Internationalist billionaire George Soros is holding
his international conference April 8 to April 11 at
Bretton Woods, N.H., the noted birthplace of the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,
where he plans to “rearrange the entire financial order,”
as he noted in a November 2009 article in The Japan
Times Online that signaled the coming conference.
This “Bretton Woods II” came along just as the
Trilateral Commission met at the same time in Washington,
D.C. With an apparent goal of creating nothing
less than a new global economy, Soros is spending $50
million in New Hampshire to bring together up to 200
academic, business and government policy leaders
under his Institute for New EconomicThinking (INET).
As AFP went to press on April 7, the attendees were
to include ex-Fed chairman Paul Volcker, former
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown andWorld Bank
executive and Nobel Prize winner in economics Joseph
Stiglitz.
The conference is slated for the Mount Washington
Hotel, site of the historic 1944 Bretton Woods conference,
which established the post-World War II international
financial architecture.
Soros chose this site because he expects his proposed
reforms to be as radical as those promoted by
British economist John Maynard Keynes, the muchpraised
“genius” of the original BrettonWoods project.
Keynesian economics have been portrayed as a cure
to theWestern world’s post-war devastation, in that governments
were liberated of money creation restrictions
imposed by the gold standard, even while global financiers
controlled much of the world’s gold as they do
now. Governments, under the new paradigm
after the war, were encouraged to
promote economic growth and
macroeconomic stability by creating
more debt-based money for
everything that ailed the economy—
debt that has today brought
most of the world’s economies to
the brink of bankruptcy.
Now Soros comes along as the
new Keynes to save the day by
proposing another miracle solution
to our problems. Couched in
lofty doublespeak such as “reform,”
“cooperation,” and
“equal participation,” Soros is
proposing the end of sovereignty
as we know it.
“Reorganizing the world order
will need to extend beyond the financial
system,” Soros wrote in his
opinion piece. “The world
faces another stark choice
between two fundamentally
different forms of
organization: international
capitalism and
state capitalism.The former,
represented by the United States, has broken down,
and the latter, represented by China, is on the rise.”
Soros is saying that a washed-up America should be
replaced by a world government with a
global currency under UN rule. He
also advocates that China should
be top dog while we play second
fiddle.What Soros doesn’t
say is that two decades of
outsourcing U.S. industry,
opening the borders and
bankrupting the economy
with pointless wars and other
debacles, have been intentionally
orchestrated so that
now international bankers
can tell the world the system
is broken and that the individuals
who broke it need to show us
how to fix it.
BRETTONWOODS, N.H.—When the AMERICAN
FREE PRESS writer—accompanied by
photographer Stephen Lombardo—finally
reached the sleepy enclave of BrettonWoods
in northern New Hampshire on Sunday, April 10, there
was no immediate outward sign that top bankers, former
federal officials, former foreign officials, academics
and select journalists were holed up in the historic
Mount Washington Hotel to monkey with the world’s
financial machinery. There were no television news
crews camped along the long drive off of Highway 302
to give viewers a glimpse of this meeting—known as
BrettonWoods II.
Neither The Boston Globe nor The New York Times
carried anything prominent in their pages during the
April 8-11 conference. Ditto for The Wall Street
Journal.And their web sites showed nothing as ofApril
11. But the first Bretton Woods conference in 1944
gave the world nothing less than the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund. So a second Bretton
Woods conference should have made huge waves.
The world is going through the most serious financial
convulsions in modern history, yet this 2011 meeting
was all but ignored. In contrast, the 1944 meeting
was heavily covered by the press.
Near the hotel around 1 p.m., the only evidence that
something unusual was afoot—besides polished black
sedans that later appeared—were small signs scattered
around that stated things like, “Soros, Enemy of U.S.,”
and “Soros, Take a Hike,” referring to internationalist
billionaire George Soros, whose Institute for New
Economic Thinking (INET) was endowed with $50
million and put on this second-ever BrettonWoods conference.
The sign man, Cliff, spent several hours calling
attention to the global-scale scheming happening inside
the hotel. Another protester, Joe Barton, told AFP that
his sign on state property (not hotel land) 100 feet from
the security detail was taken by hotel security and never
returned. The local police chief, Barton alleged, drew
his nightstick and heatedly warned Barton to stay away.
