haircut. It would kill the people, and keep the virtual assets of the speculators.
Top EU Commission officials recently discussed, in a private circle—and we have learned from extremely reliable people who participated in these discussions—that it's too bad, but we have to reduce life-expectancy to 66 years—we can't pay these pensions.
Also, it is discussed in Europe at this point, that the national budgets, this year, will have to pay an additional hundred billion euros or so into this European fund which is supposed to be created.
So, the bail-in policy would wipe out everything that is good—the real economy, wages, pensions, social systems; and it would keep the worthless speculative area alive. Therefore, we absolutely have to go on the warpath, and say: "No more bailout, and no more bail-in!" We have to stop the robbery against the part of the economy which is still productive, stop that which enhances the waste system. This is why LaRouche has basically proposed recently that the United States has to call in all those unpayable debts from the big London and European banks, and that has to be done preemptively, before this bail-in policy sets in. It has to be done now. It would be the equivalent of an immediate margin call to that debt, and then the utter bankruptcy of these banks and their U.S. counterparts will be obvious.
Obviously, it has to be followed, instantly, with the implementation of Glass-Steagall by the U.S. Congress, and something like a Resolution Trust Corp. could be created, which was used in the Savings & Loan crisis. Glass-Steagall would then separate the banks: You would put the commercial banks under state protection, and the investment banks will have to take care of themselves, without taxpayer money, without bailouts; and if their books then reveal they're in the red, too bad; then they have to declare insolvency.
So, then, naturally, it has to be followed by a credit system, which immediately restores growth, creates productive full employment, and, as we all have worked on for quite some while, and will hear more about, NAWAPA has to be the immediate driver of the U.S. economy, creating 6 million jobs, as only the beginning.
A Global Versailles Treaty
Let's look briefly at the history of what we are dealing with. Because the BIS-EU Commission-J.P. Morgan bail-in scheme is, de facto, a repeat of what the Versailles Treaty did to Germany after the First World War—only this time, they want to apply a Versailles Treaty to the whole world.
At the end of World War I, the Allies came up with the verdict that Germany was the sole guilty party of World War I, which no honest historian today is claiming any more, and it is completely absurd, if you consider the British role in the geopolitical manipulation of the chessboard, which started with the ouster of Bismarck as the Chancellor, after Bismarck had transformed Germany from a feudal state into a highly industrialized nation, based on the American System of economy! Because Bismarck completely changed after he learned the theories of Henry C. Carey, and started to reject free trade, and establish protectionism instead.
Out of this, came the building of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, between Germany and Russia, and other parts of Europe; and that was why, then, the British came up with the theory of geopolitics: Mackinder, Milner, and Haushofer, saying that whoever controls the Eurasian heartland, will control the planet. And this puts at a disadvantage the Atlantic rim countries.
The British role in preparing the stage for World War I, is well documented, and you can find it in our publications. The Versailles Treaty put the entire war preparation cost on Germany, which at that point was 169 billion gold marks. This was 295% of the German Gross Domestic Product, which, if you apply that for U.S. figures for 2012, where the Gross Domestic Product is $15 trillion, it would be the equivalent $44.25 trillion, the U.S. would have to pay! Or $4.425 quadrillion over three generations.
These payments were demanded by France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy, which, in turn, owed the funds to the City of London and Wall Street. And one of the banks that mediated that was the Morgan bank, run by J.P. Morgan, Jr.—John Pierpont Morgan, Jr.—and according to the statement of the bank itself, it played a significant role in the financial victory for the Allies. For example, in September 1915, it financed an Anglo-French loan of $500 million, which was the largest loan that Wall Street, at that time, had ever made; and it was used to buy weapons, because J.P. Morgan was also the U.S. Commissioner for this period.
Now, there was no way the German economy could pay this. So, as is known, the Reichsbank started to print money, and by the spring of 1923 when the French Prime Minister Poincaré and the Belgian King said we want more payments, and the Germans couldn't pay, they occupied the Rhineland to confiscate the coal directly. And then, between Spring '23 and November, the hyperinflation exploded, and the whole thing came to a standstill, where people, at the end, were bringing reichsmarks in wheelbarrows until 12 o'clock, because at 12 o'clock the next inflation rate was fixed, and the money was worth nothing any more.
At that point, the Allies designated ten banks from five countries under the leadership of Charles Dawes, a banker selected by J.P. Morgan, aided by Owen Young, another J.P. Morgan banker, and in 1924, the Dawes Plan was signed in London. It included a reform, under which the French and Belgian troops were withdrawn, there was a reduction in the yearly payments, a reform of the Reichsbank, and the Allies decided to put in Hjalmar Schacht as a director of the Reichsbank. He was a board member of Dresdnerbank and a founder of the German Democratic Party.
Schacht worked closely with J.P. Morgan, and they issued an 800 billion reichsmark bond, supposedly for industrial and infrastructure development, to enable Germany to pay back more of these reparations. In reality, that money went largely into a network of financial firms which were allied with J.P. Morgan—IG Farben and others—who became the financiers of Hitler.
