Our Country, Then and Now

Our Country Then and Now takes us on a 400-year journey through America’s history, providing unique snapshots from African enslavement, native dispossession, financial scandals, and wars of expansion and aggression, interspersed with tales from author Richard C. Cook’s ancestry—from Puritan forebears to fighters in the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War, to Midwest Pioneer farmers and their relations with native nations.
As a former NASA whistleblower, then US Treasury analyst, Cook dwells in particular on how the financial oligarchy aggrandized itself via a fractional reserve banking system that ultimately corrupted America’s originally proclaimed democratic and egalitarian values. He addresses how the British, European, and US bankers hijacked the American monetary system by placing it under control of the Money Trust through the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, how this then financed the British takedown of rival Germany, triggered the Great Depression by shipping US gold to Britain and Europe, and led to the Bretton Woods agreements, the creation of the International Monetary Fund, and the Marshall Plan, which combined to place the world’s economy under the control of the US dollar.
After World War II, the US financial oligarchs created the “national security state” headed by the CIA to rule the world through assassinations, financial thievery, and overthrow of governments. They elevated the Soviet Union into a bogeymen to justify the vast quantity of Federal Reserve “money printing” required to subsidize an out-of-control war budget and hundreds of US military bases around the world. These measures led to worldwide dollar supremacy under control of the Rockefeller dynasty, with the US National Security State—aka today’s “Deep State”—and the CIA set up to enforce the bankers’ financial hegemony that has lasted until now.
Finally Cook addresses his efforts, along with Stephen Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, that resulted in the NEED Act of 2011 intended to end the Federal Reserve, and restore democratic control over the nation’s financial system, explaining how such reforms could save the US from today’s terminal hollowed-out economy.

Author Biography

Richard C. Cook is a retired US federal analyst who served with the Carter White House, NASA, and the US Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he broke the story of the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Shuttle. After serving at Treasury, he exposed the disastrous flaws of a monetary system controlled by private finance in his book We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform. As an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and while working with Congressman Dennis Kucinich, he advocated the abolishment of the Federal Reserve system.