GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

[marsh]

Creepy Bill Gates Plans to Hire a 3,000-Person Social Media Team to Push Vaccines and Suppress Any Differing Information | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

Bill Gates is planning on hiring a 3,000-person social media team to push vaccines and to quash any differing opinions.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Creepy Bill Gates Plans to Hire a 3,000-Person Social Media Team to Push Vaccines and Suppress Any Differing Information

By Jim Hoft
Published May 7, 2022 at 12:45pm

Bill Gates is planning on hiring a 3,000-person social media team to push vaccines and to quash any differing opinions.

Gates made the comments at The Wall Street Journal Summit earlier this week.

Gates said vaccine misinformation spread like wildfire on the internet during the COVID pandemic. Maybe it was all of the dead people?

And this clown wonders why no one likes or trusts him?

CNBC reported:

Combating misinformation
Vaccine misinformation has spread like wildfire on social media during the Covid-19 pandemic, with some wrongly claiming that Gates was somehow using vaccines to implant 5G chips into people so that he could track their location.

“That’s so unexpected and almost so bizarre,” Gates said. “Now that I’m back in the physical world … people come up and yell and protest.”

He said it’s “dangerous” when people “cast out” on the key tool that’s being used to save people’s lives and he believes those who own social media platforms have a role to play when it comes to ensuring the truth gets shared effectively.

“When you don’t have the trusted leaders speaking out about vaccines, it’s pretty hard for the platform to work against that,” he admitted. “So I think we have a leadership problem and we have a platform problem.”

“The way that you make those platforms spread truth and not crazy stuff, there’s some real invention required there,” Gates said.

“It’s a huge problem in terms of legitimacy of elections or medical innovations … any sort of collective behavior,” he added.

The fact that information on the efficacy of drugs can move quickly and cheaply should be a blessing to mankind, Gates said, before going on to call the hydroxychloroquine saga “insane.”

“I can’t explain that,” he said. “I don’t think digital is responsible for that obsession with drugs that don’t work.”

Gates said he plans to set up a 3,000-person social media unit to help propagate accurate vaccine information in the future. He stressed that “good messages” need to be carried forward by people of trust in the community, such as political and ethnic leaders.

 

[marsh]

Is the Left Agitating for War With Russia so It Can Cement Domestic Tyranny? - The New American

A major war under Biden’s handlers’ watch would become a pretext for the greatest Big Brother seizure of control in U.S. history. ...

thenewamerican.com

Is the Left Agitating for War With Russia so It Can Cement Domestic Tyranny?

by Selwyn Duke May 7, 2022

Neosiam/iStock/Getty Images Plus

It has been odd and alarming watching the powers-that-be relentlessly escalate the proxy war our government is waging against Russia. It’s not just that we’re sending billions of dollars of weapons into Ukraine, are calling Vladimir Putin a war criminal and issuing other fightin’ words, are training Ukrainian troops and are trying to effect Moscow’s economic destruction. It’s also, senior American officials have now revealed, that via intelligence aid the U.S. has helped to:
• kill Moscow’s generals;
• down a plane carrying Russian soldiers; and
• sink one of Putin’s warships.

The kicker: By revealing this publicly — perhaps as strikingly inappropriate as leaking a Supreme Court draft opinion — Biden administration officials appear to be bragging about these “exploits” and rubbing the Russians’ noses in them. If you wanted to provoke a hot war, this is exactly how you’d do it.

But why would our officials seek conflict with the nation boasting the world’s largest stockpile of nukes (6,000) in the name of thwarting aggression that, as I explained here and here, globalist policy invited and is none of our affair? It all has a very Dr. Strangelove-esque quality about it.

But there may be method to this madness. And, no, a mere desire to enrich weapons-manufacturer political donors doesn’t explain it. There is one motivation that would, however:
A serious conflict would provide the Left an opportunity to seize complete domestic control, to cement its power — perhaps permanently.

For certain is that locking horns with Russia would be used to further curtail civil liberties.

We know this because major conflicts always are thus used. Abraham Lincoln arrested opposition journalists and publishers during the War Between the States. WWI saw the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, the latter of which absolutely infringed upon freedom of speech. And Franklin Roosevelt is notorious for having interned U.S. citizens of Japanese and also of German descent and for persecuting some Italian-heritage Americans.

Civil rights’ trampling would surely be worse under a major-war scenario today. Not only are we much farther down the rabbit hole of moral nihilism and wanton constitutional trespass, but Americans who even question our Ukraine policy are already labeled “stooges of Putin.”

Moreover, Democrats have already made crystal clear what they want: Complete power — by any means necessary.

This desire has manifested itself in politicians such as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) calling for violence against political opponents and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) threatening SCOTUS justices who dare vote contrary to the Left’s agenda.

Heeding such calls, the Democrats’ de facto storm troopers have effected hundreds of violent riots, more than 600 in 2020 alone. One Democrat operative, Scott Foval, was caught on hidden video in 2016 talking about inciting violence at Trump rallies and unabashedly said, “We’re starting anarchy here.”

This violence is again now being ratcheted up, just in time for the midterms, with news that the unconstitutional Roe v. Wade opinion could be overturned. This is attended by threats made against the “conservative” SCOTUS justices and the doxxing of them, with activists encouraging protests at their homes.

All the while that this violence is tacitly approved by Democrat leaders — and it is — conservatives are hung out to dry if they step even one inch out of line, as the January 6 martyrs’ plight proves. In contrast, 2020’s CHAZ, or Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, takeover of part of Seattle was by definition an insurrection but was sloughed off. Why, its “warlord” leader, Raz Simone, was apparently never even charged with a crime.

This, not to mention that Nancy Pelosi called the longest ever occupation of an American government building — leftists’ 2011 takeover of the Wisconsin Capitol — an “impressive show of democracy in action.” This statement was, of course, as true as claiming that the stolen (and it was) 2020 presidential contest was “the most secure election in U.S. history.”

Get the picture?

It’s not pretty, and it adds up to this: A major war under Biden’s handlers’ watch would become a pretext for the greatest Big Brother seizure of control in U.S. history. The question is, however, would the radicals in charge be crazy enough, or desperate enough, to risk nuclear war for power’s sake?

Note two matters when assessing this. First, being completely un-American and unpalatable, the Democrats have nothing to run on in the midterms aside from the just ginned up Roe v. Wade abortion controversy. Second and as I often warn, these demagogues aren’t normal.

They’re power mongers.

Just as people can lust after food, sex or money — motivations everyone can understand — so can they exhibit that rarer phenomenon: lust for power. And just as a man may endanger his marriage and career to indulge his prurient desires, megalomaniacs may assume great risk to satisfy their dark cravings.

For certain is that cementing total power requires something Marxist revolutionaries would call “crisis,” the third stage of communist subversion. The first, “demoralization,” is the undermining of the nation’s moral foundation; Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov said this was “more than complete” in the mid-’80s already. The second, “destabilization,” is what we’ve seen with the violence, the toppling of statues and the intensified attacks on our institutions the last many years. Now all we need is a crisis and what it facilitates: revolution — a final seizure of power.

A major war (along with food shortages) could certainly fit the bill. And while this may appear a crazy theory, the people in charge may just be crazy enough for it to be true.

 

[marsh]

As Meat Prices Continue to Skyrocket, Industry Insiders Warn It’s Time to Consider Our Options

If people like Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab get their way, we will soon be eating bugs as one of

uncanceled.news

As Meat Prices Continue to Skyrocket, Industry Insiders Warn It’s Time to Consider Our Options
The modern meat industry in the United States has always relied on abundant and inexpensive chickens, cows, and other animals. Today, it's getting harder to find, even for industry insiders.

by JD Rucker
May 7, 2022



If people like Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab get their way, we will soon be eating bugs as one of our primary sources of protein. The globalist elites have been telegraphing their desire to eliminate real meat from our diets altogether, which is why it’s conspicuous that we’ve seen so many allegedly unrelated events hitting meat companies and, as a result, meat consumers.

Bird flu. Food processing plant “accidents.” Fertilizer shortages causing massive increases in feed prices. The supply chain crisis. All of these combined with ludicrous regulations and economic policies from Washington DC portend a continuation of food price hikes, particularly products that offer real meat.

For transparency, we are launching a freeze-dried organic chicken company right now. We decided to do this because of the current situation and the very likely need that patriots will have for alternative sources of high-quality meat, especially in the long term. But even if I had no personal interest in this, I would still be posting the article below by Arsenio Toledo from Natural News. I would likely still be talking to meat industry insiders and learning the very discouraging news they’ve shared with me recently.

Morale is low across the board as it’s getting harder for them to sell meat at affordable prices.

And despite Democrat claims that it’s only corporate greed driving the price increases, I’m learning that margins are going down even as prices go up. What these meat companies are forced to charge customers does not reflect a similar increase in profits. They’re making less even as they charge more.

Two of the meat industry insiders I’ve spoken to in the last couple of weeks say they’re looking at alternatives to regular fresh or frozen meat sales. They believe, as I do, that they need to stock up now and utilize preservation techniques rather than rely on the fresh or frozen meat process. Even frozen meat will only last for so long. Canned meat can often last longer. Freeze-dried meat, properly stored, can last for two decades or more. They’re watching with interest how we’re able to do by offering this last option. Perhaps they may do the same, buying as much meat now as they can so they can preserve it rather than waiting for the costs of meat to make it cost-prohibitive.

That seems to be one of the many dastardly goals of the globalist elites. They want meat to be so expensive that few are able to afford it. Doing so will “help the environment,” they claim, but their goals have nothing to do with going greener. It’s all about control, and forcing the masses into diets that are even less healthy than they are today while making it far more difficult to acquire food means billions will be beholden to government.

We must continue to expose the parts of their plan that we come across while getting as many American patriots as possible to establish food independence for their families. We need more preppers in America. We need more people to establish for their families. The fewer people there are who are forced to stand in breadlines to survive, the better our chances are of slowing the globalist elites, or even stopping them in their tracks. Here’s the article by Arsenio…

Meat Prices Will Continue to Rise for the Next Two Quarters, Warns US Meatpacker
National Beef, one of America’s largest meatpackers, has warned that the price of beef will continue rising at least for the next two quarters.

The Kansas City-based beef processing company, whose parent is Brazilian food processing giant Marfrig, noted that it is expecting stable margins for the next two quarters. This suggests that their operating costs, such as the price of cattle, are increasing.

CoBank, which provides financial services to cooperatives and agribusinesses, believes the elevated meat prices will continue through the rest of 2022.

To maintain its profit margins, National Beef will have to pass on the added costs to consumers.

“Cattle prices will go up, and beef prices will go up with them,” said Tim Klein, head of Marfrig’s operations in the United States, during an earnings interview. (Related: Tucker Carlson: America could experience FOOD SHORTAGES very soon.)

But corporations like Marfrig are still earning less even as they continue to pass on added expenses to consumers. Marfrig’s net income fell by 61 percent from last year even as U.S. operations continue to report record growth.

Wages not rising in tandem with the cost of food
The cost of meat is currently rising at its fastest rate in over four decades. The average price of ground beef in American grocery stores has risen by 18 percent compared to a year ago.

Compared to last month, the price of red meat surged by 13.8 percent.

If the wages of red meat consumers are unable to deal with the added expense of purchasing red meat, CoBank noted that they will likely “trade down” at the meat case, opting to buy cheaper meat options like chicken. Klein advised that American shoppers may be able to adapt to the rapid inflation by switching to eating less expensive cuts of red meat.

In New York, Frank Ottomanelli, owner of S. Ottomanelli & Sons Prime Meats, said the inflation crisis has forced him to raise prices between five to 10 percent.

Ottomanelli said he has tried to do everything to keep his store’s prices “down as much as possible” because he did not want to be too much of a burden to his loyal customers, all of whom are also having to deal with the rising price of rent, gas and other food products.

“We have a legion of customers coming into Ottomanelli for years and years and years. We want to keep the customer base,” said Ottomanelli. “We didn’t want to scare them away, so we did everything possible for them to keep coming back again.”

Ottomanelli pointed out that the price hikes are “not in proportion” to what ordinary people are earning. “We have inflation that’s causing things to go up even further than what they’re making,” he said.

Real average hourly earnings in March decreased by 0.8 percent compared to the previous month. The month-over-month inflation increase of 1.2 percent eroded the 0.4 percent total wage gain American workers experienced. Year-over-year, real earnings fell by 2.7 percent in March, largely due to the inflation crisis.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) latest Food Price Outlook showed that grocery prices have increased at the fastest rate in 10 years. Retail grocery prices in March were 10 percent higher compared to the same time last year.

USDA economist Matt MacLachlan explained that grocery price inflation this year was initially only expected to be between 1.5 to 2.5 percent. Upon seeing the current inflation rates, the department has since raised its projections to a yearly inflation rate of between five to six percent.

Restaurant prices are also predicted to increase by 5.5 to 6.5 percent this year. This would mark the third year in a row that all food prices would increase more than the 20-year average of 2.4 percent. The food products to be worst hit by the massive price increases will be beef, poultry, eggs, dairy and fresh fruits.

The USDA is currently blaming inflation on the substantial increase in the price of fuel, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing avian flu outbreak in the United States.

More related news can be found at FoodInflation.news.

 

[marsh]

Data show Shanghai lockdown is precipitously driving up shipping delays

Import holdups skyrocket in world’s biggest container port.

justthenews.com

Data show Shanghai lockdown is precipitously driving up shipping delays
Import holdups skyrocket in world’s biggest container port.

Updated: May 7, 2022 - 12:47pm

International data show that the Chinese government’s ongoing lockdown of Shanghai is precipitously driving up shipping delays around the world, risking further supply chain disruptions at a time when global commerce networks are already fragile.

Data from Project 44, a “supply chain visibility platform,” shows that “shipment delays between China and major US and European ports have quadrupled since late March, when China shut down the city of Shanghai, which has the world's busiest container port,” according to CNN.

By the end of last month ships from China to Seattle were taking on average four days longer to arrive, compared to one day in March.

Shanghai’s lockdown came as China in early March began reporting a skyrocketing number of cases there, a jump which came after the communist-run country had reported extremely low case numbers for over two years.

Josh Brazil, the director of supply chain data insights at Project 44, told CNN that delays will “continue into the summer months” due to China’s commitment to locking down the major port city.

 

[marsh]

“Pandemic Treaty” will hand WHO keys to global government

Kit Knightly The first public hearings on the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” are closed, with the next round due to start in mid-June. We’ve been trying to keep this issue on our fron…

off-guardian.org

“Pandemic Treaty” will hand WHO keys to global governmentSuggested clauses would incentivize reporting “pandemics”, and see nations punished for “non-compliance”

Kit Knightly

The first public hearings on the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” are closed, with the next round due to start in mid-June.

We’ve been trying to keep this issue on our front page, entirely because the mainstream is so keen to ignore it and keep churning out partisan war porn and propaganda.

When we – and others – linked to the public submissions page, there was such a response that the WHO’s website actually briefly crashed, or they pretended it crashed so people would stop sending them letters.

Either way, it’s a win. Hopefully one we can replicate in the summer.

Until then, the signs are that what scant press coverage there is, mostly across the metaphorical back-pages of the internet, will be focused on making the treaty “strong enough” and ensuring national governments can be “held accountable”.

An article in the UK’s Telegraph from April 12th headlines:

Real risk a pandemic treaty could be ‘too watered down’ to stop new outbreaks

It focuses on a report from the Panel for a Global Public Health Convention (GPHC), and quotes one of the report’s authors Dame Barbara Stocking:

Our biggest fear […] is it’s too easy to think that accountability doesn’t matter. To have a treaty that does not have compliance in it, well frankly then there’s no point in having a treaty,”

The GPHC report goes on to say that the current International Health Regulations are “too weak”, and calls for the creation of a new “independent” international body to “assess government preparedness” and “publicly rebuke or praise countries, depending on their compliance with a set of agreed requirements”.

Another article, published by the London School of Economics and co-written by members of the German Alliance on Climate Change and Health (KLUG), also pushes the idea of “accountability” and “compliance” pretty hard:

For this treaty to have teeth, the organisation that governs it needs to have the power – either political or legal – to enforce compliance.

It also echoes the UN report from May 2021 in calling for more powers for the WHO:

In its current form, the WHO does not possess such powers […]To move on with the treaty, WHO therefore needs to be empowered — financially, and politically.

It recommends the involvement of “non-state actors” such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation and International Labour Organisation in the negotiations, and suggests the treaty offer financial incentives for the early reporting of “health emergencies” [emphasis added]:

In case of a declared health emergency, resources need to flow to countries in which the emergency is occurring, triggering response elements such as financing and technical support. These are especially relevant for LMICs, and could be used to encourage and enhance the timely sharing of information by states, reassuring them that they will not be subject to arbitrary trade and travel sanctions for reporting, but instead be provided with the necessary financial and technical resources they require to effectively respond to the outbreak.

It doesn’t stop there, however. They also raise the question of countries being punished for “non-compliance”:

[The treaty should possess] An adaptable incentive regime, [including] sanctions such as public reprimands, economic sanctions, or denial of benefits.

To translate these suggestions from bureaucrat into English:

• If you report “disease outbreaks” in a “timely manner”, you will get “financial resources” to deal with them.
• If you don’t report disease outbreaks, or don’t follow the WHO’s directions, you will lose out on international aid and face trade embargoes and sanctions.

In combination, these proposed rules would literally incentivize reporting possible “disease outbreaks”. Far from preventing “future pandemics”, they would actively encourage them.

National governments who refuse to play ball being punished, and those who play along getting paid off is not new. We have already seen that with Covid.

Two African countries – Burundi and Tanzania – had Presidents who banned the WHO from their borders, and refused to go along with the Pandemic narrative. Both Presidents died unexpectedly within months of that decision, only to be replaced by new Presidents who instantly reversed their predecessor’s covid policies.

Less than a week after the death of President Pierre Nkurunziza, the IMF agreed to forgive almost 25 million dollars of Burundi’s national debt in order to help combat the Covid19 “crisis”.

Just five months after the death of President John Magufuli, the new government of Tanzania received 600 million dollars from the IMF to “address the covid19 pandemic”.

It’s pretty clear what happened here, isn’t it?

Globalists backed coups and rewarded the perpetrators with “international aid”. The proposals for the Pandemic treaty would simply legitimise this process, moving it from covert back channels to overt official ones.

Now, before we discuss the implications of new powers, let’s remind ourselves of the power the WHO already possesses:

• The World Health Organization is the only institution in the world empowered to declare a “pandemic” or Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
• The Director-General of the WHO – an unelected position – is the only individual who controls that power.

We have already seen the WHO abuse these powers in order to create a fake pandemic out of thin air…and I’m not talking about covid.

Prior to 2008, the WHO could only declare an influenza pandemic if there were “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” AND there was a new and distinct subtype. In 2008 the WHO loosened the definition of “influenza pandemic” to remove these two conditions.

As a 2010 letter to the British Medical Journal pointed out, these changes meant “many seasonal flu viruses could be classified as pandemic influenza.”

If the WHO had not made those changes, the 2009 “Swine flu” outbreak could never have been called a pandemic, and would likely have passed without notice.

Instead, dozens of countries spent millions upon millions of dollars on swine flu vaccines they did not need and did not work, to fight a “pandemic” that resulted in fewer than 20,000 deaths.

Many of those responsible for advising the WHO to declare swine flu a public health emergency were later shown to have financial ties to vaccine manufacturers.

Despite this historical example of blatant corruption, one proposed clause of the Pandemic Treaty would make it even easier to declare a PHEIC. According to the May 2021 report “Covid19: Make it the Last Pandemic” [emphasis added]:

Future declarations of a PHEIC by the WHO Director-General should be based on the precautionary principle where warranted

Yes, the proposed treaty could allow the DG of the WHO to declare a state of global emergency to prevent a potential pandemic, not in response to one. A kind of pandemic pre-crime.

If you combine this with the proposed “financial aid” for developing nations reporting “potential health emergencies”, you can see what they’re building – essentially bribing third world governments to give the WHO a pretext for declaring a state of emergency.

We already know the other key points likely to be included in a pandemic treaty. They will almost certainly try to introduce international vaccine passports, and pour funding into big Pharma’s pockets to produce “vaccines” ever faster and with even less safety testing.

But all of that could pale in comparison to the legal powers potentially being handed to the director-general of the WHO (or whatever new “independent” body they may decide to create) to punish, rebuke or reward national governments.

A “Pandemic Treaty” that overrides or overrules national or local governments would hand supranational powers to an unelected bureaucrat or “expert”, who could exercise them entirely at his own discretion and on completely subjective criteria.

