Wednesday, 13 April 2011



Bretton Woods 2.0 -

Soros New
World Order Conference

By Stephen Lendman
4-13-11
In July 1944, 730 delegates from 44 nations met at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, NH for a UN Monetary and Financial Conference. Its purpose was to establish a post-war international monetary system of convertible currencies, fixed exchange rates, free trade, the US dollar as the world's reserve currency linked to gold, and those of other nations fixed to the dollar.
It also designed an institutional framework for market-based capital accumulation to assure newly liberated colonies would pursue capitalist economic development beneficial to victorious allies, mainly America.
In addition, the IMF and World Bank were established to integrate developing nations into the Global North-dominated world economy, using debt entrapment as the way to transfer their wealth to powerful Western bankers.
The scheme to this day obligates indebted nations to take new loans to service old ones, assuring rising indebtedness and structural adjustment harshness, including:
-- privatization of state enterprises;
-- mass layoffs;
-- deregulation;
-- deep social spending cuts;
-- wage freezes or cuts;
-- unrestricted free market access for western corporations;
-- corporate-friendly tax cuts;
-- crackdowns on or elimination of trade unionism; and
-- harsh repression against those opposing a system incompatible with social democracy.
As a result, since WW II, public wealth shifted to powerful private hands, widening the gap between super-rich elitists and working households, a process more intense than ever now, including the amounts.
In 1971, the system unraveled when Nixon closed the gold window, ending the last link between gold, the dollar, and sound money. Thereafter, currencies floated, competing with each other in a casino-like environment, manipulated by powerful insiders like Soros, hedge funds, giant international banks, or governments at times cooperatively with others in their own mutual self-interest.
Bretton Woods established a post-war international monetary system, including the IMF and World Bank's original missions:
-- the former to establish stable exchange rates linked to the dollar and bridge temporary payment imbalances; and
-- the latter to provide credit to war-torn developing countries. Both bodies, in fact, proved hugely exploitive, their purpose to this day.
In his book "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire" and other writings, Michael Hudson explained how the dollar glut finances US imperialism and corporate interests by:
-- circulating surplus dollars globally to further financial speculation and corporate takeovers;
-- global central banks "recyl(ing) these dollar inflows (into) US Treasury bonds to finance the federal US budget deficit; and most important the military character of the US payments deficit and the domestic federal budget deficit."
In other words, dollars finance US corporate takeovers, speculative excesses creating bubbles and global economic crises, as well as America's reckless spending, militarism, imperial wars, hundreds of bases worldwide, and overall belligerence and exploitation at the expense of democratic values and social justice.
Sooner or later, however, excesses erode confidence and produce change, especially today with the Federal Reserve sacrificing dollar strength to bail out Wall Street at the expense of productive economic growth and stability. The greater the dollar erosion, the less likely foreign investors will tolerate buying bad assets, giving America a free lunch to finance counterproductive policy.
As a result, Hudson sees international tensions growing for the next generation because of America's reckless monetarism, perpetual wars, and extreme wealth gap between super-rich elitists and ordinary workers.
For decades, US companies had a competitive advantage from Washington Consensus rules and Bretton Woods institutions it controls, including the IMF and World Bank, affording America a free lunch to rule by forcing other countries into debt bondage, threatening to bring down the global monetary system if enough of them balk. And, of course, waging imperial wars when financial ones don't work.
So far it has because Europe and Asia lack the political will to establish a new international economic order, so nations producing economic gains can keep them, not let America usurp them to reinforce its "new kind of centralized global planning" - one based on financialization and a US Treasury securities standard, not industrial mechanisms.
In WTO terms, it transfers foreign trade gains from other economies to America, drains their resources overall, promotes dependency, not self-sufficiency, and backs it with hardline militarism and threats of systemic monetary collapse.
Eventually, exploited countries balk about "taxation without representation," a "quid without quo," a free lunch from "the world's payments-surplus nations." The longer America demands it by glutting world economies with dollars, the more likely disadvantaged nations will object, by threatening to withdraw from the IMF, World Bank and WTO.
It's a possibility globalists like George Soros aim to exploit, among other ways through Bretton Woods 2.0 to develop ideas and policies for a new financial world order, elitists like himself control.
George Soros - Billionaire Predatory Investor
His rogue investing is notorious. For example, in 1992, he made a billion dollars sabotaging European monetary policy by attacking the European Rate Mechanism (ERM) through a highly leveraged speculative assault on the British pound, forcing its devaluation and ERM breakup.
In June 2003, Neil Clark wrote a New Statesman article, explaining his machinations as a rogue predator. As a result, he "made billions out of the Eastern currency crash of 1997," and was fined in 2002 "for insider trading by a court in France." When asked about the turmoil his speculation caused, he dismissively said:
"As a market participant, I don't need to be concerned with the consequences of my actions."
