OUR GUILDED AGE OF GREED AND NARCISSISM is naturally going to recast Alexander Hamilton in a heroic light. Though he adorns the ten dollar bill, Hamilton was neither a president nor a founding father. The first secretary of the treasury was rather the nation’s founding banker. Not a Mr. Drysdale safe deposit banker, its loan officer.
Hamilton believed the nation’s currency should belong to a private bank and be loaned to the public, at interest, compounded so the debt could never be paid off.
Every schoolchild knows Jefferson hated Hamilton but the reason was always obfuscated by federalist triviality. In fact Jefferson believed the fruit of a nation’s productivity was supposed to be distributed to the people. Hamilton insisted it go to a bank which need share only the crumbs.
Hamilton the Rat Bastard betrayed America’s founding fathers who sought to escape the Bank of England’s talons. Its loans were not only usurious, the bank’s discretion to expand or restrict credit enabled it to create financial crashes so as to seize the public assets proferred as collateral. Though the original colonies had benefited by printing their own currency in the past, Hamilton convinced George Washington that instead of the nation printing its own currency, a bank should do it, so the 100% profit of printing money could be spread among private shareholders, not the American public or their legislature.
Any schoolchild could grasp the unfairness of the contract which Hamilton imposed on what would have been a prosperous people. The national debt is still binding today. Its abolition and everyone’s emancipation could be just one big school walkout away.
Hence the constant indoctrination.
That’s what makes Hamilton: an American Musical all the more pernicious. Because it’s aimed at children. Its theme of How History Will Remember You is an ode to infantile angst, while obviously innoculating their childish allegiance to mature scrutiny. Hamilton is High School Musical league, with the pretense of being historical. Parents are agog because they think there’s substance behind the interracial rap voguing and vapid graphic novel dialog. It’s the same excitement parents showed for Harry Potter Middle Earthian dreck because at least the kids are reading.
Before the revolution the American colonies prospered with their own currency. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson visited England and saw the poverty and squalor where they expected to see the shared bounty of the world’s most powerful empire. The “Bank of England” was sucking England’s economy dry and soon a law was passed to mandate that the colonies subjugate themselves to the same perpetual loans. That’s what prompted the American War of Independence. The Tea Tax and No Taxation Without Representation are perfidy. Why is school-taught history so boring? Because it’s a fabrication to hide the truth.
Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison opposed the yoke of debt slavery, while Hamilton’s cohorts and banking agents kept reimposing it. When President Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt in full, he bankrupted the bankers! Abraham Lincoln paid for the War of Rebellion by printing Greenbacks. Their success was sabotaged by the banks and international finance got its hooks in again.
What an odd coincidence that the portraits of each of those foes of national debt, depicted on US currency denominations, face the same direction, while the Arnold of all Benedicts grins back at them.
It might stretch credulity that the US Bureau of Engraving encrypted prophetic images of the Pentagon –and the not yet built WTC twin towers– in their iconic Reichstag Fire infamy, unto dollar bills folded just so. But who knows, they might have chosen to encode Thomas Jefferson’s oft-quoted but unheeded chiding to the American people: “Every generation needs a new revolution.” And don’t we especially want to ignore this one? “When injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”