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April 08, 2025

Rallying with PM Harper in Edmonton for CHANGE!

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Pierre Poilievre

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8 Απρ 2025

Canadians are ready for CHANGE and a new Conservative government that will build pipelines, mines, LNG plants, data centres and lower costs for families—For a Change

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Will the West’s Paranoia of Russia Destroy the World?

April 6, 2025

Paul Craig Roberts

Do you remember the James Bond film in which a deranged Soviet General wanted to launch a nuclear war, or Dr. Strangelove, an American deranged general who wanted to do the same? Well, Dr. Strangelove is still with us, but he is no longer considered insane.

In today’s Pentagon spreading nuclear weapons among allies who lack them in order to conduct an even larger nuclear war is just good war planning. On April 1, and unfortunately it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke, the nominee as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, said that the United States was ready to consider entering into nuclear sharing agreements with more of the country’s NATO allies. “From a military perspective, expanding NATO allies’ participation in the nuclear deterrence mission in some capacity would enhance flexibility, survivability, and military capability. If confirmed, I will work… to evaluate the cost/benefit of such a decision.” https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/next-pentagon-chief-confirms-willingness-provide-more-allies-nuclear-attack

The nominee said that another benefit of providing nuclear weapons to NATO members who don’t have them is to prevent nuclear proliferation resulting from acquiring them on their own. If too many of our allies have the weapons, the US would not be able to manage the escalation risk.

What Caine said makes sense. We do not want Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, or Poland launching a nuclear war.

But what this common sense hides is the absurdity of “managing nuclear war.”

There is a consensus, or close to one, that nuclear war would be lethal to life on the planet. It calls to mind the novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, with the spaceship loading with human, animal, and plant life for a distant planet in a short period of time remaining prior to nuclear armageddon on earth.

It is, of course, the Pentagon’s job to be prepared for war. But as the war the Pentagon is preparing for is unwinnable, why not attempt to prepare for peace? What cause is worth fighting for it if results in the death of planet Earth?

These thoughts entered the mind of President John F. Kennedy. JFK had campaigned as a Cold Warrior proclaiming a “missile gap.” Somehow President Eisenhower, World War II hero and 5-star general had let the Soviets get ahead of us. Kennedy was rescued from his delusion by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs. He refused the request to allow the US Air Force to support the CIA’s Cuban refugee army’s invasion of Cuba. He refused the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Northwoods Project” ( https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf ), which called for the US Air Force to shoot down US passenger airliners, staff boats of refugees from Cuba to Florida, and kill Americans on the streets of Miami and Washington, D.C., and blame Castro as justification for a US invasion of Cuba. He rejected the Joint Chiefs of Staff plan for nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. All of this information is publicly available, but few are aware of it.

Kennedy worked behind the scenes with Soviet leader Khrushchev to defuse the dangerous situation. Instead of recognizing Kennedy’s leadership, the US military/security complex saw Kennedy as “soft on communism,” a traitor-in-the-making to America who had to be removed from office. As Kennedy was popular, assassination was the solution.

I agree with James Douglas, Oliver Stone, and all the rest that Kennedy was murdered by the US Security State. Where I depart from them is over whether it should have been revealed or covered up. Here facts are not the issue, just judgment, and judgment is not infallible.

I do not believe that anyone on the Warren Commission believed the report. The entire purpose of the report was to protect the American public from losing confidence in their own government in the midst of a dangerous Cold War with a nuclear-armed opponent in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs. With the balance of power in the world at stake, the United States would have been harmed by official admission that the security agencies of the US government had assassinated its own president.

I agree that today six decades after JFK’s assassination, the truth, long proven by independent investigators, could be officially recognized, and perhaps it will be.

What I will address instead is how the truth could have presented in 1963 if only the American government were up to the task.

