Drive Escalates To Impose `Mussolini' Bloomberg Option
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On Feb. 7, Lyndon LaRouche issued a clarion call to warn that desperate international financier circles, associated in the United States with outright fascists Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz, were committed to imposing their latter-day Mussolini, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, into the Presidency in November of this year.
In that statement, LaRouche spelled out a several possible pathways to a Bloomberg Schachtian fascist takeover. "Will Bloomberg actually run for President? On which ticket: Democratic, Republican, or 'Independent'? I am confident," LaRouche wrote, "that I can already identify some of the leading options here, as follows.
"Republican option: A McCain-Bloomberg ticket, in which case, it would be expected that Bloomberg would soon succeed McCain in the Presidency, for health reasons, and the not entirely excluded possibility of Lenora Fulani as successor to Condoleezza Rice.
"Democratic option: Following the London orchestration of Obama's downfall, Hillary Clinton is also eliminated in some way, and Bloomberg's machine grabs the Presidency and, with the support of Schwarzenegger, institutes the immediate reign of a neo-Schachtian, corporativist fascist program of Lazard Frères-created George Shultz 'revolution in military affairs' crony Felix Rohatyn, in the U.S.A."
Just as LaRouche Called It
In the intervening two weeks since LaRouche issued his warning, which is now circulating in the form of a nationwide bulletin, events have proven that the American political economist has been absolutely right.
Showcasing the Bloomberg drive, political operative Doug Schoen, in early February, released a book-length promo for an independent candidacy, Declaring Independence—The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System, which argues that a wealthy independent candidate could grab the Presidency in 2008. Schoen, a former partner of Hillary Clinton's chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn, worked for Bloomberg's two mayoral campaigns. The book features glowing back-cover endorsements from former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), U.S. News and World Report publisher Mort Zuckerman, and Robert Shrum, the failed campaign manager of Sen. John Kerry's 2004 Presidential run, and a longtime Ted Kennedy operative.
The book was also heartily endorsed by Bloomberg, himself, who wrote, in self-serving words: "The two-party system in America is breaking down, and Doug Schoen's new book explains why. This is an in-depth look at why the American people are so fed up with partisanship, and where we, as a nation, go from here."
Just days after the release of the Schoen book, Shrum appeared on Mayor Bloomberg's own NY1 television station, to tout Bloomberg's electability. Shrum told listeners, "I always thought that under the right circumstances, in a three-way race, of course he could win. First of all, he could have a lot of money. He could hold a breakfast fundraiser and raise a billion dollars and the only guest would be himself. And voters wouldn't mind that because he wouldn't owe anything to anybody. Secondly, he's very different from candidates like Ross Perot. This is someone who has been in elective politics and has worked with political professionals, and has some very smart people around him. And he's tough-minded, can make decisions, but doesn't think he knows everything.... If you think you know more than your pollster and you throw him out of the room because you're unhappy with the results—which I think Perot did—you're going to get in trouble. So I think Bloomberg was ideally set up to do it if he had the right Republican and the right Democrat."
Kennedy man Shrum has been a key campaign advisor to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of Bloomberg's closest allies, in promoting a corporativist fascism for America, faced with a worse financial and economic crash than the Great Depression. In mid-January, Bloomberg had traveled to Los Angeles, to join Schwarzenegger, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and Rockefeller Foundation president and longtime Bloomberg ally, Judith Rodin, in launching a drive for a hard-core fascist scheme to "build American infrastructure" through private funding schemes—all taken directly from the early Mussolini and Hitler slave-labor programs, and private oligarchical ownership of public assets.
Bashing and Bagging Obama
Another Bloomberg Presidential option was floated by right-wing African-American pundit Armstrong Williams, an operative of Richard Mellon Scaife's Newsmax.com. Mellon Scaife was the financier of the "Get Clinton" blitzkrieg throughout the 1990s, and remains one of the leading architects of what Hillary Clinton once correctly labeled the "vast right-wing conspiracy." In a Feb. 14 column, Williams proposed a Barack Obama/Michael Bloomberg independent ticket for November:
"The word on the street," he wrote, "is that the Obama campaign and New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg have already met and devised an incredible plan if Clinton wins the nomination. Mayor Bloomberg would give nearly $1 billion to Obama's campaign, after which Obama would bolt from the Democratic Party and run as an independent candidate with king-maker Bloomberg as his running mate."
Williams continued his scheme: "The Obama campaign realizes that Obama is too new at this game and doesn't have the political weight of the Clintons to bring in the true heavy-hitters of the party's hierarchy. So, according to sources, it was Bloomberg himself who suggested this cunning strategy. It's mind boggling that the Clintons are willing to destroy the entire Democratic Party and potentially in the process lose the White House and seats in Congress, for their own selfish thirst for power and glory."
Of course, the forces behind the Bloomberg fascist drive know perfectly well that Sen. Barack Obama is being used as a battering ram against Hillary Clinton, and is, himself, soon to be dumped, under a mountain of scandals. To make the point obvious, Bloomberg's own news service, Bloomberg.com, published a Feb. 15 story, highlighting Obama's own vulnerabilities to the Republican Party's notorious attack-dogs. Under the headline "Obama's Ties Might Fuel 'Republican Attack Machine,' " Bloomberg News writer Timothy J. Burger warned, "While the Illinois senator has never been accused of wrongdoing, some of the associations he formed as a community organizer and politician in Chicago may provide fodder for attacks, Democratic and Republican political experts say. Besides his relationship with indicted businessman Antoin Rezko, Obama might face Republican criticism over contacts with a former leader of the Weather Underground, a banker with ties to a convicted felon and even his Church."
