Why is it that American liberal Democrats and Europeans are so disturbed that Trump is moving the United States toward normal relations with Russia instead of maintaining a hostile approach to Russia based on proxy wars, sanctions, and endless propaganda? We know why the think tanks and university faculties supported by the military/security complex are upset–their incomes are at stake. But why the Democrats and Europeans? The answer will have to wait until another occasion. This column addresses readers’ questions about the many varied conflicting reports about a Trump-Putin deal.

What are my expectations, readers ask, for the Trump-Putin meeting about the conflict in Ukraine? I am pleased that readers think I have been sufficiently correct over the years for my analysis to be of interest.

The outlook for the resolution of the conflict and for a final end of the Cold War is good, but never forget the adage that “there’s many a slip between cup and lip.�

First of all, neither leader wants the war. Putin did everything he could to avoid war. He devised the Minsk Agreement which kept the breakaway Donbas republics in Ukraine. He begged for a mutual security agreement and was cold-shouldered. He was forced to intervene in Donbas by Washington, a conflict for which Russia was unprepared. Putin has fought the conflict in the least effective way possible in order to counter the Western propaganda that he had “invaded Ukraine� and Europe would be next.

Trump regards the orchestrated conflict the American Zionist neoconservatives created with Russia as a stupidity that is in the way of profitable business between the US and Russia and as a stupidity that is leading to the rise of BRICS and the denial of American business relationships with a large part of the world.

A war leader is the last thing Putin is, a job for which he has no talent. Trump favors business uber alles. So a deal is the most likely outcome.

Moreover, statements from Trump, Putin, Lavrov and other officials have created such expectations of an end to the conflict that it is now almost impossible not to deliver a mutually acceptable outcome.

Even proxy wars are expensive, and Trump and Musk are committed to reducing the US budget by $1 trillion. That can’t happen with the US shipping hundreds of billions of dollars into Ukraine.

Putin and Lavrov remain open for Russia being a part of the Western world. Although Putin was forced by Washington’s aggression to revive Russian nationalism, his heart, like many of his generation, is for Russia to be a part of the Western world. Perhaps Putin is lost in the past and does not recognize the spiritual and moral corruption into which the Western world degenerated under liberal leadership. If Trump had not won the election, pedophilia would have been legalized in the Kamala regime. Indeed, it is likely that Democrat judges would have legalized marriage between women and dogs as “freedom of choice.�

The question before us is: Can Trump and his government, a capable collection of talent, restore American principles or have our principles been so destroyed by decades of university, media, and entertainment propaganda, and by judicial rulings and unconstitutional regulatory rules that have left the American system too far gone to be resurrected?

If Putin secures a reasonable end to the conflict in Ukraine, will he revert to his trust in negotiations with the West as he did with the Minsk Agreement, thus setting himself up for a future US government that equates Making America Great Again with Washington’s Hegemony?

The problem with the US government is that it no longer honors the agreements of previous governments. The neoconservative Clinton Regime did not honor the agreement between Gorbachev and the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations that the Cold War was supposed to end, not move to Russia’s borders.

Unless Trump succeeds in cleaning out of the US government all anti-American forces, a vast ensemble, a subsequent government can walk away from an agreement that ends the conflict and renew the conflict or start a new one.

The problem with the West is that governments have lost character and integrity. Can they be trusted?

Just as American propaganda destroyed the confidence of the German people and turned them into self-accusing anti-semites, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe used the dissatisfaction of life under the Soviet Union to place Russian hopes in the West, and there they remain among many of the Russian intellectual class, few of whom are Russian nationalists.

With all of these considerations, I still think that the expectations created by statements of Trump and Putin are too high for them to renege on a deal.

If we can say goodbye to conflict with Russia, the remaining question is whether Trump in truth is really Israel’s puppet and can be led into a war for Israel’s behalf with Iran. At this point I think not. Has Trump been playing along with Israel to avoid attacks by the Israel Lobby on top of attacks by the whore media, Democrats, corrupt judiciary, EU morons, and RINO Republicans?

