likely to have committed it. The policies of the Wall Street investment banking interests
named are those of usury and Malthusianism, stressing the decline of a productive
industrial economy in favor of savage Third World looting and anti-population measures.
The changes subsumed by Watergate included the abolition of government's function as a
means to distribute the rewards and benefits of economic progress among the principal
constituency groups upon whose support the shifting political coalitions depended for
their success. Henceforth, government would appear as the means by which the sacrifices
and penalties of austerity and declining standards of living would be imposed on a
passive and stupefied population. The constitutional office of the president was to be
virtually destroyed, and the power of the usurious banking elites above and behind the
presidency was to be radically enhanced.
The reason why the Watergate scandal escalated into the overthrow of Nixon has to do
with the international monetary crisis of those years, and with Nixon's inability to
manage the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the US dollar in a way satisfactory
to the Anglo-American financial elite. One real-time observer of the events of these years
who emphasized the intimate relation between the international monetary upheavals on
the one hand and the peripetea of Nixon on the other was Lyndon LaRouche. The
following comments by LaRouche are excerpted from a July, 1973 article on the
conjuncture of a re-valuation of the Deutsche Mark with John Dean's testimony before
Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate investigating committee:
Last week's newest up-valuation of the West German D-Mark pushed the inflation-soaked Nixon
Administration one very large step closer toward "Water- gate" impeachment. Broad bi-partisan
support and press enthusiasm for the televised Senate Select Committee airing of wide-ranging
revelations coincides with surging contempt for the government's handling of international and
domestic financial problems over the past six months.LaRouche went on to point out why the same financiers and news media who had
encouraged a coverup of the Watergate scandal during 1972 had decided during 1973 to
use the break-in and coverup as a means of overthrowing Nixon.
Then came the January [1973] Paris meeting of the International Monetary Fund.The world monetary system was glutted with over $60 billions of incon- vertible reserves. The
world economy was technically bankrupt. It was kept out of actual bankruptcy proceedings
throughout 1972 solely by the committment of the USA to agree to some January, 1973 plan by
which most of these $60 billions would begin to become convertible. The leading suggestion was
that the excess dollars would be gradually sopped in exchange for IMF Special Drawing Rights
(SDRs). With some such White House IMF action promised for January, 1973, the financial world
had kept itself more or less wired together by sheer political will throughout 1972.Then, into the delicate January Paris IMF sessions stepped Mr. Nixon's representatives. His
delegates proceeded to break up the meeting with demands for trade and tariff concessions- a
virtual declaration of trade war.Promptly, the financial markets registered their reaction to Mr. Nixon's bungling by plunging into
crisis.