Trump's "Liberation Day" Tariff Program

Can it work?

President Trump’s just-announced tariff program that he calls “Liberation Day” attempts to undo the catastrophic de-industrialization of the US perpetrated on this country by the globalist financial elite that began after the Vietnam War. A milestone was Nixon’s withdrawal from the gold standard. Another was the Federal Reserve’s crashing of the US economy in the recession that began in 1979. Another was NAFTA. Another was the massive wave of Chinese imports starting around 2000. Another was Obama’s bank bailouts of 2009.

The globalist program was led in the US by banking magnate David Rockefeller as a plan to destroy US manufacturing capability while flooding the world with dollars issued by the Federal Reserve as a world reserve currency. These dollars have also enabled the US to build hundreds of military bases to keep the world under control. Results today are the Ukraine and Middle Eastern wars.

The fact that millions of Americans no longer have real productive jobs and instead must work in the pathetically anemic “service industries” that mainly push paper has been a major factor in the demoralization and dumbing down of our entire society.

Whatever you might think of Trump, his associates, his foreign policy, and his first months in office with all the big policy changes, he has to be credited with recognizing the existential peril befalling the nation under this globalist mismanagement.

The new tariff program hopes to bring manufacturing back to the US in a big way. But there are problems with it. It certainly will not eliminate taxes which will always be a way of life in an industrial economy. Reducing taxes, maybe; eliminating them, no.

Also, a whole new generation of manufacturing-savvy Americans must be identified and trained to do the work needed for a high level of competitiveness in a world economy which has outpaced the US in many ways over the past few decades. It would be patently unfair to turn these jobs over to immigrants.

But most importantly, the bank-oriented world financial system run by debt based on usurious rates of interest has created a system where nations are in steep competition with each other to maintain their own standards of living and competitive edge. Thus a new era of trade wars is being forecast where not every nation can “win.” What happens to nations that don’t “win”? Do they go to war to regain their standing? Is this what is going on with the EU’s new belligerence?

These issues have been addressed but not by mainstream economists. I wrote about them back at the time when I had retired from the US Treasury Department, when I predicted the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and when the US government began to “print money” to bail out the banking system. This is what led to the massive debt infusions during COVID and the current $36.2 trillion federal deficit.

But there are solutions. These were pioneered in the writings of British engineer C.H. Douglas with his 1920 book Economic Democracy at a time when he was in competition with John Maynard Keynes’s theories of government deficits as needed to prime the economic pump, theories that have failed catastrophically.

I will be reposting and updating my articles on C.H. Douglas over the next few months. For now, here are two recent articles on Trump’s “Liberation Day” that give an overview.

The first is an article on Jeff Childer’s “Coffee and Covid” blog entitled, “Morning in America.” Click here.

The second is an analysis by Simplicius entitled “Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’: Another PR Gag, or Global Reorientation Turning Point.” Click here.

Please let me know below if either of these is behind a paywall.

Take your time with these articles. Trump’s tariff program is a big, important topic but not easy to grasp in its permutations.

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in his book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an advisor to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack as well as his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/

“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.