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The “Dollarization” of the Americas
By William F. Jasper
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Source: The John Birch Society Bulletin, August 1999
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“When
I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means
just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
— Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass
Last
January, the business pages of many newspapers reported on a startling
proposal by Argentine President Carlos Menem that his country abandon
its own currency, the peso, and adopt the U.S. dollar. In short order,
a number of stories began surfacing that Mexico, Canada, El Salvador,
Brazil, and Venezuela are also considering similar “dollarization”
proposals.
The brief, shallow analysis and generally nonchalant
tone found in most of the Establishment media’s reports about this
astounding development greatly belie the impact upon the world’s
political and economic structures that actual “dollarization” would
inaugurate. The vast majority of Americans have not even heard of
“dollarization” and have not the slightest idea that the adoption of
this nation-destroying program is an integral part of the Insiders’
plans for an end to sovereign nationhood and the enthronement of
tyrannical, one-world government. Nor do our fellow citizens have the
merest inkling that the plans to implement this program are already
well underway. To the extent that these radical proposals have
engendered “debate” at all, it has been an overwhelmingly one-sided
affair (no surprise there), with the usual assortment of globalist
cognoscenti unabashedly promoting the scheme and assuring us that
dollarization is the only realistic hope for stabilizing Latin
America’s tottering economies and protecting America’s prosperity.
While
the dollarization scheme is but one of several strands in the economic
rope of bondage that is being tightened on the American people (as well
as on the billions of other hapless victims with whom we share this
planet), it is the primary one on which we will be focusing here. There
are many possible and logical points at which to begin unraveling this
dangerous stratagem, but we will choose the Time magazine cover story
for February 15, 1999, which must surely rank as one of the most
extraordinary propaganda and disinformation pieces of this decade, if
not of this century. Along with the headline, “The Committee to Save
the World,” the cover featured the beaming visages of Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan, then- Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and
Deputy Treasury Secretary (now Treasury Secretary) Lawrence Summers,
with this riveting subtitle: “The Inside story of how the Three
Marketeers have prevented a global economic meltdown — so far.”
This
was more than your standard Insider puff piece aimed at honoring and
promoting a few of its own. It was designed as one of the major
centerpieces in an accelerated and intensified propaganda war unleashed
by the Conspiracy over the past few months to advance a number of key
objectives, all of which, ultimately, are directed toward propelling
the program of economic, political, and military “convergence” into
their planned, Orwellian new world order. Realizing that their
proposals for international political and military convergence face
strong nationalist objections — objections that will more readily be
overcome once economic convergence is well established — the one-world
advocates have been pushing the economic “reform” and “restructuring”
agenda full tilt.
The main purpose of the Time story is
two-fold: to incite near panic in the American public concerning
various “crises” that could initiate a global economic implosion; and
to offer panic relief in the form of economic crisis managers of
super-human genius and wisdom in whom we must place complete authority
to manage our planet’s economic assets and policies. “In late night
phone calls, in marathon meetings,” writes Time magazine’s Joshua
Cooper Ramo, “…these three men — Robert Rubin, Allan Greenspan and
Larry Summers — are working to stop what has become a plague of
economic panic.” According to Mr. Ramo’s gushingly adulatory screed —
replete with lavish, flattering photo spreads — citizens Rubin,
Greenspan, and Summers become ethereal creatures, virtual demigods,
with celestial intelligence and selfless virtue not available to mere
mortals. “What holds them together,” says Ramo, “is a passion for
thinking and an inextinguishable curiosity about a new economic order
that is unfolding before them like an Alice in Wonderland world.” The
reference to Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical storybook world is entirely
apropos, particularly if one keeps in mind that Alice’s dreamscape,
which began as amusingly absurd, rapidly degenerated into one that was
not merely terrifying and nightmarish, but decidedly dangerous — with
lots of nasty people trying to chop off her head. And, it should be
noted, this divine trio (Ramo calls them “The Trinity”) is not
passively observing this “unfolding” new order, but is actively
involved in creating the worldwide disorder that is generating the
“consensus” on the absolute “necessity” to adopt their global
solutions.
