Trump

The Upcoming Trade War Between The U.S. And China Will Be The Biggest In The History Of The Planet

Globe At Night - Public DomainThe United States and China are the two largest economies in the world by far, and the upcoming trade war that is about to erupt will be cataclysmic for both sides.  The Trump administration and the Chinese government are both gearing up for a prolonged trade war, and this is going to have very severe implications for the entire global economy.  During the campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly stated that we “can’t continue to allow China to rape our country”, and he was quite correct about that.  Over the past ten years, the U.S. has run a trade deficit of over $2 trillion with China, and as a result of imbalanced trade we have lost tens of thousands of manufacturing businesses, millions of good paying jobs, and hundreds of billions of dollars of tax revenue.

So clearly something needs to be done to balance our trade with China and other countries.  But the situation must also be handled delicately, because trade disruptions could bring substantial short-term economic pain.

Prior to winning the election, Trump threatened to unilaterally impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports.  Unfortunately, China is not just going to sit there and take whatever Trump throws at them.  Every single time the U.S. has imposed tariffs on Chinese goods in the past, China has responded by slapping tariffs on U.S. goods.

And this time around, the Chinese are already preparing a very harsh response even though Trump has not officially made his move yet…

The policy advisers believe the Trump administration is most likely to impose higher tariffs on targeted sectors where China has a big surplus with the United States, such as steel and furniture, or on state-owned firms.

China could respond with actions such as finding alternative suppliers of agriculture products or machinery and manufactured goods, while cutting its exports of consumer staples such as mobile phones or laptops, they said.

Other options include imposing tax or other restrictions on big U.S. firms operating in China, or limiting their access to China’s fast-growing services sector, they added.

When this coming trade war erupts, economic activity will be reduced significantly.  And considering the fact that U.S. economic growth is projected to be about one percent in the first quarter of 2017, that could be more than enough to push us into a deep recession.

Some of the biggest U.S. exports to China include airplanes, autos and agricultural products, and the Chinese are ready to attack on all of those fronts.  The following comes from CNN…

Here’s what Global Times, a newspaper backed by the Communist Party, had to say about how Beijing would respond to tariffs of 45%:

“A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus,” the paper said Monday. “U.S. auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and U.S. soybean and maize imports will be halted.”

But once again, something must be done for the long-term good of our country.  We have been allowing the Chinese to flood our shores with super cheap goods, but meanwhile they have already been hitting our products with ridiculously high tariffs.  Here is just one example…

U.S.-made cars exported to China face tariffs of at least 25 percent, including American-made Cadillacs. The American-made Jeep Grand Cherokee costs $27,490 at U.S. dealerships and cost at least $85,000 in China.

What we have with China today is very far from “free trade”, and if they want to trade with us they need to do so on a level playing field.

But China will never allow that to happen.  As Donald Trump has correctly stated, they have been “raping” us for years, and they are going to fight very hard to keep anything from upsetting the status quo.

Trump has got to do something for the long-term good of the U.S. economy, but he has also got to try to find a way to avoid a major trade war, because a major trade war would be exceedingly painful for both countries.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but more iPhones are actually sold in China than in the United States.  And it is being projected that Boeing will sell nearly 7,000 airplanes to China over the next decade…

By the end of 2015, Chinese consumers bought 131 million iPhones. The total sales to U.S. customers during the same period stood at only 110 million. And iPhones are only a small part of U.S. exports. Boeing, which employs 150,000 workers in the U.S., estimates that China will buy some 6,810 airplanes over the next 20 years, and that market alone will be worth more than $1 trillion.

So what happens if all or part of that economic activity goes away?

According to one study, in the short-term millions of U.S. jobs could potentially be at risk if a major trade war happens…

“Millions of American jobs that appear unconnected to international trade—disproportionately lower-skilled and lower-wage jobs—would be at risk,” according to the PIIE study.

And of course a major trade war would hit American consumers very hard as well.

Just think about it.  When you go into a Wal-Mart or a dollar store, are more of the products made in the United States or in China?

A trade war would hit all of us in the wallet as the cost of living goes up.  And considering the fact that about two-thirds of the country is essentially living paycheck to paycheck, that would not be a good thing.

So yes, our trading relationship with China definitely needs to be rebalanced, but Trump needs to find a way to make this transition as minimally disruptive as possible.

A major trade war is just one of the “black swans” that could push us into the kind of economic nightmare scenario that I have been warning about for a very long time.  And sometimes a trade war can serve as a prelude to a real war.  The South China Sea has become a major sticking point between the U.S. and China, and the Chinese are getting ready to cross one of the “red lines” that Barack Obama established while he was still in office…

Beijing has plans to start construction on the disputed Scarborough Shoal this year.

China has reclaimed land in both the Spratly and Paracel Islands and constructed military outposts, but it has been hesitant to start construction on the Scarborough Shoal. Xiao Jie, the mayor of Sansha — an administrative base for China’s South China Sea activities masquerading as a city — said this week that China intends to construct environmental monitoring stations on a number of territories in the South China Sea, including the Scarborough Shoal.

So how will Trump respond when construction on Scarborough Shoal actually begins?

It will be very interesting to watch how that plays out.

The relationship between the United States and China was starting to deteriorate badly even before Donald Trump was elected, and it is very easy to see how it could totally break down in the months ahead.

And considering how interconnected the global economy is today, the United States and China could easily end up dragging down everyone else along with them.

