Federal education loan payments have been suspended ever since early 2020 when COVID was used as a justification to delay payments.  The current extension on the delay, a pre midterm bribe for young adults, runs through June 2023 and then people with the loans have to start paying again.

In the interim, Joe Biden had a plan to relieve up to $10,000 in federal student loans for low-to-middle-income borrowers and up to $20,000 for qualifying Pell Grant recipients.  However, that arbitrary Biden decree encountered multiple legal setbacks including rejection by a federal court in St. Louis and another in Texas.

Earlier today, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals again rejected the Biden administration’s request to pause the Texas order vacating the $400 billion student debt relief program in a lawsuit pursued by a conservative advocacy group. {LINK}  The Texas ruling from U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman was one of two decisions that prevented the Department of Education from moving forward.

The St Louis case, also lost on appeal and based on a similar finding that Biden cannot subvert congress for this spending, has now travelled to the Supreme Court who have agreed to hear oral arguments in February but will not intervene to stop the lower court rulings.

Washington — The Supreme Court said Thursday it will take up a court fight between the Biden administration and a coalition of six Republican-led states challenging the legality of the president’s student loan forgiveness program.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar asked the Supreme Court last month to lift an injunction from a federal appeals court that blocked implementation of the plan, but told the court that if it denied relief, it should agree to consider the merits of the case instead.

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The White House is urging Nancy Pelosi to utilize the lame duck congressional session and construct a massive omnibus spending bill that will wrap Ukraine funding, COVID spending and a federal budget extension via continuous resolution.  The request for Ukraine funding is an additional $38 billion.

Federal funds to support FEMA and hurricane recovery efforts will likely be part of the bargaining chips. Essentially, the sausage ingredients are: if congress doesn’t give Zelenskyy more money, then DeSantis will not get federal financial assistance.

If you don’t support Ukraine, you’re a Russian operative.

WASHINGTON DC – The Biden administration sent a letter to Congress on Tuesday outlining nearly a $38 billion request to help Ukraine continue fending off Russian attacks.

The administration is also asking for $10 billion in emergency health funding, with more than $9 billion going toward Covid vaccine access, next-generation Covid vaccines, long Covid research and more. About $750 million would be spent on efforts to control the spread of monkeypox, hepatitis C and HIV.

Congress has so far provided about $66 billion for Ukraine and other war-related needs. The administration argues that about three-quarters of that funding has either been spent or is committed to specific purposes.

An administration official said the White House plans to request additional disaster relief in the coming weeks to help with hurricane and wildfire recovery but didn’t provide any tentative figure.

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They have proposed and refined so many of the carbon trading schemes, it becomes difficult to remember which iteration each new formula replaces.  Heck, I’ve lost track of how many of the individual components of the larger plan are already in place.  However, John Kerry has introduced the western elites at COP27 to the latest acceptable proposal surrounding coal fired energy.

Against the backdrop of sped-up Build Back Better urgency, this coal-based carbon trading platform is called the Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA).

When you stay elevated to the larger way the Energy Transition Accelerator works you can clearly see the transferring of wealth from your bank account to the global control mechanism that will eventually determine your energy allotment.  The companies that provide energy are simply the collectors for the fees you will pay to the World Economic Forum income disbursement group.

(Reuters) – […] The scheme, known as the Energy Transition Accelerator (ETA), was launched at the United Nations’ COP27 conference this week by John Kerry, the United States’ climate envoy, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bezos Earth Fund.

[…] Voluntary carbon markets, in which companies get emissions credits in return for channeling cash to poor countries that cut their carbon output, have often been riddled with fraud and double-counting. Many critics think rich countries should just fork out the cash themselves to close coal plants – or tax fossil fuel companies to get the money. (read more)

There’s the system in a nutshell.  Energy providers must purchase emission credits from the ‘carbon market’ (govt); in the U.S. likely the EPA as they do with RIN credits.  The electricity provider puts the carbon purchase credit fee in your electricity bill.

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Using the outline of the previous global famine to trace a modern history of desperation and the Live Aid movement rallying of the public to feed the world, Neil Oliver contrasts the current cultural Green Agenda 40 years later and the pending energy crisis.

