In the days when I still used the despicable instant gram, I made this to try to summarize what I felt was most important to grasp about what happened at the Bretton Woods Conference when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as they exist today were established. The conference was held in July of 1944, but Keynes's plan was written two years earlier, in preparation for the conference. John Maynard Keynes is largely misunderstood today, as many powerful people would like him to remain, because understanding him correctly would allow the masses to establish an actually fair international monetary and financial system. As it is, however, the IMF and World Bank function as a global autocracy, issuing fiat currency that only their close knit insiders have legal rights to oversee and dictate. The entire edifice is the quintessence and origin, if you ask me, of monopolism, autocracy, and totalitarianism in the world. It starts with our value system, our units of account and value, our means of keeping track of our relationships and resources. In Debt, the First 5000 Years, David Graeber explains the concepts of debt, money, and trade, from a historical and anthropological perspective. One takeaway from that text is that money, finance, and debt are all symbolic means of relating to each other and collectively managing our shared resources on this planet, to survive, and to balance the trade offs inherent in situations where resources can be limited, off limits at times, or overabundant at others. It is worth reading that book to break free of the ideas many of us have about what money means, and what debt is--to see from the vantage point that unfortunately only officers at central banks tend to feel authorized to use.

Each of us is authorized to oversee and consent or disagree with our global legal and economic structures and protocols. There is absolutely no reason aside from chance and custom that a few people are in positions to dictate which states are "poor" and which are "rich" and even if this were based on the natural resources in the very earth beneath those made-up borders, such resources would not belong to any one person more than any other, aside from the violent forces used to insist on such access or lack thereof. Property, like debt, is a human construct, a social construct, and as such is subject to collective understandings and sentiments of justice. Each and every person is entitled to an equal say in what is just and what is equitable. Anyway, the individuals who represented the states with surplus wealth at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference were nonetheless in positions to establish customs, protocols, and institutions for regulating global trade and finance. There were representatives from the wealthy states of the world, and the two wealthiest were the US and the UK, in that order. Therefore, Harry White, the rep of the US, was ultimately given the final say in what proceeded. John Keynes, the rep of the UK, outlined the bancor plan, which in its best form would mean an egalitarian central credit union, treating all states equally, functioning to maintain sustainable and humanitarian windows of surplus and deficit. The global "reserve" currency would be a neutral, nondenominational currency regulated by that central union, not a currency controlled by any member state, as such power corrupts and was one of the very reasons the conference was held in the first place.

That plan was altered to render it useless by White, who, in the interest of maintaining US dominance in international finance and trade, elected instead to use the US dollar, supposedly backed by gold at $35 an ounce, as the global reserve currency, meaning the US Fed would remain the ruler of the global financial and trade economies. In my simplistic caricature of the event, I show Keynes proposing a sensible plan that, though never tried before, would by its very definition maintain balanced trade and stimulate cooperation among states by keeping finance running according to egalitarian logic, disallowing any states from falling so far into debt as to become stuck in debt peonage, and any states from accruing so much surplus wealth as to become too big to fail on global markets and in global relations. Then I depict White as arrogantly assuming that holding onto US dominance is the obvious and only option, since no one could effectively overrule the US rep's decision.

As we all know, in 1971, the gold standard became a worldwide joke when France called the US on its bluff, requesting its gold in exchange for all of its US dollars, and Nixon said, "Uh, never mind. The new rule is that dollars are reserve currency in themselves. Gold will not be exchanged for dollars, but dollars are still the global reserve currency." The 2008 crisis was another huge disaster stemming from this same cheat. It is still up to us to establish a global monetary policy that does not let any one state act as a bank to control the rest, because such a position of power is obviously not a fair or democratic function of any social organization meant to stimulate the best in all members for the sharing and trading of resources and ensuring of collective survival.