Government Spooks Can Use The Mic And Camera On Trump’s Phone Even When He Thinks It Is Turned Off

Trump Speaking With Putin In The Oval Office - Public DomainAfter reading this article you might not ever view your electronic devices the same way again.  Last year, Hollywood released a biographical political thriller based on the life of Edward Snowden that had one particularly creepy scene.  In that scene, a government spook used a program to remotely activate the microphone and camera on a laptop, and by doing so he was able to watch a woman as she got undressed.  Sadly, as you will see below, this kind of thing is happening constantly.  Any digital device can potentially be accessed and used to spy on you even if it appears to be turned off.  And this is why Donald Trump needs to be so careful right now, because the intelligence community wants to take him down and they can literally use any digital device in his possession to try to gather dirt on him.  We have a “deep state” that is absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking and monitoring the American people, and something desperately needs to be done about this unconstitutional surveillance.  Now that Trump has become greatly upset about how the government was tapping into his phone calls, maybe something will finally get accomplished.

In an article that I just published on The Most Important News, I talked about the NSA’s brand new two billion dollar data storage facility in Utah that can store up to five zettabytes of data.  Secret “electronic monitoring rooms” embedded within the facilities of major communications companies across the United States send an endless flow of digital information to this facility, and most Americans have no idea that this is even happening.  The following comes from Wired…

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits.

Whistleblowers have come forward again and again to warn us about what was happening, but they have largely been ignored.  One of the most prominent whistleblowers was former NSA employee William Binney…

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there.

Can you imagine recording 320 million phone calls a day?

And that was at the beginning of the program – I can’t even imagine what the number must be these days.

But even if you aren’t using your phone government spooks can still potentially be listening to you.  The following comes from a CNN article entitled “How the NSA can ‘turn on’ your phone remotely“…

Government spies can set up their own miniature cell network tower. Your phone automatically connects to it. Now, that tower’s radio waves send a command to your phone’s antennae: the baseband chip. That tells your phone to fake any shutdown and stay on.

A smart hack won’t keep your phone running at 100%, though. Spies could keep your phone on standby and just use the microphone — or send pings announcing your location.

John Pirc, who did cybersecurity research at the CIA, said these methods — and others, like physically bugging devices — let the U.S. hijack and reawaken terrorists’ phones.

Unfortunately, these tactics are not just used against “terrorists”.

The truth is that these tactics are employed against anyone that the NSA is interested in, and in fact they could be listening to you right now.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we have learned quite a bit about how the NSA takes over digital devices…

The latest story from the Edward Snowden leaks yesterday drives home that the NSA and its spy partners possess specialized tools for doing exactly that. According to The Intercept, the NSA uses a plug-in called GUMFISH to take over cameras on infected machines and snap photos.

Another NSA plug-in called CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE hijacks the microphone on targeted computers to record conversations.

Intelligence agencies have been turning computers into listening devices for at least a decade, as evidenced by the Flame spy tool uncovered by Kaspersky Lab in 2012, which had the ability to surreptitiously turn on webcams and microphones and perform a host of other espionage operations.

So what can you do to prevent this from happening?

If you have external webcams and microphones, you can unplug them when they are not in use.

If you have a built-in camera, some have suggested covering the camera with a sticker.

And of course pulling out the battery entirely will prevent someone from taking over your phone when you are not using it.

But at the end of the day, it is going to be really hard to keep government spooks out of your electronic devices completely.  They have become extremely sophisticated at using these devices to get what they want, and they will literally go after just about anyone.

For example, just consider what they did to former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson.  In her recent book, she details a campaign of digital harassment that sounds like something out of a spy novel.  The following comes from the Washington Post…

The breaches on Attkisson’s computer, says this source, are coming from a “sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the National Security Agency (NSA).” Attkisson learns from “Number One” that one intrusion was launched from the WiFi at a Ritz Carlton Hotel and the “intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool.”

To round out the revelations of “Number One,” he informs Attkisson that he’d found three classified documents deep inside her operating system, such that she’d never know they were even there. “Why? To frame me?” Attkisson asks in the book.

If they can do all of that to Sharyl Attkisson, they can do it to Donald Trump too.

Trump needs to understand that the deep state is trying to destroy him, and that everything that he says and does is being monitored.

So until Trump can completely clean house at all of our intelligence agencies, he is going to have to be extremely careful 24 hours a day.

And let us hope that Trump is ultimately victorious in his struggle against the deep state, because the future of this nation is literally hanging in the balance.

President Oprah? Speculation Rises That The 2020 Election Will Feature An Epic Battle Between Donald Trump And Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey_receives_2013_Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom - Public DomainWhen Donald Trump originally announced that he was going to run for president, he said that his ideal choice for a running mate was Oprah Winfrey, but now he may be actually running against her in the 2020 election.  A recent episode of The David Rubenstein Show that featured an interview with Oprah Winfrey is creating a tremendous amount of buzz that Oprah Winfrey may throw her hat into the ring during the next election cycle.  This particular episode was taped back on December 12th, but it didn’t actually get aired on Bloomberg TV until last Tuesday.  You can see the portion of the interview in which Oprah is asked about her presidential aspirations on YouTube right here, and as you can see, she definitely sounds like someone that is very seriously thinking about running…

Prior to this last election, Oprah says that she never even considered the possibility of running, but Donald Trump’s victory in November made her realize that maybe she could do it too.  The following summary of the most important moments from the interview comes from Charisma News…

“I actually never thought—never considered the question, even the possibility,” she said while smiling coyly. “I just thought, ‘Oh. Oh.'”