Once sworn in, Lyndon Johnson could have said something along the following lines:

“Dear fellow Americans, Our inordinate paranoia, our fear, of the Soviet Union has resulted in our President’s death at the hands of the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service, because President Kennedy’s efforts to reduce the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union that very recently brought the world close to nuclear war were misperceived by our protective agencies as a sign of dangerous and unwarranted trust in our enemy that left us exposed to nuclear attack. President Kennedy was seen as soft on Communism and possibly a traitor.

“The fault is not in the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. The fault is in the Cold War and the deployment of immensely destructive nuclear weapons. This threat is real, and it must be eliminated. Our most urgent task is not to prosecute our protective agencies for their misjudgment but to terminate the Cold War and ban the existence of nuclear weapons. Our challenge is to learn how to get along, not how to kill one another. The tragedy and our grief over our President’s assassination is the fruit of our own paranoia. Our job is to substitute mutual understaffing and trust for fear and mistrust. If not, sooner or later the disastrous weapons will be used.”

Nothing like this could happen, because too many people and interests had a stake in an ongoing conflict. The assassination of JFK put Johnson in the presidency. It benefitted the power and budget of the military/security complex by blaming the assassination on Oswald, a Soviet agent. For the Joint Chiefs and the CIA that was a wonderful outcome. What did they have to gain from Johnson telling the truth and continuing Kennedy’s efforts to reduce hysteria and threats? When vision was needed, it wasn’t there.

Most disasters in history result from people being incapable of making the right decisions. Today it is Trump and Putin who are being tested. How much confidence can we have in either?

source:

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/04/06/.

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Cost of Living for Americans Is About to Rise

U.S. President Donald Trump holds a chart as he delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs during a “Make America Wealthy Again” event at the White House on April 2.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Cost of Living for Americans Is About to Rise

Making America great again will require some big short-term sacrifices.

By Andrew Miiller • April 7, 2025

The United States stock market has lost $9.6 trillion since President Donald Trump took the oath of office as investors fret about the effects of his revolutionary tariff plan. On April 2—a date the president proclaimed “Liberation Day”—the administration announced the most sweeping tariff hikes in nearly a century. Invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act as his justification, President Trump slapped a 10 percent tariff on imports from all foreign countries and higher rates on particular economies taking advantage of the United States, including China and the European Union.

Some investors are considering the possibility that President Trump may postpone implementing his controversial tariff plan after the stock market tanked. But if all of President Trump’s proposed tariffs do take effect, the effective U.S. tariff rate will rise to 22.5 percent, the highest since President Theodore Roosevelt.

The Budget Lab at Yale, a nonpartisan policy research center that provides in-depth analysis of federal policy proposals for the U.S. economy, estimates that all the tariffs President Trump has proposed so far would raise prices by 2.3 percent, an average per household consumer loss of roughly $3,800 per year.

Republican lawmakers are working to extend President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts in order to help Americans better afford tariff hikes. If these tax cuts expire, however, the average American family can expect to pay $1,000 more in annual income taxes in addition to $3,800 more in tariff levies. This means the average family should probably budget $400 per month more in various taxes than they spent last year—a considerable sum.

“I don’t want anything to go down but, sometimes, you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump told reporters asking about the market. “We have been treated so badly by other countries because we had stupid leadership that allowed this to happen. They took our businesses; they took our money; they took our jobs.”

The problem that President Trump is prescribing strong medicine to fix is the U.S. trade deficit. The last time America sold more goods to other countries than it bought was 1975. In the 50 years since, America has become so addicted to cheap foreign goods that it now imports an astounding $1.1 trillion more than it exports.

“We allowed ourselves to be transformed from a cast iron economy that made things into a largely paper economy that depends on the good graces of foreign nations for its survival,” wrote Sean Davis at the Federalist. “This is a recipe for civilizational suicide. We don’t make our own weapons, food, machines, vehicles, plastics, medicines, or computers. The whole covid insanity, with its shutdowns and shortages and supply-chain chaos, was a blaring alarm warning us that the economy we thought was so strong was shockingly fragile.”