“The sheer fascination of inventing a 21st century
financial system motivates them more than the usual Washington drugs of
power and money,” says Ramo admiringly. No doubt the “Trinity” is
fascinated indeed with its heady mission of “inventing” and “saving”
the world. But is not holding the economic destiny of the planet in
one’s hands the ultimate drug of power and money? Though the
Greenspan-Rubin-Summers pseudo-deity may be in a key position for
wielding power, most veteran JBS members realize that it exercises no
power of its own. They are mere temporarily elevated front men,
sanctified technocrats, who implement the plans of a concerted
conspiracy of Insiders that remains behind the scenes. The most visible
organizational structure representing and carrying out the evil plans
of those Insider megalomaniacs is the Council on Foreign Relations. In
the May Bulletin, we provided an abbreviated history of the treachery
of the same CFR cabal operating through several presidential
administrations — both Republican and Democrat — to deliver the Panama
Canal, an asset of enormous economic and military value, to our
enemies. In the dollarization “debate” — and the larger, global,
economic “restructuring” of which it is a part — we are dealing with
the delivery of our entire country to the enemy.
Greenspan,
Rubin, and Summers are, naturally, veteran CFR members. As is Joshua
Cooper Ramo, the editor of Time’s world section, who heaped such lavish
praise upon the trio of economic mega-managers. So are, for that
matter, many other executives and editors at Time magazine and its
parent company, Time Warner. (Time Warner, in fact, is a corporate
member of the CFR.) But Time folks are not unique. Hundreds of their
colleagues, who dominate and control virtually all of our major media,
are also members of the CFR’s “Pratt House fraternity” that has
literally been running America for several decades. And, like Time,
they have been campaigning for economic convergence. Mr. Ramo’s piece
is but one of many similar reports in the broadcast and print media
over the past few months that have been aimed at psychologically
softening up the American business community and winning its acceptance
of the dollar as a regional currency.
What makes Mr. Ramo’s
article particularly revealing, though, is that it provides an
especially significant admission. He writes: “In the same way that the
threat of mutually assured destruction helped Kissinger replace the
Washington ideology with Realpolitik, the shadow of a massive economic
meltdown has helped the committee sell a market-driven policy that
could be labeled Realeconomik.” Aside from the fact that he is engaging
in typical CFR deception by referring to the blatantly
globalist-statist economic policies as “market-driven,” Ramo confirms
that the CFR clique is employing a favorite tactic that has succeeded
so fabulously on other fronts: pose a global specter, real or fictional
(which, in either case, you have created yourself), and then offer a
solution that demands vast new power for you and your cabal of “crisis
managers.”
So it was that we began to see a growing parade this
year of CFR “wise men” and their unquestioning followers marching in
lock step to push dollarization as the salvation for our impending
economic woes. The Wall Street Journal has been the chief cheerleader
for this effort.
One of the early Journal volleys this year
was fired by Harvard University Professor of Economics Robert J. Barro
in an op-ed column for March 8, 1999 entitled, “Let the Dollar Reign
From Seattle to Santiago.” Dollarization, he said, is “a good idea, not
just for Argentina but for other countries in the Western Hemisphere.
But the dollarization of the Americas won’t happen without U.S.
leadership.... Washington ought to take the lead in promoting the
monetary integration.”
When Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan
and Deputy Secretary Summers (who has since moved up to Secretary,
replacing his boss, Rubin, who retired on July 2nd) appeared before the
Senate Joint Economic Committee, they played the coy coquettes.
Greenspan averred that dollarization could “be clearly in the economic
and broader national interest of the United States,” but did not
explicitly endorse the proposal.
The supposedly tepid support
by Summer and Greenspan during their Senate testimony elicited an op-ed
piece from Judy Shelton in the Journal on April 29th admonishing them
to get behind dollarization:
The issue of dollarization goes to
the heart of monetary stability in our hemisphere. With Mexico and
Canada, our two most vital trade partners, considering the
dollarization option at the highest levels of policy discussion and
public debate, the U.S. is compelled to take a position. These
countries are talking about effectively replacing their own currencies
with the U.S. dollar or at least granting their citizens a choice of
currencies. For the three signatory nations to the North American Free
Trade Agreement, it would amount to the establishment of a common
currency to more fully realize the economic returns from a tariff-free
common market…. [Emphasis added.]
Then comes the big whopper.
“Dollarization has arisen as a spontaneous movement within our
hemisphere,” claims Ms. Shelton. “The ball is in America’s court; if
Washington plays it properly, it will score a powerful victory for free
trade and free markets.” But the dollarization bandwagon is about as
spontaneous as the Normandy invasion, and it has nothing to do with
free markets.