This is the very definition of technocratic globalism.

 

[marsh]

[For the archives - backgrounder]

World Economic Forum: a history and analysis | Transnational Institute

The annual gathering in Davos has certainly cemented the power of a tiny global elite, but its real power has been as a spawning ground for neoliberalism's major advances - the rise of the financial sector, the spread of corporate trade agreements and the integration of emerging economic powers...

www.tni.org

World Economic Forum: a history and analysis
20 January 2015

The annual gathering in Davos has certainly cemented the power of a tiny global elite, but its real power has been as a spawning ground for neoliberalism's major advances - the rise of the financial sector, the spread of corporate trade agreements and the integration of emerging economic powers into the global economy.

Author
Andrew Marshall

Henry Kissinger at the World Economic Forum in 2008
This article and its accompanying infographic have been jointly published by the Transnational Institute and Occupy.com.

The annual meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, bring together thousands of the world’s top corporate executives, bankers and financiers with leading heads of state, finance and trade ministers, central bankers and policymakers from dozens of the world’s largest economies; the heads of all major international organizations including the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization, Bank for International Settlements, UN, OECD and others, as well as hundreds of academics, economists, political scientists, journalists, cultural elites and occasional celebrities.

The WEF states that it is “committed to improving the state of the world through public-private cooperation,” collaborating with corporate, political, academic and other influential groups and sectors “to shape global, regional and industry agendas” and to “define challenges, solutions and actions.” Apart from the annual forum meeting in Davos, the WEF hosts regional and sometimes even country-specific meetings multiple times a year in Asia, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere.

The Forum is host to dozens of different projects bringing together academics with corporate representatives and policy-makers to promote particular issues and positions on a wide array of subjects, from investment to the environment, employment, technology and inequality. From these projects and others, the Forum publishes dozens of reports annually, identifying key issues of importance, risks, opportunities, investments and reforms.

The WEF has survived by adapting to the times. Following the surge of so-called anti-globalization protests in 1999, the Forum began to invite non-governmental organizations representing constituencies that were more frequently found in the streets protesting against meetings of the WTO, IMF and Group of Seven. In the 2000 meeting at Davos, the Forum invited leaders from 15 NGOs to debate the heads of the WTO and the President of Mexico on the subject of globalization.

The participation of NGOs and non-profit organizations has increased over time, and not without reason. According to a poll conducted on behalf of the WEF just prior to the 2011 meeting, while global trust in bankers, governments and business was significantly low, NGOs had the highest rate of trust among the public.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last September, the founder and executive chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, was asked about the prospects of “youth frustration over high levels of underemployment and unemployment” as expressed in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements, noting that the Forum was frequently criticized for promoting policies and ideologies that contribute to those very problems. Schwab replied that the Forum tries “to have everybody in the boat.”

Davos, he explained, “is about heads of state and big corporations, but it’s also civil society – so all of the heads of the major NGOs are at the table in Davos.” In reaction to the Occupy Wall Street movement, Schwab said, “We also try... to put more emphasis on integrating the youth into what we are doing.”

WEF's beginnings
So, what exactly has the World Economic Forum been doing, and how did it emerge in the first place? It began in 1971 as the European Management Forum, inviting roughly 400 of Europe’s top CEOs to promote American forms of business management. Created by Klaus Schwab, a Swiss national who studied in the U.S. and who still heads the event today, the Forum changed its name in 1987 to the World Economic Forum after growing into an annual get together of global elites who promoted and profited off of the expansion of "global markets." It is the gathering place for the titans of corporate and financial power.

Despite the globalizing economy, politics at the Forum have remained surprisingly national. The annual meetings are a means to promote social connections between key global power players and national leaders along with the plutocratic class of corporate and financial oligarchs. The WEF has been a consistent forum for advanced “networking” and deal-making between companies, occasional geopolitical announcements and agreements, and for the promotion of "global governance" in a world governed of global markets. Indeed, the World Economic Forum’s main purpose is to function as a socializing institution for the emerging global elite, globalization’s "Mafiocracy" of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats and politicians.

They promote common ideas, and serve common interests: their own.

Writing in the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman noted that more than anything else, “the true significance of the World Economic Forum lies in the realm of ideas and ideology,” noting that it was where the world’s leaders gathered “to set aside their differences and to speak a common language... they restate their commitment to a single, global economy and to the capitalist values that underpin it.” This reflected the “globalization consensus” which was embraced not simply by the powerful Group of Seven nations, but by many of the prominent emerging markets such as China, Russia, India and Brazil.

Indeed, the World Economic Forum’s main purpose is to function as a socializing institution for the emerging global elite, globalization’s "Mafiocracy" of bankers, industrialists, oligarchs, technocrats and politicians. They promote common ideas, and serve common interests: their own.

Geopolitics and Global Governance
The World Economic Forum has been shaped by – and has in turn, shaped – the course and changes in geopolitics, or "world order," over the past several decades. Created amidst the rise of West Germany and Japan as prominent economic powers competing with the United States, the oil shocks of the 1970s also produced immense new powers for the Arab oil dictatorships and the large global banks that recycled that oil money, loaning it to Third World countries.

New forums for "global governance" began to emerge, such as the meetings of the Group of Seven: the heads of state, finance ministers and central bank governors of the seven leading industrial powers including the U.S., West Germany, Japan, UK, France, Italy and Canada, starting in 1975. When the debt crisis of the 1980s hit, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank achieved immense new powers over entire economies and regions, reshaping the structure of societies to promote “market economies” and advance the interests of domestic and international corporate and financial oligarchs.

Between 1989 and 1991, the global power structure changed dramatically with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. With that came President George H.W. Bush’s announcement of a "New World Order" in which America claimed "victory" in the Cold War, and a unipolar world took shape under the hegemony of the United States. The ideological war between the West and the Soviet Union was declared victorious in favor of Western Capitalist Democracy. The "market system" was to become globalized as never before, especially under the presidency of Bill Clinton who led the U.S. during its largest ever economic expansion between 1993 and 2001.

During this time, the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum became more important than ever, and the role of the WEF in establishing a "Davos Class" became widely acknowledged. At the 1990 meeting, the focus was on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’s transition to “market-oriented economies.” Political leaders from Eastern Europe and Western Europe met in private meetings, with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl articulating his desire to reunify Germany and cement Germany’s growing power within the European Community and NATO.

Helmut Kohl laid out his strategy for shaping the “security and economic structure of Europe” within a unified Germany. Kohl’s “grand design” for Europe envisioned a unified Germany as being “firmly anchored” in the expanding European Community, the main objective of which was to establish an "internal market" by 1992 and to advance toward an economic and monetary union, with potential to expand eastward. Kohl presented this as a peaceful way for German power to grow while assuaging fears of Eastern Europeans and others about the economically resurgent country at the heart of Europe.

At the 1992 WEF meeting, the United States and reunified Germany encouraged “drastic steps to insure a liberalization of world trade,” and furthered efforts to support the growth of market economies in Eastern Europe. The German Economics Minister called for the Group of Seven to meet and restart global trade talks through the 105-nation General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). At that same meeting, the Chinese delegation included Prime Minister Li Peng, who was the highest-level Chinese official to travel internationally since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Of great significance also was the attendance of Nelson Mandela, the new president of South Africa. When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, he declared the policy of the African National Congress (ANC) was to implement “the nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries.” When Mandela attended the January 1992 meeting of the WEF just after becoming president, he changed his views and embraced “capitalism and globalization.”

Mandela attended the meeting alongside the governor of the central bank of South Africa, Tito Mboweni, who explained that Mandela arrived with a speech written by ANC officials focusing on nationalization. As the week’s meetings continued, Mandela met with leaders from Communist Parties in China and Vietnam, who told him, “We are currently striving to privatize state enterprises and invite private enterprise into our economies. We are Communist Party governments, and you are a leader of a national liberation movement. Why are you talking about nationalization?”

As a result, Mandela changed his views, telling the Davos crowd that he would open South Africa up as a market economy and encourage investment. South Africa subsequently became the continent’s fastest growing economy, though inequality today is greater than it was during apartheid. As Mandela explained to his official biographer, he came home from the 1992 WEF meeting and told other top officials that they had to choose: “We either keep nationalization and get no investment, or we modify our own attitude and get investment.”

At the 1993 meeting, the main consensus that had emerged called for the U.S. to maintain its position as a global economic and military power, and for it to take the lead encouraging greater “co-operation” between powerful nations. The major fear among Davos participants was that while economies were becoming globalized, politics was turning inward and becoming “renationalized.”

Later that year, Anthony Lake, Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser, articulated the “Clinton Doctrine” for the world, explaining: “The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement – enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.”

Lake explained that the United States “must combine our broad goals of fostering democracy and markets with our more traditional geostrategic interests.” No doubt, the Davos crowd welcomed such news.

At the 1994 meeting, the director-general of GATT, Peter D. Sutherland, declared that world leaders needed to establish “a new high-level forum for international economic co-operation,” moving beyond the Group of Seven to become more inclusive of the major "emerging market" economies. Sutherland told the assembled plutocrats that “we cannot continue with the majority of the world’s people excluded from participation in global economic management.”

Eventually, the organization Sutherland described was formed, as the Group of 20, bringing the leading 20 industrial and economic powers together in one setting. Formed in 1999, the G20 didn't become a major forum for global governance until the 2008 financial crisis.

In 1995, the Financial Times noted that the new “buzzword” for international policymakers was “global governance,” articulating a desire and strategy for updating and expanding the institutions and efforts of international co-operation. The January 1995 World Economic Forum meeting was the venue for the presentation of an official UN report on global governance.

President Clinton addressed the Davos crowd by satellite, stressing that he would continue to push for the construction of a new “economic architecture,” notably at meetings of the Group of Seven.

The arrival of the Davos Class

[The Davos Men] “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that are thankfully vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations." (Samuel Huntington)

In 1997, the highly influential U.S. political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the term "Davos Man," which he described as a group of elite individuals who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that are thankfully vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”

Samuel Huntington's thesis, summarized in the Financial Times article, outlined a world that “would be divided into spheres of influence,” within which “one or two core states would rule the roost.” Huntington noted that the “Davos culture people,” while extremely powerful, were only a tiny fraction of the world’s population, and the leaders of this faction “do not necessarily have a secure grip on power in their own societies.”

The Financial Times, however, noted that while the "Davos culture people" did not constitute a “universal civilization” being such a tiny minority of the world’s population, “they could be the vanguard of one.”

An article that year in The Economist came to the defense of the "Davos Man," declaring that he was replacing traditional diplomacy which was “more likely to bring peoples together than to force them apart,” noting that the WEF was “paid for by companies and run in their interests.”

TNI fellow, Susan George in her book, Whose Crisis, whose future, went further than Huntington arguing that we were not just facing a group of elites, but a genuine social class who "run our major institutions, know exactly what they want, and are well organized." But she also noted that "they have weaknesses too. For they are wedded to an ideology that isn't working and they have virtually no ideas nor imagination to resolve this."

Part 1 of 3

 

[marsh]

Part 2 of 3

Russian Oligarchs and the Rise of China
In fact, at the previous year’s meeting in Davos, the World Economic Forum functioned precisely as the vanguard for seven Russian oligarchs to take control of Russia and shape its future. At the 1996 meeting of the WEF, the Russian delegation was made up largely of the country’s new oligarchs who had amassed great fortunes in the transition to a market economy.

Their great worry was that Russian President Boris Yeltsin would lose his re-election later that year to the resurgence of the Communists.

At the WEF meeting, seven Russian oligarchs, led by Boris Berezovsky, formed an alliance during private meetings, where they decided to fund Yeltsin’s re-election and work together to “reshape their country’s future.” This alliance (or cartel, as some may refer to it), was the key to Yeltsin’s re-election victory later that year, as they held weekly meetings with Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russia’s privatization program that made them all so rich.

Berezovsky explained that if the oligarchs did not work together to promote common ends, it would be impossible to have a transition to a market economy “automatically.” Instead, he explained, “We need to use all our power to realize this transformation.” As the Financial Times noted, the oligarchs “assembled a remarkable political machine to entrench and promote the market economy – as well as their own financial interests,” as the seven men collectively controlled roughly half the entire Russian economy.

Russian politician Anatoly Chubais commented on this development and the role of the oligarchs, saying: “They steal and steal and steal. They are stealing absolutely everything and it is impossible to stop them... But let them steal and take their property. They will then become owners and decent administrators of this property.”

In the 1990s, with the spread of global markets came the spread of major financial crises: in Mexico, across Africa, East Asia, Russia and then back to Latin America. At the WEF meeting in 1999, the key issue was “reform of the international financial system.” As the economic crises spread, the Group of Seven nations, and the Davos Class, told the countries in crisis that in order “to restore confidence [of the markets], they should adopt politically unpopular policies of radical structural reform,” promoting further liberalization and deregulation of markets to open themselves up to Western corporate and financial interests and 'investment.'

The major emerging markets have been frequent participants in annual Davos meetings, providing a forum in which national elites may become acquainted with the global ruling class, with whom they then cooperate and do business. China started sending more high-level delegations to the WEF in the mid-1980s. During the 2009 meeting, two prominent speakers were President Putin of Russia and the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Both leaders painted a picture of the crisis as emanating from the centers of finance and globalization in the United States and elsewhere, with the “blind pursuit of profit” and “the failure of financial supervision” – in Wen’s words – and bringing about what Putin described as a “perfect storm.”

Both Wen and Putin, however, declared their intentions to work with the major industrial powers “on solving common economic problems.”

In 2010, China’s presence at Davos was a significant one. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who attended the previous year, was not to return. In his stead, his chosen successor, Li Keqiang, attended. China’s economy was performing better than expected as its government was coming under increased pressure from major global corporations.

Kristin Forbes, a former member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and an attendee at Davos, commented, “China is the West’s greatest hope and greatest fear... No one was quite ready for how fast China has emerged... Now everyone is trying to understand what sort of China they will be dealing with.” China sent its largest delegation to date to the World Economic Forum, with a total of 54 executives and government officials, many of whom were intending to “go shopping” for clients among the world’s elite.

Li Keqiang, the future Chinese prime minister, told the Davos audience that China was going to shift from its previous focus on exports and turn to “boosting domestic demand,” which would “not only drive growth in China but also provide greater markets for the world.” Li explained that China would “allow the market to play a primary role in the allocation of resources.”

In 2011, The New York Times declared that the World Economic Forum represented “the emergence of an international economic elite” that took place at the same time as unprecedented increases in inequality between the rich and poor, particularly in the powerful countries but also in the fast-emerging economies. Chrystia Freeland wrote that “the rise of government-connected plutocrats is not just a phenomenon in places like Russia, India and China,” but that the major Western bailouts reflected what the former chief economist at the IMF, Simon Johnson, referred to as a “quiet coup” by bankers in the United States and elsewhere. Davos and the Financial Oligarchy

The power of global finance – and in particular, banks and oligarchs – has grown with each successive financial crisis. As the financial crisis tore through the world in 2008, the January 2009 meeting of the World Economic Forum featured less of the Wall Street titans and more top politicians. Klaus Schwab declared, “The pendulum has swung and power has moved back to governments,” adding that “this is the biggest economic crisis since Davos began.” Goldman Sachs, which in past years was “renowned for hosting one of the hottest parties at the World Economic Forum’s glittering annual meeting in Davos,” had cancelled its 2009 party.

Nonetheless, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, decided to continue with his plans to host a Davos party.

Goldman Sachs.. was “renowned for hosting one of the hottest parties at the World Economic Forum’s glittering annual meeting in Davos" In 2010, thousands of delegates assembled to discuss the "important’ issues of the day. And despite the reputation of banks and bankers being at all-time lows, top executives of the world’s largest financial institutions showed up in full force. The week before the meeting, President Obama called for the establishment of laws to deal with the "too big to fail" banks, and European leaders were responding to the anger of their domestic populations for having to pay for the massive bailouts of financial institutions during the financial crisis. Britain and France were discussing the prospect of taxing banker bonuses, and Mervyn King, then governor of the Bank of England, suggested the possibility of breaking up the big banks. Several panels at the WEF meeting were devoted to discussing the financial system and its possible regulation, as bankers like Josef Ackermann of Deutsche Bank suggested that they would agree to limited regulations (at least on "capital requirements").

More important, however, were plans for a series of private meetings of government representatives and bank chiefs, who would meet separately, and then together, in Davos.

Roughly 235 bankers were to attend the summit – a 23% increase from the previous year.

Global bankers and other corporate leaders were worried, and warned the major governments in attendance against the financial repercussions of pursuing “a populist crackdown” against banks and financial markets. French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke to the Forum’s guests about a need for a “revolution” in global financial regulation, and for “reform of the international monetary system.” The heads of roughly 30 of the world’s largest banks held a private meeting at Davos “to plot how to reassert their influence with regulators and governments,” noted a report on Bloomberg. The “private meeting” was a precursor to a later meeting at Davos involving top policymakers and regulators.

Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, said of the assembled bankers, “We’re trying to figure out ways that we can be more engaged.” According to Moynihan, a good deal of the closed-door discussion “was about tactics, such as who the executives should approach and when.”

The CEO of UBS, a major Swiss bank, commented that “it was a positive meeting, we’re in consensus.”

The bankers said they were aware that some new rules were inevitable, but they wanted to encourage regulators and countries to coordinate the rules through the Group of 20, revived in 2009 as the premier forum for international cooperation and "global governance."

Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank, suggested that “we should stop the bank bashing,” and affirmed that banks had a “noble role” to play in managing the economic recovery.

Christine Lagarde, France's Finance Minister and current Managing Director of the IMF, encouraged a “dialogue” between governments and banks, saying, “That’s the only way we’re going to get out of it.” Later that week, the bankers met “behind closed doors with finance ministers, central bankers and regulators from major economies.”

The key message at the time from finance ministers, regulators and central bankers was a political one: “They [the banks] should accept more stringent regulation, or face more draconian curbs from politicians responding to an angry public.” Guillermo Ortiz, who had just left his post as governor of the central bank of Mexico, said, “I think banks have misjudged the deep feelings of the public regarding the devastating effects of the crisis.” French President Sarkozy stated that “there is indecent behavior that will no longer be tolerated by public opinion in any country of the world,” and that bankers giving themselves excessive bonuses as they were “destroying jobs and wealth” was “morally indefensible.”

As the 2011 Davos meeting began, Edelman, a major communications consultancy, released a report that revealed a poll conducted among 5,000 wealthy and educated individuals in 23 countries, considered to be “well-informed.” The results of the poll showed there to be a massive decline in trust for major institutions, with banks taking the biggest hit. Prior to the financial crisis in 2007, 71% of those polled expressed trust in banks compared with a new low of 25 percent in 2011.

A home for a global elite
Despite the lack of public trust in banks and financial institutions, Davos remains devoted to protecting and expanding the interests of the financial elite. In fact, the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum (its top governing body) includes many representatives of the world of finance and global financial governance.

Davos Faces 2015
Among them, (as this infographic makes clear) are Mukesh Ambani, who sits on advisory boards to Citigroup, Bank of America and the National Bank of Kuwait; and Herman Gref, the CEO of Sberbank, a large Russian bank. Ernesto Zedillo, the former President of Mexico who is also a member of the board, currently serves as a director on the boards of Rolls Royce and JPMorgan Chase, international advisory boards to BP and Credit Suisse, an adviser to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is a member of the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission as well as sitting on the board of one of the world's most influential economic think tanks, the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Also notable, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, is a member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum. Carney started his career working for Goldman Sachs for 13 years, after which he was appointed as Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada. After a subsequent stint in Canada’s Ministry of Finance, Carney returned to the Bank of Canada as governor from 2008 to 2013, when he became the first non-Briton to be appointed as head of the Bank of England in its 330-year history. From 2011 to present, Carney has also been the Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, run out of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.

Apart from heading the FSB, Mark Carney is also a board member of the BIS, which serves as the central bank for the world’s major central banks. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty, a private and highly influential think tank and lobby group that brings together dozens of the most influential economists, central bankers, commercial bankers and finance ministers.

Carney has also been a regular attendee at annual meetings of the Bilderberg Group, an even more-exclusive "invite only" global conference than the WEF.

Though there are few women among the WEF’s membership – let alone its leadership – Christine Lagarde has made the list, while simultaneously serving as the managing director of the IMF. She previously served as the French finance minister throughout the course of the financial crisis. Lagarde also attends occasional Bilderberg meetings, and is one of the most powerful technocrats in the world. Min Zhu, the deputy managing director of the IMF, also sits on the WEF’s board.