If millions were at risk in the 1980’s, how many are likely at risk today?  Yet the same people, institutions and systems that rallied to save the hungry are right now the same people, institutions and systems willing to inflict more harm as they chase the false climate change agenda.  It is an interesting and brutally honest perspective.

Oliver then walks through the looming and predictable consequences as he follows the process to its logical conclusion. WATCH:

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Every institution of the JoeBama administration is filled with climate change ideologues. Never is that more abundantly clear than a U.S. Treasury Secretary who celebrates the future of the U.S. economy becoming “dependent on the wind and the Sun“.  {Direct Rumble Link}

[Transcript] – “Our plan – powered by the Inflation Reduction Act – represents the largest investment in fighting climate change in our country’s history. It will put us well on our way toward a future where we depend on the wind, sun, and other clean sources for our energy. We will rid ourselves from our current dependence on fossil fuels.” (link)

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To understand the scale of the ideological effort, review this earlier statement in her prepared remarks, “In markets where we could not help lower prices by expanding supply, we have aimed to mitigate the pain directly, through cost relief.”  The admission here is that ideologically the Biden administration cannot expand energy supplies to lower energy prices without compromising their climate change mission.

[Full Transcript Here]

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Long-term CTH readers might remember in 2014 when President Obama claimed U.S. families had been paying too little for electricity for too long.  As soon as Joe Biden took office, he began implementing the Green New Deal energy policy that, (a) directly forces higher costs for energy; and (b) is now creating massive problems.

In July I noted my own electricity bill had jumped 28% in a single month.  That bill was followed by another almost identical increase this month.  A review of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for July [Data Here] shows that nationally the same thing is happening.  The year-over-year electricity price has increased 15.2%. However, worse still, the July increase alone was 1.9%, which figures to an annualized rate of 22.8%.

When the growth rate of monthly increase is exceeding the year-over-year result, that means future higher prices are coming.  This is a serious problem that cannot be overstated. Already struggling with a doubling of gas prices, massive food price increases at the grocery store and the pain of all costs for goods far outpacing any rate of wage increase, this type of uncontrollable increase in price of electricity is going to hit the middle class hard.

Steve Cortes calls this the backside of the Biden created inflation hurricane.  The backside of a hurricane is the worst because it hits from the opposite direction upon already weakened infrastructure.

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When congress approved $80 billion in new funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enforcement division, the intellectually honest crowd knew this was not just about hiring more IRS agents.  Indeed, the personnel side of the spending will almost certainly pale in comparison to the IRS creating new technological enforcement mechanisms to track electronic payment systems.  Ultimately, it’s just an obvious evolution in IRS monitoring and surveillance.

Today, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seemed to outline exactly that when she sent the IRS a memo instructing them to develop an action plan within six months for how to improve the technology needed to expand enforcement {link}.  What we are likely to experience is the next phase in the public-private partnership, this time focused almost exclusively on electronic payment systems, income and earnings.

On August 10th, after reviewing the legislative language, CTH said, “I predict (in phase one) the IRS will soon create an office of “digital income verification and audits” or DIVA. This agency will be used to confiscate and remove access to on-line funds. In phase two they trigger the ‘climate change’ control mechanisms.”  {link} It’s not that much of a prediction as it is just an acceptance of this ongoing big government continuum. 

An IRS enforcement agency specifically focused on “Digital Income Verification and Audits” (DIVA), is a transparent mechanism following the basic principles of the government partnership with big tech social media.  The IRS version will be a collaboration, and/or monitoring system, between the Treasury Dept and processors of on-line funds like PayPal or GiveSendGo, etc.   Just like social media, the payment processing systems will eventually be merged with government systems.

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A few months ago, amid all of the headline warnings about inflation and prices of essential products, CTH noted that if we were to continue waiting about six months, we would see a massive backlog of unsold goods and as a consequence the prices of non-essential durable goods would begin a rapid decline.  That exact scenario is about to unfold.

Keep in mind, this is not necessarily a collapse of total global economic activity; what we are seeing is a collapse of western nation economic activity that is impacting the rest of the world.  A great economic fracturing is taking place as the western nations intentionally shrink their economy.  The supplier nations are feeling the consequences.

