Concerned Citizens,
Alex Krainer, Is Trump actually taking on the bankers?
Trump's agenda is next to impossible to discern; but viewed from 36,000 ft and 200-year context suggests that there may be a method to the madness. Today we are witnessing a scramble for Ukraine’s resources, which I covered in an earlier report. Presumably, these are coveted by Western banking interests for similar ends, except that since Trump’s inauguration this scramble seems to be at the center of a growing hostility between the United States and her European “allies,” led by Great Britain. These struggles are happening behind the scenes so they are difficult to discern from media reports and the pronouncements and speeches by public leaders.
However, something odd clearly is going on and the result is that the US is drifting away from its postwar alliances and closer to Russia. This could have a massive impact on both US and European economies, but we’ll be obliged to interpret events by reading between the lines...
..I suspect that Trump’s ultimate agenda could be aimed at returning the United States to Alexander Hamilton’s American System of political economy and away from the British free trade system. The difference is that the American System allocates credit for industrialization and productive ends while the British free trade system credits nonproductive uses aimed at inflating, then bursting asset bubbles. Abraham Lincoln's chief economic advisor Henry C. Carey contrasted the two systems in his 1851 work, "The Harmony of Interests".....The American System turned the United States from a patchwork of disjointed British colonies into the world's most prosperous and most powerful nation. It is possible that in his effort to “Make America Great Again,” Trump wants to return it to that system. However, he obviously can’t come out and state this openly: all eight U.S. presidents who have either been assassinated or “mysteriously died” in office were promoters of Hamilton’s American System. Those presidents were William Henry Harrison (9th, 1841), Zachary Taylor (12th, 1850), Abraham Lincoln (16th, 1865), James Garfield (20th, 1881), William McKinley (25th, 1901), Warren G. Harding (29th, 1923), Franklin D. Roosevelt (32nd, 1945), and John F. Kennedy (35th, 1963).
I know, someone will object: nowaitjustaminute, FDR died of polio, everyone knows that! Sure, but that might have been fake news. In his memoirs, FDR’s son Elliott Roosevelt revealed what he learned when he met with Joseph Stalin in 1946...[Stalin emphatically stated his belief that "Churchill's gang" had poisoned FDR.] ...
..Whatever the case, there have already been two assassination attempts at Trump and understandably, his administration must tread carefully, or advance their agenda in an utterly unpredictable fashion... That’s not positive for the economy, but hopefully... the uncertainty will subside as rapidly as it has exploded, and in the not too distant future we'll know much more about the future trajectory of global developments. https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/is-trump-actually-taking-on-the-bankers
Michael Hudson,
Trump’s Tariffs Hurt the US Much More Than China Trump said, “Well, let’s see, under tariff protection, in the late 19th century, that’s how the United States rose to be a great industrial power. So somehow, tariffs must have nurtured industry. And I want to bring industrialization back to the United States, to make America great again. And I can say tariffs are going to bring back industry”.
And what he means is, un-taxing the wealthy people, especially the finance and real estate sector, and shifting the tax on the consumers is going to make the country great again.
Well, what he’s leaving out is the fact that it wasn’t tariffs as such that made America into an industrial power. What there was a whole large program that was necessary to industrialize America.
All of this was spelled out in the 1820s by Henry Clay, and it was called the American System. And the American System was protective tariffs, with “internal improvements” — that means public investment in infrastructure — and a national banking system to finance industry.
Well, Trump said nothing about these, so it’s worth saying something about them.
By the late 19th century, the United States, said, “How are we going to lower the cost that industry has to pay for its wages, without leading to a huge round of strikes?”
The solution was we can have the public sector pick up many of the costs that labor would otherwise have to pay out of its own paychecks... ..“Socialism” was not a bad word in the late 19th century. Almost everyone across the political spectrum was describing their policies as socialist. There were Christian socialists, and libertarian socialists, and Marxian socialists, and social democracy. Everybody was one kind of socialist for another.
