Comrades, Dear Leader Joe Biden cares about your well-being.
Today, the United States government is proud to announce the first ever emergency food shipments from international relief agencies to help feed American citizens.
Let that sink in.
White House – Today, the Department of Defense (DOD) is sourcing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s request for Operation Fly Formula to transport Nestlé S.A. formula from Zurich, Switzerland to Plainfield, Indiana.
CTH has been preparing to write about this for a week. Today a serendipitous event took place which highlights the dynamic within the current Biden administration.
During a Senate Energy Committee hearing today, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a woman specifically appointed for her progressive identity as a native American indian – with no skills to be interior secretary, was questioned by Senator Joe Manchin about a press release [LINK] from the interior department that took place in real time as Secretary Haaland was giving testimony. Secretary Haaland had no idea what the press release was about. WATCH:
The issue surrounds the U.S. Interior Department, which is filled to the brim with left-wing climate activists, pushing out a press release saying that any further oil and gas leases are not going to happen. Secretary Haaland was telling congress the Interior Department was doing everything they can to allow oil and gas leases and expand drilling with additional permitting.
The press release from the dept says the proposal the Secretary was stating “is not a decision to issue specific leases or to authorize any drilling or development,” literally undercutting her testimony in real time, and reaffirming that no further oil drilling will be authorized. Secretary Haaland was caught completely off-guard, stammered and admitted she had no idea what the bureaucrats in the dept were doing.
What this example reveals is something we have noticed and discussed but has become very clear in the past few weeks.
Montana Senator Jon Tester is deeply connected to the corrupt and multinational Big Agricultural (BigAg) lobby. As a democrat connected closer to Wall Street, he is not a supporter of American farmers overall as it pertains to America First food security and domestic food prices. However, that said, what Senator Tester says in the first two minutes of this interview is correct.
As Tester notes, the food “supply” issue is not as big a deal in North America as it will certainly be in food dependent regions. Between the U.S, Mexico and Canada we produce more food than we consume, and with excellence in industrial farming we export food products to the world, eastward and westward. The issue for the U.S. population is going to be massive increases in food prices in later summer and fall as the cumulative increase in costs at the field reach the stores. WATCH (2 mins):
My own back of the envelope calculations put the third-wave price increase in the 35 to 40% range overall. Based on the input costs, energy and transportation, a current $4.00 item is going to cost around $5.50 later this year. That is the approximate scale of price increase in foodstuff we should be anticipating.
Food insecurity, as an outcome of food pricing, is going to be the election issue that might supersede the gasoline price issue. That’s going to be the crisis, and we are going to need to be very careful; because depending on the scale of the crisis there are going to be massive numbers of people demanding the government step in to solve it. Our current government is being run by economic socialists; we do not want their equitable distribution solutions.
Do you know what it’s technically called when “government takes control of the means of production?” Yeah, that.
This afternoon Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) giving Health and Human Services (HHS) the legal authority to control the supplies needed for the creation of baby formula (how it is made), and the authority to determine distribution equity (who gets it). Emphasis mine:
White House [DPA Sec. 2] – “[T]he authority of the President conferred by section 101 of the Act to require performance of contracts or orders … is delegated to the Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to all health resources, including the ingredients necessary to manufacture infant formula.”
“(b) The Secretary of Health and Human Services may use the authority under section 101 of the Act to determine, in consultation with the Secretary of Agriculture and the heads of other executive departments and agencies as appropriate, the proper nationwide priorities and allocation of all ingredients necessary to manufacture infant formula, including controlling the distribution of such materials (including applicable services) in the civilian market, for responding to the shortage of infant formula within the United States.” (read more)
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, an über-leftist who ironically self-describes as an abortion absolutist, is now in charge of infant formula manufacture and distribution. You do not need to be a conspiracy theorist to predict which “at risk” group will get priority distribution of limited resources.
The stock market is dropping, Wall Street analysts are flummoxed, but it just isn’t rocket science folks. It’s Main Street economics 101.
The price to produce, manufacture and transport goods has skyrocketed, that’s the Producer Price Index (PPI). Arriving goods at retail are significantly higher in price. Simultaneously, consumer spending is being squeezed by unavoidable inflation in housing, energy, food and gasoline; so consumer spending is tight, that’s the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Higher costs to retail that cannot be passed on as higher prices to customers, means lower profit margins for the sellers. That’s it. That’s the majority of it. Major retail companies like Target and Wal Mart are reporting the impacts from the squeeze in higher costs that cannot be passed to consumers in higher retail prices. Checkbook economics.
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Businesses are seeing higher costs in the unavoidable goods they need to sell, the fixed price of goods. What comes next? Businesses, knowing they cannot raise prices too much, look at lowering the costs of operations in an effort to remain competitive, stay profitable, and stay in business.
How do businesses lower operational costs? Increase expectations of employee productivity and/or lower employment costs. That leads to layoffs.
I guarantee you…. YOU know more about the basic principles of Main Street economics than a room full of these Wall Street analysts. I like El-Erian, but sheesh, talk about pretending not to know things.
Zero Hedge published a good article yesterday with some solid internal data showing a strong likelihood that national gasoline prices are likely to rise another 40% from current levels by mid-late summer. That would put the national average for a gallon of gasoline around $6.20 by August.
