Lyndon H. LaRouche Glass-Steagall Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente LaRouche: Launch All-Out Fight for Glass Steagall—Because It Must Be Done 23 July 2014 (LPAC)—Lyndon LaRouche today forcefully urged Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and other Glass-Steagall sponsors to act immediately to push for Congressional debate and vote. ``Don’t wait until the perfect moment when you think you have the votes lined up. You have to campaign to win. You fight to get it through because it has to be done.’’ Indeed, not only is passage of Glass-Steagall urgent at this very moment, as major European banks and Wall Street unravel over their mountain of unpayable debt. There is a building groundswell for implementation. According to one Washington source, there is now a clear majority in support of Glass-Steagall or neutral. This is the perfect time to strike. In the past several days, there have been repeated calls appearing in the media for reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. Former Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) wrote in today’s Forbes magazine website that ``After Four Years of Dodd-Frank, We’re Still Waiting for Wall Street Reform.’’ He wrote, ``The solemn pronouncements coming from Washington that `Too Big to Fail’ is a thing of the past are ludicrous. The megabanks are bigger than ever, and are behaving exactly the way they did when, one year before the crash, Citibanks’s CEO Charles Prince declared `as long as the music is playing you’ve got to get up to dance.’ And the music being made these days while the banks gamble with FDIC-insured money and expand trading in risky derivatives is truly beautiful for the dancers. Megabank profits are soaring.’’ He concluded, ``Of course the real solution is reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act,’’ but then added his often heard caveat that ``there is no movement in Congress or the administration to do that.’’ Another push for Glass-Steagall appeared today in Business Spectator, which reported on a recent study by a Chinese economist, Liu He, a leading advisor to President Xi Jinping. Liu looked at ways for China to avoid a crash by studying the common features of the 1929 and 2008 crashes. One common feature the study highlighted was the adoption of deregulation. Business Spectator writer Peter Cai noted the parallels between Calvin Coolidge’s policy of non-interference and non-regulation and the Thatcherite ``free market ideology’’ of the 1980s and ’90s, noting ``The Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment banking from commercial banking was abolished.’’ Robert Scheer also published, today, an Oped News column picked up in newspapers around the country, noting the recent $7 billion out-of-court settlement by Citicorp and the role the bank played in the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which some people referred to as ``the Citigroup authorization act.’’ Joe Nocera, writing in today’s New York Times, noted on the fourth anniversary of the passage of Dodd-Frank, that no one believes that the TBTF problem has been solved, and that the mechanisms in Dodd-Frank are so complex and arcane that ``we have no way of knowing whether `too big to fail’ still exists until we have another crisis. Let’s just hope we don’t have to find out anytime soon.’’ Jeff Steinberg