“Because it’s clear you don’t need government experience to be elected president of the United States,” Rubenstein interjected.

“That’s what I thought,” she replied. “I thought, Oh gee, I don’t have the experience, I don’t know enough. Now I’m thinking, Oh. Oh.”

When Oprah made these statements, she had to know that they would create a firestorm.

And that is definitely what is happening.  People are going absolutely crazy on Twitter at the thought that we could have “President Oprah” in 2020, and Matt Drudge is extremely enthusiastic about a Trump vs. Oprah race…

In a tweet sent Wednesday morning, the reclusive journalist who broke the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal said such a race would be one for the ages.

“Trump vs Oprah would be the most epic race in American history. MAKE THIS HAPPEN…” Drudge tweeted to his nearly half a million followers.

And this is certainly not the first time that it has been suggested that Oprah should run for president.  Just one week after the election, political activist Michael Moore mentioned her as a potential candidate…

“Democrats would be better off if they ran Oprah or Tom Hanks … why don’t we run beloved people?” Moore told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

“We have so many of them,” he said. “The Republicans do this — they run Reagan and the Terminator and other people.” It was a reference to former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as former President Ronald Reagan.

“Why don’t we run somebody that the American people love and are really drawn to, and that are smart and have good politics and all that?” Moore said.

Needless to say, Oprah would make a horrible president.  Her political views are ultra-liberal, and she has no practical political experience whatsoever.

However, if she did run she would definitely be the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.  At the moment, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren are considered to be the most likely opponents for Trump, and Oprah would almost certainly trounce either of them.

But will she actually do it?  Oprah’s friend Gayle King is saying that it is not going to happen…

“I was in the audience that day and it was clearly a joke when she was playing with David because they have such a great rapport,” said Winfrey’s close pal and CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King early Thursday of a recent interview Oprah gave suggesting she was finally thinking of running for President. “But I also heard on the Oprah Winfrey show over the years you always have the right to change your mind but I would bet my first, second born and any unborn children to come, that ain’t never happening,” King emphatically added.

And hopefully it will not happen.

But the ironic thing is that the very first person that Donald Trump suggested as a potential running mate when he announced his candidacy in 2015 was Oprah Winfrey.  The following comes from the New York Post…

Real estate mogul-turned-celebrity TV star Donald Trump already had an “Aha!” moment about his 2016 running mate.

After declaring his run for the White House Tuesday, Trump appeared on ABC and said Oprah Winfrey would complete his presidential dream ticket.

“I think Oprah would be great. I’d love to have Oprah,” Trump said. “I think we’d win easily, actually.”

I’ll bet you don’t remember that, do you?

And in his new book entitled “The Making of the President 2016“, Roger Stone reminds everyone that Trump actually floated the idea of Oprah as his running mate all the way back in 1999 during an interview with Larry King.  The following is an excerpt from Roger Stone’s new book that was posted on Infowars…

Early in the interview, Trump dropped Bombshell Number One: “So I am going to form a presidential exploratory committee, I might as well announce that on your show, everyone else does, but I’ll be forming that and effective, I believe, tomorrow,” Trump told the crusty interviewer. “And we’ll see. I mean, we’re going to take a very good, strong look at it.”

And just minutes later, Larry went for it and asked him if he had a vice presidential candidate in mind. Trump hesitated briefly as if to ponder his answer and then stunned everyone including King – and no doubt Oprah herself. “Oprah. I love Oprah,” Trump said. “Oprah would always be my first choice. She’s a terrific woman. She is somebody that is very special. If she’d do it, she’d be fantastic. I mean, she’s popular, she’s brilliant, she’s a wonderful woman.” The following day the newspapers and TV news were filled with talk of Trump and Oprah.

I honestly don’t know what Trump was thinking, because Oprah Winfrey definitely does not belong in politics.

Even if Oprah does not run for president, Trump’s victory has a lot of other celebrities thinking that they could do the same thing that he did.  Other big names that have been floated as potential candidates in 2020 include Mark Zuckerberg, Kanye West, Mark Cuban and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

As you can see, we have entered a strange new era in American politics, and there is no telling what craziness we may see during the next election cycle.

11 Quotes From Trump’s Speech To Congress That Show That The U.S. Economy Is In A State Of Collapse

Donald Trump's Speech To A Joint Session Of Congress - Public DomainAfter Tuesday night, nobody should have any more doubt that the U.S. economy has been in the process of collapsing.  Donald Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress is being hailed as his best speech ever.  Even CNN’s Van Jones praised Trump, which shocked many observers.  Jones said that when Trump honored the widow of slain Navy Seal Ryan Owens that it “was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics”, and Jones believes that Trump “became President of the United States in that moment”.  But Trump’s speech is not just being praised for that one moment.  He detailed many of the most important problems that our nation is facing, and he explained his prescription for addressing those problems.

Hopefully Trump’s words helped people to understand that our problems did not get fixed just because he got elected.  It is going to take extraordinary action to fix those problems, because our problems run very deep.  In particular, Trump made an exceedingly strong case that the U.S. economy has been badly deteriorating for a very long period of time.  The following are 11 quotes from Trump’s speech to Congress that show that the U.S. economy is in a state of collapse…

#1 “Ninety-four million Americans are out of the labor force”

#2 “Over 43 million people are now living in poverty”

#3 “Over 43 million Americans are on food stamps”

#4 “More than one in five people in their prime working years are not working”

#5 “We have the worst financial recovery in 65 years”

#6 “In the last eight years, the past administration has put on more new debt than nearly all of the other Presidents combined”

#7 “We’ve lost more than one-fourth of our manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was approved”

#8 “We’ve lost 60,000 factories since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001”

#9 “Our trade deficit in goods with the world last year was nearly 800 billion dollars”

#10 “Obamacare premiums nationwide have increased by double and triple digits. As an example, Arizona went up 116 percent last year alone.”