There are a myriad of documents, publications,
statements, speeches, conferences, meetings, and events from the past
several decades to which we could point — time and space permitting —
which copiously prove that the current dollarization drive we are now
witnessing is the culmination of a massive, long-range effort that
began many years ago as an intermediate stepping stone to world
government. One such document is Western Hemisphere Economic
Integration, a study by Gary Clyde Hufbauer (CFR, and former CFR vice
president) and Jeffrey J. Schott, published in 1994 by the Institute
for International Economics (IIE).
The dedication at the
beginning of this book reads: “TO DAVID ROCKEFELLER, For his lifelong
devotion to promoting economic development in Latin America and to
improving relations among the countries of the Western Hemisphere. His
wisdom has been an enormous source of encouragement to the work of the
Institute and inspired us to explore the important ties that unite the
Americas.”
Mr. Rockefeller, of course, was chairman of the CFR
from 1970-1985 and, as we will see, has played an especially key role
in the dollarization and Western hemispheric economic convergence
scheme. Likewise the IIE, which is virtually joined at the hip to the
CFR. The executive director of the IIE is former U.S. Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs C. Fred Bergsten
(CFR), who appeared on May 21st of this year before the House Banking
and Financial Services Committee to argue for the dollarization power
scam. The link between the CFR and the IIE is further demonstrated by
the list of IIE officers and directors provided in the Hufbauer-Schott
study. IIE’s Chairman is listed as Peter G. Peterson, who is also
chairman of the board of the CFR, a position he has held since 1985,
when he succeeded David Rockefeller in that position. Chairman of the
IIE Executive Committee is Anthony M. Solomon (CFR). Listed also are
the IIE board of directors, which include such CFR luminaries as W.
Michael Blumenthal, Carla A. Hills, Donald F. McHenry, Paul A. Volcker,
Marina Whitman, and Andrew Young. Chairman of the Advisory Committee is
Richard N. Cooper (CFR) a leading advocate of a global currency, a
global Federal Reserve, and global government. One of the members of
that same Advisory Committee was Lawrence H. Summers. Listed as an
Honorary Director was Alan Greenspan.
So what did the
Hufbauer-Schott study published by the IIE advocate? Very simply, “a
Western Hemisphere Free Trade Area (WHFTA)” following the EU pattern.
“After four decades of dedicated effort,” said the report, “Western
Europe has just arrived at the threshold of … monetary union, and
fiscal coordination. It seems likely that trade and investment
integration will proceed at a faster pace within the Western
Hemisphere.” (Emphasis added.) “Finally,” it stated, “the more
countries that participate in integration and the wider its scope, the
greater the need for some institutional mechanism to administer the
arrangements and to resolve the inevitable disputes, and the stronger
the case for a common legal framework.” (Which means, supranational
legislative, executive and judicial institutions, naturally.) “The
European Commission, Council, Parliament, and Court of Justice have
many of the powers of comparable institutions in federal states,” the
report noted approvingly, then went on to comment, “On this subject, we
score Europe with a 5 [on a scale of 0 to 5].”
Not satisfied
with the EU model, the authors proposed going far beyond it. They
asserted that “integration between NAFTA and Latin America should be
legally open-ended; potentially the WHFTA should include countries
outside the hemisphere.” Indeed, they asserted: “Economic logic
suggests that the expansion of NAFTA in an Asian direction is just as
desirable as its expansion in a Latin American direction.”
In
countless similar studies, speeches, lectures, and programs over the
years, the CFR elitists have prepped the elite of the U.S. and Western
intelligentsia and business communities so that they would
enthusiastically embrace this deadly nostrum — long before it appeared
“spontaneously” for general public consumption. But how did they
succeed in drawing Latin American leaders into this snare and
overcoming the long-standing fear of Yankee “dollar imperialism?” One
obvious answer is that through the lending programs of the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Wall Street banks, they
have saddled Latin American countries with hopeless debt burdens that
have left them desperate and willing to try radical measures. But a
more complete answer is to be found in the long-term activities of
groups like the IIE and the Council of the Americas (COA) that have for
two generations been assiduously grooming and tutoring the business,
academic, and political leaders of Latin America.
The COA
describes its origins thusly: “In 1965, David Rockefeller and a group
of like-minded business people founded the Council of the Americas
based on the fundamental belief that free markets and private
enterprise offer the most effective means to achieve regional economic
growth and prosperity.” (Those so naïve as to believe in the COA’s
professed embrace of “free markets and private enterprise” probably
also believe that the Social Security Administration has set up a bank
account with their name on it, awaiting their retirement!) Among the
CFR brotherhood joining Mr. Rockefeller in the COA’s leadership are COA
Chairman Robert A. Mosbacher, Sr., Vice Chairman Robert E. Wilhelm,
Treasurer Richard de J. Osborne, and General Counsel Sergio J. Galvis.
