Kamala and Pete have been in a contest to see who can use the most words without actually saying anything. Previously, Pete set the record during his presidential bid of 2020. However, in 2021 Kamala got serious about the contest. Harris fired her communications team and brought in new brand image consultants to help her finally achieve that first-place status which was so elusive.
Appearing on NBC’s “Today” show with Savannah Guthrie, the additional training paid off. Kamala Harris was asked about the U.S. economic impact of sanctions on Russia and whether stopping purchases of Russian oil was possible. This was the opening Harris had been looking for to highlight her sharpened linguistics.
Using the communication team notes for reference (watch her eyes), for almost a minute Kamala Harris assembled 247 various words in a random sequence. The result is remarkable. WATCH: (prompted):
Everything including oil, natural gas, wheat, and fertilizer is skyrocketing in price right now. Ten- and twenty-year records are being eclipsed, as energy prices are soaring on the back of oil flirting with $114 a barrel. Unfortunately, here comes more inflationary pain, and everything is being blamed on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Toward the end of last year, we warned that fertilizer costs were going to harvest costs in 2022 (field to fork, go deep), long before Ukraine came into the picture. Unfortunately, future wheat prices reached $10.59 a bushel today, the highest since March 2008. Additionally, corn prices have passed their highest rate since December 2012.
It may seem like those crops are not that important. However, keep in mind that corn, wheat and soybeans represent the baseline for not only grain production in the U.S, but they are also the primary feed products for proteins: chicken, pork and beef. We are going to feel this second wave surge at the grocery store. Hopefully everyone has prepped.
Additionally, oil prices have jumped to near eight-year highs. Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, rose as high as $113.94 a barrel, the highest since June 2014, and has been trading around $111 for most of the day. If you were paying $4/gal for gas, these oil rates add around another .50¢ today alone. Yes, you read that correctly, inbound tankers of gasoline will offload at your convenience store at a rate ten percent higher than yesterday.
Making matters worse, the Joe Biden energy policy -focused almost exclusively on green energy- is making any investment in domestic oil production tenuous at best. The major oil companies are wary of spending money for U.S. energy development in a climate where the U.S. government is specifically against that effort.
Remember that fourth quarter GDP result that seemed manipulated? Well, I suspect the record setting trade deficit now being reported for January is an outcome of those pesky fourth quarter trade results being intentionally skewed by the withholding of December 2021 import data.
Additionally, methinks we are likely to get some increased economic clarity about why the White House needed Ukraine to become the big shiny thing with such urgency.
Just like everything else, geopolitical dynamics –especially those surrounding entrenched ideology– are always about the economics. Someone, eventually, always has to pay. Follow the money; there are trillions at stake.
(REUTERS) […] The goods trade deficit jumped 7.1% to an all-time high of $107.6 billion last month. Imports of goods increased 1.7%, led by food and motor vehicles. There were also large increases in imports of industrial supplies, capital and consumer goods. Imports of other goods, however, tumbled 15.3%.
Exports dropped 1.8%, weighed down by consumer goods, motor vehicles, food and other goods. But exports of capital goods and industrial supplies increased. Trade has been a drag on gross domestic product for six straight quarters. (read more)
That missing Port of LA December import data, now being introduced into the month of January, might just be the cause of the “all time high” noted above. I will bet one sustainable rice cake on it.
A fantastic piece by Peter Beinart on substack {SEE HERE} puts excellent clarity on the people around Joe Biden baiting Russian President Vladimir Putin to enter Ukraine.
Current CIA Director William “Bill” Burns was the former ambassador to Russia and Jordan. Bill Burns had a 33-year career at the State Department under both Republican and Democratic presidents and speaks fluent Russian. If the people in the background of Joe Biden wanted an intelligence operative to trigger a specific result from Russia, there’s no one more strategically perfect for the job than CIA Director Bill Burns.
The article by Beinart is mainly focused on pointing out the irreconcilable nature of Joe Biden implying Ukraine could join NATO, while his own CIA Director has a history of giving serious warnings emphasizing the “brightest of all red lines” about that specific point.
[…] “Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.”
On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” (read more)
Against this backdrop of Bill Burns, the details about the lead up to the Russia-Ukraine crisis gain quite a bit of clarity.
A recent image attributed to the Moscow subway system presents some consideration for a potentially larger problem.
Increasingly, people everywhere have stopped using cash to pay for simple purchases. The electronic payment systems shifted to credit cards and debit cards, and then, eventually as technology merged with phone platforms, the linking of your portable transponder to your financial institution in order to make purchases became an efficient way to make transactions.
However, as governments start using definitions of who is good and who is bad to create sanctions against the bad actors, and with Russia representing the most expansive modern targeting of the global financial system, the control of monetary transactions enters the sphere of integrated payment systems like VISA, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay and others. With Russia being essentially “de-banked” on the world stage, this happens:
There’s an irony to this surfacing now… so soon after the Canadian government began targeting their political opposition for de-banking.
Essentially, what is happening in Russia, on an entire citizen scale, is the same issue that happened in Canada to the individuals targeted. The financial mechanisms in this integrated system of payment are now creating havoc for the individual.
The SWIFT transfer system sanction(s) against the Russian government, end up debanking everyone in the country. These are remarkable times, and this is an example of something that needs to be factored into how you can retain individual liberty and freedom.
In case you missed it, March 1st has been declared as the unofficial end date for COVID-19 as a political weapon.
Domestically, the political leftists, who weaponized science for their totalitarian control, have decided it is time to head for the exits. We are now supposed to ignore the last two years of brutal impact they inflicted on society. You can always spot the shift by looking at how Hollywood and pop culture are triggered by the messaging from the political crew.