#11  “We’ve spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas, while our infrastructure at home has so badly crumbled”

All of these quotes come from the transcript of the speech that was posted on the official White House website.

So many of the economic themes that Trump touched on are things that I have been writing about recently.  For example, I recently published an article entitled “11 Deeply Alarming Facts About America’s Crumbling Infrastructure” in which I discussed the horrific state of our roads, bridges, ports, dams, water systems and airports.  I greatly applaud Trump for wanting to do something about this growing national crisis, but I just don’t know where the money is going to come from.

Just over a week ago I also wrote a major article about Obamacare.  We have zero hope of turning our economy in a positive direction until we do something to fix our dramatically failing healthcare system, but at the moment Republicans in Congress seem extremely hesitant to take action.  Instead, many Republican leaders are now talking about trying to “fix Obamacare“, and that simply is not going to work.

You can’t “fix” a steaming pile of garbage.

All of the other facts that Trump listed about the economy were right on point too.  I have been screaming for seven years about our nightmarish trade deficit and the fact that tens of thousands of businesses and millions of good paying jobs were leaving the country.  It is refreshing to finally have a president that understands how badly America has been hurt by imbalanced trade agreements, and my hope is that he will start to take constructive action in this regard.

So much damage to the economy has already been done, and there are all kinds of indications that we are about to officially slide into yet another recession.  Yesterday we learned that the number of “distressed retailers” in this country is the highest that it has been since the last recession, and in recent weeks major retailers across the nation have announced the closing of hundreds of stores.  Lending standards are tightening, bankruptcies are rising, and employment growth at companies listed on the S&P 500 has gone negative for the first time since the last recession.

It is being projected that GDP growth for the first quarter of 2017 will be barely above zero, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we actually had a negative reading.

If we indeed are heading into a new recession, Trump and his supporters need it to happen as soon as possible so that they can blame it on Obama.  If a recession begins a year from now, everyone will blame it on Trump even if it is not his fault.  But if a recession begins now, Trump and his supporters can pin responsibility for it on Obama and then take credit if and when a recovery occurs.

Trump’s speech on Tuesday night was very optimistic, and he seemed quite confident that every issue that we are facing as a nation can be fixed…

Everything that is broken in our country can be fixed. Every problem can be solved. And every hurting family can find healing and hope.

I hope that Trump is right, but I also know that the federal government is already 20 trillion dollars in debt, U.S. consumers are already more than 12 trillion dollars in debt, and corporate debt has approximately doubled since the last financial crisis.

You can’t squeeze blood out of an apple, and you can’t get out of a debt bubble by going into a lot more debt.

I understand that there are so many people out there right now that are deeply optimistic about the future, but the truth is that we have no hope of a positive future unless we fundamentally change our ways as a nation.  I wish that someone could show me evidence that this is happening, because I would be very glad to see it.  As it stands, we continue to steamroll toward the kind of apocalyptic future for this country that I have been warning about for a very long time.

It will take a lot more than words to fix America, and I think that Donald Trump understands this.

Hopefully many of his followers will start to get the message as well.

The Russian Love Affair With Donald Trump Sours As The U.S. And Russia Move Toward War

NATO Seasparrow surface missile is launched from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush - Publc DomainIn recent months Donald Trump has been severely criticized by both Democrats and Republicans for not being sufficiently “anti-Russia”, but the truth is that the Trump administration has not been working hard enough to repair a relationship that is now souring very rapidly.  When Donald Trump won the election in November, the Russians celebrated tremendously, because they greatly preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton.  But just because Trump was victorious does not mean that our relationship with Russia will automatically improve.  Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin both have huge egos, and it is quite easy to imagine a scenario in which things between them go very, very badly.

In fact, we may already be starting to see such a scenario play out.  As you will see below, under President Trump U.S. troops are being deployed to a very sensitive area of Poland, and they are also being sent to key areas of Bulgaria and Romania.  That is not sitting well with the Russian government, but they were much more upset when Trump insisted that Russia must give the Crimea back to Ukraine.  This is something that the Russians would never do, and they were quite stunned that Trump would even suggest such a thing.

On the flip side, the Pentagon was quite annoyed when Russian fighter jets buzzed a U.S. warship in the Black Sea just a few days ago, and when a Russian spy ship set up shop just off the coast of Connecticut recently, President Trump told Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that “the greatest thing I could do is shoot that ship that’s 30 miles off shore right out of the water”.

When I first heard about that quote I thought it might be “fake news”, but it was actually reported by ABC News and a whole host of other prominent news outlets.

I know that Trump doesn’t have much of a filter, and that is a good thing when he is dealing with the mainstream media, but it can be a very, very bad thing for foreign policy.

Look, you may think that it is a good idea to blow a Russian spy ship out of the water, but you never, ever say such a thing out loud.

The Russians think like mobsters.  That means that they are quite paranoid, and it also means that they take whatever you say very, very seriously.

In a few days, most of us living in the United States will completely forget what Trump said about that Russian spy ship, but over in Russia they will remember this quote forever.

