Saturday Class - Why We Need a New Bretton Woods System

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The world had a working American economic order once. The British killed it in 1971. Trump now has a once-in-a-generation chance to bring it back.

President Trump heads to China May 14–16 to meet President Xi. President Putin has been invited to the G20 in Florida in December. The European satraps of the British Empire are panicked.

Even Macron admits it. On April 24 he warned:

"We should not underestimate that this is a unique moment where the US president, the Russian president, the Chinese president are dead set against the Europeans — and for good reason."

This week's speaker, William Wertz, was at Lyndon LaRouche's side fighting for a new Bretton Woods from 2000 until LaRouche's death in 2019 — and literally wrote the book on it. He joins Tony Papert to lay out what Bretton Woods actually was, who killed it, and why the Trump moment is the opening LaRouche spent his life preparing for.

The American world system that actually worked

Bretton Woods, July 1944. Forty-four allied nations, gathered in New Hampshire, build a postwar monetary order on Hamilton's American System: national banking under sovereign control, fair and reciprocal trade, fixed exchange rates, a gold-backed dollar — and a global program of TVA-style infrastructure to develop the entire planet.

FDR was explicit about the lineage. His great-great-grandfather Isaac Roosevelt had worked with Hamilton at the Bank of New York. As he prepared to re-enter politics, FDR wrote an essay titled simply Alexander Hamilton. The man who designed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Ex-Im Bank intended Bretton Woods to end the British, French and Dutch colonial systems for good.

Even sabotaged from day one, the system worked. Between 1960 and 1975, more than 50 countries posted GDP growth above 3% per capita — including Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Tunisia, Turkey, and seven nations in Sub-Saharan Africa. The fastest-growing country on Earth before 1975 wasn't an Asian Tiger — it was Gabon. Botswana outgrew Hong Kong. Walter Rostow told JFK that Brazil, Argentina, India, the Philippines, Taiwan and Greece were on track for self-sustaining growth by 1970.

Had Brazil's pre-1975 growth continued, by the year 2000 it would have been richer than France or the United Kingdom.

Then they killed it.

BEWARE The British East India Company!: Toward an Alliance Between the USA, Russia, China, and India to Finally Defeat the British Empire

by William Wertz

A comprehensive history of the existential war between the Anglo-Dutch imperial system and the American System of political economy — and why only a Four Power alliance of the USA, Russia, China and India has the strategic weight to finally dismantle it.

GET IT ON KINDLE AND AMAZON

Who actually runs the swamp

In 1971 Nixon abandoned the gold standard under coordinated pressure from Britain, France, and the Netherlands — the very colonial powers FDR had warned against. Floating exchange rates, deindustrialization, and globalization followed. Of the 50 countries that had grown above 3% under Bretton Woods, only nine repeated that performance afterward.

To understand what really happened, you have to know about an institution most Americans have never heard of: the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.

The BIS was created in 1930 by Bank of England chief Montagu Norman and Hjalmar Schacht — the man who brought Hitler to power and ran Nazi war mobilization. During World War II, the Reichsbank and the central banks of Nazi-occupied countries controlled 67.4% of the BIS. Its directors included Walter Funk, Hermann Schmitz of IG Farben (the cartel that ran Auschwitz), and Reichsbank executives later convicted at Nuremberg for processing dental gold from concentration-camp victims. Throughout the war, the president of the BIS was an American.

The Bretton Woods Conference voted to liquidate the BIS "at the earliest possible moment." John Maynard Keynes — chairman of Britain's Malthusian Society and vice-chair of its Eugenics Society — threatened to walk Britain out of the system unless the order was killed. The resolution passed anyway. By 1948, after Roosevelt's death, the liquidation was quietly suspended. The BIS still exists today.

It is the central bank of central banks — and it is the architect of more than just the dollar's collapse:

Harry Dexter White, the American who actually drafted the Bretton Woods agreement, was hounded as a Russian agent until he had a heart attack. Sound familiar? It was the original Russia hoax.
Wall Street took over the World Bank — Eugene Meyer, John J. McCloy, then Chase's Eugene Black.
The European Union itself was drafted by the BIS: the Delors Committee met at BIS headquarters in Basel, every member belonged to the BIS, and the BIS general manager personally wrote three of the 15 reports that became the Maastricht Treaty.
A succession of Federal Reserve chairs — Burns, Volcker, Greenspan — worked hand-in-glove with Basel to deindustrialize America and gut Glass-Steagall.

Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. Will Wertz argues he should have warned about the financial-military-industrial complex — the international cartel network running through Basel, into the Federal Reserve, and out through the World Bank, IMF, WTO and EU. That is the actual swamp Donald Trump is up against. It is not just Hillary Clinton. It is not just Jerome Powell.

What a new Bretton Woods looks like

Trump's tariff fight, his rejection of the WTO and the Paris Treaty, his Core 5 idea, his Board of Peace, his outreach to Xi and Putin — these aren't disconnected moves. They are the scaffolding of a replacement system.

In the class, Wertz lays out the principles of what a new Bretton Woods has to look like. The short version:

A gold-backed US dollar as the international reserve currency, with fixed exchange rates among sovereign nations.
Eliminate independent central banking. Reduce the Federal Reserve to a Hamiltonian agent of the US Treasury, issuing low-interest credit for productive investment.
Liquidate the BIS — finally carrying out the 1944 Bretton Woods resolution.
Reinstate Glass-Steagall in every member nation.
Withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty and abolish the WTO.
Low-interest credit for high energy-flux-density technology — fission, fusion, manufacturing, infrastructure, mining, agriculture, space.
An ecumenical principle of national sovereignty — nations may differ in religion or form of government, so long as they consent to be governed and commit to the development of their people.

Russia was at Bretton Woods. China was at Bretton Woods. India was there too — though only as a colony of Britain. The geometry today is different. The Four Powers — the US, Russia, China and India — finally have the combined weight to dismantle the Anglo-Dutch imperial system that has been at war with the American System since the East India Companies.

There is no better way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution than to finish the job.

Watch the full class — and share it with anyone who still thinks the "deep state" is just a Washington problem.

—Promethean Action Editorial Staff

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