Earning billions from them, they've caused havoc for millions globally. More still by his International Crisis Group and Open Society (open meaning for him to plunder) collaboration with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Al Gore, General Wesley Clark, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and many other notorious scoundrels and organizations.
For decades, Soros operated roguishly for a buck. For example, in 1998, he wrote an outrageous letter to Bill Clinton, calling for a "comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime" for reasons the Bush administration implemented.
He's also connected to the Carlyle Group, profiting on militarism and wars from defense contracts. There his partners and associates include Bush I, James Baker, Colin Powell, former UK Prime Minister John Major, Frank Carlucci, Richard Darman, at one time members of bin Laden family, and many other well-connected figures.
Clark explained that Soros "may not, as sometimes suggested, be a fully paid-up CIA agent. But that his corporations and NGOs are closely wrapped up in US expansionism cannot seriously be doubted."
He turned on Bush II over tactics, not ideology, for committing the cardinal sin of giving away the game through overzealously endorsing belligerence.
In fact, Soros strongly supports financial and military warfare for greater profits globally, to gain control over money, resources and markets, but wants it done skillfully with little notice - his way.
As a result, he uses his wealth and influence to oust "bad for business" regimes. For example, Clark said he was instrumental in the Soviet collapse by:
"distribut(ing) $3 million a year to dissidents including Poland's solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent media. Ostensibly aimed at building up a 'civil society,' these initiatives were designed to weaken the existing political structures and pave the way for eastern Europe's eventual exploitation by global capital."
Soros now takes credit for "Americaniz(ing) eastern Europe" by exploiting its wealth and people for profit. In Yugoslavia, Clark said:
"The Yugoslavs remained stubbornly resistant and repeatedly returned Slobodan Milosevic's reformed Socialist Party to government. Soros was equal to the challenge. From 1991, his Open Society Institute channeled more than $100 million to" anti-Milosevic elements, "funding political parties, publishing houses and 'independent' media" like Radio B92," using it against Milosevic.
When Washington ousted him in 2000, "all that was left was to cart (him) to the Hague tribunal, co-financed by Soros" and other so-called human rights custodians, corporate ones wanting their share of the booty. Today, Yugoslavia is balkanized, its people exploited, and Kosovars governed by Hashim Thaci's Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a rogue organization connected to the CIA and organized crime.
Soros, however, profited hugely. He's done it, in fact, in each country he targeted at the expense of freedom, democratic values, and public welfare.
"In Kosovo, for example, he invested $50 million in an attempt to gain control of the Trepca mine complex, where there are vast reserves of gold, silver, lead and other minerals estimated to be worth (about) $5 billion. He thus copied a pattern he (used) to great effect over the whole of eastern Europe (through) 'shock therapy' and 'economic reform,' then swooping in with his associates to buy valuable state assets at knock-down prices."
In fact, his Pax Americana strategy differs only from Bush II in subtlety. "But it is just as ambitious and just as deadly," whether by military or financial warfare for maximum profits.
Soros' Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) Bretton Woods Conference
From April 8 - 11, INET's second annual conference addressed global economic crisis aftershocks, as part of a wide-ranging effort to "engage the larger European Union, as well as the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia" to accept Soros' New World Order ideas.
Aiming to "inspir(e) and provok(e) new economic thinking," over 200 academics, business and government leaders (many with direct ties to him) attended, including INET's Soros and Robert Johnson, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Paul Volker, Larry Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, Kenneth Rogoff, Jeffrey Sachs (whose shock therapy poison helped wreck post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe), Carmen Reinhart from the (Pete) Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Bank of England's Andy Haldane, Henry Kaufman, and other New World Order elitists, plotting new ways for global financial control and profits.
Topics discussed included:
-- The emerging economic and political order: what lies ahead?
-- Bretton Woods: what can we learn from the past in designing the future?
-- Getting back on track: macroeconomic management after a financial crisis.
-- Sovereignty and institutional design in the global age: the global market and the nation states.
-- Can sovereignty and effective international supervision be reconciled: the challenge of large complex financial institutions.
-- Exploring complexity in economic theory.
-- The political economy of structural adjustment: understanding the obstacles to cooperation.
-- The market or the state: can market forces deliver innovation, education, and infrastructure?
-- Sustainable economic.
-- Optimal currency areas and governance: the challenge of Europe.
-- The architecture of Asia: financial structure and an emerging economic system, and
-- Rising to the challenge: equity, adjustment and balance in the world economy.
A Final Comment
Globalist Soros believes "America should be replaced by a world government with a global currency under UN rule."
In other words, he wants national sovereignty replaced by centralized control over money, populations, resources and markets - an undemocratic ruler-serf society unfit to live in except for rulers and profiteers.
On January 25, 2010, New York Times writer Andrew Sorkin headlined, "Still Needed: A Sheriff of Finance," quoting Soros saying:
"We need a global sheriff" ahead of the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Perhaps he has himself in mind.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

Posted by Britannia Radio at 21:17