This is just how the Russians operate – they never forget, and they never, ever forgive.

When you are dealing with Russia, you have got to be very, very careful.  Unfortunately, being cautious is not one of Trump’s strengths, and the wild optimism about Trump in Russia is now being replaced by disappointment and anger…

The new U.S. president has been in his role for just under a month, taking office in a transition that has been marked by chaos and missteps. And already, from the right of the political spectrum to the marginalized Russian left, a mixture of disappointment with the new U.S. president — who came into office promising to remake relations between the two countries — and a sense of vindication that Trump couldn’t be trusted after all has crept into Russian political chatter.

“Is Trump already out of fashion?” the independent Russian journal Russkaya Fabula asked on Wednesday — the same day that the Trump administration was dealing with the fallout stemming from revelations about National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador. The site pointed to a small demonstration by hard-line nationalists this week, which picketed a major state-run news outlet and demanded the end of the “cult of Trump” in Russian media.

And in a sign of how far things have already deteriorated, Putin has ordered state media over in Russia to cut back on their coverage of Trump…

The Kremlin ordered state media to cut back on their fawning coverage of President Donald Trump, reflecting a growing concern among senior Russian officials that the new US administration will be less friendly than first thought, three people familiar with the matter said.

Just before Trump took office, Barack Obama aggressively moved U.S. troops toward the Russian border, and I highly criticized him for that.

So now that Trump is doing the exact same thing, I have to be critical of him as well.  Somebody needs to tell Trump that stationing 1,000 U.S. troops in northeastern Poland is not going to help our relationship with Putin…

The US Army’s Europe headquarters located in Wiesbaden, Germany announced late Saturday that 1,000 US troops and their vehicles would be sent to northeastern Poland at the end of March.

The unit – part of 4,000 US troops being deployed in rotation along NATO’s eastern flank  under its “Atlantic Resolve” mission – will be located at Orzysz.

That particular Polish city is less than 90 miles from the extremely sensitive Russian city of Kaliningrad.

If I was Trump, this is something that I would not have done.

At this point, the Russians are not quite sure what to make of Trump.  In fact, they have even gone so far as to prepare a “psychological dossier” on him to help Putin prepare for his first meeting with Trump…

A dossier on Donald Trump’s psychological makeup is being prepared for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Among its preliminary conclusions is that the new American leader is a risk-taker who can be naïve, according to a senior Kremlin adviser.

Unfortunately, Trump tends to listen to those in his immediate vicinity, and in Washington he is surrounded by war hawks that absolutely hate Russia.  The following comes from Pat Buchanan…

The anti-Putin paranoia here is astonishing.

That he is a killer, a KGB thug, a murderer, is part of the daily rant of John McCain. At the Munich Security Conference this last weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham promised, “2017 is going to be a year of kicking Russia in the a– in Congress.”

Members of Congress such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham are playing a very dangerous game.

It is okay to be critical of Russia, but if you are constantly making inflammatory statements all the time that is just going to push us toward war.

And as I explained in my latest book, we do not want a war with Russia.

For years, the Russian military has been laser-focused on preparing for a war with the United States, while at the same time the U.S. military has been primarily focused on fighting wars in the Middle East.

So the Russians have been working very hard to upgrade their strategic nuclear arsenal, and at this point their arsenal is far superior to ours.  The following comes from an article that I came across earlier today…

Russia is constantly improving its nuclear deterrence and is very close to deploying new technologically-advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles which can defeat any US missile defense systems, a Russian deputy prime minister said in an interview.

“These weapons will soon appear in our armed forces,” Dmitry Rogozin told Rossiya-1 TV on Sunday. While not naming the new ICBM, the deputy PM in charge of the defense industry said the missile will have the capacity to penetrate any American air defenses.

“These weapons are able to clear the United States’ missile defense both of today and of tomorrow – and even of the day after tomorrow,” Rogozin said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to rely on weapons systems that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Russians are a very dangerous foe, and it is in our national interest to try to have a positive relationship with them.

There are going to be times when we strongly disagree with what the Russians are doing, but our interactions with them should always be focused on trying to avoid a nuclear conflict.

So yes, we should let the Russians know when we are upset about something, but constantly making provocative and incendiary statements is a recipe for disaster.

Hopefully our leaders will start to realize this very soon, because right now our relationship with Russia is deteriorating very rapidly.

It Is About Time That We Had A President That Was Willing To Go To War With The Mainstream Media

Donald Trump Waving - Public DomainThursday afternoon’s press conference was perhaps the most memorable moment of Donald Trump’s presidency so far.  Trump’s blistering attack on the media was quite a spectacle, but the truth is that it was desperately needed.  For decades, the mainstream media has dominated political discourse in this country no matter who has been in control of the White House or Congress.  They have become masters of guiding and shaping public opinion, and in recent years they have completely discarded any pretense of being “unbiased” or “objective”.  These monolithic media organizations relentlessly push the progressive agenda of their owners (the global elite), and that is why the “news” always seems to be just about the same no matter which network it is coming from.  Their monopoly is slowly being broken by the rise of the alternative media, but the truth is that most Americans still rely on just a handful of ultra-powerful media organizations for their news.

So when Trump brutally attacked the mainstream media at his press conference on Thursday, millions upon millions of Americans greatly rejoiced, because they finally got what was coming to them.  And then on Friday, Trump posted a message to Twitter calling the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN “the enemy of the American people”…

After Donald Trump’s surprise election victory in November, many in the mainstream media started referring to the pro-Trump alternative media as “fake news”, but now Trump has totally turned that insult against them. 

