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“Securing World Peace Through
Embracing the Common Aims of Mankind”


Schiller Institute Conference
Saturday, September 10, 2016, 12 noon – 4:30 pm
New York Cit
y

Conference Page:  Program and Video Links

Conference Report Press Release

Media Advisory Announcing Conference

Invitation to Conference

TRANSCRIPT

Helga Zepp-LaRouche    Ramsey Clark   

Richard Black    Bashar Ja'afari    Walter Jones

Questions and Answers

SPEED:  Our next speaker is Jeff Steinberg, senior editor of EIR, and general all-round troublemaker.

VIDEO

JEFFREY STEINBERG:   I didn't know I had military rank. Thank you, Dennis for the promotion.

I think it's really important in the spirit of what Helga just went through, because many of you have endured many, many meetings, where the general theme was not a kind of compilation and pile-up of good news.  I think everybody in this room should start out by applauding yourselves, because the victories that we've accomplished around the release of the 28 pages, the now passage of the JASTA bill, now unanimously through both Houses of Congress, the fact that both political parties could not avoid putting Glass-Steagall's restoration in their party platforms is a tribute to the persistence and perseverance of the work that all of you have been involved in.  so I think it's very appropriate to applaud ourselves and yourselves, for performing the kind of miracles that only human beings are capable of. [applause]  Because these accomplishments are truly miraculous, but they're the kind of miracles that come as the result of believing that the truth matters, that there's no statute of limitations on the truth, and that we genuinely live in a democratic republic in which the voice of the population has meaning.

Now, I can  tell you, from very detailed, firsthand knowledge that I don't  even remotely have the time to go through today, that the reason the 28 pages were released on July 15th, is because of what we collectively, with many, many others, with the 9/11 families, with leading members of Congress, were able to stick with and force to happen.

President Obama has no intention whatsoever, of releasing the 28 pages.  But the groundswell of demand for the truth on this issue reached the point, 15 years after the fact, where his closest advisors had to go to him and say, "these 28 pages by hook or by crook are going to be made public."  That was made very clear on July 6th, when Congressman Walter Jones and Congressman Stephen Lynch invoked the Gravel precedent, the Pentagon Papers precedent, and said:  It's our Constitutional obligation to inform the American people about critical issues of national security where secrecy has no place.  The minute it became clear that they were prepared to go that far, people at the White House went to the President and said, "well, you've got a simple choice.  You're either going to be the villain of this story, or we'll try to spin it so you're the hero," even though he had no intention of releasing them.   He was told, "it's going to happen anyway, whether it's done by the next President, whether Congress just takes it upon themselves to make it public; so you might as well get a little bit of credit for it. And by the way, we're going to do it as the House and Senate are packing up their bags to go on vacation for two months and as the two Presidential nominating conventions are about to happen and all of the oxygen is going to be  sucked out of the media for the next month; so maybe we'll sort of sneak by and people will forget about it, and we'll have gotten away with releasing it with minimum blowback."

Well, obviously, the turnout here, today, other events that will  be happening this weekend, make it clear that that is not the case; that's not going to happen.

And so, as Helga indicated,  we've got to build on the victories that we've established.  I can tell you that the turmoil in Washington is enormous.  It used to be that leadership in the Congress, leadership in other institutions in Washington was defined by who you know, and how well you "go along to get along." And that concept is dead.

The fact that people who have been ostracized — Walter Jones has no committee assignments!  He should have by all rights been the chairman of a major at least subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee;  he was kicked off the House Financial Services Committee because he introduced Glass-Steagall.

But people know there's a new, emerging leadership.

Clearly, what this Presidential election makes clear, is that personality is not a criterion for leadership, [laughter] but that now we're moving into a point where here in the United States, we can win on the basis of ideas and principles.

So we've had these victories about the 28 pages, about 9/11, about the passage of the JASTA bill.  President Obama is having probably the worst weekend of the summer and that's saying a great deal given what he just went through in Asia, especially courtesy of President Duterte of the Philippines.  He's now got a dilemma:  Does he veto the JASTA bill?  And Democrats are saying to him: If you do that, then you will be singlehandedly blamed for the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, because people will hate the democrats because of your actions.

So we're at a very interesting moment, and I think, again, we've got to take the big picture into account.  The whole movement that's coming out of the summit meetings that have just concluded in Asia, and by the way, starting on Tuesday, that same process is right here on our home turf, here in Manhattan, with the opening of the UN General Assembly:  The discussions that took place in Vladivostok, that took place in Hangzhou, will now be taking place on the East Side of Manhattan, and world leaders, foreign ministers will be here following through, and we've got to hold their feet to the fire, that these ideas will be truly realized and implemented.

Our other minor task, by the way, is that the United States does have to be brought into full alignment with this new paradigm. And the first step on that is to make sure that Congress acts to reinstate Glass-Steagall.  We're at the point right now, where, as Helga said, Deutsche Bank is on its last legs, and there's really a race between Deutsche Bank and the Dope, Inc. primo bank, HSBC, for who's going to go under first. So we're on the edge of a crisis that goes beyond 2008, beyond Lehman Brothers, because Deutsche Bank has the largest derivatives exposure of any bank in the world, and every big New York bank is a counterparty to those derivatives transactions; they'll set to blow.

The first step is Glass-Steagall.  Glass-Steagall solves a piece of the problem.  It basically takes out the garbage, the sanitation workers are going to be busy on Wall Street for months to come!  But that just means we've reached the moment where we rebuild, and that means the other  element of what Mr. LaRouche has called for, for the entirety of his political career, but which he put very succinctly in the last few years:  reinstate Glass-Steagall, reestablish viable commercial banks. Go back to a long, proud tradition where Congress used to have  two budgets. They used to have an operating budget, and a budget that was oriented toward investment, a capital budget.  When times were tough you could always tighten the belt by  20 or 30% on the operational budget; but you never scaled back on the capital budget, because that's the future.  Those are the next generations:  That's the infrastructure, it's the investment in science and technology, it's the investment in education and all of those things.

So we've got to go back to those core principles.  And I think the momentum going into this weekend and coming out of it is such, that we can truly win this fight in the United States. We're not going to solve the problem globally, fully, until we've won the United States back to these core principles, and based on what we've accomplished over this recent period, through many, many years of cumulative work, we're on the cusp of that kind of victory, and I think that the celebration this weekend, the Living Memorial to those who gave up their lives on 9/11, and the recent report from Newsweek indicates that there are now 400,000 people, among the first responders and others, who survived 9/11 but who are suffering from debilitating diseases, because they were heroes in the days and weeks and months that followed.

So we've got a lot of work to do, but I think we've got to carry the spirit of optimism and confidence forward, and there's no doubt that there are many more miracles awaiting us to accomplish.

Thank you. [applause]

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Next: Ramsey Clark