PRESS RELEASE
Cantwell Expects Glass-Steagall Amendment To Become Law
May 13, 2010 (EIRNS)—While the Obama Administration, through Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and others, is doing its best to bury the Cantwell-McCain Amendment which would reinstate FDR's Glass-Steagall standard, Senator Maria Cantwell came forward May 12, to assert that she expects her amendment to eventually become law.
The report on Cantwell's statement comes from Bonnie Erbe, in her Thomas Jefferson Street blog on U.S. News and World Report. Erbe reports interviewing Cantwell May 12, for her PBS program, To the contrary with Bonnie Erbe. She adds: "Cantwell told me the Senate will vote on restoring Glass-Steagall either this week or next. She is pretty confident it will eventually become law, although she says it might be a two-step process, restoring part of the act now or soon, and other parts later."
EIR's sources report that the White House is still waging a fierce battle to try to prevent the Cantwell-McCain amendment from being heard, seeking instead to have the Washington State Senator drop her bill in favor of the weak Levin-Merkley amendment, which would place some restrictions on speculative activity by banks, but fall far short of the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial and "trading" banks. Obama's British sponsors, as was reported in LaRouche's May 8 webcast, see the re-imposition of Glass-Steagall as a "hostile act" against their financial system.
So far, Sen. Dodd, who is running the Senate debate, has given no indication of when, or if, the Cantwell-McCain amendment would be raised. But he, and other Senators, are now coming under increasing pressure from the mobilization of the LaRouche Political Action Committee, to stop their de facto filibustering on diversionary issues, and pass the Glass-Steagall amendment. Passage—which is virtually assured, once the amendment is raised—is the only way to protect the U.S. banking system from the huge hyperinflationary swindle the British financial system is trying to pull off, and to establish the basis for a global economic recovery.