AI generated propaganda videos of Trump turning Gaza into a Gold Coast Resort not withstanding, Israel might yet find itself ordered to stand down or else.

I don’t think it is a good bet that a person of Trump’s ego would subordinate himself to Israel.

If Trump stops the wars and throttles the criminal regime in Israel, will a successor regime in Washington undo Trump’s good work?

Does the pleasure you get from scrolling your cell phone compensate you for the frustration from the absence of customer service? The same digital revolution that gave you a cell phone gave the companies the opportunity to drive up profits and executive bonuses by replacing customer service with AI that is seldom, if ever, programed to answer your questions and is extremely reluctant to connect you to a superior human who knows what to do. All of us have been stressed out trying to get problems fixed, accounts adjusted, repairs made. My favorite AI response when I call about the internet being down is “you will get faster service if you chat with us online.�

All of us know the frustration of the constant demands to update our information, our telephone number, our email. These endless notices always appear when we are in the middle of some activity that is inconvenient to interrupt to go tend to Internet house-keeping problems. But if you fail to respond too often, all of a sudden you cannot get into your investment accounts, your bank account, your Internet files, because the necessary code, since passwords no longer suffice, doesn’t reach you via cell text or email because you didn’t update. These kinds of problems are almost impossible to correct, because they use your cell phone number and email to identify you. And even if you can get a human on the phone, the person has no way of knowing who you are except your information on file.

The ability to hack the Internet has grown so rapidly that accounts now have to have double and triple protection, and this doesn’t suffice. Your password and user name are merely step one. Next you have to receive a code via cell phone as a text to the number on record. Then a code via email of record. If you didn’t update or made a typo, you don’t have access to what is yours. Just try getting that straightened out.

And now we hear from Malwarebytes, one of the protective services you can purchase online to protect you against viruses, phishing, and capture of your cell phone and/or computer, that AI is being employed by cybercriminals to craft convincing voice, video, and email messages to defraud both businesses and individuals with sophisticated tactics that result in devastating financial losses, reputational damage, and compromise of sensitive data. The AI-powered scamming operations can bypass security filters. As the AI tools are low cost, they can be used on a poor man’s budget. https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/how-ai-was-used-in-an-advanced-phishing-campaign-targeting-gmail-users?utm_source=iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b2c_pro_oth_20250224_februaryweeklynewsletter_v4_174008949080&utm_content=AI_used_for_phishing

Every dollar companies saved by laying off customer representatives has been spent on cybersecurity. As cybersecurity experts will tell you, there is no cybersecurity. The protections can only make hacking more difficult. The digital revolution is costing us much more than our privacy.

Malewarebytes gives an example of how the attack on you unfolds and how to avoid being a victim. Notice that the only way you can avoid being a victim is to be unreachable by anyone whose email or telephone number you do not recognize. But these can also be obtained, and I suspect that it will not be long before scammers contact you via your husband, wife, or child’s cell phone number. Or something like this can happen. Your college kid loses his/her cell phone, gets a new one, different number, has a car accident, calls you and cannot reach you because you don’t recognize the number. Suppose a headhunter wants to offer you a job at $100,000 more than you are currently making, but it is not a number you recognize and goes unanswered.

Already cell phones have gone beyond being useless, as no one answers a call, to being dangerous. Texting has taken over communication. People hear one another’s voices less and less. The digital revolution is isolating people by making verbal conversation problematical.

And the situation is worsening at warp speed. The other day a software engineer I know who is earning in the six figures told me that his employer just told the engineers that they would be replaced by AI in three years. He has a mortgage on a $900,000 condo and is stunned that his expensive education and years of experience are suddenly worthless. Why will Americans go to universities? What will be the point of education, of public schools? Who among the work force displaced by AI can pay property taxes?

The digital revolution and its bastard child AI, along with nuclear weapons, US blowar labs, and Israel, are the worst enemies mankind has. How is Trump going to make America Great Again when in the third and fourth year of his term there will be mass layoffs of Americans replaced by AI? Indeed, Trump and Musk have bought into this development and are discussing replacing a large chunk of the civil service with AI. Why not instead just get rid of the useless work with budget and spending reform?

