EDITORIAL
Italy and Glass-Steagall Could Save Europe—The Threat Is from the City of London
May 22 (EIRNS)—The latest terrible “Russian threat” is now claimed to be coming from the two parties which have agreed to form a new government in Italy. Stalwarts of European stagnation and financial speculation are lining up to warn of the end of the(ir) world if the Lega and Five Star parties’ coalition is not prevented. We are supposed to forget that these parties were just favored by Italian voters for their policies, in elections held in March—just as we have been told for two years to forget that American voters, not Russians, elected Donald Trump.
But if it is allowed to be formed, the proposed new Italian government can start the overdue process of saving Europe: from 10 years’ stagnation after a crash triggered by London and Wall Street banks; from blows to its productive industries by anti-Russia sanctions; and from another, worse financial crash which is looming over America and Europe.
The key is establishing the Glass-Steagall Act, which both leading Italian parties want, to break up the big so-called “universal banks” demanded by the European Union, which absorb trillions in bailout money from the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve, and do not lend to anything productive. The second key: A national bank with the ability to issue credit for productive employment and new infrastructure, outside the EU austerity limits on government productive credit. Those two, if the parties can stick to them, can avert another financial blowout and start real economic growth again.
Both U.S. major parties put Glass-Steagall in their presidential platforms; President Trump called for it on the stump. But Wall Street has won out so far, and the megabanks have become even bigger, more debt-leveraged, with bigger exposures to super-speculative derivatives contracts. Experts like former FDIC officials Sheila Bair and Thomas Hoenig have been warning, that has made the financial system more dangerous as interest rates rise on an unheard-of ocean of corporate debt, about to blow.
In Germany, the former chief economist of Europe’s most dangerous huge bank, Deutsche Bank, has given an explosive interview on what ruined it: “Anglo-American banking.” A team of star speculators from Merrill Lynch in London and New York took over Germany’s then-leading bank 20 years ago and turned it into a giant hedge fund, which made huge profits every year—until it became clear the profits were faked and the bank was all but bankrupt.
Wall Street and London have won out so far, and the price has been economic stagnation with massive central bank money-printing, and another crash coming on. It Italy, there is a chance to start the reversal of that before it is too late.
In the United States, those Americans defending the presidency from a relentless coup attempt against Donald Trump, have learned the hard way that London, British intelligence, started it, and is running it. Trump supporters are realizing you can’t defend the presidency without attacking the British and London’s anti-Russia, anti-China geopolitics.
That realization has even reached Congress, in the statements of Senator Rand Paul. To quote one author’s May 21 attack on the anti-Trump spying, “The British … have never hesitated to interfere in our domestic politics…. It happened in the run-up to both world wars, and it is happening today. If we trace the origins of the Russia-gate hoax, and the campaign to dethrone Donald J. Trump, all roads lead to London.”
The perpetrators of this hoax, even exposed, will not give it up; they have to be defeated. The British financial empire, the City of London which still dominates trans-Atlantic financial activity, has also to be defeated.
In the face of another crash worse than 2008, Italy can be the start in saving Europe. Its leading parties are proposing what Americans wanted when they elected Donald Trump president. Their challenge is the same: Defeat the City of London.
U.S. POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC
The Worm Has Turned: Will the Obama Gang Join Brits on Trial as Real ‘Collusion’ Is Exposed?
May 22 (EIRNS)—Over the weekend, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein bowed to pressure, assigning the Justice Department’s (DOJ) Inspector General to investigate whether the FBI and DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Rosenstein added that if an investigation determines that was done, they would “take appropriate action.” New revelations are pointing to the role of not just FBI/DOJ corruption and crimes, but also violations by the CIA, especially former director John Brennan, in coordinating an operation against the Trump campaign with a foreign power—the British Empire, through its intelligence arms, GCHQ and MI6.
The British-Obama networks behind Russiagate were operating on behalf of a global banking/financial cartel, centered in the City of London and Wall Street. As its dirty tricks in running a regime change coup against President Trump are increasingly being exposed, so too is it becoming apparent that its global speculative casino is heading toward a spectacular collapse. They are resorting to their old stand-bys—using coups, proxy wars, terrorism, sanctions and blackmail—to try to bluff their way through.
But this time, it is different, as a New Paradigm, which will replace the old paradigm of the financial elites and their geopoliticians, is gaining strength. On Monday, the Schiller Institute’s Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who has been leading the fight for this New Paradigm, said that to stop the coup in the U.S., it is necessary to implement the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche, and mobilize for the United States and others, including Germany, to join the New Silk Road. “This war can be won,” she said. “We have come a long way, and there are more battles to be fought, but history will be shaped by the ideas of Lyndon H. LaRouche.”
