After Glass-Steagall Sabotage, Obama Must Be Impeached Now!

May 23, 2010 (LPAC)—On Monday, May 17, President Barack Obama met with Rahm Emanuel, and was informed by his chief of staff that a number of Democratic U.S. Senators were still insisting on the inclusion of the Glass-Steagall amendment and the restrictions on derivatives in the Dodd financial reform bill. Emanuel had been engaged in round-the-clock negotiations, over the weekend, with a group of Senators, attempting to cajole, bribe and threaten them into dropping their amendments, and letting the Dodd bill go to a final vote, unchanged. In characteristic Nero fashion, the President went absolutely berserk, and demanded that all such Senate insubordination be crushed immediately. He demanded that the Dodd bill be passed, as-is, by Thursday, May 20.

Over the course of the next 72 hours, on Obama's orders, Emanuel, Larry Summers, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Sen. Chris Dodd used every dirty trick in the book, to kill the Cantwell-McCain amendment, and the Lincoln-Cantwell amendment, which sought to reverse Dodd's sabotage rewrite of the anti-derivatives measure already in the bill. The White House even crushed the Levin-Merkley amendment, that would have incorporated the so-called Volcker Rule, limiting certain activities by commercial banks—demonstrating that Obama's professed public support for the Volcker reforms were themselves pure lies.

While other factors were clearly at play, including a desperate Wall Street and City of London drive to kill every effort to strengthen the final bill, none of those factors mitigate against President Obama's own, personal role in virtually guaranteeing the total destruction of the United States in the immediate weeks and months ahead. He is accountable for his own actions, in killing off—for the moment—the restoration of Glass-Steagall and the banning of derivatives, the only two actions that could, at this late date, save the United States economy from a total collapse. Obama's deeds well surpass the "high crimes and misdemeanors" standard for impeachment.

Polling data from the immediate 24-hour period following the Senate's shameful Thursday night vote for the Dodd bill, without taking up the Cantwell-McCain amendment, the Cantwell-Lincoln derivatives language, or even the Levin-Merkley "Volcker Rule," revealed that the overwhelming majority of Americans saw through the President's lies and realized that the bill was a complete piece of filth. Democratic voters who participated in the poll said they were sick and tired of the fake rhetoric and the lecturing. The across-the-board repudiation of the Dodd bill, and the posturing by the Senate leadership, and particularly the President, clearly registered among some of the President's top White House aides. Reportedly, Rahm Emanuel contacted Rep. Barney Frank, who was crowing in public about how he and Sen. Dodd were going to ram through the final House-Senate version of the bill by the Fourth of July, and ordered him, in his typical expletive-laden language to shut his mouth.

Lyndon LaRouche said today that "the American people are in a total rage against the Congress and against President Obama. Face it: Obama is the problem. Time for his impeachment is over-ripe. The honeymoon is over—and it was lousy."