And Then Came the Crash
In 1928, it was clear that Germany could not pay these exorbitant sums, and they decided on a new bailout plan, the Young Plan, who again was a Morgan banker. Now, the negotiations to implement that started in February 1929, between Schacht and J.P. Morgan, who was the U.S. negotiator. But then came the big Wall Street crash in October '29, and nobody could give any credits any more to anybody. And at that point, Germany was put under an extreme austerity regime under Chancellor Brüning, which caused, between 1929 and 1932, unemployment to rise from 1.5 million to 6 million—without which, Hitler would not have been able to take power. And naturally, Hitler was financed by some bankers from London and New York, Montagu Norman, Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush. There was a big affinity with the American Eugenics Society, which had worked with the Nazis since the 1920s, because they liked Hitler's race policy.
These were the circles who were involved in the coup attempt against Franklin D. Roosevelt, who tried to convince Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler to make a coup against Roosevelt, which did not function, because Butler revealed it to the U.S. Congress and the media.[1] So this is what we are dealing with. And obviously, by their own admission, these people, such as the Boston Consulting Group and others, have put themselves in that tradition, by referring to the 1930s.
The lesson to be learned from all of this, is that the combination of the debt tyranny and Schachtian economics breeds fascism. When the BCG says, "Programs we describe would be dramatic, and they would not be popular. The longer politicians wait before they implement them, the more necessary they will become. Unfortunately, reaching a consensus is a tough question and might require an environment last seen in the 1930s." Now, that is the policy which the EU finance ministers just agreed on, with their bail-in policy: It's open fascism.
In 1971, Lyndon LaRouche debated one of the leading Keynesian economists, Abba Lerner, at Queens College in New York, and he got Abba Lerner to admit: He said, "If people would have accepted Hjalmar Schacht, we would not have needed Hitler." Now, the EU finance ministers just accepted Schacht.
The trans-Atlantic world is in a debt trap just like the Versailles Treaty. The quadrillions that Germany had to pay are the equivalent of the quadrillions in outstanding derivatives, which are presently about $1.4 quadrillion. And if you reduce that by half, because this is the amount which goes to the counterparty in the derivative contracts, it still would leave a sum between $700 and $800 trillion as compared to a meager EU500 billion in the European Stability Mechanism!
The Versailles bail-in policy holds the world hostage to the past. And as you know, that led to World War II, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression. Today, I can assure you, if we don't change that, it will lead to World War III, but much faster. Because if you look at the situation in Syria and Iran, which is already a powder keg, one more step, and this will go into an escalation without any stopping it.
There was recently a paper published in the Strategic Studies Quarterly, of the U.S. Air Force, which said, blatantly, that the previous NATO strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is no longer valid, meaning that you can not use thermonuclear weapons, because if you do, then everybody eliminates each other, and there's nothing left; because, they argue, now, new technologies have developed, which allow you to take out the nuclear arsenal of your opponent, without nuclear fallout.
That is going from MAD to sheer madness!
Realize Cusa's Mission
Now, the Glass-Steagall policy, and what FDR did, has shown how we can get out of the depression. Lyn, in the webcast last evening [June 28; http://larouchepac.com/], which you should absolutely all look at, called for a national campaign for the real Glass-Steagall; what it really means: What are the principles of a credit system? What is the image of man associated with it? And I think we have to be committed to a sacred mission in the United States to adopt Glass-Steagall. Because the United States can do it! Because you have the precious good of national sovereignty, even if it's in danger. You have the Preamble of the Constitution; you have the Declaration of Independence; and this is a very, very precious good.
Because if you look at the evolution of the sovereign nation-state, it was combined with enormous struggles. It's not something which evidently was there! Because in the Middle Ages, you had imperial structures; the papacy, and the emperors, were a universal system, and you did not have states. So, it took enormous struggles to come to the first sovereign states, which were implemented in England by Henry VII Tudor, and in France by Louis XI, and in Sicily by Frederick II Hohenstaufen.
But it took Nicholas of Cusa and his very important, groundbreaking writing of the Concordantia Catholica, where, for the first time, the representative system was elaborated, including the idea of the equality of all human beings before the law, defining that government has a legitimacy, only with the consensus of the governed.
This, obviously, is a real question, in light of the recent NSA developments, because there is no consent of the governed. And I think that that has to be invoked again.
Nicholas said that this consent of the governed to be ruled, is a human right, not only for Germany, but for all people in the world. He said, even in places far away like Ethiopia, people should have the same right. So, he defined it as a universal principle.
He also said that all legitimate authority results out of the chosen concordance, and the voluntary submission of the governed, because of the fact that all human beings are endowed with equal natural rights; that there is a divine seed, so that all authority, which comes from God, as from man himself, is regarded as divine if it results from the consent of the governed. Therefore, a system of equality before the law, the representative system, where the representative has to fight for the rights of the governed, and represent the right of the government, is the only way that the inalienable rights of all individuals can be protected.
This was written by Nicholas of Cusa in 1433, and it took exactly 343 years before it was realized in the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Now, in Europe, we have some constitutions which are approximations of this, but never in the forceful way that the American Constitution defines it. Also, we lost all sovereignty already to the EU dictatorship.
Therefore, that leaves a very special responsibility to you, to the American people, and to the U.S. Congress, because it is the representative of exactly this representative system.
So let's organize a passionate campaign, to say what we used to say in 1945: "Never again!" I appeal to you, the American people, to once again save the world from fascism.
We have a world drama, but it does not take place on the stage. It is real history, and we, our organization, are the main actors. So let's make sure it does not end as a tragedy, but instead, it is the beginning of a new paradigm, of a second American Revolution, and a new Renaissance for all of Mankind.
[1] See "Wall Street Backed The Plot To Kill FDR," EIR, Oct. 21, 2011.