Further, the World Economic Forum has another governing body, the International Business Council, first established in 2002 and composed of 100 “highly respected and influential chief executives from all industries,” which “acts as an advisory body providing intellectual stewardship to the World Economic Forum and makes active contributions to the Annual Meeting agenda.”

The membership of the WEF is divided into three categories: Regional Partners, Industry Partner Groups, and the most esteemed, the Strategic Partners. Membership fees paid by corporations and industry groups finance the Forum and its activities and provide the member company with extra access to meet delegates, hold private meetings and set the agenda. In 2015, the cost of an annual Strategic Partner status with the WEF had increased to nearly $700,000. Among the WEF’s current strategic partners are Bank of America, Barclays, BlackRock, BP, Chevron, Citi, Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Dow Chemical, Facebook, GE, Goldman Sachs, Google, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, PepsiCo, Siemens, Total, and UBS, among others.

Depending on its finances from these sources, as well as being governed by individuals from these and others institutions, it is no surprise that Davos promotes the interests of financial and corporate power above all else. This is further evident on matters related to trade.

 

[marsh]

Part 3 of 3

Davos and "Trade"
Trade has been another consistent, major issue at Davos meetings – which is to say, the promotion of powerful corporate and financial interests has been central to the functions of the WEF. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “it is pretty much a tradition that trade ministers meet at Davos with an informal meeting.”

At the 2013 meeting, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk explained at Davos that the Obama administration was “committed to reaching an agreement to smooth trade with the European Union,” saying in an interview that “we greatly value the trans-Atlantic relationship.” The week’s meetings suggested that there “were signs of progress toward a trade accord.” Thomas J. Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who was present at Davos, commented that “half a dozen senior leaders in Europe are ready to move forward.” In fact, at the previous Davos meeting in January 2012, high level U.S. and EU officials met behind closed doors with the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), a major corporate grouping that promotes a U.S.-E.U. “free trade” agreement. The TABD was represented at the meeting by 21 top corporate executives, and was attended by U.S. Trade Representative Kirk, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, the European Commissioner for Trade, Karel De Gucht, other top technocrats, and Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economic Affairs, Michael Froman (who is now the U.S. Trade Representative). The result of the meeting was the release of a report on a "Vision for the Future of EU-US Economic Relations," which called “to press for urgent action on a visionary and ambitious agenda.”

The meeting also recommended the establishment of a "CEO Task Force" to work directly with the "High Level Working Group" of trade ministers and technocrats to chart a way forward.

Just prior to the 2013 meeting in Davos, the TABD corporate group merged with another corporate network to form the Transatlantic Business Council (TBC), a group of top CEOs and chairmen of major corporations, representing roughly 70 major corporations. The purpose of the TBC was to hold “semi-annual meetings with U.S. Cabinet Secretaries and European Commissioners (in Davos and elsewhere).” At the Davos 2013 meeting, the TBC met behind closed doors with high level officials from the U.S. and EU. Michael Froman, who would replace Ron Kirk as the U.S. Trade Rep, spoke at the meeting, declaring that “the transatlantic economy is to become the global benchmark for standards in a globalized world.”

The following month, the U.S. and EU "High Level Working Group" released its final report in which it recommended “a comprehensive trade and investment agreement” between the two regions. Two days after the publication of this report, President Obama issued a joint statement with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, in which they announced that “the United States and the European Union will each initiate the internal procedures necessary to launch negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership,” or TTIP.

At the announcement, Kirk declared the sectors that will fall under the proposed agreement, stating that, “for us, everything is on the table, across all sectors, including the agricultural sector.”

The World Economic Forum in a World of Unrest
Perhaps most interestingly, the World Economic Forum has been consistently interested in the prospects of social unrest, protests and resistance movements, particularly those that directly confront the interests of corporate and financial power. This became particularly true following the mass protests in 1999 against the World Trade Organization, which disrupted the major trade talks taking place in Seattle and marked the ascendency of what Davos called the “anti-globalization movement.”

These issues were foremost on the minds of the Davos Class as they met less than two months later in Switzerland for the annual WEF meeting in 2000. The New York Times noted that as President Clinton attempted to address the issue of restoring “confidence in trade and globalization” at the WEF, global leaders – particularly those assembled at Davos – were increasingly aware of the new reality that “popular impressions of globalization seem to have shifted” with growing numbers of people, including the protesters in Seattle, voicing criticism of the growing inequality between rich and poor, environmental degradation and financial instability.

The head of the WTO declared that “globalism is the new ‘ism’ that everyone loves to hate... There is nothing that our critics will not blame on globalization and, yes, it is hurting us.”

The guests included President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, along with the leaders of South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia and Finland, among others. The head of the WTO and many of the world’s trade ministers were also set to attend, hoping to try to re-start negotiations, though protesters were also declaring their intention to disrupt the Forum’s meeting. With these worries in mind, the Swiss Army was deployed to protect the 2,000 members of the Davos Class from being confronted by protesters.

As the World Economic Forum met again in January of 2001 in Davos, “unprecedented security measures” were taken to prevent “hooligans” from disrupting the meeting. On the other side of the world, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, roughly 10,000 activists were expected to converge for the newly-formed World Social Forum, a counter-forum to Davos that represented the interests of activist groups and the Third World. As the Davos Class met quietly behind closed doors, comforted by the concrete blocks and razor wire that surrounded the small town, police on the other side of the fence beat back protesters.

In the wake of the financial crisis, the WEF meeting in 2009 drew hundreds of protesters to Davos and Geneva where they were met by riot police using tear gas and water cannons. Inside the Forum meeting, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde warned the assembled leaders, “We’re facing two major risks: one is social unrest and the second is protectionism.” She noted that the task before the Davos Class was “to restore confidence in the systems and confidence at large.” Protesters assembled outside held signs reading, “You are the Crisis.”

The January 2012 WEF meeting took place following a year of tumultuous and violent upheavals across the Arab world, large anti-austerity movements across much of Europe, notably with the Indignados in Spain, and the Occupy Wall Street movement just months prior in the United States and across much of the world. As the meeting approached, the WEF announced in a report that the top two risks facing business leaders and policy makers were “severe income disparity and chronic fiscal imbalances.” The report warned that if these issues were not addressed it could result in a “dystopian future for much of humanity.” The Occupy Movement had taken the issue of inequality directly to Davos, and there was even a small Occupy protest camp constructed at Davos. As the Financial Times noted, “Until this year [2012] the issue of inequality never appeared on the risk list at all, let alone topped it.” At the heart of it was “the question of social stability,” with many Davos attendees wondering “where else unrest might appear.” Beth Brooke, the global vice chair of Ernst & Young, noted that “countries which have disappearing middle classes face risks – history shows that.”

With citizens taking to city streets and protesting in public squares from Cairo to Athens and New York, the Financial Times noted that discontent was “rampant,” and that “the only consistent messages seem to be that leaders around the world are failing to deliver on their citizens’ expectations and that Facebook and Twitter allows crowds to coalesce in an instant to let them know it.” For the 40 government leaders assembling in Davos, “this is not a comforting picture.”

In Europe, democratically elected leaders in Italy and Greece had been removed and replaced with economists and central bankers in a technocratic coup only months earlier, largely at the behest of Germany. Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank (ECB), was perhaps “the most powerful leader in Europe,” though an Occupy movement had sprung up at the headquarters of the ECB in Frankfurt as well. During the Forum, Occupy protesters outside clashed with police. Stephen Roach, a member of the faculty at Yale University and a chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, wrote an article in the Financial Times describing his experiences as a panelist at the "Open Forum," held on the last day of the Davos gathering, in which citizens from the local community could participate along with students and Occupy protesters.

The topic he discussed was “remodeling capitalism,” which, Roach wrote, “was a chance to open up this debate to the seething masses.” But the results were “disturbing” as “chaos erupted immediately” with chants from Occupy protesters denouncing the forum and calling for more to join them. Roach wrote that it was “unruly and unsettling” and he “started thinking more about an escape route than opening comments.”

Once the discussions began, Roach found himself listening to the first panelist, a 24-year-old Occupy protester named Maria who expressed anger at “the system” and that there was a “need to construct a new one based on equality, dignity and respect.” Other panelists from the WEF included Ed Miliband from the UK, a UN Commissioner, a Czech academic and a minister from the Jordanian dictatorship. Roach noted that compared to Maria from Occupy, “the rest of us on the panel spoke a different language.”

Having spent decades as a banker on Wall Street, Roach confessed that “it as unsettling to engage a hostile crowd whose main complaint is rooted in Occupy Wall Street,” explaining that he attempted to focus on his expertise as an economist, “speaking over hisses.” He explained that all of his "expert" insights on economics “hardly moved this crowd.” Maria from Occupy, Roach wrote, got the last word as she stated, “The aim of Occupy is to think for yourself. We don’t focus on solutions. We want to change the process of finding solutions.” As “the crowd roared its approval,” Roach “made a hasty exit through a secret door in the kitchen and out into the night.” Davos, he wrote, “will never again be the same for me. There can be no retreat in the battle for big ideas.”

In October of 2013, The Economist reported that “from anti-austerity movements to middle-class revolts, in rich countries and in poor, social unrest has been on the rise around the world.”

A World Economic Forum report from November 2013 warned of the dangers of a “lost generation” that would “be more prone to populist politics,” and that “we will see an escalation in social unrest.” Over the course of 2013, major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, HSBC, AXA and others were issuing reports warning of the dangers of social unrest and rebellion. JPMorgan Chase, in its May 2013 report, stated that Europe’s “adjustment” to its new economic order was only “halfway done on average,” warning of major challenges ahead. The report complained about laws hindering the advancement of its agenda, such as “constitutional protection of labor rights... and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo.”

The 2014 meeting of the World Economic Forum drew more than 40 heads of state, including then-president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, as well as Mexico’s Enrique Pena Nieto, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Brazilian Presient Dilma Rousseff, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan. U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and prominent central bankers such as Mario Draghi and Mark Carney also attended alongside IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and World Bank president Jim Yong Kim.

As the meeting began, a major report by the World Economic Forum was published, declaring that the “single biggest risk to the world in 2014” was the widening “gap between rich and poor.” Thus, income inequality and “social unrest are the issue most likely to have a big impact on the world economy in the next decade.” The report warned that the world was witnessing the “lost generation” of youth around the world who lack jobs and opportunities, which “could easily boil over into social upheaval,” citing recent examples in Brazil and Thailand.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is due to attend the annual Davos meeting this week. But just prior to that meeting, violent protests erupted in the streets of Brazil in opposition to austerity measures imposed by President Rousseff, recalling “the beginnings of the mass street demonstrations that rocked Brazil in June 2013.” One wonders whether Rousseff will be attending next year’s meeting of the WEF, or whether she will still even be president.

Indeed, the growth and power of the Davos Class has grown with – and spurred – the development of global unrest, protests, resistance movements and revolution. As Davos welcomes the global plutocrats to 2015, no doubt they'll be reminded of the repercussions of the "market system" as populations around the world remind their leaders of the power of people.

 

[Dozdoats]

Cleaned up the stupid italics ...
=========================

A Monetary Reset Where The Rich Don’t Own Everything - PopularResistance.Org

In ancient Mesopotamia, it was called a Jubilee. When debts at interest grew too high to be repaid, the slate was wiped clean. Debts were forgiven, the debtors’ prisons were opened, and the serfs returned to work their plots of land. This could be done because the king was the representative of...

popularresistance.org

A MONETARY RESET WHERE THE RICH DON’T OWN EVERYTHING
By Ellen Brown, Scheer Post.
May 4, 2022

We Have A Serious Debt Problem, But Solutions Such As The World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” Are Not The Future We Want.
It’s time to think outside the box for some new solutions.

In ancient Mesopotamia, it was called a Jubilee. When debts at interest grew too high to be repaid, the slate was wiped clean. Debts were forgiven, the debtors’ prisons were opened, and the serfs returned to work their plots of land. This could be done because the king was the representative of the gods who were said to own the land, and thus was the creditor to whom the debts were owed. The same policy was advocated in the Book of Leviticus, though it is unclear to what extent this biblical Jubilee was implemented.

That sort of across-the-board debt forgiveness can’t be done today because most of the creditors are private lenders. Banks, landlords and pension fund investors would go bankrupt if their contractual rights to repayment were simply wiped out. But we do have a serious debt problem, and it is largely structural. Governments have delegated the power to create money to private banks, which create most of the circulating money supply as debt at interest. They create the principal but not the interest, so more money must be repaid than was created in the original loan. Debt thus grows faster than the money supply, as seen in the chart from WorkableEconomics.com below. Debt grows until it cannot be repaid, when the board is cleared by some form of market crash such as the 2008 financial crisis, typically widening the wealth gap on the way down.



Today the remedy for an unsustainable debt buildup is called a “reset.” Far short of a Jubilee, such resets are necessary every few decades. Acceptance of a currency is based on trust, and a “currency reset” changes the backing of the currency to restore that trust when it has failed. In the 20th century, major currency resets occurred in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was instituted following a major banking crisis; in 1933 following another catastrophic banking crisis, when the dollar was taken off the gold standard domestically and deposits were federally insured; in 1944, at the Bretton Woods Conference concluding World War II, when the US dollar backed by gold was made the reserve currency for global trade; and in 1974, when the US finalized a deal with the OPEC countries to sell their oil only in US dollars, effectively “backing” the dollar with oil after Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard internationally in 1971. Central bank manipulations are also a form of reset, intended to restore faith in the currency or the banks; e.g. when Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker raised the interest rate on fed funds to 20% in 1980, and when the Fed bailed out Wall Street banks following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-09 with quantitative easing.

But quantitative easing did not fix the debt buildup, which today has again reached unsustainable levels. According to Truth in Accounting, as of March 2022 the US federal government has a cumulative debt burden of $133.38 trillion, including unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises; and some countries are in even worse shape. Former investment banker Leslie Manookian stated in grand jury testimony that European countries have 44 trillion euros in unfunded pensions, and there is no source of funds to meet these obligations. There is virtually no European bond market, due to negative interest rates. The only alternative is to default. The concern is that when people realize that the social security and pension systems they have paid into for their entire working lives are bankrupt, they will take to the streets and chaos will reign.

Hence the need for another reset. Private creditors, however, want a reset that leaves them in control. Today a new sort of reset is setting off alarm bells, one that goes far beyond restoring the stability of the currency. The “Great Reset” being driven forward by the World Economic Forum would lock the world into a form of technocratic feudalism.

The WEF is that elite group of businessmen, politicians and academics that meets in Davos, Switzerland, every January. The Great Reset was the theme of its 2021 Summit, based on a July 2020 book titled Covid-19: The Great Reset co-authored by WEF founder Klaus Schwab. Some of the WEF’s proposals are summarized in a video on its website titled “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” The first prediction is, “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. Whatever you want you’ll rent. And it will be delivered by drone.”

Schwab’s proposal would reset more than the currency. At a virtual meeting in June 2020, he said, “We need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.” But as talk show host Kim Iversen observes, the proposed solution is more capitalism by a new name: “stakeholder capitalism,” where ownership will be with corporate stakeholders. You will have an account with the central bank and a mandatory federal digital ID. You will receive a welfare payment in the form of a marginally adequate basic income – so long as you maintain a proper social credit score. Your central bank digital currency will be “programmable” – rationed, controlled, and canceled if you get out of line or disagree with the official narrative. You will be kept happy with computer games and drugs.

According to WEF speaker and author Prof. Yuval Harari, “Covid is critical, because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize total biometric surveillance…. We need not just to monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under the skin.”

Harari is aware of the dangers of digital dictatorships. He said at a pre-Covid Davos presentation in January 2020:

In Davos we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology – and these promises are certainly real. But technology might also disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways, ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data colonialism and of digital dictatorships.…

We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. … if this power falls into the hands of a twenty-first century Stalin, the result will be the worst totalitarian regime in human history…

In the not-so-distant future, … algorithms might tell us where to work and who to marry, and also decide whether to hire us for a job, whether to give us a loan, and whether the central bank should raise the interest rate….

What will be the meaning of human life, when most decisions are taken by algorithms?

Clearing The Chessboard By Controlled Economic Demolition?
Before the game can be reset, the board must be cleared. What would make the population accept giving up their private property, surviving on a marginal basic income, and submitting to constant surveillance, internal and external?

The global pandemic and the lockdowns that followed have gone far toward achieving that result. Lockdowns not only eliminated smaller business competitors but drove up the debts of small countries, forcing them to increase their loans from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF is notorious for onerous loan terms, including imposing strict austerity measures, relinquishing control of natural resources, and marching in “lockstep” with pandemic restrictions.

In a June 2020 article on the blog of the IMF titled “From Great Lockdown To Great Transformation,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva called the global policy response to the 2020 crisis the “Great Lockdown.” She is quoted as saying to the US Chamber of Commerce:

We call the current period ‘the Great Lockdown’ because we are fighting a health emergency by bringing production and consumption to a standstill….

In March, around one hundred billion dollars left emerging markets and developing countries—three times more than during the global financial crisis.

But in April and May—thanks to this massive injection of liquidity in advanced economies—some emerging markets were able to go back to the markets and issue bonds with competitive yields, with total issuance of around seventy-seven billion dollars. This is almost three and a half times as much as in the same two months last year. [Italics added.]

In other words, by bringing production and consumption to a standstill, the Great Lockdown had already, by June 2020, managed to strip emerging markets of $100 billion in additional assets and to lock them into $77 billion in new debt.

That helps explain why so many countries acquiesced to the Great Lockdown so quickly, even when some had only a handful of Covid-19 deaths. Lockdown was apparently a “conditionality” required for getting an IMF loan. At least that was true for Belarus, which rejected the offer. Belarus’ President :

We hear the demands … to model our coronavirus response on that of Italy. I do not want to see the Italian situation to be repeated in Belarus. We have our own country and our own situation. … [T]he IMF continues to demand from us quarantine measures, isolation, a curfew. This is nonsense. We will not dance to anyone’s tune.

Unlike Belarus, most countries acquiesced, and so did households and businesses locked into the debt trap by an economy in which production and consumption were brought to a standstill. Like most emerging economies, they acquiesced to whatever terms were imposed for returning to “normal.”

The lockdowns have now been lifted in most places, but the debt trap is about to snap shut. A moratorium on U.S. rents and student debt is due to come to an end, and cumulative arrears may need to be paid. Debtors unable to meet that burden could be out in the street, joining the “useless class” described by Prof. Harari. They may be forced into accepting tThe technocratic feudalism of the WEF Great Reset, but it’s is not the sort of future most people want. However, what are the alternatives?

A Eurasian Jubilee?
For sovereign debt (the debt of national governments), a form of jubilee is envisioned by Sergei Glazyev in conjunction with the alternative monetary system currently being designed by the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), detailed in my last article here. Glazyev is the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU. An article in The Cradle titled “Russia’s Sergey Glazyev Introduces the New Global Financial System” is headlined:

The world’s new monetary system, underpinned by a digital currency, will be backed by a basket of new foreign currencies and natural resources. And it will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity.

The article quotes Glazyev as stating:

Transition to the new world economic order will likely be accompanied by systematic refusal to honor obligations in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. In this respect, it will be no different from the example set by the countries issuing these currencies who thought it appropriate to steal foreign exchange reserves of Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Russia to the tune of trillions of dollars. Since the US, Britain, EU, and Japan refused to honor their obligations and confiscated wealth of other nations which was held in their currencies, why should other countries be obliged to pay them back and to service their loans?

In any case, participation in the new economic system will not be constrained by the obligations in the old one. Countries of the Global South can be full participants of the new system regardless of their accumulated debts in dollars, euro, pound, and yen. Even if they were to default on their obligations in those currencies, this would have no bearing on their credit rating in the new financial system. Nationalization of extraction industry, likewise, would not cause a disruption. Further, should these countries reserve a portion of their natural resources for the backing of the new economic system, their respective weight in the currency basket of the new monetary unit would increase accordingly, providing that nation with larger currency reserves and credit capacity. In addition, bilateral swap lines with trading partner countries would provide them with adequate financing for co-investments and trade financing.

That may largely eliminate the sovereign debt overhang in the EAEU member countries, but what of the United States and other Western countries that are unlikely to join? Some innovative possibilities will be covered in Part 2 of this piece. Stay tuned.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Ukraine Grain Strain: Almost 25 Million Tonnes Blocked From Export

SUNDAY, MAY 08, 2022 - 05:45 AM

A massive backlog of grain shipments is piling up in Ukraine to the tune of nearly 25 million tonnes due to 'infrastructure challenges' and blocked ports in the Black Sea, including Mariupol, Reuters reports, citing a UN food agency official.'


