REGISTER: Bette's Sunday Speakeasy with Matthew Pearce on the profit of destruction

Bette members—please register for our Speakeasy with NAFO founding member Matthew Pearce who will walk us through his nine-part economic series, The New Bretton Woods - May 31, 11 am Pacific

***Bette members will find the registration link below the paywall. To join our community events and to help support independent investigative journalism in a time of grave peril, please upgrade to a paid membership.***

The Profit of Destruction

Some of the most important work being done in this moment is coming from activists committed to applying their areas of expertise to the fight for democracy and democratic values.

Among them is Matthew Pearce, a UK-based economist, technologist and founding member of NAFO, who worked with me on this devastating report:

Before the Final Stage: America Is On the Edge of Genocide — A Q&A with Matthew Pearce

NAFO — North Atlantic Fella Organization — is a pro-Ukrainian decentralized fund-raising group of volunteers who accidentally reinvented information warfare.

At his The Angry Dogs Substack, Pearce reports on the cost of disinformation, the pipeline from Moscow to the West Wing, and how the world set itself on fire.

I am bringing him back to speak with the Bette Dangerous community on Sunday, May 31, 11 am Pacific, to walk us through his nine-part economic series, The New Bretton Woods, on how America is being destroyed for profit.

The Atlantic Charter, drafted during U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's August 1941 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on a ship in the North Atlantic, was the most notable precursor to the Bretton Woods Conference. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

You can read a summary of the series here, which includes links to each report published to date:

The New Bretton Woods

Here is an excerpt from that summary:

In July 1944, in a hotel in New Hampshire, forty-four nations sat down and agreed how money would work after the war. They produced a system that ran the international economy for twenty-seven years and underwrote the dollar’s reserve status for fifty-five. The system was Bretton Woods. The men who built it understood, even if they did not always say so, that a monetary order is a security order in different clothes.

That order is ending.

It is not ending in the way the textbooks anticipated, through inflation or current-account crisis or the slow grinding rise of a credible competitor currency. It is ending through privatisation. The yield on the dollar’s reserve status, which has accrued for half a century to the US Treasury and through it to the public balance sheet, is being captured by a small set of equity holders. Their political representatives now hold cabinet positions in the United States. Their largest single donor in the United Kingdom has given Reform UK more money than any living person has ever given a British political party. The vocabulary through which the transition is being narrated, to Global South audiences and to Western voters alike, was written in 1975 by a man most people remember, if at all, as an eight-time American presidential candidate with a fraud conviction.

This series is about how that happened, who is doing it, and what it means.

---

Matthew also offered the following details to read in advance of our meeting on Sunday:

What a nine-part investigation found when it stopped using the words other people had built...—Matthew Pearce

There is an argument that arrives pre-assembled in the educated register of serious financial commentary. It runs roughly as follows: The dollar has been weaponised. Reserve managers have grown nervous. The exorbitant privilege is being abused. A multipolar transition is under way, with the Global South pushing back against an arrangement that has outlived its legitimacy. Reasonable people are obliged to take this seriously, and reasonable people increasingly do.

Almost every word of that paragraph was built by people who hold positions in the trade it describes.

This is the load-bearing finding of The New Bretton Woods, a nine-part investigation into how the dollar’s reserve role, established in 1944 as a public good and defended for eighty years as the financial leg of a transatlantic security architecture, is currently being asset-stripped in plain sight.

The investigation reads donation registers, beneficial-ownership leaks, Companies House filings, employment histories, parliamentary Hansard records, and primary documents.

It avoids press characterisation where it can. And underneath every part runs a methodological commitment that turned out to be the investigation’s most uncomfortable discovery: the vocabulary in which the dollar system is discussed has been deliberately contaminated, and the contamination is the proof that the operation worked.

You cannot see the trade if you describe it in the words built by the people running it. That sounds melodramatic. It is, on the evidence, true.

Once you realise that Trump and co. are in position to make billions from the failure of the dollar, everything makes sense. Chaos is the thing. There is no endpoint apart from chaos, chaos sells gold. Crypto allows the profits to vanish, AI makes the infrastructure sellable to the general public in a way crypto cannot… It is all documented, every single thing.—Matthew Pearce for Bette Dangerous

As Matthew gives us clarity on this intentionally opaque world, we have a better chance to focus the fight ahead.

Please join us on Sunday, and if you are not yet a paid member, please consider upgrading.

---

More about Matthew Pearce here:

Matthew Pearce is founding member of NAFO, a founder of SE42 Labs Technology and AI Research Company; a writer for Washington Outsider Centre for Information Warfare; a writer for theangrydogs.com; and a stakeholder in the UK government Rycroft Report into foreign interference in British politics.

A heartfelt thank you to those of you who are renewing your memberships at the full annual fee and to those who continue to support me at the Founding Member level. Your support means everything to me and allows this project to continues.

Those on a tight budget, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at bettedangerous/gmail as I offer a discount for fixed income members and those dedicated to pro-democracy activism.

Please keep scrolling below the paywall for the registration link.

****

****

Bette Dangerous is a reader-funded magazine. Thank you to all monthly, annual, and founding members.

I expose the corruption of billionaire fascists, while relying on memberships for support.

Thank you in advance for considering the following:

• Upgrade to Paid Member

• Upgrade to Founding Member

• Gifting memberships

• Share my reporting with allies

• Buying my ebooks

• Donating to the ko-fi fund or directly to venmo

A private link to an annual membership discount for older adults, those on fixed incomes or drawing disability, as well as activists and members of the media is available upon request at bettedangerous/gmail. 🥹

More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Her Hot Type column appears in Byline Supplement. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.

🤍

Begin each day with a grateful heart.

🤍

REGISTRATION LINK FOUND HERE