first federal income tax | Bertram's Blog

Stepping on Toes

March 1, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I stopped paying attention to partisan politics when, as a young adult, I learned about shadow governments, globalists, an international elite of some sort that was running things behind the scenes.

Even if I hadn’t researched the histories hidden in books, some of the sense that both parties were working toward the same agenda is obvious when you see how often policies changed to reflect the losing candidate’s point of view. It seemed so contrived — a play put on for the benefit of the voters who otherwise didn’t count in the rulers’ grand scheme of power and political leverage.

The way I saw it, when a tiger and a lion fight (or an elephant and a donkey), the poor rabbit always gets trampled. Or devoured.

Trump’s first term caught my attention because he seemed an outlier, not a politician but someone who had a different agenda, something more than just accruing power and money as politicians so often do. But I never really thought much about him and his presidency until the personal attacks on him began, most of which have subsequently been litigated out of existence or are proving to be false as more information comes out. (Many of those lies are still believed despite proof to the contrary.)

Those attacks continue. There’s an almost constant barrage of lies, hatred, vilification, name calling, more than any other president in my lifetime. Even if the current president is as bad as they say he is, it still comes down to why he’s not being protected from the outrage. Almost all presidents were corrupt (or corrupted) in some way, almost all overreached their power, but (with a couple of exceptions) the system protected them, hiding their transgressions from the voters, or at least downplaying their corruption. But not him. He’s out there on his own. The traditional media will not report anything he does that benefits people, and if they do, they spin it so it’s a bad thing. And news apps perpetuate this bias. A content analysist, Media Research Center, reviewed the news that was presented in January to Apple News’ 140 million subscribers, and out of more than 600 articles during the most popular time slot, not a single article was from a conservative point of view.

Since this is history as it’s happening rather than books, I have no recourse but to do my research online to try to find out why the power brokers, the opposition party, and those who influence public opinion are treating this president differently from previous presidents. I’ve found many in-depth articles showing how he’s making his deals. Like with any dealmaker, he starts out with a brash opening, and it’s that opening that gets reported and excoriated. The steps that come after the opening salvo are ignored, so people only see how outlandish that first statement is without noticing the strategic moves he has already planned to get what he’s really aiming for.

I suppose it’s possible that the globalists let him continue doing his thing because of the chaos his presidency causes, which I’m sure furthers their agenda. But why do those in powerful positions hate him so much if he’s just the reverse of the same globalist coin presidents have always been? Is it possible that he’s actually doing something to upset or at least delay globalist policies that have been playing out for over a hundred years?

The first 150 years of the United States, there was no income tax. There were tariffs to support the various government programs, tariffs that were so successful, there was money to spare. Then, at the instigation of a cabal of bankers, the US money system was turned over to the newly created Federal Reserve Board, which Woodrow Wilson later admitted he regretted: “The Federal Reserve Act, which I signed, allowed our system of credit to become too concentrated. The growth of the nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved. We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world — a government run by the opinion of small groups of dominant men.”

Not only did the government of the time create the Federal Reserve Board (which they kept secret from the public for more than a decade), but they amended the constitution to allow for an income tax, which just twenty years previously had been decreed unconstitutional. (At first, they only taxed the highest 1%. In 1942, Frankin D. Roosevelt increased the number of people to be taxed to 75% of workers.) Because of bribery, corruption, and influence from other nations, tariffs were rescinded and taxation and debt became the name of the game.

Tariffs were always meant to be the main source of income of the United States not, as it is now, directly and solely from American citizens through taxation.

So why the hatred of Trump and his tariffs? Why the hatred of his push for nationalism? Why the insistence on destroying the immigration policies that all of his predecessors had created and espoused? These things, in the main, seem as if they would only help the country, though people point to each of these things (as well as other policies he’s followed) as reason to hate him, forgetting that the hatred and vitriol came first. Even before he was inaugurated, before he did a single thing, there was already talk of impeachment. And in the years between his two terms, there was a concentrated effort to discredit him irreparably.

