Kennedy and the Twilight of the Globalists

By Aaron Good, Columnist, The Kennedy Beacon

Independent candidate for president Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently spoke about the BRICS alliance — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — and the ongoing and unprecedented move toward de-dollarization in the global economy. Said Kennedy to “Last Call” host Brian Sullivan, CNBC,

[The emergence of BRICS] happened because of our weaponization of the US dollar and weaponization of our foreign policy – unilateral weaponization – and the weaponization of our control of the world currency. We’re impounding people's personal assets if the government misbehaved, and we do it unilaterally, so we created [the BRICS]. We need to de-escalate our … violence around the world which has driven the creation of BRICS.

This is going to be an enormous issue for the next US president and the American people. In a cyclical fashion, the US – as Kennedy points out – has itself generated serious opposition to the US-led international economy. Specifically, the US has abused its status as the owner of the global reserve currency. In so doing, the US sparked a growing international alliance dedicated to overcoming the monetary foundation of US global dominance, the US dollar. Like a tragic hero, the US Empire has finally conjured Nemesis, the vengeful Greek goddess who punished those whose hubris offended the gods.

It was another Kennedy – President John F. Kennedy – who most actively sought to stabilize the dollar and the Bretton Woods system which had been established by the US and its allies near the end of World War II. After JFK was assassinated, there was no restraining the US war machine. President Lyndon Johnson quickly abandoned JFK’s effort to responsibly manage the US balance of payments position. Most notably, Johnson reversed JFK’s Vietnam policies. President Kennedy had not only refused to introduce ground troops into Vietnam, he ordered a full withdrawal of US personnel by the end of 1965. Johnson’s reversal was swift. He  immediately set about starting a hot war in Vietnam, signing an escalatory executive order on the day after JFK’s funeral. A month after the assassination, Johnson told his generals, “Just get me elected and I'll give you your damn war.”

Under Johnson, the US badly wrecked its balance of payments position. Under the US-designed Bretton Woods system, the US was obligated to use up its gold reserves to pay off foreign holders of dollars. The dollar’s gold peg was established in the interest of fairness – so that the US could not abuse its ownership of the dollar by buying up the commanding heights of smaller economies. But rather than uphold its end of the bargain, the US simply defaulted on the Bretton Woods dollar system in 1971. The high-handedness of this move was best captured at the G10 Rome meeting that same year by US Treasury Secretary John Connally, who stated, “The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem.”

I detail the Western elites’ conflict over the dollar in my book, American Exception. To summarize, the apex of the US power structure acted to manage and manipulate events throughout the 1970s – including oil shocks, Fed interest rates, and Third World debt crises. The endgame was to install a new dollar regime that would give the US oligarchy even more wealth and power. Once this new dollar regime was fully consolidated in the early years of Reagan’s presidency, the US power elite became even more dominant over politics and society. The end of Bretton Woods and the creation of the new dollar regime marked the beginning of an era of unprecedented economic polarization in the US. The link between rising productivity and rising wages was severed, as seen in the chart below:

The key to the new system was that it gave the US the ability to run massive deficits year after year because the US treasury bill came to replace gold in the international system. This allowed the US to spend enormous sums on the military, and it allowed Wall Street to create enormous amounts of credit (and debt) – all without suffering the inflation that such policies would otherwise produce. Due to these dynamics, I have referred to the USA’s post-Bretton Woods currency as the Rumpelstiltskin dollar. The US can create money from nothing; the rest of the world treats these dollars as though they are “good as gold.” When one grasps the enormity of what the US pulled off here, it calls into question whether the Vietnam War should be regarded as a defeat for the US. The war’s consequences left the US Empire more powerful than before.

Now, in 2023, the historic inertia of empire is moving the US ever closer to the fate of all empires. The American people cannot but feel the ways in which the republic has been bled to feed the empire. Wall Street and the military industrial complex have profited immeasurably from this system while the American people have been exploited and neglected. This chart below, with data from the World Inequity Database, illustrates how dramatically the economy shifted after the fall of Bretton Woods and especially since the early 1980s when the new dollar regime was consolidated:

Linear-scale chart showing net personal wealth, categorized by percentile ranges. Data source, through 2021, is the World Inequity Database: https://wid.world/country/usa/ [from Wikipedia]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the only presidential contender speaking seriously about these issues and connecting them to the struggles of everyday Americans. “[We’ve] got 57% of the American people who could not put their hands on a thousand dollars if they have an emergency,” Kennedy has said on numerous occasions. “For those people, the engine light goes on in their car and it's like the apocalypse happened. It's the end of the world.”

Kennedy also alludes to how predatory financialization of the economy has put homeownership out of reach for the majority of Americans:

We have kids [who] can't afford houses. [T]he housing prices have gone from [around] two hundred thousand dollars… two years ago to four hundred thousand today. [A]lmost none of [my kids’] friends are buying houses. That was part of the American dream […] if you worked hard, you played by the rules, you could afford a house, you could take a summer vacation, […] you could raise a family, put money aside for retirement… That was with one job.

Perhaps most notably, Kennedy has the courage and wisdom to connect these issues to the US Empire and the ways in which the American war machine has sucked money and resources away from human needs and into corporate profiteering:

[America’s economic decline] seems structural over years or decades… Number one, we have to unravel the warfare business – the warfare machine—that is bankrupting our country. […] Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian, [he] has done this extraordinary history on the decline of Empires. Every Empire in the last 500 years – its death knell was overextending its military abroad.

Although RFK Jr. has not released a comprehensive monetary reform plan, he has spoken of the need to stabilize the system:

Backing dollars and U.S. debt obligations with hard assets could help restore strength back to the dollar, rein in inflation and usher in a new era of American financial stability, peace and prosperity. [...] My uncle, President Kennedy, when he was in office, understood the importance of hard currency and the dangers of having pure fiat currency with no other option. He understood the relationship between fiat currency and war, fiat currency and […] very, very destructive environmental projects and also these giant aggregations of wealth and the unbalance, the disparities in wealth that are the ultimate yield of every fiat currency.

The US military colossus is intertwined with the post-Bretton Woods era of “globalization.” Since its inception, this imperial project has been pursued by people we can call globalists – Wall Street-centered corporate titans who created and policed a global economic system that made them richer than any oligarchy in history. The excesses of this system have created massive discontent and insecurity in the US and abroad. If the US does not change course, the inevitable end of this system is likely to be far more dangerous, if not nuclear. 

The importance of the 2024 presidential election is difficult to overstate. Independent candidate Kennedy represents the best possible opportunity for reforming this corrupt system, for restoring peace and prosperity in America, and for transforming the US into a positive actor on the global stage.