The data behind the prediction is solid and essentially boils down to the U.S. refineries not having the expanded capacity needed to keep up with an increased summer demand, particularly as they need to keep generating high volumes of diesel fuel due to current critical shortages.
The issues are created by the Biden administration and the regulatory stranglehold they put on the oil and gas industry last year. Obviously, all of this is a feature of the administration plan, not a flaw. The Green New Deal agenda necessarily requires that gasoline rise in price to $7/gal this year in order to force the change in profit dynamic for alternative fueled transportation.
Unfortunately, we the consumers will be the ones punished as the progressive, communist and far-left policy makers chase their climate change agenda. Cheap and cost-effective energy has to be made ‘not cheap’ and ‘not cost-effective’ in order to create the energy crisis their agenda requires.
Massive increases in gasoline prices are a feature, not a flaw.
Remember, Biden is disposable. The people behind Biden purposefully selected him in order to generate a kamikaze ‘fundamental change’ mission within a single 4-year presidential term. Getting crushed on the political outcomes is irrelevant, they just need to push the agenda fast enough, far enough, and destructive enough, so that all energy policies become irreversible.
Interesting background discussions today, very interesting. There are some aspects to the Washington Post story about DHS abandoning, at least temporarily, the Dept of Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board.
WaPo represents the CIA public relations/narrative engineers, so it doesn’t come as a surprise they would be the announcing outlet for the leaked information. There’s also an interesting aspect in who was selected to write the article, Taylor Lorenz, the conscripted narrative engineer and lead on-line counterintelligence/propaganda pusher. [LINK]
However, beyond the background intelligence motive; and accepting the expressed intent of the DHS ministry of truth effort; notice the picture Lorenz published to accompany the notification (see above). “Nina Jankowicz … works in a press room at Volodymyr Zelensky’s campaign headquarters in 2019 in Kyiv, Ukraine.” Quite telling.
The takeaway from the above data points, outlines how long the DHS has been planning to use the conflict in Ukraine to advance the agenda of the State Dept and intelligence apparatus (CIA). When combined with the rapid response from big tech search engine notifications about removing on-line content that contradicted the official position of the U.S. government toward the Ukraine conflict (Google and DuckDuckGo), what we see is a very fulsome picture of how the U.S. government advanced propaganda was being constructed.
In February the White House said strategic victory in Ukraine would be dependent on who can win the cultural war of social likeability {link}. In March the White House and State Dept recruited a battalion of TikTok influencers so they could dance and sing about Ukraine and Russia for their audiences in social media {link}. In April USAID announced they would coordinate entertainment resources to keep the public interested in Ukraine and Bono was recruited to sing in Kyiv {link}.
Following along with the coordinated scheduling, Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats took turns rotating through Kyiv with Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans. Boris Johnson from the U.K and Justin from Canada also took their entourages into Kyiv to hold media events and photo ops with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
All of the U.S. propaganda efforts originate from within the strategy teams at the U.S. State Dept. It is the Dept of State who coordinates with U.S. intelligence, Hollywood and big tech social media to frame the overall narrative. Big Tech and social media assist by blocking any platform content that does not fit the narrative created by the State Dept.
New York Times narrative engineer Charlie Savage is tweeting from within a packed media center at the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in Washington DC for the government case against Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann. [TWEET THREAD] The mentions and notations, while skewed toward the self interest of media, give us a good insight into what is taking place in the courtroom.
First things first. All media reporting of this case will be done through the prism of their own cooperation in the perpetration of the fraud. The MSM knew along with everyone else inside and outside of government, that their efforts to create the Trump-Russia conspiracy and collusion narrative were based on fraudulent pretext manufactured by the Clinton campaign. They all knew it. They all acted collaboratively and they all engaged purposefully.
As noted by Charlie Savage, prosecutor Deborah Shaw, a member of the Durham team, delivered the opening remarks to frame the government position in the case.
The telling remarks came early: “Shaw addresses “the elephant in the room” – tells jury their feelings about Russia, Trump, Clinton can’t play a role in the case. This is about “our FBI” which should not be used as a tool by anyone, Republicans or Democrats.” In essence, prosecutor Shaw is telling the jury the FBI were duped into the Trump-Russia conspiracy investigation by outsiders connected to the Clinton campaign.
That’s a critical baseline from the government we must understand and accept. That baseline now indicates that none of the DOJ and FBI operatives involved in the fraudulent scheme will be held accountable by the Durham team. “Our FBI should not be used as a tool by anyone,” yet they were, so sayeth the United States Government.
The ramifications for Twitter surrounding fake users or algorithmic bots are considerable. One issue is overcharging advertisers for ad impressions based on mDAU’s, which are “monetized Daily Active Users.” The second issue is an outcome of the first and relates to the valuation of Twitter. If Twitter bots are higher than Twitter estimates, then the mDAU rate is overstated.
Elon Musk is indicating there may need to be a lowering of the purchase price unless Twitter becomes transparent with how they are calculating the number of bot users at less than 5%. All outside reviews attempting to estimate the number of fake accounts, or bots, puts the estimations considerably higher than the claims by Twitter. Elon Musk tweeted:
At “The All In Summit 2022,” Elon Musk gave the impression the purchase price of Twitter may be tenuous. He said that a deal with a lower price tag is not “out of the question,” Bloomberg reported. “Currently, what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots… It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul,” Musk said at the Miami conference, per a social media video, Bloomberg added.