Transcript for "Dismantling America's Debt-Based Financial System"

Video by Richard C. Cook

Video posted May 15, 2025: Dismantling America's Debt-Based Financial System

Transcript:

I’d like to speak to you about Trump's tariffs by showing how Alexander Hamilton's compromised US financial system has come home to roost. To understand what is really going on, we need to study history.

Alexander Hamilton was named the first secretary of the treasury by President George Washington on September 11, 1789. They knew that the new government was not just broke. It was deeply in debt.

This was because Hamilton would be lobbying to get the federal government to pay off—at face value—all the debt from Revolutionary War bonds sold to ordinary citizens to raise money to fight the war. But this benefited mainly wealthy speculators who scoured the countryside to buy what had become worthless paper.

Hamilton was frank in his logic. He wanted to bind the moneyed class—mainly merchants, investors, and foreign bankers, primarily British bankers—to the new republic. So from the very start, the US government was a cash cow for the already rich.

In fact, the day after Hamilton became secretary of the treasury, he borrowed $50,000—then an immense sum—from his own Bank of New York, followed by another $50,000 from the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, to tide the government over until it got up and running and began to collect revenues from his planned tariff regime. But they knew tariffs on imports would never be enough.

The underlying purpose of Hamilton’s program was to recreate the British imperial system, also based on government debt, for our own Western Hemisphere empire. Hamilton used the word “empire” many times in his vision of America’s future. He knew that like the British Empire, America’s would also mean endless war. So a large standing army was also planned.

Nothing has changed in the intervening 236 years. The system has not been altered in any important respect. It has just become more locked in and harder to change, especially after the Federal Reserve System—actually designed by the European bankers—took effect in 1913, now over a century ago.

So here are the main elements of the system:

• The federal government, charged with applying the military force to create and expand the empire—now worldwide—is essentially bankrupt.

• To get money it has to go to the rich and mortgage the country’s future with the sale of bonds; of course, it has to out-compete all other countries with the same bleak outlook.

• The rich have an enormous and compliant banking system to borrow from in order to expand their bond purchases ad infinitum.

• The interest on the bonds is paid by the working classes at all income levels through taxes. Cumulative federal, state, and local taxes now run at about 50% of national income.

• A massive number of government, contractor, and NGO employees have also been living off the government’s deficits, creating a huge voting bloc to maintain the status quo.

• The government has even gotten foreigners to accept its dollar-denominated debt as payment against trade deficits by using US military might to enforce use of these dollars as a world trading currency.

• The only way for anyone to escape debt is through wars, default, or a devalued currency—that is, inflation, for which there is constant pressure. The government actually promotes inflation because this increases tax revenues needed to service the interest on the debt.

Until recently, the US (and Britain behind the curtain)—actually their rich bondholders—have ruled the world. Except that the world has now changed with other power centers arising and interest payments on the bonds becoming so high they can no longer be paid off. The Trump administration has recognized the catastrophic failure of the system. In fact, the entire Western financial structure is bankrupt.

So now tariffs have to go up in order to increase revenue, rebuild domestic manufacturing, create jobs, and reduce borrowing. Government expenditures must also be reduced, hence the huge budget cuts. The nation’s survival is at stake. Meanwhile, global finance is trying to crash the stock market to provoke hysteria. Britain and Israel, both fortresses of globalist influence, have been trying to stoke more war in Ukraine and the Middle East.

And, as always, the globalists will continue their relentless campaign to dumb down, brutalize, terrorize, and even genocide the world’s population. Underlying all is the inordinate lust for power.

What I have just explained is what is really behind the decision by the Trump administration to change the system, even if those involved are not fully conscious of all the pieces of the puzzle.

Yet an intelligent person might now even suggest that there’s got to be a better way to go about it, or at least measures that can be taken to improve the chances of success.

And of course there are. The original American colonies, particularly the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were able to create what may have been the most prosperous region on earth by utilizing their own indigenous currencies until the practice was outlawed by the British Currency Act of 1767. When Hamilton helped write the US Constitution, he made sure that no indigenous currencies would ever be issued in America. Only currency backed by loans from the rich, both to individual citizens and the government, would ever be allowed.

For a time, the government’s First and Second Banks of the United States functioned as a legitimate source of loans for industrial and infrastructure development, but this was short-lived. The Second Bank was abolished after President Andrew Jackson pulled out government savings. But at least it was recognized that credit should be treated as a public utility, not just the property of the rich.

Then during the Civil War, the Lincoln administration issued its own debt-free Greenbacks which kept working-class America afloat into the 20th century, until the Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913.

Before and during the Great Depression, there were many voices speaking out for a Greenback-type national currency and many calls for local currencies as well. But instead, Keynesian debt financing—more government borrowing—was embraced on a massive scale. Then, prior to his assassination, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order, though never implemented, to mandate issuance of a new regime of silver certificates as legal tender in payment of debt and taxes.

In 2011, Congressman Dennis Kucinich entered a legislative proposal for a system of indigenous national currency with a provision that would also abolish the Federal Reserve. This legislation, called the NEED Act, remains on the books. It would create a true Treasury-run national monetary authority and also contains a provision for a national dividend, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund, to balance government deficits and reduce consumer debt.

In other words, there’s a whole world of research, writing, and historical precedent available to the Trump administration to solve today’s crisis, if they are willing to break free of the globalist financiers, largely working from the City of London and New York, who have held our country in subjugation for over two centuries.

The US declared political independence in 1776, but we lost our economic independence to globalist finance. They are the ones who suck up the profits from our massive public and private debt, much incurred through endless war. Now is the time to regain our freedom. We can hope that Donald Trump understands that.