Ukraine was the fourth-largest exporter of maize (corn) in the 2020/21 season, and the sixth-largest wheat exporter in the world, according to the International Grains Council.

"It's an almost grotesque situation we see at the moment in Ukraine with nearly 25 mln tonnes of grain that could be exported but that cannot leave the country simply because of lack of infrastructure, the blockade of the ports," said FAO Deputy Director Josef Schmidhuber during a Geneva press briefing via Zoom.

According to Schmidhuber, the full silos could result in storage shortages for this year's July and August harvests.

"Despite the war the harvest conditions don’t look that dire. That could really mean there's not enough storage capacity in Ukraine, particularly if there's no wheat corridor opening up for export from Ukraine."

He alluded to destroyed grain storage as a result of the Russian invasion, without elaborating.

CNN, however, reports from 'multiple sources' that Russian forces have allegedly plundered farm equipment and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grains from Ukraine, with the Ministry of Defense estimating on Thursday that 400,000 tonnes of grain had been stolen to date.

[And given the source(s), the usual 'grain of salt' disclaimer applies as to the extent and accuracy of claims.]

Oleg Nivievskyi at the Kyiv School of Economics told CNN the thefts of farm equipment, such as tractors and harvesters, by Russian forces have been absolutely devastating for Ukrainian farmers.

"Even if these regions are liberated tomorrow, it will take time to restart the production cycle," perhaps two to three years. Buying fertilizer and equipment and hiring workers would be tough for farmers who have been cleaned out by the Russians -- because their grain is their working capital for the next season," Nivievskyi said.

Footage has been posted online of long Russian convoys of farm equipment on flat-bed trucks leaving Melitopol, a city in southeastern Ukraine.



Olga Trofimtseva, former agriculture minister in Ukraine, said farm equipment thefts were also seen in Donetsk and Kharkiv. "Their equipment was simply stolen and pulled across the border -- new tractors, harvesters," she said.

Prior to the invasion, there were 6 million tons of wheat and 15 million tons of corn ready for export.

Farmers in top growing areas in the southern part of the country, such as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, have halted sowing operations due to the lack of farm equipment, shortage of diesel, fertilizer, and seed as the disruptions caused by the conflict.

CNN reported one instance where a large grain storage complex located in the eastern part of the country was bombed.



Russia has also reportedly intensified strikes on infrastructure, destroying highways, bridges, rail hubs, ports, electrical power stations, and fuel facilities, in a bid to disrupt the West's shipments of weapons to resupply the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The combination of thefts of tractors and grains, sowing disruptions, and blown-up ag facilities and infrastructure will severely impact food production in one of the world's largest grain exporters.

Ukraine's deputy agriculture minister Taras Vysotskiy said Thursday the country only has enough stocks to feed its population. This means that Ukraine might not be able to export grains to other countries. Even if farmers were to plant, damage to highways, ports, and rail systems could make the flow of farm goods out of the country near impossible.

The latest Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations report estimated a 20% decline in global wheat production this year due to the ongoing situation in Ukraine, where the Ministry of Agriculture recently warned a third of the country's farmland is occupied or unsafe.

The worst of the global food crisis could still be ahead (well, at least the Rockefeller Foundations thinks so...) since the Northern Hemisphere planting season has only begun, and commodity traders will have a more accurate crop production estimate by summer, which may result in even higher food prices.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

The Battery Boom Will Redraw Geopolitical Maps

SUNDAY, MAY 08, 2022 - 05:10 AM
Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

• The vulnerability of global energy markets is once again back in focus due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
• The race for a renewable future will come with its own geopolitical issues and could lead to new conflicts as new supply chains emerge.
• In March, President Biden introduced a plan to secure the strategic and critical materials necessary for the clean energy transition—such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed, once again, the vulnerability of the global energy markets and economy to the actions of petrostates with the power to weaponize their energy resources for political purposes. In the biggest shock to oil flows since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the war in Ukraine and the hesitancy of Europe to immediately punish Putin threw into sharp relief the geopolitical power that countries with huge oil and gas resources currently hold.


The European Union’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to wean off Russian energy as soon as possible and reduce overall fossil fuel consumption in the longer term in order to stop being beholden to malign actors for energy sources.

The mad dash to boost renewables and transport electrification, however, comes with its own set of geopolitical issues.

Countries that aren’t Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran hold vast resources of the metals and minerals that will be critical to enabling a faster energy transition. But those resource holders also include Russia, China, and a host of African and South American nations still living “the resource curse”, where conflict, forced and child labor, and critically low environmental standards are undermining the “green” credentials of the clean energy transition.

As developed economies look to lessen their dependence on fossil fuels and, by extension, on the political goals and whims of major oil and gas resource holders such as Russia and the members of OPEC, the geopolitical influence of the petrostates would likely wane over time.

But a new geopolitical issue would rise—potential dependence on countries holding resources of critical minerals. And those countries include the likes of China and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example.

Oil Wars
The geopolitics of oil resources has shaped the second half of the 20th century and continues to do so in the 21st century.

“Although the threat of "resource wars" over possession of oil reserves is often exaggerated, the sum total of the political effects generated by the oil industry makes oil a leading cause of war,” Jeff D. Colgan, Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C, wrote in a policy brief in the peer-reviewed journal International Security nearly a decade ago.

Since 1973, between one-quarter and one-half of interstate wars have been connected to one or more oil-related causal mechanisms, Colgan notes, adding that “No other commodity has had such an impact on international security.”

International and energy security continue to be influenced by fossil fuel resources a decade later.

Due to the high dependence on Russian oil by some of its members, the EU is debating how to implement an oil embargo on Moscow without plunging Europe into a recession and without fracturing a united EU front against Putin and his aggression in Ukraine.

Renewables Could Hold The Key To Energy Independence…
Therefore, the EU is looking to switch to renewables faster, as a way to reduce fossil fuel consumption and reliance on Russia.

“The quicker we switch to renewables and hydrogen, combined with more energy efficiency, the quicker we will be truly independent and master our energy system,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in early March, announcing a goal to reduce EU demand for Russian gas by two-thirds before the end of this year.

“Renewables give us the freedom to choose an energy source that is clean, cheap, reliable, and ours. And instead of funding fossil fuel imports and Russian oligarchs, we can create jobs here,” European Commission Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans, said.

The EV revolution would also help reduce the geopolitical power of petrostates.

“The ability to electrify transportation and get off combusting fossil fuels, and oil specifically, means we would solve massive geopolitical problems, which have been just a plague for the last 100 years,” Adam Scott, executive director at Toronto-based charity advocating for sustainable investing, Shift, told Andre Mayer of Canada’s CBC News.

…If Clean Energy Didn’t Need Key Metals Resources
The war in Ukraine is accelerating the shift to increased investment in renewables as a way to lessen dependence on imports of fossil fuels, a large part of which comes from OPEC and Russia.

However, the big challenge in the energy transition will be supply chains, Simon Flowers, Chairman and Chief Analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said last week.

“Costs for solar and wind turbine components are already experiencing inflation and demand is only going to intensify. There’s also going to be a massive scramble to access the metals to build out electrification – from steel, key base metals including copper, aluminum and nickel, and battery raw materials,” Flowers noted.

Developed economies, including the United States, currently depend on imports for boosting low-carbon energy sources. The U.S. imports more than half of its annual consumption of 31 of the 35 critical minerals, the Department of Energy said at the start of President Biden’s term in office. America does not have domestic production for 14 of those critical minerals and is completely dependent on imports to supply its demand.

President Biden included in March strategic and critical materials necessary for the clean energy transition—such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese for large-capacity batteries—in the Defense Production Act of 1950.

This is a step in the right direction for ensuring more domestic supply, considering that geopolitics will play a role in the energy transition, too, although the resource holders may be different.

“There is an underappreciated risk to the energy transition: the supply of clean energy depends on mined natural resources, which are steeped in geological, geopolitical, and governance challenges,” KPMG and Eurasia Group said in a report last year.

The new global energy ecosystem could shift “from OPEC to OMEC”, where OMEC is what KPMG and Eurasia Group describe as a “freshly minted acronym for ‘Organisation of Mineral Exporting Countries’ – this grouping may not yet exist, but the point remains: geopolitical power could shift from oil-dominated countries to critical metal-dominated countries.”

 

[marsh]

Industry experts warn of power shortages due to ‘renewable’ energy

“Traditional and nuclear power plants are being retired to make way for renewable sources of energy, but the plants are going offline faster than renewable energy and battery storage can keep up.”

thepostmillennial.com

Industry experts warn of power shortages due to 'renewable' energy

"Traditional and nuclear power plants are being retired to make way for renewable sources of energy, but the plants are going offline faster than renewable energy and battery storage can keep up."

James AnthonyMontreal QC
May 8, 2022 2:27 PM1 Mins Reading

Company executives who own electrical grids are making dire pronouncements about potential mass shortages over plans to replace fossil-fuel and nuclear plants with "renewable" sources.

John Bear, the CEO of MISO told the press on Sunday, "As we move forward, we need to know that when you put a solar panel or a wind turbine up, it’s not the same as a thermal resource."

According to Fox News, "the issue is on the rise throughout the country as many traditional and nuclear power plants are being retired to make way for renewable sources of energy, but the plants are going offline faster than renewable energy and battery storage can keep up."

"Green" energy sources such as solar and wind rely heavily on batteries. Battery efficiency is constantly improving, but it's not enough to keep up with current demand if plant closures continue as planned, Bear said.

Brad Jones, acting CEO for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said "every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue."

"We’re all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible…and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability."
Both supply chain issues and inflation are reportedly slowing the process.

 

[marsh]

18 Signs That Food Shortages Will Get a Lot Worse as We Head Into the Second Half of 2022 (Sponsor GOLD)

18 Signs That Food Shortages Will Get a Lot Worse as We Head Into the Second Half of 2022

by Michael Snyder
May 8, 2022





If you think that things are bad now, just wait until we get into the second half of this year.

Global food supplies have already gotten very tight, but it is the food that won’t be produced during this current growing season in the northern hemisphere that will be the real problem.

Worldwide fertilizer prices have doubled or tripled, the war in Ukraine has greatly reduced exports from one of the key breadbaskets of the world, a nightmarish bird flu pandemic is wiping out millions of chickens and turkeys, and bizarre weather patterns are absolutely hammering agricultural production all over the planet.

I have often used the phrase “a perfect storm” to describe what we are facing, but even that phrase really doesn’t seem to do justice to the crisis that we will be dealing with in the months ahead. The following are 18 signs that food shortages will get a lot worse as we head into the second half of 2022…

#1 The largest fertilizer company on the entire planet is publicly warning that severe supply disruptions “could last well beyond 2022”…

The world’s largest fertilizer company warned supply disruptions could extend into 2023. A bulk of the world’s supply has been taken offline due to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. This has sparked soaring prices and shortages of crop nutrients in top growing areas worldwide; an early indication of a global food crisis could be in the beginning innings.

Bloomberg reports Canada-based Nutrien Ltd.’s CEO Ken Seitz told investors on Tuesday during a conference call that he expects to increase potash production following supply disruptions in Russia and Ukraine (both major fertilizer suppliers). Seitz expects disruptions “could last well beyond 2022.”

#2 The world fertilizer price index has skyrocketed to absurd heights that have never been seen before.

#3 It is being reported that global grain reserves have dropped to “extremely low” levels…

“Global grains stocks remain extremely low, an issue that has become amplified because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We think it will take at least 2-3 years to replenish global grains stocks,” Illinois-based CF Industries Holdings Inc.’s president and chief executive officer Tony Will said in a statement in Wednesday’s earnings report.

#4 Due to the war, agricultural exports from Ukraine have been completely paralyzed…

Nearly 25 million tonnes of grains are stuck in Ukraine and unable to leave the country due to infrastructure challenges and blocked Black Sea ports including Mariupol, a U.N. food agency official said on Friday.

The blockages are seen as a factor behind high food prices which hit a record high in March in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, before easing slightly in April, the FAO said on Friday.

#5 The out-of-stock rate for baby formula in the United States has now reached 40 percent…

The out-of-stock rate for baby formula hovered between 2% and 8% in the first half of 2021, but began rising sharply last July. Between November 2021 and early April 2022, the out-of-stock rate jumped to 31%, data from Datasembly showed.

That rate increased another 9 percentage points in just three weeks in April, and now stands at 40%, the statistics show. In six states — Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Texas and Tennessee — more than half of baby formula was completely sold out during the week starting April 24, Datasembly said.

#6 In six U.S. states, the out-of-stock rate for baby formula has actually risen to 50 percent or greater.

#7 Searches for the phrase “how to make homemade formula for babies” on Google have spiked 120 percent.

#8 We are being told that this is a “perfect storm” as shelves become increasingly bare at food banks all around the nation.

#9 In Canada, more than 1.7 million chickens and turkeys have already been lost in recent months due to the global bird flu pandemic.

#10 In the United States, more than 37 million chickens and turkeys have already been wiped out due to the global bird flu pandemic.

#11 The two largest reservoirs in California, Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville, have both fallen to “critically low levels”.

#12 Some communities in southern California won’t be able to make it through the coming summer months without “significantly cutting back” on their water usage.

#13 Many of the largest lakes around the world are currently in the process of disappearing because they are rapidly drying up.

#14 Wildfires continue to absolutely devastate agricultural land all across the western half of the United States. This weekend, it was New Mexico’s turn to be hit the hardest…

After a few days of calm that allowed some families who had fled wildfires raging in northeast New Mexico to return to their homes, dangerous winds picked up again Sunday, threatening to spread spot fires and complicate work for firefighters.

More than 1,500 firefighters were on the fire lines at the biggest blaze east and northeast of Santa Fe, which grew another 8 square miles (20 square kilometers) overnight to an area more than twice as large as the city of Philadelphia.

#15 We are being told that steak prices in the United States will “keep rising” in the days ahead.

#16 Due to hail and frost, the Spanish apricot crop is going to be way below expectations…

In Spain, the latest forecasts suggest production will not reach 60,000 tonnes, compared with 110,000 tonnes in 2019 and 100,000 tonnes in 2020 and 90,000 tonnes in 2021.

In Murcia, where around two-thirds of Spain’s apricot production is located, farmers in the Mula River and northwest regions have been forced to write off the entire season following a severe hailstorm on Monday which not only resulted in the loss of the fruit, but also caused widespread damage to trees.

#17 Overall, Spanish fruit production is expected to drop to the lowest level in 40 years.

#18 Kansas Senator Roger Marshall is openly warning that a horrifying worldwide famine is coming…

The war in Ukraine will lead to a worldwide famine in the next two years, warned Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Ky.), who serves on the Senate Agriculture Committee, warned on Tuesday.

“You know I’m a big agriculture guy. Twelve, 15 percent of the agriculture products – corn and wheat, sunflower oil – come through that Black Sea, so— and fertilizers come from that area as well, so there actually is going to be a famine one to two years from now. I think two years from now will be even worse,” he told Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo” on Tuesday.

The alarm bells are ringing.

Are you listening?

In all of the years that I have been writing, I have never seen anything even close to this, and this crisis is only going to intensify as the months roll along.

 

[marsh]

Wind, Solar & Electric Cars Put Taxpayer on a 'Green Hook'

It is impossible to believe that these new and improved things, wind, solar and electric cars, are not presented as deliberate efforts to fraudulently promote

www.americaoutloud.com

Wind, Solar & Electric Cars Put the American Taxpayer on a ‘Green Hook’

by Rich Kozlovich and Jay Lehr | May 8, 2022 | Climate Change, Energy, Politics,

In years gone by, you would hear about some girl who had been given a ring that looked like gold but left a green residue on the finger. Well, there were a couple of things that were clear to everyone. The ring wasn’t gold, and the guy who gave it to her was a phony. If it turns green, it isn’t gold.

Those promoting green initiatives in power generation, automotive enterprises, and other things that fall into that category are sticking the taxpayers with debts to the tune of billions of dollars for so-called green investments.

There are many green disasters for which the American taxpayer is on the hook. Who are the folks who promote these projects? They are not ignorant. We have evidence to show that all these ‘green’ initiatives are economically disastrous.

When promoted by Jimmy Carter (synfuels), they were failures, and they are still disasters. The only difference is Carter could be excused for promoting these ‘alternative’ schemes because no one really knew if these were good ideas or not. Society had been prepped by circumstances for just such an effort.

Carter at least could claim ignorance, and in this case, a valid argument, since every scientific success starts with ignorance, which is later dispelled through experimentation’s trial and error processes. But now we knew the outcome even before they started. We were led to believe that the technology was “new and improved,” which has always been a great sales slogan.

Although we have no doubt that there are improvements in wind, solar and electric cars, those improvements have clearly not made them an economic success, and they had to know it. In short, it is impossible to believe that these new and improved things are not presented as deliberate efforts to fraudulently promote this to the American taxpayer, who is now on a “green hook” financially. Ideology and financial gain can cause intelligent people to fall for really dumb ideas, which is inexcusable.

Australian environmental scientist, Viv Forbes, explained all green issues as follows; “The public has been misled by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians, and profit-seeking vested interests.”And we agree that none of them are ignorant. They are driven by greed, ideology, or both.

In an article entitled, Delaware Taxpayers on the ‘Green’ Hook as Fisker Can’t Pay Bills, authored by Alyssa Carducci ⏤ notes that “Delaware taxpayers may lose a $21.5 million “investment” as Fisker Automotive took taxpayer money to create green jobs that never materialized and produced no cars in the state.” The state even had to cover $400,000 in electric bills.

How did this come about?

In 2009 Gov. Jack Markell announced that California-based Fisker Automotive Inc. would be setting up shop in the state after he offered the company $21.5 million in incentives. Delaware residents were promised 2,500 green jobs in return for their investment. And the results have been a complete failure to the point that even the “U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) suspended a $529 million federal loan to Fisker.” And it gets worse as she notes that; “Two months later, Fisker halted operations and laid-off workers at a former General Motors site it had taken over in Delaware.”

Our question has always been; how do they come up with these figures on jobs to be created with these initiatives? What formula are they using? Where did they get their insights? In reality, these people don’t have a clue. People who pick and choose companies to invest in for a living have difficulty and fail regularly. Why would we think a politician or a government bureaucrat would do any better?

James M. Taylor, President of the Heartland Institute, once reported that efforts made to repeal ethanol mandates to be mixed with gasoline failed even though energy experts have shown that ethanol requirements raise transportation fuel costs, hike food prices, decrease gasoline mileage, and harm the environment in many ways.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said ethanol subsidies and mandates have caused a dramatic rise in U.S. food prices since 2005, reversing 50 years of decline.” Are we to believe no one could see this was going to happen? This should have been obvious to the most casual observer.

Promises that never materialize were perfectly exemplified in the ‘experimental’ wind turbines that were placed years ago on the roof of the Michael V. DiSalle Government Center in Toledo, Ohio. They failed, and all the costs fell on the backs of the taxpayers.

Renewable energy advocates promised that this scheme would save taxpayers thousands of dollars “each year” due to the reduction in their electricity bills. It didn’t! “The turbines ceased to spin and generate energy quickly.

Helix Wind Corp., the manufacturer, and installer of these turbines, went broke and is out of business. This stuff is no different from any con artist scam that promises untold and unearned dollars for nothing.

Let’s face it; ‘going green’ is a lousy investment; otherwise, the world would have already ‘gone green’ from investments by private sector investors and wouldn’t have had to be subsidized by governments around the globe.

There are other even more onerous consequences to going green. Food prices have been rising all over the world as a result of ethanol subsidies and mandates. After fifty years of falling prices, that trend has reversed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The common theme from the green movement is that all of the things they promote; from the elimination of pesticides, promotion or organic farming, an abandonment of production of energy by traditional sources and means, the elimination of dams so that the rivers may flow free, taking over millions of acres of other people’s property in order to save some beetle, or mouse, or a flower which may be listed as an endangered species; is for humanities own good.

The reality is that the writings from the foundational thinkers of the green movement show they were misanthropic, blaming mankind for all sorts of calamities that had no basis in fact, much like the claims by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. And if that is doubted intellectually, we must, at the very least, acknowledge that in the real world, none of their schemes generate the utopia they say they desire. In reality, there are two things we can glean from history; dystopia follows the green movement like Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote de La Mancha, a madman, and if it’s green, it isn’t gold.