Mrs. LaRouche will push this battle forward with her weekly strategic webcast on Thursday, May 24 at noon EDT, 18:00 CET. Join her, to become a part of the movement shaping the future.
Sen. Rand Paul Believes CIA Head Haspel Lied to Senate about British
May 22 (EIRNS)—U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) publicly attacked just-appointed CIA Director Gina Haspel’s claim that the CIA did not work with British intelligence to surveil the Trump campaign, Gateway Pundit blog reported yesterday. The Senator spoke in an interview with Fox News May 21.
Senator Paul immediately challenged Haspel’s report and former CIA Director Brennan’s claim that the British did not spy on Trump. Paul tweeted on May 20, “Gina Haspel is categorically denying that [the CIA] got information from the British intelligence. And if what I’m saying today is not her opinion, she needs to speak up today and she needs to say ‘did British intelligence give information to @JohnBrennan?’ ”
Paul continued, “I’m not so sure I believe what they’re saying.” He said he expects information will come out that British intelligence did hand over information on the Trump campaign to former CIA chief Brennan, and, Paul stated, “They’re going to say it was done accidentally.”
Senator Paul’s chief strategist Doug Stafford told Gateway Pundit previously, “Gina Haspel is a John Brennan acolyte. Brennan is a visible and now-public opponent of President Trump. He is part of the deep state that opposed and now works against the President. She should not be in charge of the CIA.”
Haspel was CIA station chief in London during 2016 when two MI6-linked companies, Orbis Business Intelligence and Hakluyt & Co., were conducting espionage operations against individuals working in the Trump presidential campaign in various capacities, and were preparing dossiers to be used by U.S. intelligence agencies against Trump.
Antiwar.com: Brits Sicced Spy Stefan Halper on Trump Campaign
May 22 (EIRNS)—The identification of veteran British spy Stefan Halper, who penetrated three Republican administrations, as the British spy in Trump’s Presidential campaign shows that the British never abandon successful “game plans,” Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo wrote on May 21, in his “A Spy in the House of Trump” exposé.
In 2016, Halper, a dual citizen of the U.S. and U.K., taught at Cambridge University, where he and retired MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove resided. Together with historian Peter Martland, these three raised an alarm about “Russian influence” there. Raimondo wrote that “Russiagate” appeared to be launched by “former” MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s “Dirty Dossier.” But problems with inaccurate details in the Steele dossier required the remedy of a new myth: Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia was said to have started when Australian diplomat Alexander Downer related a booze-fueled talk he’d had with George Papadopoulos, who supposedly revealed the Russians had “thousands” of Clinton campaign emails. The Australians reported this to the FBI, which opened its investigation in July 2016.
In September 2016, Halper requested a meeting with Papadopoulos to ask him to write a paper, for a $3,000 fee and all-expenses-paid trip to London. They met a number of times, and Halper asked, “George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?” Papadopoulos said he had no idea what Halper was talking about, and Halper dropped the subject.
Raimondo reported Halper has a history of disrupting campaigns. He points to the Reagan-Carter 1980 Presidential race, where he disseminated Carter’s stolen foreign policy briefings to the media, and reportedly ran the operation that procured them. Halper’s father-in-law is Ray S. Cline, a top CIA official from the Truman administration in 1948 through the Johnson Administration, making over $1 million, and another $400,000 since 2016 for classified work.
Raimondo concluded, “The Russiagate hoax has many actors, all playing their appointed roles as provocateurs, cutouts, and informants, but this was originally a British production, with Halper and Steele at the center of it. The Obama leftovers in the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA colluded with the British to frame the incoming President as a Russian agent,” but Raimondo concludes, they were only projecting their own evil actions onto the President.
“The British, in particular, have never hesitated to interfere in our domestic politics if they thought their own interest would be advanced: It happened in the run-up to both world wars, and it is happening today. If we trace the origins of the Russia-gate hoax, and the campaign to dethrone Donald J. Trump, all roads lead to London.”
Two British Intelligence Companies Worked at Entrapping Trump
May 22 (EIRNS)—The story of ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s founding of Orbis Business Intelligence after his retirement from MI6 in 2009, and MI6 retired agent Steele’s role in producing the Trump dossier, is well known for wreaking havoc on the Trump Presidency since the 2016 election. Today Zero Hedge exposes a second British company—U.K.-based Hakluyt & Co.—founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995, which has played a major role in the second phase of Trumpgate. This company, Hakluyt, is full of Hillary Clinton supporters and alumni of the Obama Administration.