As an economist I am utterly and totally amazed at the complete and total stupidity of displacing humans with AI. Robots don’t need food and clothing and entertainment and cars and housing. They don’t have car payments and mortgage payments and credit card payments. With humans displaced by machines, aggregate consumer demand disappears, so, as no one has a job or any income, who purchases the goods and services produced by AI? What becomes of the economy?

As I pointed out years ago, and as Elon Musk today confirms, AI and the digital revolution introduce the era of Socialism. Everyone, Musk admits, will have to be given an income. Otherwise, there is no point in the AI provision of goods and services. As humans are not involved in production, merit no longer matters. Everyone will be given the same income. Equality at last. Indeed, what is the point of humans? They no longer have any productive function. Why are they needed? What do they do with themselves with nothing to do? Why should machines produce substance for people who do not participate in production? You can see why Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum want to reduce the human population to a small percentage of its present size.

The digital revolution and AI bring us the most dystopian of all worlds.

The First World will be the first to be utterly and totally destroyed by the digital revolution. But “education� will eventually carry the digital revolution into what was once called “darkest Africa.�

In an AI world universities are superfluous as there are few if any jobs that AI cannot do. The only remaining jobs would be plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and perhaps sooner or later your friendly plumber will be a robot programmed to run through the programs, one of which will clear your line.

Meanwhile libertarian and free market economists will be telling us that “better jobs� will be created by the digital revolution just as they told us that jobs offshoring would create better jobs to take the place of the old “dirty fingernail jobs.� These promised jobs are yet to materialize.

We learned from the hoax “Covid pandemic� how bad the American medical system is. It is worse than bad. It is terrible. Americans have the most expensive and least effective medical system in the Western world.

Over the course of my life I have listened to the propaganda that private medicine is superior to socialized medicine. Perhaps it is, but the United States has not had private medicine for decades. The prices paid for medical services are fixed by Medicare and private insurance companies and amount to far less than the billings. Moreover, the prices are fixed in a way to eliminate private medical practice and force doctors into an employee relationship with “health maintenance organizations.� Private practice in America is being extinguished, especially at the level of family practitioners. As a matter of policy, health maintenance organizations–corporate medicine–are reimbursed at a higher rate than doctors in private practice. This causes private practitioners to capitalize what value there is in their practice by selling out to HMOs and becoming employees subject to a manager with a MBA whose job is to maximize the profit from the medical unit. In other words, profit maximization takes over from health care.

I have had two doctors who were forced out of private practice by the disparity in billing that favors corporate medicine. In corporate medicine your doctor is not the boss. He is an employee subject to being fired if he does not follow the treatments ordered by his employer. This is the reason so many people were murdered and had their health permanently injured by the “Covid vaccine.�

My doctor, am employee of corporate medicine, understood that the lab-manufactured Covid virus was of little danger to those whose health was not already in question. He treated those patients whose health made them vulnerable to Covid with Ivermectin and cured their illness. His corporate employer called him in and informed him that he would be fired if he continued treating with Ivermectin. He was to send his Covid patients to the hospital where they would be ventilated and treated with Remdesivir and, thus, murdered, because hospitals were paid $39,000 for very Covid death. Maximizing death, not saving lives, was the result of the profit motive that libertarians and free market economists worship. The reason for maximizing deaths by withholding effective treatment and by inflating the infection rate with the PCR test was to create panic that would line up millions of people willing to have the Covid vax, thus maximizing Big Pharma’s profits.

We now know for a proven established fact that the Covid “vaccine� killed more people than the Covid virus, but whore media continues to suppress the knowledge as do corrupt medical societies supported with Big Pharma grants..

Big Pharma dominates American medicine. Their grants to medical schools influence medical education. Their grants to medical scientists determine research findings. A couple of years ago the former editors of the two most prestigious medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet wrote that they had no confidence in the articles they published, because 70% of the articles were written by scientists supported by Big Pharma grants.