Once given the nod, there’s a silent move toward the exits while everyone is distracted. Of course, the exit strategy is always frustrating for those who have watched this play out. The SNL segment is presented as humor, but when you recognize the inherent message, there’s nothing funny about it.
The left weaponized COVID for their political needs. However, within this COVID fiasco there were real victims. Many people lost incomes, small businesses were closed, families were torn apart as people were caught up in the frenzy. All of that now positioned as a joke, as the professionally political left try to find a way to tell their tribe it’s over.
We are supposed to forget the pain they inflicted as loved ones were choking in anguish, unable to visit family in hospital, the funerals that were not permitted, the catastrophic damage to our children’s lives, and the massive ridicule deployed (with maximum snark) in their condescending attacks against anyone who did not kneel at the altar of COVID virtue signaling. All of it…. ALL OF IT… now boiled down to a few jokes as they walk backwards trying to avoid the political fallout.
During an ABC interview today, White House Spokesperson Jennifer Psaki gave away the game for the Biden Administration’s intent on exploiting the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
Keep in mind, as the Biden team were getting pummeled for negative economic outcomes, massive inflation, skyrocketing energy costs and gas prices set to double, the White House worked to create an urgent defense by manufacturing the crisis.
While Joe Biden ate his pudding, the people behind the scenes told Zelenskyy and Putin that Ukraine was about to enter NATO {December 2021}. The White House then seeded details through China knowing the intel would get back to Putin. Russia took the bait and intervened.
The collective left (far more western leader beneficiaries on a global scale) now have a quick and strategic pivot point to go from COVID-19 as the excuse for all the economic ills, to Russia. The Russia-Ukraine crisis transfers the cost of the Build Back Better climate change agenda from COVID-19 to Russia/Ukraine. We can now watch COVID just disappear.
The BBB agenda, domestically known as the Green New Deal, intentionally makes energy costs skyrocket. By creating the Ukraine crisis, gas prices specifically are no longer blamed on COVID-19 (the original fraudulent justification). Gas prices are now rising because of Russia and the villainous Vladimir Putin. Climate change policy outcomes are made palatable by blaming Putin. Cue Jen Psaki, (Prompted):
The propaganda pouring out of Ukraine from the U.S. State Department and the taxpayer funded Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) is, in a modern scale, historic.
In their collective effort to make #Ukraine the modern image of The Alamo (where the last stand to defend all mankind is taking place), the corporate media, state dept and NGO’s are utilizing their Hollywood directed #BringBackOurGirls and #KonySurrender techniques in the extreme.
Pay no attention to the absence of any war fighting actually taking place, meaning the lack of actual fighting shooting and stuff in a modern era where everyone has cell phone cameras, and instead focus your attention to the ‘story telling.’
After all, the White House was very clear that the winner of this contest to defend all humanity from the Russian villain Vladimir Putin, would depend on who could tell a “better story.”
Thus, you do not need to see shooting or actual war type stuff. Instead, the contest to save the planet is boiled down to who can take a better selfie.
As Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh stated last week, the U.S. government has rallied the collective west to defeat Russia using the cultural weapon of social likeability. Vladimir Putin is getting pummeled.
It’s all a grand pantomime folks. All of it. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the newest Michael Avenatti.
There is so much that’s disturbing about this interview, it is very difficult to adequately contextualize the danger we are facing as a nation.
It’s an easy disposable line to say Joe Biden is clueless about things. He stumbles with cognitive thought, has trouble putting thoughts into understandable sentence structures using words, makes frequent gaffes and generally struggles to communicate issues that are simple and not complex. When the issues are complex, the cognitive impairment gets worse. These are easy truths to hit him with…
However, there’s a more concerning aspect once you listen to how genuinely he has been led to believe in things that are fundamentally false. That’s where the danger comes from. In this prompted segment on COVID and the economy, Joe Biden references a perspective, a belief in current events, that has been seeded into his brain by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
I know it’s hard to listen to him, but in this segment pay close attention. Joe Biden believes, really believes, that a COVID induced mental psychosis is responsible for people convincing themselves that prices have gone up, that inflation is extreme, and that economic pain is real.
He has been told that inflation does not exist, so he believes inflation is imaginary. He is reconciling the difference between what he is told to believe and the reality that everyone lives, by accepting an explanation from his advisors – that working class people are suffering from psychosis. WATCH (8:54):
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Transfer that reference into the policy from his office, and things become clear. Those driving the economic policy know they are creating chaos; however, they are telling Joe Biden the economic chaos does not exist. Without a reference for the damage his office is responsible for creating, more intentionally chaotic economic policy comes forth.
The same context applies to foreign policy, monetary policy, regulatory policy, economic policy, energy policy, education policy etc. Scary stuff.
The key word in this release is “selected“. I would guess that any bank involved in state energy sales, and/or the bank of any energy company involved in the direct sales of Russian oil and gas, are not included.
Joint statement from NATO, EU Commission and White House:
WHITE HOUSE – […] As Russian forces unleash their assault on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, we are resolved to continue imposing costs on Russia that will further isolate Russia from the international financial system and our economies. We will implement these measures within the coming days.
Specifically, we commit to undertake the following measures:
First, we commit to ensuring that selected Russian banks are removed from the SWIFT messaging system. This will ensure that these banks are disconnected from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally.
Second, we commit to imposing restrictive measures that will prevent the Russian Central Bank from deploying its international reserves in ways that undermine the impact of our sanctions.