March 17, 2008 (LPAC)--The campaign of former Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti against globalization, and for a New Bretton Woods monetary system, gained major press coverage again today, with an interview published in La Repubblica, the second largest national newspaper in Italy. "Globalization creates poverty, let us defend our production," reads the headline. "Tremonti: another Bretton Woods for the world order."

Tremonti's campaign has become the real issue in the ongoing Italian election campaign, and is splitting both his own political party and others, drawing support from members of both the traditional "left" and "right."

In the interview, Tremonti bluntly describes the situation:

"This crisis is a crisis with a big C, unfortunately similar, in many aspects, to 1929. Up until now, there has been no panic only because public intervention didn't take place after financial crashes but one moment before them. We can get out of it only through a new Bretton Woods, by rewriting the rules of the world order."

"Citing Goethe: this is not the end of the world but of a world. The end of the `marketist' world, the bankruptcy of economists who have either legitimized or misunderstood what was being created: [they are] furious Templars who are now shouting under the ruins of their mental temple."

In response to the question, how long will the crisis last? "This is a global, structural crisis. It is not limited to finance, but it includes the economy; not limited to the USA, but includes the rest of the world. The liquidity crisis is becoming an insolvency crisis. The technical instruments used so far have a limited usefulness... we need a concrete and symbolic discontinuity: a new Bretton Woods. In 1944 a new world economic order was founded, and the time has come to replace global disorder with a new global order. The sooner we organize a Bretton Woods, the earlier the crisis will be over."

In a rebuke to former EU commissioner Mario Monti, who wrote that globalization began already in 1914, but it was "interrupted by the war," Tremonti says: "What we call now globalization, in 1914 was created by `haute finance,' but above all by colonialism, by mass emigrations, and by the violent conflict among mercantile powers. The 1914 war was not a war to end globalization, but, combined with other causes, "globalization" unleashed the war, and devoured itself. In 1914, a fantastic book by Norman Angell came out, which excluded the possibility of war. One year later, somehow things occurred otherwise. Maybe we live in a time that needs more humanists and historians and fewer economists."

Tremonti defends himself from those who accuse him of "protectionism" with verbal tricks. He says that he is not "protectionist" as such, but a "liberal" who believes in "rules that create, correct and defend the market." In my book, Tremonti says, I wrote that "Europe must imitate America: protect its industrial production against unfair competition."

The article is accompanied by a small box explaining that "The Bretton Woods agreements were signed in July 1944 by 44 anti-fascist nations. They included fixed exchange rates, convertibility of the U.S. dollar in gold and the birth of the World Bank and the IMF. In 1947, the Treaty on trade followed."