To this, Mr. Nixon shortly responded with devaluation of the dollar, a temporary expedient giving
a very brief breathing-space to get back to the work of establishing dollar convertibility. Nixon
continued his bungling, suggesting that this devaluation made conditions more favorable for
negotiating trade and tariff concessions-- more trade war.^The financiers of the world weighed Mr. Nixon's wisdom, and began selling the dollar at still-
greater discounts. Through successive crises, Mr. Nixon continued to speak only of John
Connally's Holy Remedies of trade and tariff concessions. Financiers thereupon rushed
substantially out of all currencies into such hedges as world-wide commodity speculation on a
scale unprecedented in modern history. Still, Mr. Nixon had nothing to propose on dollar
convertibility- only trade wars. The US domestic economy exploded into Latin American style
inflation.General commodity speculation, reflecting a total loss of confidence in all currencies, seized upon
basic agricultural commodities-among others. Feed prices soared, driving meat, poultry, and
produce costs and prices toward the stratosphere.^It was during this period, as Nixon's credibility seemed so much less important than during late
1972, that a sudden rush of enthusiasm developed for the moral sensibilities of Chairman Sam
Ervin's Senate Select Committee. [fn 13]As LaRouche points out, it was the leading Anglo-American financier factions who
decided to dump Nixon, and availed themselves of the pre-existing Watergate affair in
order to reach their goal. The financiers were able to implement their decision all the
more easily thanks to the numerous operatives of the intelligence community who had
been embedded within the Plumbers from the moment of their creation in response to an
explicit demand coming from George Bush's personal mentor, Henry Kissinger.
Watergate included the option of rapid steps in the direction of a dictatorship not so much
of the military as of the intelligence community and the law enforcement agencies acting
as executors of the will of the Wall Street circles indicated. The "Seven Days in May"
overtone of Watergate, the more or less overt break with constitutional forms and rituals
was never excluded. We must recall that the backdrop for Watergate had been provided
first of all by the collapse of the international monetary system, as made official by
Nixon's austerity decrees imposing a wage and price freeze starting on the fateful day of
August 15, 1971. What followed was an attempt to run the entire US economy under the
top-down diktat of the Pay Board and the Price Commission. This economic state of
emergency was then compounded by the artificial oil shortages orchestrated by the
companies of the international oil cartel during late 1973 and 1974, all in the wake of
Kissinger's October 1973 Middle East War and the Arab oil boycott. In August, 1974,
when Gerald Ford decided to make Nelson Rockefeller, and not George Bush, his vice-
president designate, he was actively considering further executive orders to declare a new
economic state of emergency. Such colossal economic dislocations had impelled the new
Trilateral Commission and such theorists as Samuel Huntington to contemplate the
inherent ungovernability of democracy and the necessity of beginning a transition
towards forms that would prove more durable under conditions of aggravated econmomic
breakdown. Ultimately, much to the disappointment of George Bush, whose timetable of
boundless personal ambition and greed for power had once again surged ahead of what
his peers of the ruling elite were prepared to accept, the perspectives for a more overtly