The midterms did not change the war. This week the empire went after Miller, Hegseth, Musk, and Huang — a purge of America’s creators. Judy’s class shows how Colbert wriggled France free of Amsterdam. Our job is to get Americans onto the Ark.
Hamilton called him "the great Colbert." Judy Hodgkiss shows how a French minister's canals, credit, and Academy of Sciences began to wriggle France free of Amsterdam — and how that design reached the Erie Canal.
Jensen Huang has resigned from Nvidia after a Chinese spy scandal, and Democrats are preparing to put Elon Musk under oath. Barbara Boyd argues both are part of the same purge of America's creators, with the Huang scandal as its Russiagate.
Hamilton called him "the great Colbert." Judy Hodgkiss shows how a French minister's canals, credit, and Academy of Sciences began to wriggle France free of Amsterdam — and how that design reached the Erie Canal.
Every week, Promethean Action holds a Saturday Class — a deep dive into the ideas, history, and strategic thinking that the mainstream won’t touch.
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In this week’s Saturday Class, Judy Hodgkiss, with host Tony Papert, took the class to France. Her subject was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister Alexander Hamilton later called "the great Colbert."
She began with a lesson from the election. The enemy is clever. She did not mean Chuck Schumer, Jeffries, Kamala, or AOC. She meant the people who pull their strings, from the haunts of the City of London and from "basements in Basel, Switzerland."
They think in centuries. Their system treats human beings as cattle. A good program does not win the population automatically. Even reviving the American System can be outflanked with narrative, especially among the young. The string-pullers already know this history, because they have outflanked men like Colbert before. Judy's point was simple. We need to know it too.
Colbert served Louis XIV as both prime minister and finance minister. He used tariffs to protect and develop domestic industry. He invested directly in infrastructure, what Americans would later call "internal improvements."
He never had a national bank. He built something close to one. Regional tax farmers sent part of the revenue to the center and kept part in the region, to fund improvements and to back lines of credit for local entrepreneurs. Judy called this the beginning of the idea of a national bank, done on a regional basis. A hundred years after he died, in the collapse leading into the French Revolution, that system had become barbaric. It was not the system he built.
Hamilton saw what the original had been worth:
France was much later in commercial improvements, nor would her trade have been at this time in so prosperous a condition had it not been for the abilities and indefatigable endeavors of the great Colbert.
— Alexander Hamilton
The emphasis on "great Colbert" is Hamilton's. He pointed to the wool manufacture, established "in a kingdom where nature seemed to have denied the means." Decades earlier, Lord Bolingbroke had written that Colbert "improved the wealth, and consequently the power of France extremely by the order he put into the finances, and by the encouragement he gave to trade and manufacturers."
As Judy put it: "Hamilton was very big on Colbert."
Colbert's best-known project is the Canal du Midi. It cuts through the middle of France, from the Atlantic side at Bordeaux to the Mediterranean at Narbonne.
Without it, a ship from northern or western France had to sail around Spain and through the Straits of Gibraltar. Spain charged for the bottleneck. The Barbary pirates raided off present-day Algeria and Morocco. And the Bank of Amsterdam controlled the bills of exchange and the insurance that shipping depended on.
The canal bypassed the whole arrangement. A month at sea became, depending on the river, a week or two. It cut the payment to Spain. It cut the pirate risk. Most important, French commerce began to wriggle free of Amsterdam.
This was always Colbert's goal.
— Judy Hodgkiss
Judy pointed to today's choke points: the Strait of Hormuz, and the Gulf of Aden, where the Houthis attack ships "just like the Barbary pirates." She said they are a useful tool for the City of London and Lloyd's of London. Trump has been disrupting that grip.
The oligarchy's address has changed. Its methods have not. Venice ran this traffic for centuries. In the 1500s its fondi moved to Amsterdam. The Bank of Amsterdam was founded in 1609. In 1694 the same interests set up the Bank of England on that model. Power shifted to London. The American Revolution was fought against that empire.
Colbert died in 1683. His legacy did not. His nephew, the Marquis de Torcy, became foreign minister of France. In 1712 Lord Bolingbroke became Secretary of State to Queen Anne. The two men became close friends. They settled a perpetual war — instigated by the Dutch — and engineered an alliance to develop both countries, in defiance of Amsterdam.