That meant a rising role of government in providing more and more services, or regulating the economy, such as the anti-trust law of 1890, to prevent monopoly pricing, and Teddy Roosevelt’s, trust-busting.
The whole idea was to minimize the cost of production with an act of a government. And they said that, well, if we can have a mixed economy, a public and private economy together, with the government sponsoring industrial credit — not the kind of British credit that was just for trade, or exploitative, or loans to the farmers — but actually to finance capital investment in industry, then we can take off.
It was this context for protective tariffs that enabled the United States to get rich.
Well, what Trump wants to do is the exact opposite of this context. He wants to deregulate the economy, not regulate it. He wants to privatize any public domain that’s left, any public enterprises.
The post office, for instance, can be privatized. It’s going to cut back services to rural areas. It’s going to increase prices...
..So, this is what is really in store for the US: cut, essentially privatize, the government; especially get rid of Social Security, and other social programs, Medicare.
They call it streamlining the economy or making a “free market”, a market without government that interferes by protecting consumers, protecting the population against predatory monopolies and predatory finance.....China has sort of reinvented the wheel. One of the first books of mine that they translated as a textbook into Chinese was my book on trade, development, and foreign debt, when I described the contrast between free trade and protectionism, and how the United States developed a protectionist argument to counter the free-trade arguments of England, in order to protect industry.
So, China has essentially done the same logical thing that any government would have to do. You have to subsidize your own industry and protect it, insulate it, from lower-cost imports underselling you.
You have to enable industry, if not really to make a profit, to at least make enough money to somehow be able to pay its labor force, and to pay for the raw materials and the machinery that it takes to create industrial production.
The one thing that China has done that other countries did not do — although Germany began to do it in the 19th century — was to keep money and credit as a public utility...
..So China has been able to create money to spend into the economy for purposes intended to serve the public interest, to build housing, to finance high-speed railways, to finance all of the public infrastructure that China has kept in the public domain, to offer at low, subsidized prices to the population at large.
So if you have a private enterprise in China, creating a factory to produce goods for exports to the United States or other countries, they don’t have to pay the workers enough to have to pay for privatized transportation; they have wonderful public transportation, in the subways and railroads.
They they don’t have to take out student loans to get an education; they can get the education from the public sector in China. They can get health care.
They don’t have to pay for all of the things that the United States’ employees and employers have to pay for. That’s what enables China to have low-cost labor.....With each country, he’s going to treat individually, that they give America something. But the common denominator in all of his demands is that they impose trade sanctions against commerce with China, and against mutual investment with China, and especially any plans they may have to join its Belt and Road Initiative in favor of US plans to interrupt the whole connection system of Belt and Road that China wants to put in place...
..I think the whole mentality of US diplomats is punitive. That’s the only thing they have today. They have little to offer the other country.
They can’t do what President Xi does and say, here’s a win-win situation; we’ll develop our trade with each other, and we’ll both gain from this, from our mutual interdependency that’ll create an efficient, regional trading system.
But the United States doesn’t have that. All it can do is disrupt the trading system. And they can disrupt it for a few months; maybe it’ll take a year. It takes time to replace new means of production, to replace trade, imports and exports, with the United States.
But you can imagine that European countries, Asian, African countries, Latin American countries, are all spending these next three months thinking, how are we going to create a world after August, that is going to enable us to keep on producing what we’re producing and importing what we’re importing, but not from the United States.
They’re all trying to think of realignment. And the United States says, well, this is going to disrupt your economy for a year or so; and the other countries will make a calculation and they’ll say, yes, it’s going to disrupt our economy for a year or so, but then for the next decade or century, we won’t have to deal with US threats anymore...
..So you have two different views of what an alternative world trade system would look like. And of course, this alternative is what everybody expected to be created after World War One.