One could argue that a private organization like
INET ought to be able to rent an entire hotel and discuss
whatever they want. But the identity and affiliations
of the participants (see additional story on pages
10-11 in this issue) strongly suggest that today’s recommendations
could well become tomorrow’s legislation.
When private talks lead to public decisions, playing the
private card does not hold water.
Local residents and visitors hesitated to comment
when informed of the conference. But Mark Catalano
knew the conference’s basic nature and plans to distribute
AFP on a regular basis at his Twin Mountain
Trading Post and at LivingWater Campground.
Several hotel staffers, with their jobs on the line if
they talked too much, said conference participants
would take a break, say little among themselves, and
return to another session with the doors barred. Staffers
had to immediately leave the conference area after they
served the esteemed guests so the staff would not hear
anything.
Obviously, attendees did not want to be filmed or
interviewed under any circumstance by media beyond
their control.
The only mainstream
newspaper known to have published a
timely piece of any substance on the Bretton
Woods II conference, the New Hampshire
Times-Union, which does not reach a national audience,
was permitted entry April 9 for a canned press
conference and portrayed the event’s head honcho,
George Soros, as a harmless philanthropist.
“Anyone looking for evidence at the sessions that
Soros, who is best known . . . for giving money to liberal
causes, was using the conference to take over the
financial world and shape it to his own design would be
sorely disappointed,” Times-Union correspondent Sara
Young-Knox wrote. “Many of the panelists were university
professors and as such focus on research and
publishing, not politics.”
But insider billionaire Soros, as AFP reported last
week, is much more than a maverick investor and
Democratic Party donor. And as the front-page story in
this edition explains, the thin glaze of benign intentions
and shop talk among intellectuals presented in the Times-
Union’s news story belied the reality outside the sealedoff
hotel, where curious citizens and independent, nonestablishment
media were treated as interlopers.
The 2011 conference, “Crisis and Renewal:
International Political Economy at the Crossroads,” was
billed as a means of addressing “the aftershocks of our
global financial crisis,” according to a posting on the
website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking
(INET), which sponsored the event.
INET’s posting added: “We face our own challenge
of reconstruction. The 1944 conference was, famously,
largely an Anglo-American affair, whereas today’s
reconstruction must engage the larger European Union
as well as the emerging economies of Eastern Europe,
Latin America and Asia.”
So, INET’s stated goal of reconstruction—
a revealing word used twice referring
to vast regions of the world—is presented
as no big deal, since this event
was supposedly about “research and
publishing,” according to what the
Times-Union conveyed. But it’s clear
from INET’s own words that this conference
was designed to deal with the big
picture.
As AFP went to press, INET had
posted videos of some panel discussions
on its website just after the conference.
AFP will review them for future stories.
Logically, recommendations from a
conference like this will function as
“soft law” and influence legislation or
executive policy decisions down the
road, just as UN confabs eventually
inspire binding agreements. The distinction between
private and public is so minor these days as to be almost
non-existent. A private, for-profit central banking system
controls the money and credit of the world’s nation
states and hammers them with interest charges for creating
money (governments essentially buy money from
the banks) which has been the case for nearly 100 years
in the U.S. and much longer abroad. So there is no historical
basis to assume INET’s BrettonWoods event can
be regarded as a harmless gathering of intellectuals
who just wanted to hear themselves talk.
Notably, INET executive director RobertA. Johnson
has credentials that reveal a background involving decisionmaking
in government and in the business sector.
“He recently served on the United Nations
Commission of Experts on International Monetary
Reform under the chairmanship of Joseph Stiglitz.
Previously, Johnson was a managing director at Soros
Fund Management where he managed a global currency,
bond and equity portfolio specializing in emerging
markets. Prior to working at Soros Fund Management,
he was a managing director of Bankers Trust Company
managing a global currency fund. Johnson served as
chief economist of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee
under the leadership of Chairman William Proxmire
(D-Wis.),” states an INET biography.
The NewYorker magazine’s John Cassidy, listed as a
participant by INET, saw the Bretton Woods event as
largely an intellectual aerobics session on economics,
as related in his blog column dated April 12.
AFP, in trying to gain access like any other media,
made several phone calls to INET’s listed media representative.