In Summer 2016, British agent Stefan Halper was working for the Obama Administration while also participating in the FBI/DOJ spy operation on the Trump campaign. Halper was revealed as the FBI’s informant on May 18, after the New York Times and Washington Postpublished information about this “Cambridge Professor” which made him easily identifiable. The newspaper reports matched a March 25 Daily Caller article detailing Halper’s attempts to entrap several lower-level aides in Trump’s campaign, including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Halper’s infiltration of the Trump campaign is notable, Zero Hedge says, because it corresponds with two targets of the FBI’s Operation Crossfire Hurricane—in which the FBI sent agent Peter Strzok and others to London to meet former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who said that a drunk Papadopoulos admitted he knew the Russians had Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Downer, the source of the Papadopoulos intelligence, and Halper, who conned Papadopoulos months later, are linked through Hakluyt & Co., an opposition research firm founded by three former British operatives in 1995. Downer is a good friend of the Clintons, Zero Hedge reports, and has been on the Clinton Foundation Advisory board for a decade. Halper has authored two books with Hakluyt’s U.S. Director Jonathan Clarke.
Both Halper and Downer lured Trump aides to London to entrap them. Halper reportedly ran a spy-operation on the Jimmy Carter Administration, Zero Hedge reports, and was enlisted by the FBI to spy on Trump campaign aides during the 2016 election.
Halper’s ongoing contracts were funded through four annual awards paid directly out of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), established as the DOD’s “internal think tank” in 1973 by Richard Nixon, in whose administration Halper worked.
Zero Hedge reports that between 2012 and 2018, Halper received a total of $1,058,161 from the Department of Defense.
FBI agents flew to London to interview Downer, who reported that Papadopoulos told him in May 2016 that Russia had Hillary Clinton’s emails, which information was passed to Australian and U.S. officials.
Zero Hedge cites Lifezette website that: “Downer is not the only Clinton fan in Hakluyt.” FEC records show large contributions by the firm’s U.S. representatives to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
President Trump has called for an official investigation by the DOJ. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein assigned to the DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Potential New Italian Government Could Change Europe
May 22 (EIRNS)—If the new Italian government, formed by the populist M5S and Lega parties, comes into being, it may upset the EU applecart. Even if its anti-EU positions have been watered down due to pressures from Brussels conveyed by Italian State President Sergio Mattarella, the “Contract for a Government of Change” signed M5S and Lega leaders Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini calls for changes in foreign and economic policies which, if implemented, would break the EU’s geopolitical schemes and its austerity regime.
The contract characterizes Russia as a potentially more relevant economic and commercial partner and calls for lifting sanctions. As for Brussels, it proposes to examine the jurisdictions of the EU by returning to the member countries those jurisdictions that cannot be effectively managed at the level of the Union.
On the economic side, it recommends budget flexibility and a national investment bank; and last but not least, banking separation: “We must go towards a system in which the retail credit bank and the investment bank are separated, both as concerns their type of activity and as concerns supervision.”
This is the first time that bank separation (Glass-Steagall Act) has been part of a government program. Both the Lega and the M5S, indeed, had Glass-Steagall in their election programs, and as many as 132 elected representatives, both nationally and locally, mostly Lega members but also a few M5S representatives, have signed a petition for Glass-Steagall launched in 2017 by the Italian LaRouche movement, Movisol.
Implementing Glass-Steagall would be the single government act that can finish off the global financial casino which is cannibalizing the real economy. However, for Italy as a member of the EU to do that, means violating EU law, which establishes the “universal bank” as the only model to be chartered. It would amount to exiting the EU or force a change of its treaty.
Because of that, and the Russia-friendly foreign policy, EU officials and “experts” have responded with threats. On May 20, French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire stated that if commitments on debt, deficit and bank consolidation are not maintained by Italy, the entire stability of the Eurozone is threatened. He was then followed by European Parliament European People’s Party (Christian Democracy) faction leader Manfred Weber, who said that Italian populists are playing with fire with Italy’s debt. Well-known German economist Hans-Werner Sinn was quoted, “This will lead to the destruction of the European Union and bring the AfD [right-wing Alternativ für Deutschland] to power in Germany.”
Freshman Sen. Alberto Bagnai, a progressive economist who joined the Lega in order to carry out his pro-independence fight, explained in a radio interview: “We do not want to make war against anyone, either the ECB or Europe. We simply want to put our country in conditions to recover and express its potential.”
