Trump's Tariffs: Alexander Hamilton's catastrophic US financial system comes home to roost.

Don't let all the hot air deceive you.

The big news, of course, is Trump’s tariffs. Given the time constraints in trying to keep up with all the news of late, I’ll try to be concise. But there are still some fundamentals that must be discussed.

Alexander Hamilton was appointed the first secretary of the treasury by President George Washington on September 11, 1789. Both Washington and Hamilton knew that the new government of the US was not just broke. It was deeply in debt and the debt would only be getting much, much worse.

This was because Hamilton would be working behind the scenes to get Washington’s approval, then the approval of Congress, for the federal government to assume—at face value—all the debt from Revolutionary War bonds sold to investors and ordinary citizens by the Continental Congress and the 13 states to fight the war. Speculators in-the-know scoured the countryside to buy what bondholders thought was worthless paper in anticipation for the big payday Hamilton would be arranging. Some of the bonds were even held by war veterans as payment in lieu of soldiers’ wages.

Hamilton was frank in his logic. He wanted to bind the moneyed class—mainly merchants, stock brokers, and European bankers—to the new republic. So from the very start, the US government was made into a cash cow for the already rich. And the banks, authorized even then to create money out-of-thin-air, stood by to lend even more to the already rich for their speculative purchases.

In fact, the day after Hamilton became secretary of the treasury in September 1789, he borrowed $500,000—then an immense sum—from his own Bank of New York to tide the government over until it got up and running and began to collect revenues from his planned tariff regime. (You can read about it in Ron Chernow’s 900+ page biographical tome.)

The underlying purpose of Hamilton’s machinations was to recreate the British imperial system, also based on government debt, for a similar Western Hemisphere empire with New York City the capital. Hamilton used the word “empire” many times in describing his vision of America’s future. (He only agreed to allow the capital to be moved from New York to a future site on the Potomac to acquire Jefferson’s acquiescence in his financial scheme. It was called the “Great Compromise.”)

Nothing has changed in the intervening 236 years. The system has not been altered in any important respect. It has just become more refined, more locked in, and harder to change, especially after the Federal Reserve System—actually designed by the British Rothschilds—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 broke.

• 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 Deep State exists to get it done and to eliminate opposition.)

• 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, with all kinds of coercive and competitive devices installed to assure maximum tax revenue. (Cumulative taxes now run at about 50% of national income.)

• A massive number of unfortunate people, with no real jobs, also live off the government cash cow, creating a huge voting bloc to maintain the status quo.

• As an aside, the government has even gotten foreigners to accept its dollar-denominated debt as payment against imports by using its military might to enforce use of said dollars as a world trading currency.

• The only way for anyone to defeat debt is through a devalued currency—i.e., inflation, for which there is constant pressure throughout the entire system.

Until recently everyone was deliriously happy with the US (and Britain behind the curtain)—actually the rich bondholders—ruling the world.

Except that the world has now changed with other power centers arising and interest payments on the bonds becoming so high that they can no longer be paid off. So tariffs have to go up, up, up. Trump et. al. will deal with the consequences later. Maybe more wars to keep the dollar afloat?

This is what is really behind the decision by the Trump administration to change the system. Larry Johnson came out today with a fair though limited explanation. See Some Observations on Tariff Hysteria.

But we must also turn to our informant indi.ca and how all this appears to the foreign countries which Hamilton’s latter-day empire has been exploiting for so long to keep his bond system afloat. See this: America Has Declared A Global Strike Against America.

An intelligent person might now even suggest that there’s got to be a better way.

And of course there is. The original American colonies, particularly the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were able to create what may have been the most prosperous region on the planet in the mid-18th century by utilizing their own indigenous currencies (including Wampum) until the practice was outlawed by the British Currency Act of 1767. (America’s elitist band of Ivy League historians, all sold out to Big Finance, completely ignore this fact.)

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. The way was paved for the Federal Reserve by the assassination by the globalists of three nationalist presidents—Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

Before and during the Great Depression, there were many voices speaking out for a Greenback-type national currency: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Louis T. McFadden, and many others. Click here.

Prior to his assassination, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order, 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 new 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. See this: Real Government Efficiency: How to 'Actually' End Debt and Restore America's Financial Sovereignty

Kucinich’s NEED Act contains one important factor that is often overlooked, even by monetary reformers, which was also part of the American Monetary Act drafted by Stephen Zarlenga and myself as input into Kucinich’s proposal. This was a national dividend, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, that could be used to balance government deficits and consumer debt. Such a dividend was first proposed by British engineer C.H. Douglas in his 1920 book Economic Democracy and was explained in my own books, Our Country, Then and Now and We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.

In other words, there is a whole world of research, writing, and historical precedent available to the Trump administration to solve today’s crisis, if they were willing to break free of the globalist financiers, largely working from the City of London, who have held our country in subjugation since Alexander Hamilton went to them begging for a bailout in 1789.

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.