No calls were returned. A call placed to the
head of security of the conference site, the Mount
Washington Hotel, also was not returned. The intent
was to reach a conference spokesman.
The other select media allowed inside included
Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal, Chrystia
Freeland of Reuters and three Financial Times writers,
among others.
At the April 9 press conference, according to the
Times-Union, former British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown remarked about investing “in science and education,”
and added that America and Europe need to
focus on high-value products that are based on science
and education. He added that China should open up its
consumer market to theWestern world’s products.
Brown neglected to note that, for the last 20 years
or more, the U.S. was forced to throw its markets wide
open to a barrage of Chinese imports, which have
drastically undercut U.S. industrial might because the
domestic barriers that stifle U.S. productivity—all the
regulations, environmental edicts, taxes, usury on
loans and other factors—drive up the costs of U.S.
goods and services as wages fall.
Meanwhile, U.S.-based companies farm out their
labor to lands such as China where domestic costs are
lower. The resulting products are shipped to the U.S.
nearly tariff-free. Cash-strapped American consumers
usually succumb to the cheaper imports and leave U.S.
products on the shelves. This unravels the U.S. industrial
base that used to support a thriving middle class. But
to reverse this bind would mean adopting a nationalistic
policy, which evidently is not on the INET agenda.
Brown predictably preached, “We can’t retreat into
nationalism.” Globally minded figures such as Brown
always automatically condemn the concept of national
self-interest—since they are instinctively afraid of
national sovereignty in the financial realm, just as they
bemoan it in terms of foreign policy. In their view,
NATO calling the shots militarily equates with the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank—both
created at the first Bretton Woods confab in 1944—
playing a major role in financially steering the nation
states toward a one-world system.
Some 200 participants were at Bretton Woods II,
which was INET’s second conference since its 2009
formation. A list of 94 confirmed speakers was
released by INET (see list at right). Soros, who put on
the event moderated by Mr. Johnson, also is associated
with the Bretton Woods Committee, which promotes
understanding of the IMF and theWorld Bank.
A major participant at the first BrettonWoods conference
in 1944, British economist John Maynard
Keynes, had talked about a world currency, the bancor,
but the measure was considered too radical—then. A
35-page study was released one year ago that revived
the bancor concept. It’s too soon to tell whether INET’s
meeting in New Hampshire considered a global currency
as an assumed cure for the world’s economic ills,
but the worldview of the leading figures who attended
and the history of high finance point to more consolidation
of the private monetary control already wielded
against the world.
INET’s List of Speakers at
Bretton Woods II
Anat Admati, Professor of Finance and Economics, Stanford
University
Phillipe Aghion, Professor of Economics, Harvard University
George Akerlof, UC Berkeley
W. Brian Arthur, Fellow, Econometric Society
Jim Balsillie, Founder and Chair, CIGI
Eric Beinhocker, Senior Fellow, McKinsey and Company
Erik Berglof, Chief Economist and Special Adviser,
European Bank for Reconstruction & Development
Tom Bernes, Executive Director, CIGI
Paul Blustein, Brookings Institution
Claudio Borio, Bank for International Settlements
James Boughton, Historian, IMF
Richard Bronk, London School of Economics
Gordon Brown, Former Prime Minister, United Kingdom
Wendy Carlin, University College London
John Cassidy, The New Yorker
Ha-Joon Chang, Reader, Political Economy of Development,
University of Cambridge
Barbara Craig, Oberlin College
Marcello De Cecco, Professor of Monetary and Financial
History, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Charles Dallara, Institute of International Finance
Paul Davidson, Co-Founder, Journal of Post Keynesian
Economics
Brad Delong, Professor of Economics, University of
California at Berkeley
Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political
Science, University of California Berkeley
Alex Evans, Head of Research Program on Climate Change,
Resource Scarcity and Multilateralism, Center of International
Cooperation, NYU
Niall Ferguson, Professor of History, Harvard University
Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Political Science, University
of Massachusetts
Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Professor of Economics, Institut d’Etudes
Politiques de Paris
Duncan Foley, Professor, New School of Social Research
Jeffrey Frankel, Professor of Capital Formation and Growth,
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Chrystia Freeland, Editor at Large, Reuters
Roman Frydman, Professor of Economics, New York
University
Ian Goldin, James Martin 21st Century School
Andy Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank
of England
Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, Professor of Economics and
Economic History, Freie Universitat, Berlin
Kevin Hoover, Duke University
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director, Waterloo Institute for
Complexity and Innovation, University of Waterloo
Yasheng Huang, Sloan School of Management, MIT
Joyce Jacobsen, Wesleyan University
Harold James, Professor of History, Princeton University
William Janeway, Senior Advisor, Warburg Pincus
Marleen Janssen Groesbeek, Policy Advisory, Eumedion
Paul Jenkins, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for International
Governance Innovation
Robert A. Johnson, INET Executive Director
Simon Johnson, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Global
Economics and Management, Sloan School of Management,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Senior Fellow at the
Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington,
D.C.