For weeks Trump has been referring to CNN as “fake news”, but on Friday he said that he was now going to refer to them as “very fake news”.  The following exchange between Trump and CNN’s Jim Acosta comes from the official White House website…

Q    Just because of the attack of fake news and attacking our network, I just want to ask you, sir — 

THE PRESIDENT:  I’m changing it from fake news, though.

Q    Doesn’t that undermine — 

THE PRESIDENT:  Very fake news now.  (Laughter.) 

We have never seen an exchange quite like that between a president of the United States and a prominent member of the mainstream media, but it was well overdue…

For eight years, the mainstream media gushed and fawned over Barack Obama because he supported the progressive agenda of the global elite, but now that Trump is in the White House virtually every story from the mainstream media is negative.

So when Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon refers to them as “the opposition party” he is right on target…

In a rare interview with The New York Times last month, Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon, the former chair of the far-right Breitbart News, called reporters the “opposition party” and said “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

“They don’t understand this country,” Bannon said. “They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

At this point, the mainstream media is so desperate to portray Trump as a bad guy that they have resorted to a modern day version of McCarthyism.  For decades, liberals always pointed to McCarthyism as one of the greatest examples of paranoia and intolerance in modern American history, but now they are doing the exact same thing to Trump…

A bizarre feature of the present confrontation is that the Democrats and liberals have relaunched McCarthyism, something they would have decried as a toxic episode in American political history until a few months ago. Just as Senator Joe McCarthy claimed in 1950 to have a list of communist infiltrators in the State Department, so any contact between a Trump supporter or official and a Russian is now being reported as suspicious and potentially treacherous. It is difficult to see where Trump is wrong when he tweeted that “the Democrats had to come up with a story as to why they lost the election, and so badly, so they made up a story – RUSSIA. Fake news!”

The reason why many of us constantly refer to the mainstream media as a single entity is because it really is very tightly controlled.  You see, the truth is that more than 90 percent of the news, information and entertainment that Americans get through their televisions comes from just 6 giant media corporations.  And of course those 6 enormous corporations are owned and controlled by the elite of the world.

The war for our society is a war for hearts and minds, and the reason why the elite have made so much progress is because most Americans allow thousands upon thousands of hours of “programming” to be constantly pumped into their heads.

The following numbers come directly from Nielsen, and they show how much news, information and entertainment average Americans consume through various methods each day…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using  a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add the top two categories together, the average American consumes more than five hours of television every single day.

And when you add all of those categories together, the average American is plugged into “the matrix” in some way for more than 10 hours a day.

We are literally subjecting ourselves to a form of very powerful mind control, and the extraordinary power of the media is something that I addressed in my novel.  There are some people that actually cannot stand complete silence because they have become so accustomed to having something “on” all the time.  As a society, we are absolutely addicted to entertainment, but there is always an agenda behind that entertainment.  This is something that I talked about in a previous article…

Virtually every television show, movie, song, book, news broadcast and talk show is trying to shape how you view reality.  Whether you realize it or not, you are constantly being bombarded with messages about what is true and what is not, about what is right and what is wrong, and about what really matters and what is unimportant.  Even leaving something out or ignoring something completely can send an extremely powerful message.

When Donald Trump said that the mainstream media is “the enemy of the American People”, he was 100 percent correct.

If our country is going to have a positive future, the immense power that these media corporations have over the general population must be broken.

It is about time that we had a president that was willing to go to war with the mainstream media, and I greatly applaud President Trump for the stand that he is taking.

Why Donald Trump Needs The Next Recession To Start As Quickly As Possible

Donald Trump Accepts The Nomination - Public DomainA new recession is coming, and Donald Trump needs it to begin sooner rather than later.  As I explained last week, most American voters tend to care about their pocketbooks more than anything else.  If the next recession were to officially start during the first quarter of 2017, it would be very easy for Trump to blame it on Obama, and then he could portray himself as the one that pulled the U.S. economy out of recession in time for the 2020 election.  But if the next recession does not begin until 2018 or 2019, everybody is going to blame it on Trump even if it is not his fault.  In politics, who gets the blame for whatever goes wrong is often the most important thing, and if Trump wants to avoid blame for the next recession he needs for it to start as quickly as possible.

For most of 2016, the mainstream media was warning that a new recession was probably coming no matter who won the election.  For one example, just check out this Bloomberg article.

And for once, the mainstream media was precisely correct.  Barack Obama left us with an enormous economic mess, and it would take an economic miracle of unprecedented proportions to keep the U.S. economy from going into a recession at this point.

During the Obama years, the U.S. went on a debt binge unlike anything we have ever seen before.

The U.S. national debt almost doubled.  During Obama’s time in the White House, it increased from 10.6 trillion dollars to nearly 20 trillion dollars, and that means that over 9 trillion dollars of future consumption was brought into the present.  That incredible boost to spending would have shot U.S. economic growth into the stratosphere during normal times, but because we were struggling so much all we got out of it was eight years of economic stagnation.

In fact, Barack Obama was the only president in modern American history never to have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by at least 3 percent, and he had two terms to try to accomplish that goal.

And remember, Obama also had the benefit of doctored economic numbers.  John Williams of shadowstats.com tracks what the figures would look like if honest numbers were being used, and according to his calculations the U.S. economy has actually continually been in a recession since 2005.