Some
240 companies with interests in Latin America, ranging from AT&T,
Bank of America, Coca Cola, Citibank, and Dow Jones & Company, to
Exxon, Ford, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, Newsweek, Turner
Broadcasting System, Wal-Mart, and Xerox, provide impressive muscle
(and financial support) for the COA’s agenda as corporate members. Most
of these companies, with a heavy CFR presence at their executive and
directorate levels, have proven to be reliable supporters of the
one-world corporatist line.
Working hand-in-glove with the
COA-CFR corporate socialists are the pampered princelings of the
U.S.-tax-dollar-subsidized multilateral lending institutions like the
IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), many of whose
officers are also CFR members. The acknowledgment section of the
aforementioned Hufbauer-Schott study, for instance, notes that the
“Inter-American Development Bank provided support for the research
underlying this project and the bank sponsored seminars for the
discussion of its preliminary results.” Indeed, a brief survey of the
daily faxes we receive from the IDB, IMF and their sister institutions
makes very plain the completely corrupt process by which the Insiders
form their convergence “consensus.” Each day brings announcements of
tens of millions (sometimes hundreds of millions) of dollars in IDB
“loans” for natural gas pipelines in Mexico, electric power plants in
Argentina, highways in Bolivia, coffee plantations in El Salvador, etc.
IDB cooperation can lift a Latin American politician by financing the
programs that make him look good, or help his opposition by pulling
funds and destroying confidence in his economic program.
Thus,
when President Carlos Menem of Argentina and President Hugo Chavez of
Venezuela delivered their CFR-scripted speeches at June COA luncheons
in New York, they knew they were addressing sympathetic movers and
shakers of the COA-CFR-IIE-IDB axis who would parlay their proposals
into the new “working consensus” that would become official U.S.
policy.
An American EU
Of course, what the new
world order architects have in mind for the Americas is exactly what
they are foisting on Europe in the form of the European Union and the
new euro currency. That evolving supranational monstrosity was also
presented to unwary Europeans as a “spontaneous” movement aimed at
“free trade” and “free markets.” But Europeans are belatedly waking up
to the fact that it is no accident that the centralized, socialist
bureaucracy of the EU is strangling their freedoms and national
sovereignty: It was planned to develop into exactly that from the start.
There
is no longer reason for any sensible American to doubt that the CFR
coterie intends to take us down the same path. The one-world architects
of the European Monetary Union (EMU) are openly advocating an American
Monetary Union (AMU). The CFR journal, Foreign Affairs for July/August
1999 provides ample confirmation. In the opening paragraph of his
essay, “From EMU to AMU?: The Case for Regional Currencies,” Zanny
Minton Beddoes of Britain’s The Economist pronounces with oracular
certainty: “By 2030 the world will have two major currency zones — one
European, the other American. The euro will be used from Brest to
Bucharest, and the dollar from Alaska to Argentina — perhaps even Asia.”
“Skeptics
argue that a national currency is a basic symbol of sovereignty that
countries choose to forfeit only under extraordinary circumstances,”
says Beddoes. Mr. Beddoes and his devious allies would surely like all
of us to believe that a national currency is only a “symbol of
sovereignty,” but it is much more than that, of course. It is an
essential ingredient of sovereignty, and a nation is at the fearful
mercy of any entity to whom it may be foolish enough to forfeit so
important a power. The Federal Reserve System and the International
Monetary Fund have already vindicated that claim a thousand times over,
and yet here we are about to be enticed into an even deeper abyss.
Words
fail to convey the enormity and audacity of this colossal, dangerous
fraud we are witnessing in the current “spontaneous movement” to
transform the Western Hemisphere into a carbon copy of the increasingly
tyrannical European Union. But even that grim prospect of an America
under a EU-style centrally controlled economic bloc does not begin to
convey the seriousness of the peril we face if we allow these plans to
succeed. Regional “integration” is but a steppingstone to the real
objective sought by the Insiders of a self-perpetuating Conspiracy:
Total, unrestrained power on a planetary scale. And if it ever succeeds
in attaining that monstrous objective, we can be sure that the killing
fields of Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, China and Russia
will pale by comparison to the global bloodbath that will be unleashed.
Once we are willing to grasp that fact, we will begin to give even more
effort to preventing this nightmare from ever being realized.
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