Maersk is the international shipping company that delivers millions of containers of goods all around the world, mostly by ship.  They are warning that warehouses are full of previously delivered goods, unsold consumer durable goods, as retail sales have come to a standstill.

The amount of inventory in warehousing is so extreme, major wholesale and retail groups have run out of storage space (link).

COPENHAGEN, Aug 3 (Reuters) – Shipping group Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) expects global container demand to fall this year as sales of durable goods come to a “standstill”, leaving flat-screen TVs and furniture piling up in warehouses, the company said on Wednesday.

A surge in consumer demand and pandemic-related logjams holding up containers in key ports had boosted freight rates and profits in the shipping industry in recent quarters, yet the cost-of-living crisis has reversed that trend.

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West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin was on every Sunday talk show today (CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox) responding to his reversal of position on the Build Back Better legislative package (Green New Deal spending) that is part of the senate budget reconciliation bill.  There is something very interesting in his justification. [Do not skim read this, all citations included]

Fox News Brett Bair does the best job challenging Manchin on his prior statements saying there would be no spending deal without first seeing the August inflation data. [LINK].  Manchin never answered that hypocrisy directly but says there are two components of the deal, two parts of a new future legislative bill, that brought him to the agreement on the $370 billion current spend.

The current Senate bill is a reconciliation bill, meaning it involves taxes and spending – AND ONLY taxes and spending, because the bill originated in the House.

The constitutional framework for taxes & spending requires the House to originate all spending bills.  If a desired additional measure does not involve taxes and spending (a budgetary impact) it cannot be added to a reconciliation bill.  The senate must originate a new bill and then send it to the House.

According to Manchin the deal between himself, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden includes his support for the current green energy spending, in exchange for two new items in future legislation: 1) Streamlined energy permitting/regulation; and 2) Increased development of Oil, Coal, Gas.  Both of these pieces of legislation have to be handled in a separate Senate bill.

According to Manchin, his agreement to the current spending bill was contingent upon a promise that: (A) Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will generate a new bill for streamlined energy permitting and increased oil, gas and coal development; (B) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take up the Senate bill and whip enough of her House Democrat membership to join with Republicans in support of that Senate bill; and (C) Joe Biden will sign that increased energy production bill.

Here’s the important part.  Senator Manchin claims he has leverage over Biden, Pelosi and Schumer to ensure a new bill with those priorities is created and advanced.  Manchin further claims there are “consequences” for Biden, Pelosi and Schumer if they were to renege on the deal.  He is quite emphatic about that point if you listen to the NBC interview.

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The pretending from the federal reserve chairs continues.  In this interview, Neel Kashkari, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says “we keep getting surprised” by data on inflation, which continues to be “higher than we expect, across the broad range of the economy.”  Yet, notice that Kashkari refuses to outline the single cause of the broad inflation is the intentional lack of energy production. [Transcript]

Kashkari continues the selling point that demand side inflation is being targeted because demand still exceeds supply.  That’s essentially true, however, it is the supply of energy that is fundamentally disrupted by Joe Biden energy policy.  It is not consumer demand for goods and services, it is the structural need for consumers to have consistent, affordable energy resources.

The collapse of energy production from domestic coal, oil and gas development is the problem.  Everything else is ancillary to the origination problem.  However, in order to support the climate agenda, the Federal Reserve must pretend not to know this. WATCH:

Kashkari notes a serious problem can arise when wage inflation starts to catch up with inflation overall.  THAT just happened last month.  The combination of wage inflation to match the high consumer inflation then drives an even higher cost for goods and services.  This is the inflation storm that leads to hyper-inflation, structurally high inflation that cannot be controlled by any monetary measure, and unfortunately, we just entered the first outer bands of this inflation hurricane last month.

A personal sidenote: when we were going through the pandemic crisis and response in 2020/2021, CTH took heat for saying the real objective at the end of the pandemic path was the global climate change agenda.  Well, here we are.  At the end of this climate change path is full control over human activity using digital currency.  Hunger games.

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