Schiller Institute Launches Urgent International Petition Drive For A New Bretton Woods Conference

The Schiller Institute, under the leadership of Helga Zepp-LaRouche, has launched an urgent international petition drive, seeking a conference of the United States, Russia, China, and India, to establish a new fixed exchange rate system for world trade and development, modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s concept of the Bretton Woods system. On August 15, 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon took the dollar out of the Bretton Woods system, ending the post World War II stability which had allowed the destroyed economies of Europe and Asia to not only recover from the War, but to build the modern infrastructure necessary for continued prosperity. Roosevelt’s intention for the post-war period as reported by his son, Elliot Roosevelt, was to use the Bretton Woods system to destroy British colonialism, the poverty and backwardness it produced, once and for all. Now a new such Bretton Woods conference between the U.S., Russia, China, and India, represents the only means to mitigate and survive the pending collapse of the post 2008 financial bubble, a bubble bigger by orders of magnitude than that of 2008, the collapse of which will engulf the entire world in chaos.

READ THE PETITION & SIGN IT HERE

The introduction of the petition reads as follows:

Much of the world is in catastrophic disarray. There are acute dangers of a new financial crisis and of a potentially devastating trade war. The refugee crisis in the Mediterranean underscores both the plight of the people in Africa and Southwest Asia, and the disunity of the European Union. The demographic curve in the United States has taken an alarming downturn. For most ordinary citizens, it is very difficult to see how all these different problems can be efficiently addressed.

There is, however, only one fundamental cause for all these seemingly diverse crises. When President Nixon effectively eliminated the fixed exchange rates of the Bretton Woods System in 1971, American economist Lyndon LaRouche warned that a continuation of the monetarist policies that were introduced then, would inevitably lead to the danger of a new depression and a new fascism, unless a new, more just world economic order were created. In the wake of Nixon’s action, there was a step-by-step deregulation of the financial system in the direction of neo-liberalism, which prevented the industrialization of the developing sector, and increased the profits of the speculators at the expense of the common good in the so-called advanced sector. The resulting systemic financial crisis of 2008 was not remedied by removing the causes of the crisis, but instead, the financial institutions of the British Imperial system acted to prolong the system of maximizing profits for themselves. Continue reading…