In addition to government debt, other forms of debt are way out of control as well.  The total amount of consumer debt in the United States has now hit 12 trillion dollars, and corporate debt has approximately doubled since the last recession.

When levels of debt grow much, much faster than the overall economy, it is inevitable that a crash will come.

If you look back throughout history, I don’t know if you can find a single example where debt has grown this quickly and a crash has not happened afterwards.

By some miracle if we are able to avoid a major economic downturn this time, we will literally be defying the laws of economics.

The employment crisis also threatens to get a lot worse in the months ahead.  The mainstream media keeps trying to tell us that we are almost at “full employment”, but the truth is that more than 100 million Americans do not have a job right now.

Yes, there are a few areas of the country where jobs appear to be plentiful, but there are many more areas where they are not.

For example, you will never, ever be able to convince 23-year-old Tyler Moore that the job market is good…

Tyler Moore’s late-December drive to Louisville, Ky., was one of desperation. He was headed four hours west on Interstate 64 to interview for a job. Even if he landed the position, filling his gas tank had left him with $8 to his name. He would have to sleep at a friend’s place until he could earn enough to pay rent.

The 23-year-old had run out of options. He’d applied for dozens of jobs within an hour and a half of his hometown of Lovely, once a coal-mining stronghold. Instead of opportunities, he had found waiting lists.

“Minimum-wage jobs, fast-food restaurants, Wal-Mart, anything like that, a lot of them has already been took,” he says in an Appalachian drawl, explaining that the backlog just to interview was as long as a year. “There are no jobs.”

If the U.S. economy is in “good shape”, then why can’t people like Moore find a job?

Yes, there is a tremendous amount of optimism in the financial markets right now and the stock market has been soaring.

But the exact same things were true in 2007, and we remember how that turned out.

There is no possible way that the S&P 500 can continue to generate an 18% annual return without corresponding economic growth.  The following comes from David Stockman…

Altogether the S&P 500 now stands at 3.4X its post-crisis low, having generated an 18% annual return (including dividends) for nearly eight years running.

To be sure, in an honest free market that very fact would be a flashing red light, warning that exceptionally high gains over an extended period necessitate a regression to the mean in the period ahead.

A lot of people get caught up in trying to predict exactly when the stock market will crash, but what everybody should be able to agree on is that it will crash.

There is no possible way that stocks can stay at such ridiculously overpriced levels indefinitely.

Throughout history, stocks have always moved back in the direction of the long-term averages, and this time will be no exception.

And just like last time, the beginning of a new recession will likely be accompanied by a major financial correction.

In recent articles, I have been highlighting some of the reasons why it appears that a new recession is imminent…

-Federal tax receipts have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.

-Job growth at S&P 500 companies has gone negative for the very first time since the last recession.

-The U.S. trade deficit in 2016 was the largest in four years.

-Lending standards have tightened up for medium and large sized firms for six quarters in a row.

-Lending standard are also tightening up for consumers.

-We just saw the largest percentage decline in average weekly hours since the recession of 2008.

-Gross private domestic investment is down.

-Consumer bankruptcies are rising.

-Commercial bankruptcies are rising.

All of this is not necessarily bad news for Trump.

A horrible recession started during the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, but the U.S. economy turned around later in his first term and that momentum helped propel him to an easy victory in 1984.

Similarly, Trump could actually take advantage of the coming economic downturn as long as he is able to pin all of the blame for it on the previous administration.

If there is one thing that is true about U.S. voters, it is the fact that they tend to care about their own economic well-being more than anything else.

If you doubt this, just check out the results of a recent Fox News poll…

The latest Fox News Poll also asks, what defines the American Dream today? At the top, according to the national survey released Wednesday, is “retiring comfortably.” Some 88 percent feel that is extremely or very important to realizing the dream.

Next, 76 percent say “having a successful career” is important. That’s followed by “raising a family” (74 percent) and “making a valuable contribution” to their community (74 percent).

“Owning a home” is seen as a big part of achieving the dream for nearly 7 in 10 (69 percent). About 6 in 10 say “graduating college” (61 percent) and “being better off” than their parents (57 percent).

To most Americans, being “successful in life” comes down to how much money they have.

That should not be true, but it is.

And this is ultimately what Trump will be judged on.

If the economy is improving by 2020, voters will tend to evaluate him favorably.  But if the economy is faltering during the next election season, it will be more difficult for him to get a second term.

So what Trump and all those that support Trump should want is for the coming recession to begin and end as quickly as possible.

However, there is also the possibility that the next recession may be a particularly bad one.  Because we are in the midst of the biggest debt bubble in human history, any major downturn could ultimately spiral completely out of control.  In other words, we may be facing the kind of crisis from which we never quite recover.

One expert that is warning about such a scenario is legendary investor Jim Rogers…

…get prepared because we’re going to have the worst economic problems we’ve had in your lifetime or my lifetime and when that happens a lot of people are going to disappear.

In 2008 Bear Stearns disappeared, Bear Stearns had been around over 90 years. Lehman Brothers disappeared. Lehman Brothers had been around over 150 years. A long, long time, a long glorious history they’ve been through wars, depression, civil war they’ve been through everything and yet they disappear.

So the next time around it’s going to be worse than anything we’ve seen and a lot of institutions, people, companies even countries, certainly governments and maybe even countries are going to disappear. I hope you get very worried.

when you start having bear markets as you I’m sure well know one bad thing happens and another bad thing happens and these things snowball just like in bull markets good news comes out then more good news comes out the next thing you know you’re five or six or seven years into a bull market.