That was the promise of mutual gain that mutual trade was going to integrate countries, and provide gains from trade, for peaceful, friendly international relations. It hasn’t turned out that way... ..And it goes even further than that. Trump also has said he’s going to punish other countries that try to find an alternative to the dollar. And yet today’s Wall Street Journal [on April 18] had a whole editorial: Trump is now trying to prevent other countries from keeping their international reserves in dollars.
He’s forcing other countries to sell off their dollars by imposing a tax on other countries’ holding of Treasury securities. If you’re a foreign central bank and you’ve done what you’ve done since 1971, when Nixon went off gold, and you kept your foreign exchange reserves in the form of US dollars, in the form of US Treasury securities, or government agency securities, or other US holdings, then all of a sudden you’re going to have to pay a tax on them, and this tax is going to mean that you’re losing money... ..So, other countries are essentially being driven out of the dollar, at the same time that Trump says, don’t join together and create a non-dollar area... ..Trump believes that if you lower the exchange rate of the dollar, that will make American exports more competitive. And of course, it would, if America had something to export.
But how can you make industrial exports more competitive, at a lower price — which lowers the cost of labor, lowers the cost of America — if you don’t have factories to produce these exports? That’s the crazy thing about all this!
How can you increase export competitiveness of industry, if you don’t have an industry?
The United States, ever since, really, Clinton in the 1990s, has offshored American industry — to Asia, to China and other countries — how on Earth can it be competitive?
Basically neoliberalism has undercut the ability of the United States to be competitive in the way that, it and European countries, and now China, had become competitive as a mixed economy.
The essence of neoliberalism is to carve up and privatize governments, basically on credit, borrowing the money to buy things... ..This has gone on for 2500 years. The lead for democracy in Greece occurred already in the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries BC, when the local mafia-like oligarchies were overthrown by populist leaders who were called “tyrants”.
The Roman oligarchy accused reformers of seeking kingship. The Greek oligarchy called any reformers wanting democracy as being tyrants. And the Americans call any reformers as being socialists — as if socialist today is the same term as seeking kingship to control ambition, being tyrants.
The narrative of history has been turned inside out. And they treat all of these as bad words, not as the ideal that it was during the whole reform movement, in the 19th century. https://scheerpost.com/2025/04/22/trumps-tariffs-hurt-the-us-much-more-than-china-economist-michael-hudson-explains/
But what's he really mean?
Bessent Calls For 'Reforms' Among 'Bretton Woods Institutions' To Rein In Global Trade Imbalances According to a copy of Bessent's prepared remarks, he is set to tell the IIF that "America First does not mean America Alone," and that the International Monetary Fund must prioritize economic and financial sustainability. He is calling for IMF and World Bank reforms after "mission creep," i.e. non-economic goals such as climate change and social justice, but that the Trump administration wants to work with them...
..Bessent - who blamed persistent U.S. trade deficits on foreign policy decisions that promote excess saving and low wages abroad, added that "The architects of Bretton Woods recognized that a global economy required global coordination," and called for "key reforms to ensure the Bretton Woods institutions are serving their stakeholders—not the other way around."