After weeks, months, and way too many hours on the internet trying to figure this out, I still don’t know the truth, but I do know that anyone who is so utterly vilified (someone moreover who once was loved by the very people who are now vilifying him), has to be stepping on someone’s toes. It could be all part of the play, but it seems too extreme to me. Too confusing. By the time enough years have passed to put this all into historical perspective, I’ll be long gone, so I might never know. I don’t suppose it matters anyway, since what is happening and what is going to happen will happen even if I don’t understand the play that’s being enacted.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in history/myth, internet, life. Tags: an international elite, first federal income tax, globalists, history of the Federal Reserve Board, politics, shadow governments, tariff history, tariffs, Woodrow Wilson. 2 Comments »

Rights and Independence

July 3, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I’m still a bit confused over the recent Supreme Court ruling. The rationale behind Roe vs. Wade was privacy — the Supreme Court held that the constitutional right to privacy includes a woman’s right to decide whether to have an abortion. In overturning the Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court said that “there is no inherent right to privacy or personal autonomy in various provisions of the Constitution.”

That’s spooky. No right to privacy? No right to personal autonomy? (Personal autonomy means having the right to act on our own values and interests.)

Instead of addressing that issue, most of the talk about the rationale for overturning Roe vs. Wade was about returning the power to make the decision about abortion to the individual states.

States rights has always been touchy issue because they’ve become associated with racism, but the truth is, this country was founded on the idea of a loose confederation of states —with most of the power residing in the individual states but overseen by a Congress that represented all the states. The federal government was to ensure that there would be enough checks and balances, with enough power to operate on a national level but not so powerful that fundamental rights would be at risk. At the beginning, there was no need for a federal income tax because federal power was limited, but over the centuries, the federal government usurped the power of the states to become the most powerful governing body in the country. Because of that growth of power, the tariffs, excise taxes, and bonds that funded the original federal government no longer was enough. The first year the 1040 form was required to be filed was 1914.

But still, with all that power, the Supreme Court has decided in this one peculiar instance, to give the power back to the states, many of which are now or soon will be banning abortion, which seems such a step back into a darker time. The ban, no matter what side of the issue you are on, makes women de facto wards of the state because women have no right to choose, only the state does.

For centuries, there has been a concept called coverture, a doctrine which says that females have no legal existence. First, her existence is covered by her father’s status, and when he turns her over to her husband-to-be in the marriage ceremony, her existence is then covered by her husband’s legal status. It wasn’t until about 1870 that most states passed married women’s property acts placing married women on equal footing with their husbands when it came to contracts, earnings and ownership of property. (Single women were still out of luck.)

Although that was a big step forward, it wasn’t until 1974 that women were granted the right to sign loans and contracts without a male co-signer, and could buy a house on their own. So, basically, that was the year women became truly independent.

The year before that, women were given autonomy over their own bodies as well as the right to privacy, both of which seem to have been taken away.

There are still interpretations of the constitution saying that no one is allowed to put their life over another person’s by taking their organs or blood or marrow or whatever without written consent, but when it comes to pregnancy, the fetus now in many states has more rights than the mother.

It’s odd, too, how most people point to pictures of fetuses at nineteen weeks or even more to show the humanness of the fetus, when during the first couple of months of pregnancy, the fetus hasn’t even grown to the size of a peanut. Even odder, despite the claim that the uterus is to protect the baby, it’s true function is to protect the mother from incursions into the rest of her body by this peanut. According to Suzanne Sadedinis, an evolutionary biologist, pregnancy is a war in the womb, with the fetus demanding more and more of the mother’s resources, and the mother’s body trying to protect itself. There have been instances where the fetus eats its way through the placenta, and in fact, a fetus can pretty much live anywhere in the body (fetal cells have even been found in women’s brains). The uterus is meant to keep it in its place.

That “war” is a far cry from the lovely mother/child image that is used to grant more rights to the fetus than to the host mother. It’s also no wonder that despite so-called modern medicine, too many women lose that war. (800 women die in childbirth every day.)

Not that any of this helps matters in any way; these are just some of the things I am thinking about on the day before the 246th birthday of the USA.