This is the text of a May 27, 2013 LaRouche Political Action Committee mass leaflet.
Whether your Congressman and Senator know it or not, Wall Street and the City of London’s too-big-to-fail banks have been given the keys to your savings accounts and will steal every penny that you think you own the minute they get into trouble and need another bailout. This is not some wild futuristic nightmare. This has been the reality ever since Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Bill (“The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010”) and President Barack Obama signed it into law. This is outright treason!
Under Title II of the Dodd-Frank Bill, the leveraged gambling debts of the too-big-to-fail banks are put at the front of the bail-out line. Household and business depositors are defined as “unsecured creditors” and will lose all but the FDIC insured portion of their deposits. What this means is that the “bail-in” program that looted depositors funds in the two largest banks in Cyprus earlier this year has already been in place in the United States under Dodd-Frank.
After the 2008 Wall Street fiasco, in which the too-big-to-fail banks were given tens of trillions of dollars in taxpayers’ funds in the biggest bailout in history, it was obvious that no more taxpayer bailouts were possible. Instead, the bankers and their Congressional allies opted for “bail-in.” If a too-big-to-fail bank gets in trouble, the FDIC steps in, in the form of an Orderly Liquidation Authority to oversee the restructuring. In the process, the bank is saved—at the expense of the depositors who will lose all but the FDIC insured portion of their deposits.
This represents the biggest theft in history, and it is pure treason. Under the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the first responsibility of government is to protect the general welfare of the population, both current and future generations. Under Dodd-Frank, that core principle of the American Republic is thrown out the window, in favor of “saving the system,” a system that has been hopelessly bankrupt since long before the 2008 crisis.
The Dodd-Frank Bill is 848 pages. Already, regulators have drafted 8,843 pages of rules of implementation—and they are only a third of the way through the process. Earlier this month, Members of the House Financial Services Committee passed H.R. 992, the Swap Regulatory Improvement Act, with only six dissenting votes. The bill would further guarantee that derivative contracts—pure gambling bets—would be protected even when held by foreign banks operating in the U.S. The New York Times reported on May 23, 2013 that H.R. 992 was written by Citigroup and was introduced by Members of Congress on the receiving end of major Wall Street contributions. This, too, is a further betrayal of the rights of all Americans.
As Lyndon LaRouche has been correctly warning since the 1971 breakup of the Bretton Woods System and the 1999 repeal of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the entire trans-Atlantic financial system is hopelessly bankrupt and must be put through orderly bankruptcy reorganization. The only way to achieve that is to fully reinstate the original Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from all of the gambling activities of the brokerage houses, hedge funds and insurance companies. There are now bills before both Houses of Congress to reinstate Glass-Steagall. H.R. 129 and S. 985 offer the only hope of survival for a United States already on the very edge of economic disintegration.
Lyndon LaRouche declared, “The looting has gone far enough. The Dodd-Frank Bill is a piece of treachery that has already claimed the lives of too many of our citizens, through the destruction of our economy, the continuing collapse of real employment, the gutting of our health care system. Nothing short of the full reinstatement of Glass Steagall can save the United States at this point in time.”
LaRouche continued, “Glass-Steagall is the indispensable first step to reverse the London-Wall Street tyranny of Dodd-Frank. Once we have reinstated Glass-Steagall, we must immediately move to rebuild the collapsed U.S. economy. We need to return to the American System of Federal credit for urgently needed infrastructure projects, starting with the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a project that will create millions of productive jobs and revive our collapsed manufacturing base.
“My colleagues have prepared a detailed expose of the treason of the Dodd-Frank Bill. It is available on the LaRouche PAC website. When you study that report, you will come to the obvious patriotic conclusion: Kill Dodd-Frank before it kills you.”