In this sense, American medicine is privatized. It belongs to Big Pharma, as did Tony Fauci, with whom Big Pharma shared patents. FDA, CDC, and NIH “regulators� move back and forth from being executives of Big Pharma and “regulators� of Big Pharma.

The consequence of this enormous health practice corruption has been vaccines that have left 75% of American kids with illnesses that did not exist when I was young. In my day, because we ran barefoot in summer and stepped on rusty nails and swam in creeks and lakes, we were inoculated against lockjaw and typhoid. That was it. Today I understand kids receive 60+ vaccines before they reach their teenage years. The vaccines destroy their immune systems and leave them subject to illnesses that in my day were suppressed by our immune systems.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, will try to restore health. This aligns him against the power of Big Pharma’s profits. He will be denounced endlessly by corrupt Democrats whose reelection depends on Big Pharma’s campaign contributions. He will be denounced endlessly by “medical scientists� sustained with Big Pharma grants. He will be denounced endlessly by the whore media whose very existence depends on Big Pharma advertising. He will be denounced endlessly by corrupt HMOs which are nothing but extensions of Big Pharma and whose profits depend on the extermination of the private practice of medicine.

Do not listen to them. They are lying. They are relying on conservatives to protect their illegitimate profits by opposing Trump and Robert Kennedy’s “attack on private medicine.�

Yesterday Trump began the task of his first term–the normalization of relations with Russia–which was blocked by the corrupt FBI’s “Russiagate� hoax, an act of treason for which executions should take place and, indeed, the utterly corrupt agency abolished.

The United States, to the chagrin of USAID-supported CNN, voted with Russia against a UN General Assembly revolution condemning Russia’s “invasion� of Ukraine.

CNN true to its reputation as the worst liar on earth found it “shocking� that the US aligned with Russia against the “free world� and aligned with “the aggressor in the war on the three-year anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.� https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/24/politics/us-joins-russia-ukraine-un-vote/index.html

It seems that CNN is going to continue lying for the military/security complex even after CNN’s funding courtesy of the US taxpayers has been halted.

Everyone knows that Russia did not invade Ukraine and limited its intervention to the two Russian break-away republics in Donbas. Everyone knows that Russia tried for eight years to keep Donbas in Ukraine with the Minsk Agreement. Everyone knows that the West used the Minsk Agreement to deceive the Kremlin while the US trained and equipped a large Ukrainian army to invade Donbas and subdue the break-away republics. Everyone knows that the US, NATO, and EU flatly refused Russia’s request for a mutual security agreement. Everyone knows that the US forced Putin’s hand to intervene in Donbas.

Yet the CNN excrement continues to lie through its teeth.

CNN is nothing but a lie factory. Shouldn’t the lie factory be sanctioned or abolished for fomenting war by lying and intentionally spreading misinformation, a charge that the lie factory leveled at every truth-teller?

How can anyone be sufficiently stupid and corrupt as to rely on CNN?

The US-orchestrated conflict with Russia cannot be ended on the basis of total lies about the cause of the conflict. Acknowledgement of the truth is required, and the truth is on Russia’s side. President Trump realizes that. He knows that he cannot end the conflict by imposing lies on Putin.

It is extraordinary that the dumbshit Europeans want war with Russia. It would mean the total destruction of all of Europe. European industry is dying because the fools have cut themselves off of Russian energy. European economies are dying because the fools have cut themselves off from a large and natural market.

Europe has been totally misgoverned since the end of WW II. Indeed, European misgovernment caused WW II. In the postwar period, Charles de Gaulle was the only European leader. All the others were US puppets who sold out their peoples.

The rise of AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen’s party in France are efforts to reestablish the sovereignty of Germany and France. But the German and French people have been so brainwashed and indoctrinated that they associate sovereignty with nationalism an nationalism with Nazism. Consequently, nationalist parties that actually represent the people cannot get into office.