After noting that Republican frontrunner Sen. John McCain will face tough scrutiny over his own links to the 1980s savings-and-loan swindler Charles Keating, Burger noted that Obama not only has Rezko to account for, but also will be pressed to explain his ties to Illinois state treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, whose family bank made questionable loans to a Chicago area convicted felon, Michael "Jaws" Giorango.
"Besides Rezko and Giannoulias," Burger continued, "Obama could face questions about his relationship with William Ayers, a former member of the radical Weather Underground who is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Ayers donated $200 in 2001 to Obama's Illinois state senate campaign, and served with him from 1999 to 2002, on the board of the Woods fund, an anti-poverty group."
Indicative of the kind of "swiftboating" that Obama will face on the Ayers connection (Ayers' wife is Weather Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn), Burger went on: "The Weather Underground carried out a series of bombings in the early 1970s—including the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. While Ayers was never prosecuted for those attacks, he told the New York Times in an interview published Sept. 11, 2001, that 'I don't regret setting bombs.' "
The Real Fascists: Rohatyn and Shultz
While the Bloomberg for President option is "Option A" for a network of London-run U.S. fascists, led by Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz, London is committed, under any circumstances, to a trans-Atlantic corporativist (fascist) takeover this year—as the onrushing global financial crash accelerates, and as the entire financial system heads towards a total collapse, in all likelihood, before January 2009. The London-centered drive to impose a top-down corporativist structure on all of Europe, by May of this year, through the forced ratification of the Lisbon Treaty is part of the same assault that aims to install Bloomberg in power in Washington, and thereby destroy the last vestiges of the United States as a sovereign republic.
As LaRouche recently asserted, anyone complicit in the Rohatyn-Shultz effort in the U.S.A. is guilty of "virtual treason," and should be removed from any position of authority. LaRouche singled out Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who is a notorious Rohatyn tool—whether she fully grasps that fact or not. LaRouche called for Pelosi to be removed from office, immediately, as one vital step towards defeating the corporativist drive. Pelosi has been a leading enemy of LaRouche's own Homeowners and Bank Protection Act (HBPA) and has publicly attacked Sen. Hillary Clinton, for her call to freeze home foreclosures, a call that has also been rejected by Senator Obama.
The Pinochet Model
Rohatyn and Shultz were the architects of the early-1970s coup d'état in Chile, that overthrew the Allende government and imposed a Nazi-allied dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The Pinochet coup, in turn, spawned "Operation Condor," the 1970s and '80s private death squad program, that imported war-time Nazi killers into South America, to direct assassination, kidnapping, and torture, throughout the Americas and Europe.
"Operation Condor" is the model being currently promoted by Shultz and Rohatyn, under the guise of the so-called "revolution in military affairs." On Oct. 9, 2004, Rohatyn and Shultz co-sponsored a conference at Rohatyn's Middlebury College in Vermont, promoting the "privatization of national security," on the model of the British East India Company. One leading speaker at that Middlebury event, Peter Feaver, laid bare the Rohatyn-Shultz agenda, when he boasted, "In fact, what we're seeing is a return to neo-feudalism. If you think about how the East India Company played a role in the rise of the British Empire, there are similar parallels to the rise of the American quasi-empire."
It is the same Rohatyn-Shultz duo who are the hands-on promoters of Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger as the Mussolini-Hitler "soul mates" peddling the Public Private Partnership Initiative (PPPI) to loot vital public assets, like highways and public utilities, through privatization. This is the Mussolini-Hitler model, taken directly from the early years of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany.
Jesse Whores for Felix
On Feb. 10, Rev. Jesse Jackson used the occasion of a televised interview with CNN's Lou Dobbs, to explicitly promote the idea that Barack Obama should bring in fascist Felix Rohatyn, to be the infrastructure czar. The idea that a former aide to the great civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., could turn openly to the fascist corporativist cause is revolting in the extreme.
But, in response to a question from Dobbs, Jackson did precisely that. While invoking the image of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he instead made a pitch for Rohatyn: "I think if you could get somebody like Felix Rohatyn who helped to restructure New York when it had its crisis and look at the real possibility of putting America back to work. I don't like the idea of dropping some Wal-Mart gift certificates, $300, $500. Can they help you when you have lost your house? [When] you can't pay your tuition for your child in school? We need to reinvest in our infrastructure and put America back to work."
Jackson's reference to the restructuring of New York by Felix Rohatyn recalled Rohatyn's 1970s chairmanship of the Metropolitan Assistance Corporation ("Big MAC"), which looted New York City blind, on behalf of private bond holders; shut down schools, hospitals, mass transit, and municipal services; and drove almost the entire blue-collar manufacturing sector out of the city. This is precisely the Schachtian model that Rohatyn and Shultz, through their front-men Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger, are promoting today.
Not coincidentally, the same Lou Dobbs show where Jackson embraced Rohatyn, featured an interview with Bloomberg booster Doug Schoen, and highlighted the very Los Angeles press conference where Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger, and Rendell launched their so-called rebuilding America fascist swindle, in league with the Rockefeller Foundation.
After showing a clip of Bloomberg from Los Angeles, Dobbs gushed, "Now, we just showed one man whose name is put forward as an independent candidate, Mayor Bloomberg. Why in the world are we not producing people who will step forward from some quarter of our society as independents, and take on these parties?"
