PRESS RELEASE
New York Times Echoes LaRouche's Call For a `New Pecora Commission'
Jan. 6, 2009 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC).
The New York Times today joined Lyndon LaRouche in calling for a "new Pecora Commission," to get to the bottom of the massive Wall Street and City of London fraud that has brought the global financial system to the worst crisis in modern history. First, in Sept. 2008, and again on Dec. 27, 2008, Lyndon LaRouche issued a clarion call for the launching of a full scale Congressional probe, modeled on the 1932-1934 Senate Banking and Currency Committee hearings, that exposed the massive fraud and corruption, leading to the 1929 stock market crash. That investigation, headed by former New York City assistant district attorney Ferdinand Pecora, paved the way for the banking regulation of Franklin Roosevelt.
Today's New York Times featured a 1/3 page photograph of Ferdinand Pecora, accompanying an op-ed by economic historian Ron Chernow, titled "Where Is Our Ferdinand Pecora?," in which he called on President-elect Barack Obama to task Congress with "a sweeping inquest into the twin housing and stock market crashes to create both the intellectual context and political constituency for change."
Chernow, whose history of the House of Morgan documented the bank's London ties, and its active promotion of Fascism, provided the New York Times readers with a sharp synopsis of the Pecora Commission, and its impact on the American people, who learned, through the course of more than a year of interrogations of Wall Street's top bankers, how the unregulated activities of the nation's top financiers, led to the 1929 Crash. "Pecora not only documented a litany of abuses, but also paved the way for remedial legislation. The Securities Act of 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934—all addressed abuses exposed by Pecora. It was only poetic justice when Roosevelt tapped him as a commissioner of the newborn Securities and Exchange Commission," Chernow wrote.
Chernow ended the op-ed by endorsing the call, already issued by Lyndon LaRouche: "A public deeply disenchanted with our financial leadership is desperately searching for answers. The new Congress has a chance to lead the nation, step by step, through all the machinations that led to the present debacle and to shape wise legislation to prevent a recurrence."