Judy sees a parallel now. She recalled two earlier classes by Will Wertz on Bretton Woods. On August 15, 1971, Nixon shut down the old system of fixed parities. Judy called it the disaster that opened the United States to "the speculators and the sharks and the looters and the whole predatory system out of London that has transformed our economy."
A return to fixed exchange rates would stabilize trade and provide a basis for development credit. It would also do something the original Bretton Woods never attempted: detach the real economy from the derivatives bubble. That market is unregulated, so no one knows its size. Judy Shelton estimates 600 trillion dollars. Lyndon LaRouche put it at more than a quadrillion.
Judy Shelton, an advocate of restoring Bretton Woods, was recently brought into Treasury as a counselor in the Office of the Secretary, advising on currency policy with a focus on China. Judy noted that Trump was expected in China the following Wednesday for the APEC summit, with a Trump–Putin–Xi meeting planned on the sidelines. She said it was "highly probable" that Shelton would travel with Scott Bessent's Treasury delegation.
This is the hope. This is a flank that may be on the horizon.
— Judy Hodgkiss
Then came what Judy called the fun part.
A painting from the 1660s shows Louis XIV seated in a fancy hat. Colbert stands beside him, introducing the king to the new Paris Academy of Sciences and to its head, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. Someone in the painting is climbing a map. Tony identified it as the Canal du Midi. The building in the back, he said, is the French observatory.
Colbert was not only building canals and credit. He was gathering the best minds, from France and beyond, to work out how to advance humanity. Judy said this was the worst nightmare of the fondi in Amsterdam.
From 1672 to 1676, Denis Papin worked at that Academy. Judy described him as the inventor of the steam engine. To demonstrate the power of steam, he filled a cracked hollow cannonball with water, patched the crack, and heated it until it exploded. Gottfried Leibniz was there in the same years. He arrived as an envoy for the Duke of Mainz, known only for law and international relations. In Paris he worked with Papin, developed the calculus, and developed his dynamics and his philosophy. A faction of the French church grew sympathetic. Some of the royal family were won over completely, though they did not live long enough to take the throne.
How those ideas moved through the Château de Sceaux, and into Bolingbroke's years of exile, is in the class.
The Canal du Midi was not a new idea. Charlemagne considered it around the year 800. He also set up an academy and brought in Alcuin of England to head it, a precursor of what Colbert later did in Paris. In 1516, King Francis brought Leonardo da Vinci to France to study the same canal. Da Vinci contributed the mitered gate. Colbert's builders put it to work 150 years later, along with the first step locks and the aqueducts that carried the canal over rivers.
The hardest problem was the summit: how to keep water in the canal at the high ground above Toulouse. The engineer was one of Colbert's salt-tax farmers. He wrote that his designs might surprise the minister, coming from "just a lowly salt tax farmer."
How the gate works, why it is called a miter, and how the reservoirs were fed — that's in the class.
A century and a half later, the same ideas crossed the Atlantic. The Erie Canal was completed in 1824–25, from the Hudson to Lake Erie. Commerce flooded into the Ohio Territory and on to Chicago "practically overnight." By Judy's figures, shipping a barrel of flour fell from about $20 to $3. Tolls became a large share of both New York's revenue and federal revenue. At Buffalo, a 75-foot limestone escarpment was answered with stepped locks and mitered gates.
As the terminus neared completion, the Marquis de Lafayette arrived on his farewell tour. The workers saluted the hero of the Revolution with the biggest blast they could set off in the limestone.
They weren't just celebrating the Marquis de Lafayette. They were celebrating the Canal du Midi, that the canal was modeled on, and they were celebrating all the best of France that helped to shape what America was becoming.
— Judy Hodgkiss
The oligarchy has outflanked builders before. Builders have also outflanked the oligarchy. Watch how Colbert did it — then decide which flank we take next.
Watch the full class on YouTube.
The class has much more, including Charlemagne's chapel at Aachen, why a bishop's miter gave the canal gate its name, Papin's first pressure-cooker experiment, and the slides of the Midi's staircase locks and aqueducts.
—Promethean Action Editorial Staff
PS: The American System Bootcamp resumes November 30, and for now it meets every two weeks. See the Bootcamp →
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