 

[marsh]

Google: The Dictator with Unprecedented Powers to Manipulate | SHTF Plan

Google has the power to manipulate what you see online, targeting you with certain advertisements and burying search results they’d rather you not see. But can they go so far as to control the outcome of political elections? Absolutely, according to Robert Epstein, Ph.D., a senior research...

www.shtfplan.com

GOOGLE: THE DICTATOR WITH UNPRECEDENTED POWERS TO MANIPULATE

Rhoda Wilson
May 8th, 2022
The Daily Exposé

Google has the power to manipulate what you see online, targeting you with certain advertisements and burying search results they’d rather you not see. But can they go so far as to control the outcome of political elections? Absolutely, according to Robert Epstein, Ph.D., a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology (“AIBRT”).

Epstein, a Harvard-trained psychologist who founded the Cambridge Centre for Behavioural Studies, likens Google to a dictator with unprecedented power because it relies on techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human history. The free services they provide really aren’t free, he warns. “You pay for them with your freedom.”1

In this article:

• Epstein, warns about Google’s ability to control public policy, swing elections, and brainwash our children.
• The methods Google uses are ephemeral and leave no paper trail behind, making it very difficult to track and prove that they’re using humans as pawns, manipulating us in ways that we can’t counteract.
• Research by Epstein and colleagues has found that biased search results can change people’s opinions and voting preferences, shifting opinions in undecided voters by 20% to 80% in certain demographic groups.
• Google’s “autocomplete” feature on its search engine can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into nearly a 90/10 split — all without people realizing they’re being manipulated.
• The first step to breaking free from Google’s dictatorship is recognizing that the manipulation is occurring; the next involves consciously opting out of it as much as possible by protecting your privacy online.

GOOGLE USES EPHEMERAL MANIPULATION TOOLS

Dr. Robert Epstein: Inside Big Tech’s Manipulation Machine and How to Stop It 1:29:52 min

April 8, 2022

Dr. Robert Epstein: Inside Big Tech’s Manipulation Machine and How to Stop It

American Thought Leaders

In the video above, Epstein speaks with Jan Jekielek, senior editor of The Epoch Times, about Google’s ability to control public policy, swing elections, and brainwash our children. Google has the power “to censor content, to track our every move, to tear societies apart, to alter the human mind, and even to reengineer humanity,” Epstein writes in his report, “Google’s Triple Threat,”2 which he details in his interview with Jekielek.

The methods Google uses are ephemeral and leave no paper trail, making it very difficult to track and prove that they’re using humans as pawns, manipulating us via ways that we can’t counteract. Ephemeral experiences occur briefly, then disappear, and include things like a list of suggested videos on YouTube, search suggestions, and topics in a newsfeed.

“They affect us, they disappear, they’re stored nowhere and they’re gone,” Epstein says. “It’s the ideal form of manipulation. People have no idea they’re being manipulated, number one, and number two, authorities can’t go back in time to see what people were being shown, in other words, how they were being manipulated.”3

Epstein and his team, however, have found ways to track Google’s invisible, almost subliminal, tools, including the search engine manipulation effect (SEME). According to Epstein:4

“SEME is one of the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered in the behavioural sciences … It leaves people thinking they have made up their own minds, which is very much an illusion. It also leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. Worse still, the very few people who can detect bias in search results shift even farther in the direction of the bias, so merely being able to see the bias doesn’t protect you from it.”

Research by Epstein and colleagues has found that biased search results can change people’s opinions and voting preferences, shifting opinions in undecided voters by 20% to 80% in certain demographic groups.5 Internal emails leaked from Google talk about “ephemeral experience,” and the company makes a point to engineer ephemeral experiences intended to alter the way people think.

SEME, however, is just one of about a dozen subliminal tools that Epstein’s team has discovered. Others include the “search suggestion effect,” the “opinion matching effect” and the “YouTube manipulation effect.”6

GOOGLE SHIFTED MILLIONS OF VOTES IN 2020
As Epstein and his team began to preserve politically related ephemeral experiences, extreme political bias was uncovered on Google and YouTube, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet.

In the days leading up to the 2020 Presidential election and 2021 Senate runoff elections in Georgia, for instance, they preserved 1.5 million ephemeral experiences and more than 3 million web pages, which were sufficient to shift “at least 6 million votes in the presidential election without people’s knowledge.”7

This isn’t an isolated incident. In 2016, Google’s search algorithm generated biased search results that influenced undecided voters, giving 2.6 million to 10.2 million votes to Hillary Clinton.

Epstein makes a point to state that he leans left politically, but despite Google’s bias in working to support the candidates he supported, he can’t applaud it, “because rigorous research I have been conducting since 2013 has shown me how dangerous these companies are – Google-and-the-Gang, I call them.”8

Even displaying a “Go Vote” reminder on Google on election day in 2018, Epstein found, gave one political party an extra 800,000 to 4.6 million votes compared to what the other party got.

What’s more, Epstein says those numbers are “quite conservative.”9 “In other words,” Epstein explained, “Google’s ‘Go Vote’ prompt was not a public service; it was a vote manipulation. This type of vote manipulation is an example of what I call the ‘Differential Demographics Effect.’”10
Epstein also had a monitoring system in place in 2018, which preserved more than 47,000 election-related searches on Google, Bing and Yahoo, along with nearly 400,000 web pages that the search results linked to. The political bias that was uncovered in the results may have shifted 78.2 million votes to one political party.11

Even the “autocomplete” feature that occurs when you start to type in Google’s search engine is a powerful manipulation tool. “A growing body of evidence suggests that Google is manipulating people’s thinking and behaviour from the very first character people type into the search box,” Epstein writes.12 Just from this feature alone, Epstein’s research found Google can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into nearly a 90/10 split — all without people realizing they’re being manipulated.

Further, because Google’s persuasive technologies are so powerful, and many elections worldwide are very close, Epstein’s data suggest Google has likely been determining the outcomes of up to 25% of national elections worldwide since at least 2015.13

GOOGLE IS A SURVEILLANCE AGENCY

(Google and Your Privacy- Interview with Dr. Robert Epstein 2:26:10 min)

Mercola: Google and Your Privacy, Interview with Dr. Robert Epstein, 24 January 2020 (2 hrs 26 mins)
Download Interview Transcript HERE.

It’s important to understand that Google is a surveillance agency with significant yet hidden surveillance powers, and this is one of their primary threats to society. As noted by Epstein:14

“The search engine … Google Wallet, Google Docs, Google Drive, YouTube, these are surveillance platforms. In other words, from their perspective, the value these tools have is they give them more information about you. Surveillance is what they do.”

While surveillance is Google’s primary business, their revenue — which exceeds $130 billion a year — comes almost exclusively from advertising. All that personal information you’ve provided them through their various products is sold to advertisers looking for a specific target audience. Meanwhile, they also have an unprecedented censorship ability. By restricting or blocking access to websites, they decide what you can and cannot see.

The most crushing problem with this kind of internet censorship is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If a certain type of information is removed from a search, and you don’t know it should exist somewhere, you will never know and you won’t go looking for it. This is how hundreds of millions of people have been deprived of learning the power of natural healing from me and many other clinicians who have been censored by Google.

For example, Google has been investing in DNA repositories for quite a long time and adding DNA information to our profiles. According to Epstein, Google has taken over the national DNA repository, but articles about that — which he has cited in his own writings — have all vanished.

As it stands, Epstein is worried for the future if no one steps in to stop Google’s power:15

“As the father of five children, I am especially concerned about what humanity’s future will look like if Big Tech is allowed to continue unobstructed on its path toward world domination. In the 1950s, British economist Kenneth Boulding wrote, ‘A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.’

“I am writing this essay because I believe that such a world already exists and that, unless we act quickly and decisively, the power that the technology company executives have garnered will become so firmly entrenched that we will never be able to unseat them from their invisible thrones.”

EPSTEIN’S SIX TOP PRIVACY TIPS
The first step to breaking free from Google’s dictatorship is recognizing that the manipulation is occurring. The next involves consciously opting out of it as much as possible. It’s especially important that children are protected, as they are among the most vulnerable to the onslaught of manipulation, which will have serious consequences for future generations. Epstein noted:16

“We’re trying to figure out how the manipulation works. But most importantly, we’re trying to quantify it … Because I think that what’s really happening is that there is a cumulative effect of, not just political bias, but a value literally a cumulative effect of being exposed to certain kinds of values, over and over and over again, on one tech platform, or after another.

“And I think that the people who are most vulnerable to being impacted by that kind of process are children.”

Epstein has compiled six steps that can help protect your privacy online, noting that he hasn’t received a targeted ad on his computer or mobile phone since 2014 as a result. To take back some of your online privacy, for yourself as well as your children, he recommends:17

1. Get rid of Gmail. If you have a Gmail account, try a non-Google email service instead such as ProtonMail, an encrypted email service based in Switzerland.
2. Uninstall Google Chrome and use Brave browser instead, available for all computers and mobile devices. It blocks ads and protects your privacy.
3. Switch search engines. Try Brave search engine instead, which you can access on the Brave browser and will not compromise your privacy and surveil you.
4. Avoid Android. Google phones and phones that use Android track virtually everything you do and do not protect your privacy. It’s possible to de-Google your cell phone by getting an Android phone that doesn’t have a Google operating system, but you’ll need to find a skilled IT person who can reformat your cell phone’s hard drive.
5. Avoid Google Home devices. If you have Google Home smart speakers or the Google Assistant smartphone app, there’s a chance people are listening to your requests, and even may be listening when you wouldn’t expect.
6. Consider using a proxy or VPN (Virtual Private Network). This service creates a buffer between you and the internet, “fooling many of the surveillance companies into thinking you’re not really you.”

SOURCES AND REFERENCES

• 1 The Epoch Times, American Thought Leaders April 7, 2022, description
• 2, 8 Google’s Triple Threat January 20, 2022, Page 3
• 3 The Epoch Times, American Thought Leaders April 7, 2022, 4:00
• 4, 5 Google’s Triple Threat January 20, 2022, Page 7
• 6, 9 Google’s Triple Threat January 20, 2022, Page 8
• 7, 12 Google’s Triple Threat January 20, 2022, Page 10
• 10, 11 Google’s Triple Threat January 20, 2022, Page 9
• 13 Google’s Triple Threat January 20, 2022, Page 11
• 14 BitChute, Google and Privacy January 24, 2020
• 15 Google’s Triple Threat January 20, 2022, Page 5
• 16 ZeroHedge April 12, 2022
• 17 Medium March 17, 2017

 

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Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: US and World Gripped by Fertilizer Crisis

Samantha Power: ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’ Do the World Economic Forum and China agree? “Fertilizer…

redwave.press

Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: US and World Gripped by Fertilizer Crisis

Nathan Worcester
May 8, 2022

Samantha Power: ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’ Do the World Economic Forum and China agree?

“Fertilizer shortages are real now.”

Uttered by USAID’s Samantha Power in a May 1 ABC interview with former Democratic advisor George Stephanopoulos, the words briefly drowned out the din of the news cycle. They were not unexpected to some. Power, who served as U.N. ambassador under Obama, mentioned fertilizer shortages after weeks of hints from the Biden administration.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki repeatedly alluded to challenges obtaining fertilizer in recent press briefings. So did President Joe Biden himself in a joint statement with EU President Ursula von der Leyen.

“We are deeply concerned by how Putin’s war in Ukraine has caused major disruptions to international food and agriculture supply chains, and the threat it poses to global food security. We recognize that many countries around the world have relied on imported food staples and fertilizer inputs from Ukraine and Russia, with Putin’s aggression disrupting that trade,” the leaders stated.

In an April report titled, “The Ukraine Conflict and Other Factors Contributing to High Commodity Prices and Food Insecurity,” the USDA’s Foreign Agriculture Service acknowledged that “for agricultural producers around the world, high fertilizer and fuel prices are a major concern.”

While political rhetoric has often focused on Russia, the rise in fertilizer prices did not begin with its invasion of Ukraine. An analysis from the Peterson Institute of International Economics shows that fertilizer prices have rapidly climbed since mid-2021, spiking first in late 2021 and again around the time of the invasion. Industry observers have pointed out that commodity prices are not solely affected by Vladimir Putin.

Max Gagliardi, an Oklahoma City oil and gas industry commentator who cofounded the energy marketing firm Ancova Energy, told The Epoch Times that the war and sanctions have helped drive the upward climb of natural gas prices in Europe. Natural gas is used in the Haber-Bosch process, which generates the ammonia in nitrogen fertilizers. Those fertilizers feed half the planet.

Gagliardi thinks the picture is more complicated at home, where environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) has become a controversial tool of stakeholder capitalism, often used to force divestment from fossil fuels or other industries disfavored by the left.

“It’s a combination of record demand domestically and from LNG [liquid natural gas] exports combined with less than expected supply, in part due to the starving of capital for the O&G industry due to the ESG/green movement pressures on capital providers, plus pressure from Wall Street to spend less capital and return value to shareholders,” he said.

Language from Power Echoes Green Activists, EU, WEF
In the case of increasing costs for oil, natural gas, and coal, some politicians and green activists have argued that those fast-rising prices mark an opportunity to accelerate a move from hydrocarbons to wind, solar, and electrification.

“Big Oil is price gouging American drivers. These liars do nothing to make the United States energy independent or stabilize gas prices. It’s time we break up with Big Oil and ignite a clean energy revolution,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said on Twitter in March.

“I say we take this opportunity to double down on our renewable energy investments and wean ourselves off of planet-destroying fossil fuels[.] Never let a crisis go to waste,” said former Joe Biden delegate and political commentator Lindy Li in a Twitter post about ExxonMobil’s exit from Russia’s Far East.

Meanwhile, Mandy Gunasekara, an environmental lawyer who served as the Environmental Protection Agency’s chief of staff under President Trump, said in an interview with The Epoch Times, “It’s always been part of their plan to make the price of traditional energy sources go up, so then wind and solar could actually compete with them.”

Describing how fertilizer shortages could actually help advance a particular agenda, Power sounded much like Li. She even used an identical phrase: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

Intentionally or not, this echoed a line from another high-profile Obama alum, Rahm Emanuel: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Emanuel was talking about the 2008-2009 financial meltdown.

“Less fertilizer is coming out of Russia. As a result, we’re working with countries to think about natural solutions, like manure and compost. And this may hasten transitions that would have been in the interest of farmers to make anyway. So, never let a crisis go to waste,” Power told Stephanopoulos.

Power’s language of setting crisis as opportunity parallels similar statements from environmental groups. Writing to EU President von der Leyen and other EU bureaucrats, a group of European and international environmental organizations urged the union to stay the course on environmental policy.

“The crisis in Ukraine is yet another reminder of how essential it is to implement the Green Deal and its Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies,” the letter states.

The Farm to Fork Strategy confidently asserts that its actions to curb the overuse of chemical fertilizers “will reduce the use of [fertilizers] by at least 20 percent by 2030.”

“Ploughing more farmland, as is currently being put forward, to grow crops for biofuels and intensive animal farming by using even more synthetic pesticides and [fertilizers] would be absurd and dangerously increase ecosystem collapses, the most severe threat to social-ecological stability and food security,” the activists’ letter argues.

“The European Union must tackle the current challenges by accelerating the implementation of its strategies to reduce the use of synthetic pesticides and [fertilizers], to preserve its natural environment and the health of its citizens.”

Numerous publications from the World Economic Forum (WEF), known for its role in orchestrating the global response to COVID-19, have made similar arguments.

A 2020 white paper from WEF and the consulting firm McKinsey and Company warns of greenhouse gas emissions and potential runoff from fertilizers, advocating for an end to fertilizer subsidies in developing countries and praising China for its efforts to reduce fertilizer use.

A 2018 WEF white paper, co-authored with the consulting firm Accenture, claims that “a 21st century approach to organic farming” should strive to close the gap in yields between organic and conventional farming.

WEF’s vision of 21st century agriculture comes into greater focus in another 2018 report titled, “Bio-Innovation in the Food System.” It advocates for the bioengineering of new microbes to fix nitrogen more efficiently in plants.

“This offers the prospect of lowering and more optimally applying nitrogen fertilizer,” WEF’s report states.

WEF has also pushed the use of “biosolids”—in other words sewage sludge—as fertilizer. Urine, it notes, “makes an excellent agricultural fertilizer.”

Gunasekara, formerly of the EPA, said that fertilizer overuse and runoff presents serious risks, giving rise to toxic algal blooms in the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. However, “generally speaking, the farmers are very, very efficient with their fertilizer use. They have a built-in incentive not to waste something that is a high input cost,” she told The Epoch Times, adding that in her experience, industry and communities could work out positive solutions with regulators.

Heavy-handed restrictions, she argued, are not the solution. The UK Absolute Zero report, produced by academics at top British universities, goes even further than some other reports in its opposition to nitrogen-based fertilizers and conventional agriculture more generally.

It anticipates a phaseout of beef and lamb production, with “fertilizer use greatly reduced,” in order to meet net-zero emissions targets by 2050.

“There are substantial opportunities to reduce energy use by reducing demand for [fertilizers],” the report states.

It also envisions cuts to energy in the food sector of 60 percent before 2050. That imagined energy austerity, with its many unforeseeable consequences for human life, apparently will not last forever. The report claims that after 2050, energy for fertilizer and other aspects of food production will “[increase] with zero-emissions electricity.”

“A food crisis/famine advances the long-term goal of more centralized control of energy, food, transportation, etc., as advanced by the Davos crowd of the WEF. Governments must expand their powers to ‘handle’ crises, and that is what progressives love more than anything,” Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, told The Epoch Times.

Part 1 of 2

 

[marsh]

Part 2 of 2

Sri Lanka’s Organic Experiment a Stark Warning
Though Power’s remarks were consistent with talking points from Democrats, WEF, the EU, and similar factions, they came at a particularly inconvenient moment for advocates of organic fertilizer—Sri Lanka’s recent experiment with abandoning chemical fertilizer has plunged the island nation into chaos that shows no signs of letting up.

According to a 2021 report from the USDA Foreign Agriculture service, Sri Lankan agricultural economists warned that a rapid shift from chemical to organic fertilizers “will result in significant drops in crop yields.”

The country has since had to compensate one million of its farmers to the tune of $200 million, as reported by Al Jazeera. With food shortages now a reality, anti-government protests prompted Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to declare a state of emergency on May 6—the second in two months.

“[Sri Lanka is] now literally on the verge of famine, because they’ve had massive crop failures,” Gunasekara said.

“This administration wants to use this as an opportunity to push their Green New Deal-style farming tactics, which we’ve seen implemented elsewhere, that cause significant problems beyond what we’re currently facing from our farmers’ perspective and what consumers are going to be facing,” she added.

“Manure cannot compete with modern chemical agriculture for high yield farming that the world depends on,” Morano of Climate Depot said.

Rufus Chaney, a retired USDA scientist known for his research on sewage sludge-based fertilizers, echoed Morano’s skepticism about making up for missing chemical fertilizers with organic alternatives.

“There are not enough useful (and not already being used) organic fertilizers to change the balance of any chemical fertilizer shortages,” Rufus told The Epoch Times via email.There are not enough useful organic fertilizers to change the balance of any chemical fertilizer shortages.— Rufus Chaney, retired USDA expert on sewage sludge-based fertilizers

“Nearly all organic fertilizers are built on livestock manure and can only be shipped short distances before it becomes cost-prohibitive,” he added.

These realities underscore another apparent contradiction in green policy—even as climate activists push for cuts to chemical fertilizer use and greater reliance on organic alternatives, they are working assiduously to cull the livestock populations that provide manure for those fertilizers. In Northern Ireland, for example, a newly passed climate Act will require the region to lose a million sheep and cattle.

The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy even states that work on fertilizers will be focused “in hotspot areas of intensive livestock farming and of recycling of organic waste into renewable fertilizers.”

“For years we were warned that ‘climate change’ would cause food shortages, but now it appears that climate policy will be one of the biggest factors in causing food shortages,” Morano told The Epoch Times.

He cited research suggesting that a move to organic farming in the United Kingdom could actually raise carbon dioxide emissions, as the decrease in domestic yields can be expected to boost carbon-intensive imports.

“What the Biden admin is doing is seizing on ‘crises’ to advance their agenda. Greta [Thunberg] famously said, ‘I want you to panic.’ Because when you panic, you don’t think rationally and calmly, and you make poor choices. The only way they can sell these climate-inspired utopian energy and food production fantasies is during times of COVID crisis or wartime crisis,” he added.

China’s Role Scrutinized
Still, others see the focus on Russia as a distraction from China’s maneuvering on the world stage. In 2021, China limited exports of both phosphate and urea fertilizers. The country has also stepped up its fertilizer imports.