Peter Jungen, Peter Jungen Holding GmbH
Anatole Kaletsky, Associate Editor, The Times
Henry Kaufman, President, Henry Kaufman & Co., Inc.
John Kay, Columnist, Financial Times
Richard Koo, Chief Economist, Nomura Research Institute
Louis Kuijs, Senior Economist, World Bank (Beijing)
Deepak Lal, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of
California, Los Angeles
William Lazonick, Professor, Economics, University of
Massachusetts
Robert Litan, Vice President for Research and Policy,
Kauffman Foundation
Barry Lynn, New America Foundation
Wolfgang Munchau, Associate Editor, Financial Times
Dalia Marin, Professor of International Economics,
University of Munich
Felix Martin, Thames River Capital
Richard McGregor, Financial Times
Perry Mehrling, Professor, Barnard College, Columbia
University
Zhu Min, Special Advisor, International Monetary Fund
Alan Murray, Wall Street Journal
Daniel Neilson, Bard College, Simon’s Rock
Kevin O’Rourke, Professor of Economics, Trinity College
(Dublin)
Jean Pisani-Ferry, Director, Bruegel [think tank], Brussels
Y.V. Reddy, Former Governor, The Reserve Bank of India,
currently University of Hyderabad
William Rees, Professor, University of British Columbia
Carmen Reinhart, Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow,
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics, Harvard
University
Jeff Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute
Andre Sapir, Professor of Economics, Universite Libre de
Bruxelles
Orville Schell, Director, Center on U.S.-China Relations
Garry Schinasi, Visiting Fellow, Bruegel [think tank], Brussels
Mario Seccareccia, Professor of Economics, University of
Ottawa
Andrew Sheng, Chief Adviser, China Banking Regulatory
Commission
Victor Shih, Assistant Professor of Political Science,
Northwestern University
Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy,
the University of Warwick
John Smithin, Professor of Economics, Schulich School of
Business
George Soros, Chairman, Soros Fund Management and Open
Society Foundations
Joseph Stiglitz, University Professor, Columbia University,
Nobel Laureate
Larry Summers, Harvard University
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Assistant Secretary-General for
Economic Development, United Nations Department of
Economic and Social Affairs (DESA)
Alan Taylor, Director, Center for the Evolution of the Global
Economy at UC Davis
Gillian Tett, U.S. Managing Editor, Financial Times
Niels Thygesen, Emeritus Professor of International
Economics, University of Copenhagen
Camilla Toulmin, International Institute for Environment and
Development
Adair Turner, Chairman, Financial Services Authority
Leanne Ussher, Assistant Professor of Economics, the City
University of New York
Andres Velasco, Chile’s Former Minister of Finance
Paul Volcker, Former Chairman, Federal Reserve
ChristianWesterlindWigstrom, PhD Candidate, University
of Oxford
MartinWolf, Chief Economics Commentator, Financial
Times
YuYongding, Director, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Steve Ziliak, Professor of Economics, Roosevelt University
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| if the Bretton Woods II conference was really just an academic gathering, as apologists claimed, why were policemen refusing entrance to locals, visitors and independent journalists like AFPʼs Mark Anderson and Stephen Lombardo? Those on the outside were left wondering what exactly was being discussed inside that necessitated such secrecy and security. |
 | |||
| this is one of several shiny black sedans that conspicuously tooled around the little town of Bretton Woods while the renters of such chauffeured vehicles—financial movers and shakers—met behind closed doors at the Bretton Woods II meeting. |
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