Well bear markets do the same thing and so we have a lot of bad news on the horizon. I haven’t even gotten to war. I haven’t even gotten to trade war or anything like that but you know things do go wrong.

If it is as bad as Rogers is suggesting, it wouldn’t be too long before conditions in America would begin to resemble those portrayed in my novel.

Let’s hope that does not turn out to be the case.

Let’s hope that the next recession begins and ends as quickly as possible and that the U.S. economy is on a solid upswing by 2020.

And if you are a Trump supporter, don’t be too dismayed if the U.S. economy takes a major downturn in 2017.  As I discussed above, it could actually be just the thing that Trump needs to set the stage for another election victory in 2020.

Planned Parenthood Workers That Reached Abortion Sales Quota Goals Were Rewarded With Pizza Parties

Planned Parnethood EvilCould you imagine having a job where you had to meet an “abortion sales quota” every month?  According to a shocking new investigation, this was actually happening at Planned Parenthood clinics all over the nation, and workers that reached abortion sales quota goals were rewarded with pizza parties and other incentives.  Every year, Planned Parenthood murders hundreds of thousands of precious little children, but that isn’t good enough for them, and so they have their workers aggressively push abortions to the vulnerable young women who come into their facilities.  It is a national disgrace, and Planned Parenthood should be defunded by Congress immediately.  But of course Planned Parenthood was never defunded after it was revealed that they systematically harvest baby parts and sell them off to the highest bidder, and so many observers are pessimistic that they will be defunded now.

In this video, women that used to work for Planned Parenthood explain how the abortion sales quotas worked.  This is evil that is on a level that is hard to put into words…

America will never, ever be “great again” as long as this kind of thing is allowed to happen.

As you can see in the video, former Planned Parenthood center manager Sue Thayer says that if the number of abortions got too low pressure was really put on the workers to get the number back up to an acceptable level…

“It was on this big grid, and if we hit our goal, our line was green. If we were 5 percent under it was yellow, if we were 10 percent under it was red. That’s when we needed to have a corrective action plan – why we didn’t hit the goal, what we’re going to do differently next time,” she said.

“So we were really very goal-oriented. I trained my staff the way that I was trained, which was to really encourage women to choose abortion, to have it at Planned Parenthood, because that counts toward our goal.”

Thayer’s testimony was corroborated by former Planned Parenthood nurse Marianne Anderson.  According to Anderson, she often felt like “more of a salesman” than a nurse while she was working for the organization…

“I felt like I was more of a salesman sometimes, to sell abortions,” former Planned Parenthood nurse Marianne Anderson says in the video. “And we were told on a regular basis that, ‘You have a quota to meet to keep this clinic open.’”

A very long time ago I worked in a high pressure sales environment, and I was reminded of those days when I watched this video.  In fact, some of the techniques that Thayer says Planned Parenthood uses to sell abortions are just like high pressure sales techniques that are commonly used in other industries…

She continued: “We would try to get the appointment scheduled for the abortion before they left our clinic. We would say things like, ‘your pregnancy test, you visit today is X number of dollars. How much are you gonna be able to pay towards that.’ … If they’d say, ‘I’m not able to pay today,’ then we would say something like, ‘Well, if you can’t pay 10 dollars today, how are you gonna take care of a baby?’

“‘Have you priced diapers? Do you know how much it costs to buy a car seat? Where would you go for help? There’s no place in Storm Lake – or whatever town they were in – you know, where you can get help as a pregnant mom.’”

Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, more than 56 million babies have been slaughtered in abortion mills across the United States.

And your tax dollars are being used to fund Planned Parenthood.  In fact, Planned Parenthood gets close to half a billion dollars from the federal government every year.

But now there is an effort to change all that.  A new bill has been introduced in Congress that would take that money away from Planned Parenthood and give it to other organizations that provide health care services for women…

Two U.S. Senators have introduced a bill that would redirect more than $500 million in federal funding from the abortion and contraceptive giant Planned Parenthood to women’s health care providers that do not perform abortions.

Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and James Lankford, R-Okla., recently introduced the “Protect Funding for Women’s Health Care Act” with the support of 127 co-sponsors.

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no federal funds may be made available to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, or to any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, successors or clinics,” the bill reads in part. “All funds no longer available to Planned Parenthood will continue to be made available to other eligible entities to provide women’s health care services.”

Thanks to the recent election, the Republicans now control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

If they do not defund Planned Parenthood now, there is no excuse.

So I and millions of other deeply concerned Americans will be watching.  During the campaign, Donald Trump promised that he would defund Planned Parenthood.  If it doesn’t happen, it will be a horrible stain on the Trump presidency.

People are so fired up about Trump’s executive orders on immigration and other issues, but what he does about Planned Parenthood is far, far more important than any of that.

We simply cannot continue to murder millions of our own children and expect to have any sort of a future for our nation.  In my latest book I talk about the judgments that are coming to America, but if we were to turn from our wicked ways perhaps those judgments could be delayed.

Any society that kills millions of kids deserves to be destroyed.  So please do not buy into the deception that America can be “great again” without addressing this great evil.

This revelation about Planned Parenthood comes at a critical time.  If the federal government is going to defund Planned Parenthood, it is probably going to happen fairly quickly.

But if it doesn’t happen, the blood of countless numbers of precious children will be on the hands of Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress, and they will have absolutely no excuse.

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