China’s export restrictions came after it rapidly emerged as “the most important and most influential country in the fertilizer business,” according to an outlook document from the Gulf Chemicals & Petrochemicals Association.

The Peterson Institute’s analysis shows that as global fertilizer prices shot upward in 2021 and 2022, China’s fertilizer prices mostly leveled off. Although the USDA’s April report did note the impact of China’s fertilizer export restrictions and heavy fertilizer imports, its executive summary drew greater attention to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

That summary did not mention China by name among the “countries imposing export bans and restrictions.”

Stanford University’s Gordon Chang, a China expert, warned on Twitter on May 6 that China has been “buying chemical companies whose products are needed for fertilizer and, more generally, food production,” citing comments from onshoring advocate Jonathan Bass. The Epoch Times has reached out to Chang and Bass for additional details.



China has also been buying up American farmland as well as ports around the world, including ports in the now-food insecure Sri Lanka.

Physicist Michael Sekora, a former project director in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), told The Epoch Times that worldwide fertilizer shortages could reflect China’s long-range technology strategy. A key element of that strategy, he argued, is undercutting the United States whenever and wherever possible.

“Our ability to produce food is very much under attack right now. Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s just a coincidence.’ It’s China,” Sekora said.

“China has been very strategic in making sure they shore up what they have and restricting access throughout the rest of the world,” Gunasekara said. “When you have people come in that are very anti-development and anti-growth, China can put its finger on the global market, making it that much harder, and then try to use that as an example to exert more authority and have access to greater power.”

Pain Felt Around the World
“It’s been hectic,” said South African tobacco farmer Herman J. Roos.

Roos told The Epoch Times that fertilizer prices near him have jumped since the invasion of Ukraine, on the heels of steep increases over the previous year. He was able to buy all the fertilizer he needs for this year before the latest price shock. Yet, he expects shortages of urea, monoammonium phosphate (MAP), and other fertilizers to strain a population of farmers already under significant stress.

Copper theft, lack of government support, and the ever-present threat of physical violence are all pushing Roos and producers like him to the brink. Yet, for all the challenges in South Africa, Roos anticipates the fallout will be worse elsewhere in the continent.

“The economy will be hit harder in countries like Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe—countries where your agricultural system is more focused on subsistence farming,” Roos added.
They and other sub-Saharan African countries are heavily dependent on South Africa for their food supply. Roos prays food riots won’t come to South Africa. The country is still recovering from a wave of riots in summer 2021, prompted by the arrest of former South African President Jacob Zuma.

He does predict that some farmers in the country will go bankrupt. Back in the United States, Connecticut landscaper Adam Geriak does not yet face such stark choices. He told The Epoch Times that fertilizer prices near him are up, in line with estimates a Connecticut garden store provided to The Epoch Times.

“I do primary garden work and use organic fertilizers, which primarily come from poultry manure,” Geriak said, adding that the price of poultry manure fertilizer may have risen too.

He does not think fertilizer price increases will have much of an effect on him. Yet, other facets of the current economic picture are worrisome to him as tries to manage his small business most effectively.

“I’m having a hard time planning for the future because of the uncertainty, and I think other owners are feeling this too. In the previous two years, clients seemed to have open coffers. They wanted more projects done and there seemed to be a lot of money going around. Clients seem to be a bit tighter now, asking how they can save money on certain projects and such,” Geriak said.

“Being on the verge of a recession, and retirement accounts down may be leading to these issues,” he added.

The USDA report on Sri Lanka’s organic experiment states that the country’s government made impossible promises to different parties. It informed farmers it would handle the cost of moving away from chemical fertilizers while telling consumers that rice on their shelves would not become pricier, all while attempting to realize environmental and public health benefits through a breakneck transition to organic fertilizers.

“If you put too much emphasis on environmental issues, and you ignore the very real impact that can have to people’s daily lives, it can have dire consequences,” Gunasekara told The Epoch Times.

“Unfortunately, we’re seeing it in the most dire of circumstances, which is a suppressed food supply. I think that situation is only going to get worse because of the rise in prices for fertilizers and diesel and everything else that’s going to make it harder for farmers in the U.S. to produce, then also globally.”

Josh, a farmer in Texas who raises small livestock, also believes things will get worse before they get better. He did not want to share his last name.

“I personally think that we haven’t even begun to feel the effects of inflation in our grocery store bills, because last year, the costs to produce were 1/3 to 1/2 the cost farmers and ranchers are having to pay this year. That cost has to be absorbed by the buyer to make it feasible for them to even continue,” he said in a message to The Epoch Times.

“My family is preparing now and stocking up our freezers and pantry because we are really concerned how bad it can get this next year.”

He estimates that fertilizer prices near him have increased 200 or even 300 percent, “dependent on what program you are running.”

The rise in diesel prices has hurt him the most. “Farm equipment runs on diesel,” he pointed out.

According to AAA’s gas price website, diesel in Texas is running at an average of $5.231, up from $2.820 a year ago.

“I can’t imagine how anyone would profit or sustain raising crops or cattle with all these price increases that effect your overhead,” Josh said, saying he has heard about other ranchers and farmers culling their herds to avoid losses.

“Food shortages are a great way to collapse the current system and install a Great Reset,” Morano, of Climate Depot, told The Epoch Times.

 

[marsh]

Neil Oliver: Orwell Wasn't Writing Owner's Manuals - The Liberty Daily

If you love the news, check out The Liberty Daily's homepage. As more people question official narratives regarding pretty much everything that’s happening in the world, it has been seen as a variation of “red-pilling” unlike anything we’ve seen in modern history. It’s a worldwide event that...

thelibertydaily.com

Neil Oliver: Orwell Wasn’t Writing Owner’s Manuals
By J.D. Rucker • May. 8, 2022

As more people question official narratives regarding pretty much everything that’s happening in the world, it has been seen as a variation of “red-pilling” unlike anything we’ve seen in modern history. It’s a worldwide event that some have called the “great awakening.” Whether intentionally or not, Scottish commentator Neil Oliver has been one of the most outspoken when it comes to questioning everything.

His weekly monologues have been must-watch television that many have seen in replay right here. This week’s version is another winner, and that’s unfortunate because most of Oliver’s monologues bode ill for society. When he delivers these winners, it’s because he’s commenting on the bad and predicting even worse.

The topic today was about freedom, as it often is, and how we are acting like multiple characters in the dystopian works of George Orwell. Of particular interest was his connection between what we’re seeing manifest today and what was fictionalized by Orwell in Animal Farm. The pigs are becoming indistinguishable from the powerful men, meaning the very people we empowered to protect us from the forces of evil are colluding with them at the dinner table while we watch helplessly from outside.

By no means am I feeling sorry for humanity, nor was Oliver in his monologue. The state of society is directly tied to our own unwillingness to accept the truth and foresee the results of our horrible actions. In America, we can point to the mass acceptance of Joe Biden as president.

A strong majority of Americans are either in denial about his 2020 “victory” or they’ve decided to move on from it and focus on other issues. The latter is a tremendous mistake, as I noted in an article about the movie 2000 Mules.

Here’s Oliver’s monologue followed by the transcript:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0nx7TZ_eOo&feature=emb_rel_end
10:11 min

Given all that’s happened, I might have expected overwhelming anger in the country by now, loud calls for answers and apologies. Promises that mistakes made in the recent past, liberties taken, would not be repeated in the future. Also maybe demands for change.

Many are the dissenting voices – I know because I hear them every day – but the silencing and ridiculing still goes on.

What I sense around me most of all now, however, is weariness. Council elections have been held up and down Great Britain and apart from anything else, I think we can agree that turnout was low.

In some polling stations in Hull, for example, turnout was down at 12 per cent apparently. In terms of numbers taking part, exercising their democratic right, it was a damp squib all over.

As so often happens in these plebiscites, the day-to-day rule of the many has been decided by the relatively few who could even be bothered to vote. Among that minority are fervently committed activists, of course, those who see and know that power belongs to those who can be bothered.

Most people are not activists though. Most people have more than enough to do just keeping their heads above water. This depressing state of affairs is hardly surprising. In spite of the media’s attempts to whip up excitement about the results, local council elections have been a lacklustre non-event.

I think it’s getting worse, however. I trotted along to my local polling station and made my marks on the paper. It took some effort though. Along with so many people, I’m sure, I looked at the list of names and parties and thought, “What’s the point? What difference will it make?” I looked at the names and knew what the results would be even as I went through the motions of completing my vote.

We hear a lot of use now of the word, Orwellian. It refers to the English journalist and author George Orwell, of course – he of The Road to Wigan Pier, Animal Farm and 1984 and much else besides. I have a podcast in which, for the fun of it, I invite listeners to imagine that reading history is as close to time travel as a person might get. As the years go by, I wonder more and more if George Orwell wasn’t actually a time traveller for real – so right has he proven to be about where decisions made, and actions taken, in the 20th century would lead future generations.

In Animal Farm, his fable about Communism, he predicted the abuse of trust and the exploitation of power. Once the pigs have control of the farm, they immediately set about taking advantage of their situation. When the other animals notice, for instance, that the pigs are taking all the milk and apples for themselves, while everyone else must eat tasteless slop, the pigs’ PR spokesman – called Squealer – explains the move is backed by science:

“Comrades,” he tells them, “You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples – this has been proved by science, comrades – contain substances absolutely necessary to the wellbeing of a pig. We are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depends on us.”

I read those lines again and think about the Science we have heard so much about recently. I think too about all the news stories about how good it will be for us as well to eat bugs and lab-grown meat, instead of the good stuff. That’s science too, don’t you know. Then I read about Bill Gates being the biggest owner of farmland in the US and wonder if it will be bugs and lab-grown meat he will produce from all those acres, or maybe cattle for sirloins and corn on the cob for the barbecue. Who could say?

Energy giant E.ON recently sent pairs of polyester socks to customers with the message:
“Energy down – CO2 down”. Those literally in control of the power have been telling people to wear more clothes to fend off the cold, rather than have heating in their homes.

All the while this is going on, oil and gas companies report record profits and bountiful dividends for shareholders.

Follow the science … or follow the money. You choose.

In Animal Farm, before the revolution, the pigs promised the animals that in future they would have electric light in their stalls, hot water as well as cold. Later on, once the pigs have control of the farm, such ideas are silenced. Napoleon, the leader of the pigs, says such notions are contrary to the spirit of Animalism, which is their ideology. He tells them the truest happiness lies in working hard and living frugal lives.

You will own nothing, a person might hear, and you will be happy.

I read about socks in the mail from energy companies. I read about MPs awarding themselves a pay rise in excess of £2,000 a year.

I listen to Boris Johnson justifying tax hikes and the rest.

Asked by a reporter: “What would you say to families trying to make ends meet? Buy cheaper food? Don’t replace clothes? Turn down the thermostat or turn it off altogether? What should people do?”

Boris Johnson answered: “People are obviously going to face choices that they are going to have to make.”

Frugal lives. Napoleon the pig would be proud.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t expect to see Boris Johnson, or Sir Keir Starmer or the rest of them waiting until the end of the day to hit the supermarkets in search of foods reduced to clear. I don’t expect to hear about them choosing between eating and heating.

In 1984, Orwell’s novel about a dystopian future in which the population is kept in a state of perpetual fear, on account of perpetual war with an enemy they never see, he wrote about how inconvenient facts and truth are “memory holed” which is to say, made to disappear. The protagonist is Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth. Among other state departments there is a Ministry of Plenty, which is actually a ministry of starvation, dedicated to keeping the people in a state of perpetual poverty, scarcity, and food shortage.

In his booth in the Ministry of Truth there is a slot in the wall into which Winston must post any document featuring information that is inconvenient to the government. Such data disappears at that point, as though it had never been – unless of course there comes a time in the future when the information is actually useful to the government again, at which point it miraculously reappears.

Big pharma giant Pfizer have just released the next 80 thousand pages of data related to the trial of their vaccine. 80 thousand pages. Before barely a word of it is read, many are the voices insisting it’s time anyway to move on and forget. It turns out you don’t even need memory holes when information can hide in plain sight among a population too wearied and distracted by other, more recent problems and fears, to pay enough attention.

The very people who would have us move on unquestioningly – politicians, journalists and others – those who demanded lockdowns – longer and harder – are now in the habit of lamenting the harm done by such measures. All of a sudden those that were ardent cheerleaders for the measures that have done so much harm have the unmitigated gall to fret publicly about the economy, about damage to physical and mental health, to the education and physical and emotional development of children. That they were the ones shouting loudest that we should “suck it up” and “cancel Christmas” to save Granny and the NHS, is information that seems to have been shoveled by the barrow load into the nearest memory hole.

I won’t forget, though. And neither will millions of others.

And in among all of this, ordinary tax-paying law-abiding people are simply and understandably exhausted. After two years of fear and anxiety and obeying rules that made no sense to them, many are on their knees. Into this climate of exhaustion came the local elections and, surprise, surprise, most people had energy only for going to work and feeding their families. And in this way, enervating patterns are repeated.

Another writer, Elena Ghorokova, wrote a memoir about life in the Soviet Union called A Mountain of Crumbs. In it she described how the population was ground down by fear, want, and hardship until people found they could cope best by pretending.

The joke about their relationship with the state boiled down to: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

The state was lying to the people. The people knew they were being lied to. The state knew the people knew they were being lied to. And still the state lied. It was all a great pretence played by people with power against those with none. And just in order to survive, the mass of the population played their part by joining in the pretence.

Many people are simply at the ends of their tethers – and why wouldn’t they be? We look at our politicians and would-be councillors – at Conservatives, and then at Labour, and then at Lib Dems and the rest. We look from one to the other – at those who called for lockdowns – which is to say prominent members of every party – at those who wanted them in place quicker and harder and for longer. Now we see them clamour for more control, more censorship, more compliance. We look at each in turn and in our hearts and stomachs we wonder if it makes any difference who we choose because in truth they are all the same now.

By the end of Animal Farm, the pigs are walking upright on two legs and wearing human clothes. They carry whips in their trotters. In the final scene, they host a meeting with neighbouring human farmers – the same that they had once claimed to hate as the enemies of all animals. Four legs good, two legs bad, they had once said. The pigs live in the farmhouse now. The other animals, left on the outside, in the farmyard, watch the pigs and human farmers sitting around the table, toasting each other and making plans to cooperate in the future.

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again,” wrote Orwell. “But already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Is it just me, or does it feel like someone out there is using Orwell’s work not as a warning, but as an owner’s manual?

 

[marsh]

Biden’s bread line crisis? Anatomy of the American baby formula shortage

A president who promised competence was caught flat footed by agency failure, supply chain woes and inflation, and baby parents are now in a panic.

justthenews.com

Biden’s bread line crisis? Anatomy of the American baby formula shortage

A president who promised competence was caught flat footed by agency failure, supply chain woes and inflation, and baby parents are now in a panic.

Updated: May 7, 2022 - 11:37pm

At the outset of his presidency, Joe Biden promised competence by a bigger, better government. A few days ago, one of his loyal allies exposed a gross incompetence by federal officials on Biden’s watch that defied that promise and inflamed a baby formula shortage now panicking parents nationwide.

Rep. Rose DeLauro, D-Conn., a reliable liberal ally, unveiled documents showing the Biden Food and Drug Administration was alerted by a whistleblower last fall about potential contamination issues at the Abbott Nutrition baby formula factory in Michigan and failed for months to act aggressively.

“The FDA reacted far too slowly to this report,” DeLauro said in releasing a letter to the Health and Human Services inspector general demanding an immediate investigation to an incident that has led to babies being sickened and dying and a belated recall that has emptied shelves of formula nationwide.

File
DeLauro_OIG Request Infant Formula Recall.pdf

The congresswoman, the chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, laid out a four-month-long trail of federal bumbles and stumbles: the report came in Oct. 20, the whistleblower didn’t even get interviewed for two months, the plant didn’t get inspected until Jan. 31 and the recall didn’t get issued until Feb. 17.

“Why did the FDA not spring into action?” she implored during a congressional hearing. “Why did it take four months to pull this formula off store shelves? How many infants were fed contaminated formula during this time, by parents who trusted that the formula they were buying was safe? How many additional illnesses and deaths were there due to FDA’s slow response?”

Now the bureaucratic stumbling has escalated into a national crisis, as video of bare shelves and panicked parents harken in America some of the same fears and images as the bread lines and rationing that befell the Soviet Union in the early 1990s just before its collapse.

The problems began even before the recall as inflation, labor shortages and supply chain slowdowns began putting pressure on the baby food staple last fall.

In November, baby formula was already substantially more expensive and supply shortages had already risen to 11%. By the first week of April, the shortages had soared to 31%, and last week the number stood at a stunning 40%, according to statistics kept by Datasembly.

The escalating shortages have prompted major stores such as Target, CVS and Walgreens to ration supplies with purchase limits.

"This is a shocking number that you don't see for other categories," Datasembly CEO Ben Reich told CBS MoneyWatch on Friday.

The crisis has both political and personal consequences.

Many millennial and Gen Z child-bearing parents were part of the coalition that propelled Biden to his election win. And some parents are now facing life-and-death consequences, especially for children with rare digestive disorders.

"If this doesn’t get fixed soon, I don’t know how my son will survive," Phoebe Carter, whose 5-year-old son suffers from a rare digestive and immune system disease, told Politico on Saturday. "I just can’t stress that enough."

The poor and working class – whom Biden promised hope in his inaugural speech – are also disproportionately affected. A food bank in Seattle was so desperate to get some baby formula it recently held an emergency drive.

Alfredo Ortiz, president of the small business group Job Creators Network, said the baby formula crisis follows a pattern of other economic failures by the Biden administration.

“The only thing the Biden administration seems to be efficient at is burying their heads in the sand,” he said. “These are the same bureaucrats that told us for months that inflation was only transitory and would resolve itself. Then they tried to tell small business owners that their supply chain issues had been resolved even though we could all see cargo ships backed up for miles at several ports nationwide.

”Unfortunately, it comes as no surprise that they have failed to protect even the most innocent Americans from their incompetence,” he added.

The shortages are also raising fears that parents might be tempted to concoct their own formulas or water down current store-bought formulas to stretch supplies, two actions experts say are fraught with danger.

The FDA strongly urges parents not to make their own formulas, saying contamination and inadequate nutrients in home-brewed formulas can lead to everything from "severe nutritional imbalances to food-borne illnesses, both of which can be life-threatening."

"Making things at home off of a Google recipe is potentially very dangerous for your baby," Dr. Stephen Lauer, a pediatrician with the University of Kansas Health System, told WDAF TV station this week.

Meanwhile, parents are desperately pleading for help on social media.

"If the MSM can talk about the toilet paper shortage ever hour, they should be talking about the baby formula shortage at least. ...We ended finding the Amazon brand online but not everyone is so lucky to be able to feed that. Please share. This is every store!" Danielle Miller tweeted with a picture of an empty shelve of formula.

 

[marsh]

Electricity Shortage Warnings Grow Across U.S. - WSJ

archived 8 May 2022 12:11:47 UTC

archive.ph

Electricity Shortage Warnings Grow Across U.S.

Power-grid operators caution that electricity supplies aren’t keeping up with demand amid transition to cleaner forms of energy

Power grids are feeling the strain as the U.S. moves away from conventional power plants.
PHOTO: CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By

Katherine Blunt
May 8, 2022 5:33 am ET

From California to Texas to Indiana, electric-grid operators are warning that power-generating capacity is struggling to keep up with demand, a gap that could lead to rolling blackouts during heat waves or other peak periods as soon as this year.

California’s grid operator said Friday that it anticipates a shortfall in supplies this summer, especially if extreme heat, wildfires or delays in bringing new power sources online exacerbate the constraints. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, which oversees a large regional grid spanning much of the Midwest, said late last month that capacity shortages may force it to take emergency measures to meet summer demand and flagged the risk of outages. In Texas, where a number of power plants lately went offline for maintenance, the grid operator warned of tight conditions during a heat wave expected to last into the next week.

The risk of electricity shortages is rising throughout the U.S. as traditional power plants are being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage.

Power grids are feeling the strain as the U.S. makes a historic transition from conventional power plants fueled by coal and natural gas to cleaner forms of energy such as wind and solar power, and aging nuclear plants are slated for retirement in many parts of the country.

The challenge is that wind and solar farms—which are among the cheapest forms of power generation—don’t produce electricity at all times and need large batteries to store their output for later use. While a large amount of battery storage is under development, regional grid operators have lately warned that the pace may not be fast enough to offset the closures of traditional power plants that can work around the clock.