He also encouraged "security-aligned trade," suggesting that U.S. security partnerships should influence economic alignment - a strategic counter to China’s Belt and Road. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-live-bessent-discuses-tariffs-global-financial-system
Children in Gaza suffer 'huge fatality rate,' amputations
Since Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza on March 18, children have been struggling to survive in increasingly dire conditions. https://www.dw.com/en/children-in-gaza-suffer-huge-fatality-rate-amputations/video-72273048
Israeli police ban photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza at anti-war protest, then backtrack
An excerpt from her documentary: Cannes Selects Film on Gaza Photographer Fatma Hassona; A Day Later, She’s Killed in Israeli Strike
Hassona had joyfully accepted the invitation to Cannes but had emphasized her desire to return to Gaza and remain on her family’s land. https://scheerpost.com/2025/04/19/cannes-selects-film-on-gaza-photographer-fatma-hassona-a-day-later-shes-killed-in-israeli-strike/
'Worst humanitarian situation' in Gaza as aid blockade passes 50-day mark, says UN https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/worst-humanitarian-situation-in-gaza-as-aid-blockade-passes-50-day-mark-says-un/3545064
Israeli army stopped designating Gaza 'safe zones' after restart of genocide
Nearly 2,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in one month, as Gaza remains besieged and deprived of humanitarian aid https://thecradle.co/articles-id/30241
Gazans repair water tanks punctured by Israel’s shells https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250422-gazans-repair-water-tanks-punctured-by-israels-shells/
Israeli Strikes Kill 14 in Gaza and Destroy Heavy Equipment Needed to Clear Rubble https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/5135070-israeli-strikes-kill-14-gaza-and-destroy-heavy-equipment-needed-clear-rubble%C2%A0
From December 12, 2023, NEW EVIDENCE THAT ISRAEL IS USING A NEW URANIUM WEAPON – MAKE THAT THE NEUTRON BOMB
Since 2003 measurements made by Green Audit in Fallujah, Iraq 2003, Lebanon 2006 and Gaza 2008 have provided unequivocal evidence of Uranium residues which show anomalous Uranium U-238/U235 isotope signature ratios. Results from independent laboratories in Europe and the UK, using different techniques, revealed the presence of enriched Uranium in biological materials and environmental samples including soil, bomb craters and air (as recorded in vehicle air filter dust). More recently, 2021 results published in the journal Nature, show that Uranium enrichment levels in background samples from Gaza have been increasing markedly since 2008. Since enriched Uranium is an anthropogenic substance which does not exist in nature, the question arises as to the source, in the weapons employed by the USA (Fallujah) and Israel (Lebanon, Gaza). It is proposed that the only logical answer is that a Uranium-based weapon exists that produces U-235 by neutron activation and has been deployed. Such a weapon must be some kind of neutron bomb. https://johnhelmer.net/new-evidence-that-israel-is-using-a-new-uranium-weapon-make-that-the-neutron-bomb/#more-89018
Israeli army needs additional $2.6 billion to expand Gaza war: Report
Israel has spent 250 billion shekels ($67.57 billion) in 2024 for its military onslaught on Gaza, figures show https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israeli-army-needs-additional-26-billion-to-expand-gaza-war-report/3545580
Chinese HQ-9B Long Range Air Defence Systems Now Guard Egyptian Skies https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/chinese-hq9b-guard-egyptian-skies
Baby Thermobaric Bombs: China’s non-nuclear hydrogen bomb generates fireball to burn targets at 1800°F: Report
The new weapon could be used for area denial or destruction of targets like swarms of drones. https://interestingengineering.com/military/china-non-nuclear-hydrogen-bomb-tested
Trump Signals Step Back On China Tariffs, Says They’ll ‘Come Down Substantially’ https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2025/04/22/trump-signals-step-back-on-china-tariffs-says-theyll-come-down-substantially/
Stocks Slide After Bessent Confirms "No Unilateral Offer" From Trump To Cut China Tariffs https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/stocks-spike-session-highs-wsj-report-white-house-looking-slash-china-tariffs
High-Level Ukraine Peace Talks Scrapped After Rubio, Witkoff Pull Out Last Minute https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/high-profile-ukraine-peace-talks-scrapped-after-rubio-witkoff-pull-out-last-minute
Round Two! Trump Slams Zelensky For Rejecting Crimea Proposal For Peace
Gilbert Doctorow, ‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 23 April: Are Ukraine/Russia Peace Talks Fruitless?
