IMF Managing Director Georgieva Insults, and Then Injures FDR and the American System

Oct. 19, 2020 (EIRNS)—The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgieva, gave a speech at the Fund’s annual meeting Oct. 18 amounting to an attack on President Franklin Roosevelt and the American System. It took the name of FDR’s post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary and credit plan in vain. It attributed this plan to the British pro-fascist economist John Maynard Keynes, whose proposal was rejected at Bretton Woods in 1944. And worse, Georgieva claimed that the world is now at a “new Bretton Woods moment” and needs an anti-science, anti-development, green new deal.

The Atlantic Council, which is moving at this moment to try to neutralize Trump Administration electric power development plans in Africa, strongly praised Georgieva’s speech. Atlantic Council President and CEO Frederick Kempe published an editorial Oct. 18 saying that the United States has to organize an anti-China “new Bretton Woods” quickly, as Georgieva intended. Lyndon LaRouche, who first formally proposed a return to FDR’s intended Bretton Woods system 25 years ago, insisted that U.S.-China cooperation, together with Russia and India, was necessary to launch such a return to sound international credit for industrial and scientific development. Why? To have enough economic power, said LaRouche, to put London’s financial empire down and keep it down.

Georgieva started and ended with what she thought were inspirational quotes from Keynes, as if Keynes had shaped Bretton Woods. She started by claiming that Keynes “captured the significance of international cooperation as hope for the world. ‘If we can continue ... the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase,’ he said.” What Keynes actually pushed at the Bretton Woods conference were the British imperial trade preferences, London’s colonialist practice that FDR had sworn to get rid of. In fact, his design of the IMF as an anti-investment world trade “clearing agreement” directly conflicted with Roosevelt Administration plans for Bretton Woods, and those of many developing nations there, and was rejected. And Georgieva ended with, “The best memorial we can build to those who have lost their lives in this crisis is, in the words of Keynes, ‘that bigger thing’— building a more sustainable and equitable world.” (Emphasis in original.) Keynes’s actual bigger thing was the British Empire, and its economic principles taught him by his mentor, Bank of England Governor Baron Montagu Norman—and well-practiced, Keynes wrote, by Hitler’s Reichsbank governor and Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht.

Georgieva added injury to the insults to FDR, by claiming that “a new Bretton Woods moment” means a global green new deal. This would mean reversing global economic development and reducing world population by forcing investment in the “colonial” throwbacks wind, solar and biomass power-generation worldwide. Among world leaders only Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin fully oppose this green new deal, so Georgieva was playing to what she would consider greater powers, the City of London and Wall Street.

It was otherwise a very “caring” speech about protecting people from the pandemic, from the head of an IMF which has been forcing Ecuador and other countries in hard-hit Latin America to cut their public health budgets, repeatedly, if they wish access to international credit.

The idea of Georgieva and Kempe must be at least the 25th fake “new Bretton Woods” plan in 25 years, with the intent to confuse or to suppress LaRouche’s proposal once it became widely discussed. Kempe declares,

“It’s worth reflecting on the enormity of what Georgieva is suggesting, as the original Bretton Woods was the first agreement of its kind—a fully negotiated global monetary order, resting at that time upon gold and the U.S. dollar. Bretton Woods put into place the rules and the wherewithal for the expansion and sustainability of democratic capitalism, which in the end would triumph over centrally controlled, Soviet-style economies.”

This is exactly the opposite of Roosevelt’s actual Bretton Woods plan—to triumph over British colonial “18th-century methods,” as FDR put it, and to cooperate with the Soviet Union, India, China and other countries in industrial and technological development of the underdeveloped nations.

LaRouche’s long-standing new Bretton Woods proposal is the only one which begins with President Roosevelt’s 1944 intention and builds on it; just as LaRouche was the only economist to warn in the 1967-71 period that London’s destruction of Roosevelt’s Bretton Woods system would throw the world economy into a speculative disaster.