A utility crew worked on a transmission tower near a coal-fired power plant in Illinois in 2018.
PHOTO: DANIEL ACKER/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Speeding the build-out of renewable energy and batteries has become an especially difficult proposition amid supply-chain challenges and inflation. Most recently, a probe by the Commerce Department into whether Chinese solar manufacturers are circumventing trade tariffs on solar panels has halted imports of key components needed to build new solar farms and effectively brought the U.S. solar industry to a standstill.

Faced with the prospect of having to call for blackouts when demand exceeds supply, many grid operators are now grappling with the same question: How to encourage the build-out of batteries and other new technologies while keeping traditional power plants from closing too quickly.

“Every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue,” said Brad Jones, interim chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid.

“We’re all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible…and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability.”

The risk of outages resulting from supply constraints comes amid other challenges straining the reliability of the grid. Large, sustained outages have occurred with greater frequency over the past two decades, in part because the grid has become more vulnerable to failure with age and an uptick in severe weather events exacerbated by climate change. A push to electrify home heating and cooking, and the expected growth of electric vehicles, may increase power demand in coming years, putting further pressure on the system.

California regulators on Friday said as much as 3,800 megawatts of new supplies may face delays through 2025. Such delays would pose a major challenge for the state, which is racing to procure a huge amount of renewable energy and storage to offset the closure of several gas-fired power plants, as well as a nuclear plant. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently said he would consider moving to keep that nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, online to reduce the risk of shortages.

“We need to make sure that we have sufficient new resources in place and operational before we let some of these retirements go,” said Mark Rothleder, chief operating officer of the California Independent System Operator, which operates the state’s power grid. “Otherwise, we are putting ourselves potentially at risk of having insufficient capacity.”

California is considering keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant online to reduce the risk of shortages.
PHOTO: GEORGE ROSE/GETTY IMAGES

The reliability question has stirred strong debate in Texas, where a freak winter storm last year caused power plants of all kinds to trip offline, forcing the grid operator to call for dayslong blackouts to keep supply in line with demand. Many problems played a part—some power plants weren’t prepared for subfreezing temperatures, while others couldn’t operate for lack of fuel—but the failures collectively exposed the vulnerability of the state’s power market, and resulted in calls for change.

Texas is now debating what would be a major philosophical shift for its power market: paying power generators ahead of time for resources that might be needed, instead of just compensating them for actual power sold. That approach would largely benefit incumbent generators including NRG Energy Inc. and Vistra Corp. , which own numerous conventional power plants with the potential to profit from such contracts.

The idea has prompted pushback from some battery and renewable-energy companies, including Eolian LP, which has proposed incentives for batteries, small gas turbines and other technologies capable of quickly ramping up to meet increases in electricity demand.

“The most important thing we heard after the freeze was we need to keep the lights on and make sure this grid is reliable,” said Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas. “There’s nothing worse than turning Texas off.”

The MISO, which recently warned of potential supply shortages resulting from higher-than-expected summer demand, has lately undertaken an effort to better value different types of resources based on their ability to support the grid at different times during the year and under various conditions. It is also working to improve the transfer of power across regions when needed.

MISO Chief Executive
John Bear said those processes will help the grid operator as the energy transition progresses, but he foresees the risk of near-term shortages. The grid operator has more frequently resorted to emergency measures to shore up supplies in recent years.

“I am concerned about it,” Mr. Bear said. “As we move forward, we need to know that when you put a solar panel or a wind turbine up, it’s not the same as a thermal resource,” such as gas or coal.

 

[marsh]

Authorities have passed a law banning the cultivation of their own food and large fines for violators

Australian Prime Minister Dan Andrews passes a law banning growing your own food. A bill to amend the 2022 Agriculture Act has passed its second reading in P

world-signals.com

Authorities have passed a law banning the cultivation of their own food and large fines for violators
Admin May 8, 2022

Australian Prime Minister Dan Andrews passes a law banning growing your own food.

A bill to amend the 2022 Agriculture Act has passed its second reading in Parliament. The reason for the change is biosecurity.

Expanding the powers of law enforcement, searching property and persons without a warrant, increasing fines from $1,800 to $10,000 for providing false or misleading information are all part of the new bill.

Authorized officers will no longer need the consent of the landowner to remove samples, livestock (animals) and documents.

Authorized officials will no longer be required to present an official ID. There are severe penalties for obstructing access to their land.
Documents

 

[marsh]

Michele Bachmann: WHO Vote Threatens U.S. Sovereignty

Michele Bachmann: WHO Vote Threatens U.S. Sovereignty

rumble.com

8:21 min

Michele Bachmann: WHO Vote Threatens U.S. Sovereignty
Bannons War Room Published May 9, 2022
(The WHO would have the authority to intervene in US health decisions. Creates a platform for global government. In Jan, the Biden Admin sent the Amendments to the WHO. April 12 Biden Admin posted the Amendments in the US. 40 major countries are in alliance. Vote takes place in 2 weeks. Biggest global power grab in history. Global authority would already have been transferred to the WHO by the time we have elections. May 22-28 vote. The Republican party is clueless.)

^^^^^
Frank Gaffney on the CCP in Geneva 3:40 min

Frank Gaffney on the CCP in Geneva
Bannons War Room Published May 9, 2022

(Agrees with everything Michelle Bachman said, but it's worse. The CCP understands if they take control of these multilateral UN organizations- So far they have Chinese or proxies leading 5 of them- Tedros is a wholly owned CCP subsidiary. Loyce Pace, Asst. Secretary of Dept. Health Human Svcs. for global affairs, is a graduate of Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was instrumental in running Event 201 in 2019 with Bloomberg, the Gates Foundation and CCP Centers for Disease Control on how to exploit a pandemic to usher in global governance and surpress national sovereignty. Loice Pace has been instrumental in getting the 13 Amendments to WHO. Committee on the Present Danger: China )

^^^^
Dr. Wolf: The Global Flow of Money that Transcends Nation-States 6:42 min

Dr. Wolf: The Global Flow of Money that Transcends Nation-States
Bannons War Room Published May 9, 2022

(Wolf: These transnational organizations : China, Germany and Bioentic - pushing vaccinations all over the world and the horrendous damages from them coming to light in research of the court-ordered released Pfizer docs. This is hemorrhaging national security. How do we know that these injections haven't been compromised, that the FDA didn't just turn a blind eye to problems with manufacturing and the horrendous harms the vax caused. The FDA actively colluded. National security over our public health is hemorrhaging. People are scattering and running in various directions. Global COVID Summit where they want to direct money to The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - GAVI. Being revealed this money flow above the level of nation states.

Bannon: GAVI is an alliance for vaccines. How did we (the Admin) start forwarding these documents to people (13 amendments to WHO) without Congressional hearings and debate? Why were there no townhalls? How did these just appear in broad daylight?

Wolf: We were raised in an era where we trusted that government would do government. Now government is being hemorrhaged to NGOs and corporations. The CDC was able to cook the books by handing the data of to the NGO -The Committee of State and Territorial Epidemiologists- for manipulation. GAVI not innocent do-gooders as the funders are invested in it. The government is handing its money over to them. The MSM covers for it because they are funded by the CARES Act and GAVI. The "government" is surrounded and superseded by non-profits and private sector corporations. Governance is being sent above our formal government to these transnational entities.)

 

[von Koehler]

Creepy Bill Gates Plans to Hire a 3,000-Person Social Media Team to Push Vaccines and Suppress Any Differing Information | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

Bill Gates is planning on hiring a 3,000-person social media team to push vaccines and to quash any differing opinions.

www.thegatewaypundit.com

Creepy Bill Gates Plans to Hire a 3,000-Person Social Media Team to Push Vaccines and Suppress Any Differing Information

By Jim Hoft
Published May 7, 2022 at 12:45pm

Bill Gates is planning on hiring a 3,000-person social media team to push vaccines and to quash any differing opinions.

Gates made the comments at The Wall Street Journal Summit earlier this week.

Gates said vaccine misinformation spread like wildfire on the internet during the COVID pandemic. Maybe it was all of the dead people?

And this clown wonders why no one likes or trusts him?

CNBC reported:

Maybe TB2000 will get its very own Gates funded troll?

 

[marsh]

The WHO Is Deeply Corrupt: Bill Gates Is Essentially Determining Public Health Policy 1:32 min

The WHO Is Deeply Corrupt: Bill Gates Is Essentially Determining Public Health Policy
Red Voice Media Published May 9, 2022

Dr. Tess Lawrie: "For one individual to have so much power within one organization like the World Health Organization is very, very unhealthy, and we really need to direct public attention to this relationship that is having a huge influence on our individual and collective health."

Full Video: The WHO Pandemic Treaty Should Deeply Concern You: Dr. Tess Lawrie & Mark Trozzi [VIDEO INTERVIEW]

 

[marsh]

The Synchronized Totalitarian Takeover Is No Coincidence: They've Been Planning This for 30 Years

Dr. Mike Yeadon: "In every [previous pandemic simulation], what they didn't do [was worry] about how they would treat people and how they would take care of them and keep the panic down... Again [in E

rumble.com

The Synchronized Totalitarian Takeover Is No Coincidence: They've Been Planning This for 30 Years
Red Voice Media Published May 8, 2022
Dr. Mike Yeadon: "In every [previous pandemic simulation], what they didn't do [was worry] about how they would treat people and how they would take care of them and keep the panic down... Again [in Event 201], they never talked about how to treat people. It was only [about] how to take control of the narrative, crush disinformation, and get people jabbed."

Full Video: Who And What Are Powering The Global Covid Lies

 

[von Koehler]

Authorities have passed a law banning the cultivation of their own food and large fines for violators

Australian Prime Minister Dan Andrews passes a law banning growing your own food. A bill to amend the 2022 Agriculture Act has passed its second reading in P

world-signals.com

Authorities have passed a law banning the cultivation of their own food and large fines for violators
Admin May 8, 2022

Australian Prime Minister Dan Andrews passes a law banning growing your own food.

A bill to amend the 2022 Agriculture Act has passed its second reading in Parliament. The reason for the change is biosecurity.

Expanding the powers of law enforcement, searching property and persons without a warrant, increasing fines from $1,800 to $10,000 for providing false or misleading information are all part of the new bill.

Authorized officers will no longer need the consent of the landowner to remove samples, livestock (animals) and documents.

Authorized officials will no longer be required to present an official ID. There are severe penalties for obstructing access to their land.
Documents

Australia has become a charter member of the Great Reset.

Just shows what is in store for America.

 

[marsh]

The Fight for Freedom Is Not Over: It Is Up to the People to Pressure MEPs to Reject the Current Terms of the WHO Treaty 3:32 min

The Fight for Freedom Is Not Over: It Is Up to the People to Pressure MEPs to Reject the Current Terms of the WHO Treaty
(Christine Anderson)
Red Voice Media Published May 8, 2022

German MEP Christine Anderson: "You are our employers! You are paying us! In a parliamentary democracy, elected representatives have the task of implementing the will of the people... Make it clear that you will not accept being patronized by an unelected entity (WHO). Tell your deputies in no uncertain terms that freedom, democracy, and the rule of law are non-negotiable!"

Video via Christine Anderson, MdEP (AfD)

 

[marsh]

Exit and Defund The WHO: Their Past Actions Confirm They Are Not to Be Trusted - Dr. Mark Trozzi 4:47 min

Exit and Defund The WHO: Their Past Actions Confirm They Are Not to Be Trusted - Dr. Mark Trozzi
The Vigilant Fox Published May 9, 2022

- Ushered in a global dictatorship with a sanitary excuse.

- Promoted mask wearing, which doesn't work and has a negative psychological impact, especially for children.

- Responded based on the Ferguson models, which were fraudulent and highly inaccurate. Not nearly as many people died as predicted.

- Falsely declared a pandemic in 2009 (swine flu).

- Changed the definition of "pandemic" to mean an outbreak that doesn't necessarily need a large number of deaths.

- PCR tests were fraudulent and hyperinflated the case count.

- Suppressed treatment. Widespread use of ivermectin could have saved 15,000 lives a day.

- Promoted the COVID jabs, which have terrible safety and efficacy profiles.

"They are not my friends; there's no one that makes me worry more about [the future of] my grandchildren."

Full Video: The WHO Pandemic Treaty Should Deeply Concern You: Dr. Tess Lawrie & Mark Trozzi [VIDEO INTERVIEW]

 

[marsh]

The Government Is Lawless: These Emergency Declarations Are Bogus and Need to End Yesterday 1:53 min

The Government Is Lawless: These Emergency Declarations Are Bogus and Need to End Yesterday (Dr. Robert Malone; Dr. Ryan Cole)
The Vigilant Fox Published May 9, 2022

Dr. Ryan Cole: "To declare that there's a medical emergency is pure governmental fraud... They are violating constitutional principles and law. We know the CDC is lying to us now. Who else is lying to us?.. We know what's happening; the truth needs to be told. There is no emergency. The emergency powers need to end yesterday, and we support those who use their constitutional rights to protest for freedom."

Full Video: Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Ryan Cole: CDC committing 'scientific fraud'

 

[marsh]

Average Price Of Gas Reaches $4.33 With No Sign Of Stopping

Thanks Biden. Check out my new store for the hottest conservative merch that will drive your liberal friends crazy! https://shop.dineshdsouza.com/

rumble.com

1:44 min
Average Price Of Gas Reaches $4.33 With No Sign Of Stopping
Dinesh D'Souza Published May 9, 2022
(It is what it is)

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Power Grid Operators Warn Of Potential Electricity Shortages Amid Transition To Clean Energy

MONDAY, MAY 09, 2022 - 03:12 PM
Power-grid operators across the US warn that power-generating capacity struggles to keep up with demand, a worrying sign ahead of summer where heatwaves could lead to rolling blackouts.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, operating in 15 states across the US Central region, said last month that capacity shortages this summer due to soaring summer demand might result in outages. Last Friday, California Independent System Operator, or California ISO, outlined energy shortfalls this summer because of heat and wildfires. Texas over the weekend saw triple-digit temperatures in some portions of the state, though grid stability was maintained despite several power plants being offline for maintenance.

WSJ explains grid instability and increased risk of power shortages this summer comes as fossil fuel power plants are "being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage." Power grids are racing to retire conventional power plants fueled by natural gas, coal, and diesel to green forms of energy, such as solar power and wind.

There's also the retirement of aging nuclear power plants.

Things are not working as planned in the green economy as power grids are becoming unstable by the retirement of fossil fuel power plants with unstable renewables. The transition isn't as smooth as climate change modelers once suggested as grid stability worsens, and millions of Americans could be subjected to blackouts this summer as cooling demand soars during heatwaves as grids won't have enough power to meet demand.


WSJ's author reveals their blinkered bias or ignorance about alternative energy by stating the following "wind and solar farms - which are among the cheapest forms of power generation."

Alternative energy would be expensive if it weren't for the government's tax credits, grants, and other incentives. Plus, these are unreliable sources of energy because when the wind doesn't blow, and the sun doesn't shine, power isn't produced, and there needs to be storage for electricity. However, the technology for widescale battery storage isn't feasible right now.

The accelerated path of retiring fossil fuel power plants could generate even more problems for power grids at a time when "energy and batteries has become an especially difficult proposition amid supply-chain challenges and inflation," WSJ points out.

The move to replace what's working, and a power source that can generate 24/7, unless there is a fuel shortage, has doomed grids across the US during the green transition. Explaining more is Brad Jones, interim chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state's power grid, who said:

"Every market around the world is trying to deal with the same issue ... We're all trying to find ways to utilize as much of our renewable resources as possible…and at the same time make sure that we have enough dispatchable generation to manage reliability."

Last Friday, a sobering reality from the California Energy Commission, Public Utilities Commission, California ISO, and Governor Gavin Newsom was that the state would have power supply gaps that could leave millions of people without power during peak hours. This imbalance in the grid is due to the lack of power generation and could last several years.
Mark Rothleder, chief operating officer of California ISO, said, "We need to make sure that we have sufficient new resources in place and operational before we let some of these retirements ... Otherwise, we are putting ourselves potentially at risk of having insufficient capacity."

It's become clear that the aggressive green energy push has jeopardized power grids across the US, and during heatwaves this summer, rolling blackouts could be seen as some grids may not have enough supply to meet demand.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

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Biden's 'Ministry Of Truth' Tsar: Parents Concerned About Critical Race Theory Are "Disinformers"

MONDAY, MAY 09, 2022 - 03:30 PM
Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Biden administration’s new disinformation chief says that parents who are upset about critical race theory (CRT) making its way into public school classrooms are “disinformers” who “weaponize” the issue “for profit.”

[ZH: let's not forget the US Attorney General's son makes millions selling CRT materials]


Nina Jankowicz, who was appointed to lead the newly established Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security, dismissed the pushback against CRT indoctrination at an event in Ohio last October, when the debate over parents’ right to direct their children’s education had taken center stage in high-profile elections, including Virginia’s gubernatorial race.

“Critical race theory has become one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit, frankly, … have seized on,” she said in a video that has recently regained attention.

Jankowicz added that she lived in Virginia, where parents in Loudoun County fiercely resisted attempts to inject leftist political activism into local school curricula and policies. She called Loudoun “one of the areas where people have really homed in on this topic.”

“But it’s no different than any of the other hot-button issues that have allowed disinformation to flourish,” she said. “It’s weaponizing people’s emotion.”

Jankowicz then told her audience to be alert when they read news articles that make them feel emotional, adding that she supports government-funded, left-leaning institutions such as NPR and PBS, because these media outlets “get into the nuance of the issues” and “provide a balanced, nonpartisan source of information.”

Jankowicz’s speech at the City Club of Cleveland took place on Oct. 29, 2021, weeks after U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland released a memo bringing together a coalition of federal and local law enforcement to address alleged “threats of violence” against teachers and school board members from unruly parents.

Garland has conceded that his memo was based in part on a September 2021 letter to President Joe Biden by the National School Boards Association. The now-notorious letter characterized disruptions at school board meetings as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime,” and urged the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and the FBI to invoke counterterrorism laws to quell “angry mobs” of parents, who sought to hold school officials accountable for promoting CRT and for imposing COVID-19 restrictions such as mask mandates on their children.

Jankowicz’s comments resurfaced as her new post, tasked with addressing “disinformation that imperils the safety and security of our homeland,” has generated much scrutiny. Many have since compared the disinformation board to George Orwell’s fictional “Ministry of Truth,” the main purpose of which was to rewrite history to manipulate and control the population.

“The Biden administration wants a government agency dedicated to cracking down on what its subjects can say, an idea popular with Orwellian governments everywhere,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in a May 3 statement. “This board is unconstitutional and un-American.”

Cotton has introduced a proposal that would bar any federal funds from going to the board. He was joined by 18 Republican senators as co-sponsors.

^^^^

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

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FDA Chief Claims "Misinformation" Is Leading Cause Of Death In The US

MONDAY, MAY 09, 2022 - 02:07 PM
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

During an appearance on CNN, FDA chief Dr. Robert Califf asserted that the leading cause of death in the United States is online “misinformation.”


Yes, really.

Califf spoke about his remarks during an interview with CNN’s Pamela Brown, which were originally made at a health conference in Texas last month when he said online misinformation was “now our leading cause of death.”

After admitting that there was “no way to quantify this,” before mentioning heart disease and cancer (actual killers), Califf went on to bolster the claim anyway.

Claiming that there has been “an erosion of life expectancy,” Califf went on to say that Americans were living an average of 5 years shorter than people in other high income countries.

Califf said that anti-virals and vaccinations meant “almost no one in this country should be dying from COVID,” before going on to explain that there was also a “reduction in life expectancy from common diseases like heart disease.”

“But somehow … the reliable, truthful messages are not getting across,” he said, adding, “And it’s being washed down by a lot of misinformation, which is leading people to make bad choices that are unfortunate for their health.”

The FDA chief did not explain how ‘online misinformation’ was causing more deaths from heart disease, but went ahead and made the claim anyway without being challenged by the host.



As we have exhaustively highlighted, “online misinformation” is indistinguishable from information the regime doesn’t like.

As we previously noted, the woman picked to head up the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ said free speech makes her “shudder” while also promoting the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.

Nina Jankowicz also ludicrously cited Christopher Steele as an expert on disinformation. Steele was the author of the infamous Clinton campaign-funded Trump ‘peegate’ dossier’ that turned out to be an actual product of disinformation.

The contrived moral panic over “misinformation” has become more pronounced following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, with CNN guests recently complaining about how it might impact their monopoly on controlling “the channels of communications.”