There is the new savvy Kremlin use of Public Relations to influence Washington’s handling of the negotiations. This began with Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a 30-hour Easter cease-fire which caught Zelensky off guard and exposed his reluctance to do anything constructive to lower the violence and enter into negotiations for a peace. Then a day ago there was the cleverly leaked news that Putin is prepared to halt the Russian advance, freeze the border at the present line of engagement in Donbas and not insist on full takeover of the 4 oblasts that were annexed by Russia but are only partly occupied by Russia today. This major concession put pressure on Kiev to respond in kind, as The Financial Times noted in its large front-page report on the subject yesterday evening. But instead of also offering to retreat from his maximalist position, Zelensky responded with a firm refusal to give up claims to Crimea. This intransigence surely is what prompted US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to decide against participating in the ‘peace talks’ between the UK, France and Ukraine in London today. I believe it is the first clear sign of an eventual Trump abandonment of its peace initiative, washing his hands of the whole affair and letting Ukraine and its Western backers sink to defeat while the USA proceeds with its reengagement with Russia. https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2025/04/23/judging-freedom-edition-of-23-april-are-ukraine-russia-peace-talks-fruitless/
Officially skirting the issue of what Putin may have said in private: ‘Only trust primary sources’ on US-Russia talks – Kremlin
‘A lot of fake news’ is being published on the subject, even by respectable outlets, Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has said https://swentr.site/russia/616126-only-trust-firsthand-sources-on/
Alastair Crooke, "Without a war with Russia, Europe will fall apart"
He added that the only thing that European officials can do today in an attempt to turn the entire world against Russia is to shout that Russia “poses a threat.”
According to the former MI6 employee, the only way for Europe to maintain unity is a direct military conflict with Russia. At the same time, he notes that in reality the coalition of Russia's opponents includes only three countries - Great Britain, France and Denmark.
We are talking about a European deep state that cooperates with the American one. They have a common goal - to thwart Trump. The main goal is to thwart any normalization of relations with Russia. https://en.topcor.ru/59022-bez-vojny-s-rf-evropa-razvalitsja.html
Simplicius, Ukraine Begs 30% of Bundeswehr Stock to Survive Now as of this writing the Telegraph has reported another kind of ‘leaked’ Trump plan for the cessation of hostilities, which boils down to the same old frosted Kelloggs concoction:
- (Immediate) Ceasefire now
- DIRECT Ukraine-Russia talks
- Kiev DROPS NATO ambitions
- Crimea recognized as RUSSIA
- Ukraine signs mineral deal
- US lifts ALL anti-Russia SANCTIONS
- US-Russia ENERGY cooperation
Specifically, it states that all Russian sanctions would be lifted—at least by the US—and a new era of US-Russian cooperation on energy would begin; i.e. “making a FORTUNE!” as per Trump’s earlier ejaculation. https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-42225-ukraine-begs-30-of-bundeswehr
Anti-war:
Right-wing AfD outperforms other German political forces amid 'zero growth' economy https://en.topcor.ru/59063-pravaja-adg-operezhaet-drugie-politsily-frg-na-fone-nulevogo-rosta-jekonomiki.html
RFK Jr. Launches Long-Awaited Offensive Against Deadly COVID-19 mRNA Shots
RFK Jr. breaks silence on mRNA injections — cites "profound" risks of myocarditis, stroke, and death on national TV. https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-rfk-jr-launches-long-awaited
How Junk Food Took Hold In The US And What RFK Jr. Is Doing About It https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/how-junk-food-took-hold-us-and-what-rfk-jr-doing-about-it
FDA to Remove Toxic Artificial Food Dyes from U.S. Food Supply and Medications
Long-overdue plan is a critical first step toward reversing a half-century of harm. https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-fda-to-remove-toxic-artificial
NEW STUDY – Ivermectin Shows Striking Anticancer Potential and Remarkable Safety
Largest review to date of ivermectin use in cancer patients finds no safety concerns, promising anecdotal reports, and strong preclinical evidence of tumor suppression. https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/new-study-ivermectin-shows-striking
Physicist Anastassia Makarieva, Biotic Pump Q&A
Responding to readers: the role of oceanic moisture in watering land, why—if the biotic pump drives winds—they slow over forests, how forests can stabilize rainfall, and ecorestoration vs fires https://bioticregulation.substack.com/p/biotic-pump-q-and-a
Appreciating Rainfall (showing Jenny still taller than corn in Austin garden after overnight rain)