Last week we posted a story discussing how we thought the U.S. Supreme Court made a bad decision when they prohibited President Trump from utilizing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to tariff countries who were a threat to America based on their uneven trade policies.
“The SCOTUS Trump Tariff Test” – The Thinking Conservative
While that article addressed the narrative that “Trump’s tariffs were illegal”, we did not address Trump’s accusation that some of the members of the court are “swayed by foreign interests”.
In our subsequent research we saw a presentation on YouTube by a woman named Susan Kokinda. She is an American political activist serving as the Washington representative for the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (PAC).
In her presentation Kokinda argues Trump’s response to the Supreme Court tariff ruling points beyond China to “foreign interests” tied to the British Empire’s Adam Smith free-trade ideology, defended by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Cato Institute.
In her presentation Kokinda notes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ambassador Jamieson Greer framed the administration’s tariff approach argument as Hamiltonian economic sovereignty. Alexander Hamilton was a founding father of the U.S. as the first Secretary of the Treasury. His face is on our $10 bill.
She noted tariffs will continue under other laws as we also noted in last weeks article. This will include a new 10% global tariff. She contrasts this with Thursday’s Board of Peace meeting, where 60 nations backed “peace through construction,” funding housing, security, and development, and rejected the Kissinger-style managed conflict of past years. She warns that such demoralization efforts by SCOTUS risks ending President Trump’s MAGA agenda at the Midterm Election in November.
“TRUMP NAMED THEM: The Real ‘Foreign Interests’” – Promethean Updates
I’ve never heard of this woman before and yet I found what she had to say significant to the times we are living in as Americans now. She broke her talk down into three major parts:
- The American tariff battle going on now is a battle between the “American financial system” and the “British Imperial financial system” models.
- Much of the world is rallying behind President Trump’s Board of Peace and its “anti-imperial” vision that Henry Kissinger once played a role in.
- She discussed what Americans must do to support Trump and stop what is being done against him and America.
President Trump said “China-centric forces” were behind the lawsuits against his tariffs. Translated that means people doing business with China who want to allow China to continue to rip us off by engaging in unfair trade practices.
She explained that the friends of the court brief that was filed against President Trump’s tariff authority under the IEEPA were filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Cato Institute. She then explained what has happened and what will continue to happen:
“These are the most venerable bastions of Adam Smith’s free trade ideology… an ideology which opened the floodgates for cheap Chinese goods to wipe out our manufacturing and to hollow out our middle class for decades.”
Adam Smith often gets a bad rap for seeming to oppose any government intervention in the marketplace, but the real Adam Smith believed that for free trade to exist it had to be reciprocal with equality between trading partners who treated each other’s preferences as their own (i.e. The Golden Rule). Knowing this, it would be wrong to join Adam Smith’s name with “British Imperialism”.
Kokinda then played a clip from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “Economic security is the foundation that allows a country to fulfill its most basic obligation of safeguarding its people.
Unfortunately, past administrations lost sight of this fundamental truth, allowing faux efficiency gains and shortsighted profit obsession to eclipse security resilience and long-term value.”
Kokinda concludes, “Fake efficiency gains, short-sighted profit obsession! That’s not a description of Chinese policy. That’s a description of the British liberal free trade system, the system that measures everything by how much money can be extracted from a nation and its people, leaving an economic wasteland and shattered lives behind. But what was the fundamental truth that past administrations had abandoned? Here’s what Secretary Bessant said.”
“From the earliest days of the republic, our founding fathers understood that independence required economic security. The ability to produce essential goods, sustain public credit, and foster domestic industry was seen as the foundation of sovereignty by Alexander Hamilton, and it still is.”
Kokinda goes on to make numerous valid points. Please watch her entire 15 minute video as it is better than the white noise of the mainstream media of today!
CONCLUSION:
I live near Rockford, Illinois. Most readers will recognize this city by the 1992 Hollywood movie “A League of their Own”. It was a movie about the most winning team of the World War II era professional all-female baseball league.
While the City of Rockford was pretty happy to have the attention and past memory, they were pretty angry not one part of that movie was ever filmed on location in their city! The reason for that anger was justified as Hollywood did the exact same thing as China did to the city previously, took what belonged to Rockford with nothing left in exchange!
When those historic mid-century women were playing baseball to entertain the civilian population of Rockford, Illinois, those civilians were taking a break from making things like screw fasteners and aviation parts of the world. Prior to that, wood furniture was made in Rockford as well as pocket watches and the first airbrushes of early in that century.
But then, shortly after the end of the professional all-female baseball league, China came to America to systematically raid different industries in an organized plan to destroy our “economic sovereignty”.
As an American technology teacher I consider myself an expert witness.
I can remember most all of them lost in order; the textile industries of the south, the manufacturing industries of the north, the furniture industry, the electronics industry, the lumber industry, the medical industry, and, most recently, the meat processing industry.
To be blunt, the rich fat cat CEOs of these AMERICAN industries might still lay claim to having their “corporate offices” in the U.S., but the actual labor to make their products is now long gone “overseas”, as they say.
What did this do for our American workforce? It left them unemployed is what it did!
Today the once great manufacturing industrial buildings of Rockford (having sat abandoned for decades) are now being repurposed into hotels and apartment buildings. Rockford was largely left an economic wasteland after it was raided by China.
Rockford went from being the “Screw Capitol of the World” to just another “Screwed American City of the World”.
A nation of once proud makers turned into a nation of humbled takers (unemployment), again, thanks to the Cloward-Piven’s communist strategy.
All Americans, Democrats and Republicans, should stand strong with President Trump! He is trying to save our nation. There is dignity in doing work. There is economic sovereignty.
ICE deportations were never a problem before Trump. International tariffs were never a problem before Trump. Are you awake yet?
The SCOTUS got this one obviously wrong. The only thing left to ask is, why? British Imperialism or Chinese Communism? Maybe Kokinda and I can both be right.
© 2026 by Mark S. Schwendau
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Thinking Conservative.