COLLAPSING WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
Fall of Corporate Debt Starts To Cause Severe Liquidity Danger
May 22 (EIRNS)—“Those of us with a little gray hair have seen this before, but I think the coming one is potentially Biblical in proportion.” The website Mauldin Economics carried an editorial May 17 which focussed on two emerging rocks where the ship will be wrecked. First, “Corporate debt and especially high-yield debt issuance has exploded since 2009.” The author, John Mauldin, is talking about global corporate debt; but the explosion has been quite plain in the United States non-financial corporate sector, from $10 trillion in 2010 to $14 trillion in 2016, and in some estimates as high as $18 trillion now. And second, “Tighter regulations discouraged banks from making markets in corporate and high-yield debt”; that is from maintaining readiness supposedly to buy or sell from or to any customer in any circumstance.
As Bloomberg showed in a May 19 article, the rise in dollar interest rates has already caused an average corporate bond to drop in value nearly 4% since the start of 2018. Bond values have not dropped this fast in 20 years, since, not the 2008 crash but the dotcom and sovereign bond blowouts of the late 1990s. In countries where companies borrowed heavily in dollars—Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, and numerous smaller developing countries—the loss is worse, and it is causing runs against their currencies, more serious the government’s own debt is also largely borrowed abroad, or not.
Mauldin is warning of the now fairly early point when investors in these devaluing corporate bonds want to sell large amounts of them, particularly of the “high-yield” or junk variety, and longer term. Then the problem of a crash will become acute, because much of the credit for the buying of all this debt, has come from non-banks or “shadow banks,” which are much less capitalized even than the highly-leveraged big banks.
That’s why his article was headlined, “A Liquidity Crisis of Biblical Proportions Is Upon Us.”
STRATEGIC WAR DANGER
Trump-Kim Summit Is ‘99%’ Says R.O.K. Official; Is Pence the 1%?
May 22 (EIRNS)—According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, the chief of the R.O.K.’s presidential National Security Office Chung Eui-yong said on May 21, “We believe there is a 99.9% chance the North Korea-U.S. summit will be held as scheduled. But we’re just preparing for many different possibilities.” R.O.K. President Moon Jae-in was meeting with President Donald Trump in Washington today.
Speaking to the media in Seoul, Chung said of the recent hardening of the North Korean position—expressed again yesterday with the denial of visas to South Korean journalists to observe the nuclear site destruction in North Korea May 24—“we are trying to understand the North’s position.”
Prior to Moon’s meeting with Trump, Moon highlighted the need to hold the U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore June 12 as scheduled. “I am very well aware that there are skeptical views in the U.S. on whether the North Korea-U.S. summit would succeed and if complete denuclearization of North Korea would be realized,” Moon told a quasi-joint press conference shortly before their meeting, according to the South Korean Presidency pool reports. “However, there may never have been any development in history, should we remain skeptical and expect failure just because we have failed before.”
The remaining “1% chance” could well be Vice President Mike Pence, who, in a Fox News interview May 21, misused President Trump’s May 17 statement to mean its opposite and revive the disastrous “Libya model” talk by National Security Advisor John Bolton. “You know,” Pence said, “there was some talk of the Libyan model last week. And as the President made clear, this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong-un doesn’t make a deal…. It would be a great mistake for Kim Jong-un to think he could play Donald Trump.”
Pence’s silly locker-room bluster should put impeacher Democrats like Rep. Al Green of Texas on notice, that while generally opposing Trump’s best achievements, they are voting for his worst mistake—Pence.
OTHER
Mobilize Petition Signatures for an Early Trump-Putin Summit!
May 22 (EIRNS)—Launched with a full-page ad in the May 21 Washington Times by Prof. Edward Lozansky and former U.S. diplomat James Jatras, a petition calling for a summit of Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin has now been put on the White House website, where the link can be used to sign it.
The text of the petition reads: “Ronald Reagan famously said: ‘A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be Russia.’ Unfortunately today, a new Cold War again poses an existential threat to the people of both nations and to the whole world. Therefore, we urge President Trump to follow in the steps of Ronald Reagan and to start a direct dialogue with President Putin in search of solid and verified security arrangements. As President Trump said repeatedly ‘only haters and fools’ do not understand that good U.S.-Russia relations are also good for America. By all indications President Putin feels the same way for his country. A summit should be arranged as soon as possible.”
If 100,000 people sign by June 20, the petition will get a response from President Trump. Send this out widely as an email and distribute it through social media.