Alongside the national debt, the trade deficit is perhaps America’s biggest domestic national security crisis. President Trump is taking bold action to solve both problems. He is working with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to balance the budget and cancel out America’s $1.8 trillion budget deficit. Yet since the U.S. government’s total discretionary budget is $1.8 trillion, it is highly unlikely that Trump and Musk will be able to balance the budget with spending cuts alone. Without major cuts to Medicare and Social Security, the government will have to increase taxes. And the only type of tax that helps fix a trade deficit is a tariff.

By charging the average American family $3,800 per year in tariff levies, President Trump’s tariff proposals would raise $3.1 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade. This revenue should drop the budget deficit from $1.8 trillion per year to $1.5 trillion per year while simultaneously incentivizing American citizens to buy goods produced in their own country instead of sending their hard-earned money to the Chinese Communist Party.

The catch is that the average American family will have to reduce its standard of living by about $3,800 to $4,800 per year to make their country more self-sufficient, better able to survive without foreign goods and deficit spending. When financial advisers like Dave Ramsey help heavily indebted people achieve financial independence, they usually prescribe two to three years of severe financial austerity. This is basically what President Trump is prescribing to Americans. It may take a few years for America to rebuild its industry and balance its budget. The responsible thing to do until then is to raise taxes on foreign imports.

In many ways, President Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement is a test of America’s character. Will Americans keep running up their national debt to buy cheap merchandise from nations that hate them? Or will they make the sacrifices necessary to balance their budget and rebuild their industrial base?

Regarding finances, Dave Ramsey teaches: “Almost all long-term thinking has short-term pain. Almost all short-term thinking has long-term pain and short-term relief.” Americans can either suffer a little bit now to create a nation capable of withstanding a future, prophesied trade war. Or they can take the easy way out now, only to suffer later.

In 1980, Herbert W. Armstrong wrote an article titled “Prepare to Greatly Reduce Your Standard of Living.” It warned that inflation and other economic woes were about to greatly reduce Americans’ purchasing power in the next year or two. Mr. Armstrong was right. The Crisis of 1982 was the worst downturn in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Then the 2008 recession surpassed it. Millions of people had to reduce their standard of living. But most forgot about Mr. Armstrong’s warning after President Ronald Reagan stabilized the nation’s economy. But the Crisis of 1982 was not the ultimate fulfillment of the prophecies Mr. Armstrong referred to in his article.

Mr. Armstrong explained that God had blessed America with the world’s highest per capita income because of a promise He had made to the patriarch Abraham. He warned that God would take away America’s blessing if it rebelled against Him.

As recently as 1950, two fifths of U.S. households did not own an automobile, one third did not own a television, and only a small minority of families enjoyed luxuries like air conditioning or a water heater. Yet those households were able to make it on one income and avoid consumer debt because they were less entitled than Americans today and did not buy things they could not afford. What they called “middle class” in the 1950s is now called “poverty.” Unless Americans start making some short-term sacrifices now, they will likely become acquainted with their great-grandparents’ standard of living before America’s economic collapse has run its course. You cannot run up both consumer and government debt for decades without consequences.

The fact is, the U.S. has been living beyond its means for decades and is now entering a period referred to as “Jacob’s trouble” (Jeremiah 30:7). God has raised up President Trump to give the American people a chance to repent and turn their nation around. Yet true repentance means change. We have to change our approach to finance if we want to avoid bankruptcy and foreign enslavement.

The Bible tells us that debt is a form of slavery (Proverbs 22:7) and advises us to deliver ourselves from debt “as a roe from the hand of the hunter, and as a bird from the hand of the fowler” (Proverb 6:5). This requires individual sacrifice.

Now is the time to put your financial house in order. If you have delayed taking the painful but necessary steps to do this, there is still a small window of opportunity. You can begin right away by reading Solve Your Money Troubles! and The Financial Law You Can’t Afford to Ignore.

source:

https://www.thetrumpet.com/31295-cost-of-living-for-americans-is-about-to-rise.

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