Mobilize for a Four-power ‘Bretton Woods’ System It Will Come with an Infrastructure Bill as a Bonus

U.S. Democrats, including newly elected Democratic representatives, now have the choice before them, of either crusading to drive President Trump out of office by any possible means — alienating voters and splitting their party in the process — or developing an economic development agenda and working with him on it.

Republicans, whom the President pulled through a difficult midterm election with success which was no fault of their own, must end their Churchill-imitation war fancies. They have to support him in trying to make the “deals” he wants with Russia and Korea for peace, China for economic growth, trade with Japan…

What kind of “deals” should be made? China has just given a stunning example. It has made an agreement to fund and help create a major development center for magnetic levitation trains, in the Philippines. In other words, China plans to transfer to a less developed country, a hub of combined R&D, training, and production of — not old textiles, not smart phone parts — the very front edge of ground transportation technology worldwide. Essentially they will be jointly developing this amazing new rail technology with the Philippines. If China provides credit for this, it matters not at all whether the Philippines pays it back; the “return” will be the upgrading of China’s high-speed rail industries to make the leap to maglev on a large scale. That’s the kind of “deal” that can both revive industry in industrial countries — like America — and build productive industry in developing countries.

President Franklin Roosevelt understood exactly this kind of “deal.” He introduced Lend-Lease in 1940, using the famous metaphor of lending your garden hose to your neighbor whose house has caught fire. FDR said: Forget about money; it doesn’t matter if Britain or Russia pay America back for new ships and planes under Lend-Lease; we are building up the American economy, the arsenal of democracy. And FDR’s great infrastructure projects like TVA and the Hoover and Bonneville Dams had already built up so much new electric power that the United States could be the arsenal of democracy and provide a high standard of living at the same time.

Speaking of Roosevelt, he continued the same “deals” after the War and after his death, by launching in 1944 the Bretton Woods monetary system — to facilitate credit for infrastructure projects in, and capital goods exports to, developing countries. A new Bretton Woods is the really great deal the United States could make, through summit meetings with Presidents Xi of China, Putin of Russia, Modi of India — perhaps Prime Minister Abe of Japan. Those powers can set up a new Bretton Woods and development bank to create the many trillions in credit actually required to fund great projects of high-technology economic infrastructure, including in the United States.

Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who has appealed directly to the leaders of the first four powers to initiate such a credit and development system, has called for a public mobilization for it now. The United States must take the lead; and the American President will either be free to deal with those powers, or tied up by “impeachers” instigated by British intelligence and their “liberal imperialist” cothinkers.

A new Bretton Woods is thus as crucial for peace as for productivity. As one observer remarked on Veterans Day, to honor the war dead, stop making so many of them. See to their grandchildren creating things they, themselves, could only imagine.