Trump is right that Europe is finished. Europeans have lost self-belief. European politicians are long accustomed to being on the payroll of USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, and the US military/security complex.

Europe is exhausted, murdered by its own left-wing. Russia and China are on the rise. Trump intends to restore America, about which the American Establishment, CNN and the media whores are up in arms.

Hopefully President Trump will understand that he needs peace and cooperation with China just as much as he needs peace and cooperation with Russia. If the Trump administration tries to wedge the US between Russia and China, conflict will be perpetrated.

�

Was USAID Using Our Taxpayer Dollars to Pay for CNN’s Propaganda Rants Against America?

It seems so.

https://twitter.com/LauraLoomer/status/1894246946056884264

Prior to 1913 the US government was financed by tariffs. It was under tariffs, not free trade, that the United States industrialized and became a manufacturing nation. Indeed, the Union invaded and destroyed the Confederacy in order to impose the Morrill Tariff on the South that enabled the North to industrialize. The North could not compete with British industry and required the protection of a tariff.

It is extraordinary to me that it has gone unremarked for 112 years that the income tax, which required a constitutional amendment, resurrected slavery. In actuality, white people voted to impose slavery on themselves.

Americans did not realize what was happening. The income threshold for being subject to the tax was so high that few qualified to be taxed. Moreover, the first tax rate was 1% and the progression halted at 7%. To be taxed at 7% you had to have a phenomenal amount of income for those days of more than $500,000, the equivalent of multi-millions today. In the US in the 1900s a person who made $70,000 a year was considered extremely wealthy. When Henry Ford’s innovation of the moving assembly line was introduced in 1913, he raised his workers’ pay from $2.34 per day to $5, producing an annual income of $1,300.

Only 3% of the US population was subject to the income tax. Many years ago I wrote an account of how the income tax amendment passed. In Georgia the state legislative leader said Georgia had no objection to the amendment as no one in the state of Georgia had an income high enough to be subject to the tax.

Everyone overlooked that once an income tax was in place, the thresholds could be lowered and the rates raised. By 1918, that is, within 5 years, the top tax rate had jumped to 77%, dropping to 25% in 1925.

When the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, slavery was resurrected. Historically, the definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves did not own their own labor. Serfs were not owned by feudal lords, the the lords had use rights to as much as 30% of a serf’s labor. The labor of an enslaved person belonged to the slave’s owner.

An income tax establishes government ownership over part of your labor. How much depends on your income and the tax rate at the time. If you fail to deliver the government’s share of your income, you are severely punished and can spend many years in prison. Every American income taxpayer is partly enslaved and partly free.

A tariff is a tax on consumption, the preferable means of taxation according to the classical economists. It establishes no government ownership rights in your income. An income tax not only gives government a part ownership of your working time, it is also a tax on factors of production — labor and capital. Taxing factors of production reduces economic growth and Gross Domestic Product. It is a counter-productive tax that suppresses output.

The substitution of a tariff for an income tax is a pro-growth policy that will produce higher incomes and raise living standards. Free labor is always more productive because you are working for yourself and your family.

Out-of-date neoliberal economists argue wrongly that tariffs violate free trade and reduce economic growth. In the Lionel Robbins Lecture in 2000, published by the MIT Press, Ralph E. Gomory and William J. Baumol proved that the case for free trade was false and that at best the notion that free trade was mutually beneficial was an occasional special case. Paul Samuelson found their proof convincing, but overall the economists have preferred their free trade indoctrination to the effort it takes to master a new understanding.

The information from DOGE of the enormous fraud, abuse, and self-dealing that the US budget contains as a slush fund for insiders and for bribing foreign politicians and overthrowing foreign governments indicates that sufficient reductions are possible to establish a tariff at a reasonable rate.

To rescue Americans from the slavery of an income tax would be one the greatest achievements in history. Let’s achieve it.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/trumps-new-commerce-secretary-confirms-plans-to-abolish-the-irs-5814036?ea_src=ai_recommender&ea_med=a_bot_2_ads&test_user_group=A