 

[Dozdoats]

The Government Is Lawless: These Emergency Declarations Are Bogus and Need to End Yesterday (Dr. Robert Malone; Dr. Ryan Cole)

Two highly reputable sources in an ocean of official dis/mis-information....

 

[marsh]

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

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US Shale Swings From Losses To Record Cash Flows

MONDAY, MAY 09, 2022 - 09:30 AM
Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

• U.S. shale focuses on returning capital to shareholders in 2022.
• Deloitte: the shale patch is on track for massive free cash flows of a combined $172 billion in 2022 alone.
• Several large shale producers aren’t boosting production in 2022.

After years of plowing money into boosting production and thus depressing oil prices, the U.S. shale patch emerged from the pandemic-inflicted slump with unwavering capital discipline which, combined with $100+ oil, is paying off with record cash flows for American oil producers. The largest shale producers have left years of bleeding cash behind, focusing on returning capital to shareholders from the record cash flows they have been generating for several months now. As they report first-quarter figures these days, public companies vow continued disciplined spending and only modest production growth as “drill, baby, drill” is no longer shale’s primary goal.


Investors, in turn, are rewarding the discipline—most of the 20 top-returning firms in the S&P 500 year to date are oil companies, including Occidental, Coterra Energy, Valero, Marathon Oil, APA, Halliburton, Devon Energy, Hess Corporation, Marathon Petroleum, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Schlumberger, EOG Resources, and Pioneer Natural Resources.

As a result of the highest oil prices since 2014 and capex discipline, the shale patch is on track for massive free cash flows of a combined $172 billion in 2022 alone, per Deloitte estimates cited by Bloomberg. By 2020, the shale industry had booked $300 billion in net negative cash flow in the 15 years since the first shale boom, Deloitte estimated back then.

Unlike in the previous upcycles, U.S. producers are now directing a large part of the record cash flows to boost shareholder returns with higher dividends, special dividends, and share buybacks.

U.S. producers do not plan to abandon the newly-found capital discipline and will grow production only modestly, the top executives at most public shale producers said during the Q1 earnings calls this week. Many firms acknowledged the supply chain, inflationary, and labor constraints that could result in slower American oil production growth than the increase the EIA and analysts expect. Producers are also wary of the Biden Administration’s calls for only a short-term ramp-up in production amid otherwise negative comments on the oil industry, which undermines the firms’ visibility and willingness to plan higher investments in the medium term.

“To say bluntly, the administration's comments are certainly causing a lot of uncertainty in the market, both in the terms of regulatory taxation, legislation, and negative rhetoric toward our industry. And that creates uncertainty in our owners', our shareholders' minds about what the future of this industry really is,” Diamondback Energy’s CEO Travis Stice said on the earnings call this week.

Diamondback Energy will keep its current oil production levels of 220,000 net barrels of oil per day, Stice said.

“While we believe that efficiently growing our production base is achievable over the long term, we do not feel that today is the appropriate time to begin spending dollars that would not equate to additional barrels into multiple quarters from now,” he added.

Another producer, Devon Energy generated $1.3 billion of free cash flow for the first quarter, its highest-ever quarterly FCF.

“With this increasing amount of free cash flow, our top priority is to accelerate the return of capital to shareholders,” CFO Jeff Ritenour said.

Continental Resources “delivered a record quarter of adjusted earnings per share and exceptional free cash flow generation,” CFO John Hart said as the shale giant announced a fifth consecutive increase to quarterly dividend.

Chesapeake Energy, which went through a bankruptcy during 2020, reported $532 million in adjusted free cash flow for Q1, its highest quarterly FCF ever, and launched a $1-billion share and warrant repurchase program.

Pioneer Natural Resources, for its part, will be returning 88% of its first-quarter free cash flow of $2.3 billion to shareholders, while keeping disciplined oil growth of up to 5%, CEO Scott Sheffield said.

It was Sheffield who said as early as in February: “Whether it's $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we're not going to change our growth plans.”

In Pioneer’s earnings call this week, Sheffield said that U.S. shale would likely grow less than the EIA and other analysts expect, which would put upward pressure on oil prices.

“What’s happening now in regard to labor constraints, frack fleet constraints, inflation constraints - I just think it’s going to be tough to hit some of the numbers. It even makes me even more bullish about some of the oil price numbers that are out there,” Sheffield said, as carried by Reuters.

Sheffield sees U.S. oil production growing by 500,000 bpd-600,000 bpd this year, compared to EIA and other estimates of 800,000 bpd-1 million bpd growth.

Added to operational constraints and capital discipline is the industry’s frustration with the Biden Administration, which producers say has singled out oil firms to blame for the highest gasoline prices in eight years, while calling for a short-term jump in production. Democratic lawmakers even said last week they would propose legislation to allow state and federal agencies to “go after” oil companies. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer compared oil firms to “vultures” booking record profits and using the COVID and Ukraine tragedies for market manipulation.

“Talk about mixed messages. We can’t treat the oil and natural gas industry as a kind of light switch that is turned on or off to suit the political moment,” American Petroleum Institute (API) President and CEO Mike Sommers said this week.

“It can be easy and fashionable to speak as if we hardly even need oil or natural gas anymore. But then disruptions occur, and once again everybody is staring down the truth. Now, suddenly, some policymakers want to flip the switch “on” again, but only for a short time. And as practical realities intrude, mostly what we hear from Washington is blame-shifting and excuses,” Sommers added.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

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Spring Wheat Hits 14-Year High On World War 3 & Weather Woes

MONDAY, MAY 09, 2022 - 05:25 AM
A combination of delayed plantings in Northern U.S. Plains and Canada due to soggy weather, a dry spell in Western Europe, chaos in Ukraine, and severe weather in India, have disrupted global wheat markets, sending prices in Minneapolis to the highest levels since 2008.

Spring wheat is used to make bagels, pizza crust, rolls, and croissants, among other specialty items, which touched a 14-year high on Monday morning at $12.31 a bushel due to delayed planting fears across the northern U.S. Plains and Canada because of abnormally wet conditions.



Across the Atlantic, a three-week drought plagues western Europe and adds more uncertainty for wheat. Weather forecaster Meteo France expects France to be hit with "summer-like heat this week," according to Bloomberg.

Paris-based adviser Agritel suggests even though wheat crops have been in great shape. The latest dry spell could revise the crop ratings lower given the current weather outlook and weeks of drought.

"The growing water deficit in France is causing concern amidst an already tense market," Agritel said in a commodity note.

Aside from Europe, India has considered halting wheat exports as a severe heatwave damaged crops.

"The situation is clearly stretched in terms of availability on the international scene, despite the very promising harvest expected in Russia," Agritel added.

Then there's Russia and Ukraine. Both are responsible for a quarter of global wheat exports and have been disrupted due to Moscow's invasion of the Eastern Europe country. Ukraine, alone, accounts for 10% of global wheat exports.

Weather and geopolitical issues suggest global wheat crop supplies could come under pressure as stockpiles worldwide dwindle. This may continue to place a bid under crop prices and result in high food prices. This is one situation that global central bankers can't print their way out of.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

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US Gas Prices Soar As Europe And Asia Scramble For LNG

MONDAY, MAY 09, 2022 - 05:06 AM
By John Kemp, Senior Market Analyst at Reuters

U.S. gas prices have surged to the highest level in real terms since the financial crisis in 2008 as strong demand for LNG from buyers in Europe and Asia puts pressure on inventories. Front-month futures for gas delivered to Henry Hub in Louisiana are trading at almost $9 per million British thermal units, up from just over $3 at the same point last year and less than $3 in 2019.



Front-month futures have surged into a record backwardation of almost $4 above futures for delivery one-year from now, as traders anticipate inventories will remain under pressure through the rest of the year.



Working gas stocks in underground storage are 335 billion cubic feet or 18% below the pre-pandemic five-year seasonal average for 2015-2019.



Inventories have remained low despite a fairly mild winter, with population-weighted heating demand this winter in the Lower 48 states around 7% below the average.





Domestic gas production has recovered to its pre-pandemic peak, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But exports especially in the form of LNG have risen sharply, which is keeping inventories low and putting upward pressure on prices.



In recent months, LNG exports have been equivalent to 10-12% of domestic dry gas production, up from around 4% in early 2019. Exports have become a big enough share of the market they have started to enforce a partial convergence with prices in Europe and Asia.



U.S. gas supplies have tightened as Europe and Asia scramble to buy LNG to refill their own depleted storage after last winter and amid fears about a disruption of gas supplies from Russia.




The rise in prices will enforce maximum fuel-switching among power generators from gas to coal to conserve fuel stocks this summer, with spot gas now uncompetitive against coal except for peak generation.

More importantly, high prices have started to encourage more gas-focused drilling, which should continue boosting output through the end of the year and into 2023.



The number of rigs targeting gas-rich rock formations has increased to 144, up from only 100 this time last year, according to field services company Baker Hughes.

As the U.S. gas industry becomes more export-focused, drilling rates, inventories and prices are all becoming more responsive to conditions in Europe and Asia.

 

[marsh]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

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'Digital Dystopia' Looms: 90% Of Nations Are Planning CBDCs

MONDAY, MAY 09, 2022 - 12:30 AM
Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

A new report from the Bank of International Settlements estimates that up to 90% of national central banks are at least in the planning stages for launching a central bank digital currency (CBDC):

Nine out of 10 central banks are exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and more than half are now developing them or running concrete experiments. In particular, work on retail CBDCs has moved to more advanced stages

This echoes a March report from the IMF, which claimed over one hundred nations are at least in the planning stages of releasing their own CBDC.

You can read the entire IMF report here, or a summary published by Bloomberg here.



It seems programs of government-issued digital money have been gaining momentum all around the world since at least 2020, and apparently, now they exist in over half the countries on the planet.

The newest of these – Brazil and Namibia – announced their plans only last month.
As with all globalist agendas, the push for CBDCs is always part of “the current thing”.

First, it was a response to Covid. Then they could help us halt climate change. Then they’re a response to the war in Ukraine.

Using that method they have moved from a barely-discussed fringe idea to regular mainstream coverage and 90% of the world trying them out, all within the space of a couple of years (as we predicted they would in our New Years post)

Interestingly, while CBDCs are being talked about more and more, there is one specific feature of them which is being talked about less and less: Programmability.

Regular readers will be more than familiar with this concept – we discussed it in detail in our previous articles on CBDCS (here and here).

For those new readers: programmability is a hypothetical feature of digital currency which would allow the issuer to set limits and controls over its use.

Essentially, any CBDC would give either the state, the central bank or the corporation issuing the money as wages the power to control how and where the money is spent.

Any CBDC amounts to potential third-party control of your money.

It’s that simple.

This has massive implications for the very idea of individual liberty. Given how the last two years have gone, it’s not at all hard to imagine how such a system could be abused.



Halting payments to “protect the NHS”, garnishing wages to “fight climate change” or individual financial sanctions because you aren’t vaccinated.

One need look no further back than the Canadian truckers’ protest to see a state financially unpersoning those who express dissent. A CBDC would make that process both easier for the state to enforce and harder for an individual to avoid.

It is, quite obviously, the biggest ethical and societal issue in any potential system of digital currency.

And yet, neither the BIS report nor the IMF report nor Bloomberg’s summary discusses the idea of “programmability” in any detail at all. The word is used precisely once across all three documents, and they never explain what it actually means

OffG has covered CBDCs in detail before, and the press has never been shy in talking up the “benefits” of such strictly controlled money in the past. On the contrary, it has always been treated as a major selling point.

Agustin Carstens, the head of the Bank of International Settlements discussed the idea in detail in a video in the summer of 2021:

The key difference [with a CBDC] is that the central bank would have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and then have the technology to enforce that.”

View: https://youtu.be/rpNnTuK5JJU
.56 min

A Telegraph article from June 2021 again raved about the possible benefits of programmable currency:

Digital cash could be programmed to ensure it is only spent on essentials, or goods which an employer or Government deems to be sensible […] There could be some socially beneficial outcomes from that, preventing activity which is seen to be socially harmful in some way.

They were never reluctant to talk up programmability before, so it’s noteworthy they should suddenly shut down that avenue of discussion.

Perhaps a sign they over-estimated what people would accept, and are already experiencing more pushback on the idea than they expected.

That’s a comforting thought.

But don’t be fooled: Just because they stop mentioning it, doesn’t mean they’re letting it go. They just want you to forget about it.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the list of countries trialling digital currencies includes Ukraine and Russia, the United States and China, Britain and the EU.

Every team in the league.

Picking a side won’t save you.

 

[marsh]

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The Psychology Of Manipulation: 6 Lessons From The Master Of Propaganda

SUNDAY, MAY 08, 2022 - 08:20 PM
Authored by Ryan Matters via Off-Guardian.org,

Edward L. Bernays was an American business consultant who is widely recognized as the father of public relations. Bernays was one of the men responsible for “selling” World War 1 to the American public by branding it as a war that was necessary to “make the world safe for democracy”.



During the 1920s, Bernays consulted for a number of major corporations, helping to boost their business through expertly crafted marketing campaigns aimed at influencing public opinion.

In 1928, Edward Bernays published his famous book, Propaganda, in which he outlined the theories behind his successful “public relations” endeavours. The book provides insights into the phenomenon of crowd psychology and outlines effective methods for manipulating people’s habits and opinions.

For a book that’s almost 100 years old, Propaganda could not be more relevant today. In fact, its relevance is a testament to the unchanging nature of human psychology.

One of the key takeaways of the book is that mind control is an important aspect of any democratic society. Indeed, Bernays maintains that without the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses”, democracy simply would not “work”.

We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

According to Bernays, those doing the “governing” constitute an invisible ruling class that “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses”.

In Propaganda, Bernays draws on the work of Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his uncle!), outlining the power of mass psychology and how it may be used to manipulate the “group mind”.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?

I recently explored this topic in an essay about how occult rituals and predictive programming are used to manipulate the collective consciousness, influencing the thoughts, beliefs and actions of large groups of people, resulting in the creation of what occultists call “egregores”.

Here I have extracted some key insights from Bernays in an attempt to show how his book Propaganda is, in many ways, the playbook used by the globalist cryptocracy to process the group mind of the masses.

1. IF YOU MANIPULATE THE LEADER OF A GROUP, THE PEOPLE WILL FOLLOW
Bernays tells us that one of the easiest ways to influence the thoughts and actions of large numbers of people is to first influence their leader.

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway.

In fact, one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology is that the “group mind” does not “think”, rather, it acts according to impulses, habits and emotions. And when deciding on a certain course of action, its first impulse is to follow the example of a trusted leader.

Humans are, by nature a group species. Even when we are alone, we have a deep sense of group belonging. Whether they consciously know it or not, much of what people do is an effort to conform to the ideals of their chosen group so as to feel a sense of acceptance and belonging.

This exact method of influencing the leader and watching the people follow has been used extensively throughout the last few years. One notable instance that comes to mind is the horrendously inaccurate epidemiological models created by Neil Ferguson, which formed the basis for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s lockdown policies.

Once Johnson was convinced of the need to lockdown and mask up, the people gladly followed.

2. WORDS ARE POWERFUL: THE KEY TO INFLUENCING A GROUP IS THE CLEVER USE OF LANGUAGE
Certain words and phrases are associated with certain emotions, symbols and reactions. Bernays tell us that through the clever and careful use of language, one can manipulate the emotions of a group and thereby influence their perceptions and actions.

By playing upon an old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass of group emotions.

The clever use of language has been employed throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to great effect. An obvious example of this was when the definition of “vaccine” was changed to include injections utilising experimental mRNA technology.

You see, the word “vaccine” is associated in the public mind with a certain picture – that of a safe, proven medical intervention that is not only life-saving but absolutely necessary.

If governments had told people to go get their “gene therapies”, the vast majority of the public would likely question the motives behind such a campaign; they would feel extremely sceptical because the phrase “gene therapy” is not associated with the same images, emotions and feelings as “vaccine”.

The same goes for the word “pandemic”, the definition of which was also changed. The word “pandemic” is generally associated in the collective consciousness with fear, death, chaos and emergency (largely thanks to Hollywood and the myriad virus films it has released over the years).

3. ANY MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION IS ALSO A MEDIUM FOR PROPAGANDA
Any system of communication, whether phone, radio, print, or social media, is nothing more than a means of transmitting information. Bernays reminds us that any such means of communication is also a channel for propaganda.

There is no means of human communication which may not also be a means of deliberate propaganda.

Bernays goes on to stress that a good propagandist must always keep abreast of new forms of communication, so that they may co-opt them as means of deliberate propaganda.

Indeed, systems that most people would associate with freedom of speech and democracy are none other than means of circulating propaganda. Facebook fact-checkers, Big Tech censorship and YouTube’s Covid banners certainly fall into this category.

Other examples of this include the recent algorithm updates made by various search engines (including Google and DuckDuckGo) to penalize Russian websites. Although this should come as no surprise (Google has been engaging in this type of “shadow propaganda” for many years).

4. REITERATING THE SAME IDEA OVER AND OVER CREATES HABITS AND CONVICTIONS
Although Bernays terms this a technique used by the “old propagandists”, he, nonetheless, recognizes its usefulness.

It was one of the doctrines of the reaction psychology that a certain stimulus often repeated would create a habit, or that the mere reiteration of an idea would create a conviction.

Repeating the same idea or the same “mantra” again and again is a form of neuro-linguistic programming aimed at instilling certain concepts or emotions into the subconscious mind.

Indeed, people who are feeling sad or depressed are often advised to repeat to themselves an uplifting saying or affirmation.

There are many examples of this simple, yet effective, technique being used to great effect over the last few years. Think Q’s “trust the plan”, the globalist favourite, “build back better” or the incessant repetition of that twisted phrase, “trust the science”. Included in this category are the 24/7-in-your-face death statistics and case numbers, aimed at promoting the illusion of a pandemic.

There are more obvious examples of this as well, such as news anchors in different areas all reading from the exact same script.

5. THINGS ARE NOT DESIRED FOR THEIR INTRINSIC WORTH, BUT RATHER FOR THE SYMBOLS THAT THEY REPRESENT
After studying why people make certain purchasing decisions, Bernays observed that people often don’t desire something for its usefulness or value, but rather because it represents something else which they unconsciously crave.

A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself.

Bernays gives the example of a man buying a car. From the outside, it may appear as if the man is buying the car because he needs a means of transport, but in actuality, he is buying it because he craves the elevated social status that comes with owning a motor vehicle.

This idea, too, applies to the events over the last few years.

For example, masks are a symbol of compliance. Everyone knows they don’t work but they wear them because of their desire to “fit in”, and to be seen as an upstanding citizen who follows the rules. Covid-19 injections are also a symbol and many people choose to get them because they have a desire to avoid being called an “anti-vaxxer” or a “conspiracy theorist”.

6. ONE CAN MANIPULATE INDIVIDUAL ACTIONS BY CREATING CIRCUMSTANCES THAT MODIFY GROUP CUSTOMS
Lastly, Bernays tells us that if one wishes to manipulate the actions of an individual, the most effective way to do so is to create circumstances that engender the desired behaviour.

What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of on a new piano? […] He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars. The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom.

For example, why all of a sudden does everyone “stand with Ukraine”? According to Bernays, it’s not because there is a war going on and innocent people need our love and support, but rather because it is the new “group custom” to do so.

The process of altering group customs begins from the top down. In every nation or social clique, there are leaders, public figures and influencers. Manipulating those with the most sway eventually filters down into the public mind. That is why when a celebrity decides to wear something extravagant on the red carpet, a whole new trend can arise overnight.

Similarly, at the beginning of the Covid saga and then the Russia-Ukraine war, the media were quick to circulate stories of celebs “catching Covid” and urging people to stay home, or public figures condemning Russian actions and calling for stricter sanctions (which just so happened to hurt the West more than they hurt Russia).

THE PROPAGANDA PLAYBOOK
The world is a volatile place right now. Things seem to change quickly and no one knows what might happen next. However, amid all this chaos there is one thing that has not changed and is unlikely to change any time soon, and that is human psychology.

Because of this, the tactics used to manipulate people’s thoughts, beliefs and actions have not changed either. In fact, most of them were outlined in detail 100 years ago by Edward Bernays in his 1928 book, Propaganda.

That’s right, the Puppet Master’s playbook isn’t a secret. It’s right there, freely available to anyone who cares to understand how the powers that be seek to influence them on a daily basis.
* * *
Propaganda by Edward Bernays has now been added to our Forbidden Library. Read it now, along with other forbidden books.