Tag Archives: food shortages

How “Food Shortages” & Economic Collapse Protects the Status Quo

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Engineered Food & Poverty Crises Secure Continued US Dominance

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Off-Guardian

In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.

Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.

According to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, there is currently sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages.

We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.

The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.

Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.

Neoliberal policies since the 1980s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, the only way for the US to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.

Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolise it itself.

Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to US attempts to retain hegemony.

The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.

US policymakers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.

It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.

In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.

Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.

It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world.

Today, the US is again waging a war on vast swathes of humanity, whose impoverishment is intended to ensure they remain dependent on the US and the financial institutions it uses to create dependency and indebtedness – the World Bank and IMF.

Hundreds of millions will experience (are experiencing) poverty and hunger due to US policy. These people (the ones that the US and Pfizer et al supposedly cared so much about and wanted to get a jab into each of their arms) are regarded with contempt and collateral damage in the great geopolitical game.

Contrary to what many believe, the US has not miscalculated the outcome of the sanctions placed on Russia. Michael Hudson notes energy prices are increasing, benefiting US oil companies and US balance of payments as an energy exporter. Moreover, by sanctioning Russia, the aim is to curtail Russian exports (of wheat and gas used for fertiliser production) and for agricultural commodity prices to therefore increase. This too will also benefit the US as an agricultural exporter.

This is how the US seeks to maintain dominance over other countries.

Current policies are designed to create a food and debt crisis for poorer nations especially. The US can use this debt crisis to force countries to continue privatising and selling off their public assets in order to service the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports.

This imperialist strategy comes on the back of ‘COVID relief’ loans which have served a similar purpose. In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.

Oxfam and Development Finance International have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.

The closure of the world economy in March 2020 (‘lockdown’) served to trigger an unprecedented process of global indebtedness.

Conditionalities mean national governments will have to capitulate to the demands of Western financial institutions. These debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.

The US is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.

Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.

Back in 2014, Michael Hudson stated that the US has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.

The oil sector and agribusiness have been joined at the hip as part of US geopolitical strategy.

The dominant notion of ‘food security’ promoted by global agribusiness players like Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus and supported by the World Bank is based on the ability of people and nations to purchase food. It has nothing to do with self-sufficiency and everything to do with global markets and supply chains controlled by giant agribusiness players.

Along with oil, the control of global agriculture has been a linchpin of US geopolitical strategy for many decades. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agri-capital’s chemical- and oil-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development.

It entailed trapping nations into a globalised food system that relies on export commodity mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. What we have seen has been the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

And what we have also seen is countries being placed on commodity crop production treadmills. The need for foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food entrenches the need to increase cash crop production for exports.

The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) set out the trade regime necessary for this type of corporate dependency that masquerades as ‘global food security’.

This is explained in a July 2022 report by Navdanya International – Sowing Hunger, Reaping Profits – A Food Crisis by Design – which notes international trade laws and trade liberalisation has benefited large agribusiness and continue to piggyback off the implementation of the Green Revolution.

The report states that US lobby and trade negotiations were headed by former Cargill Investors Service CEO and Goldman Sachs executive – Dan Amstutz – who in 1988 was appointed chief negotiator for the Uruguay round of GATT by Ronald Reagan. This helped to enshrine the interests of US agribusiness into the new rules that would govern the global trade of commodities and subsequent waves of industrial agriculture expansion.

The AoA removed protection of farmers from global market prices and fluctuations. At the same time, exceptions were made for the US and the EU to continue subsidising their agriculture to the advantage of large agribusiness.

Navdanya notes:

“With the removal of state tariff protections and subsidies, small farmers were left destitute. The result has been a disparity in what farmers earn for what they produce, versus what consumers pay, with farmers earning less and consumers paying more as agribusiness middlemen take the biggest cut.”

‘Food security’ has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.

We need look no further than India to see this in action. The now repealed recent farm legislation in India was aimed at giving the country the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberalism that other countries have experienced.

The ‘liberalising’ legislation was in part aimed at benefiting US agribusiness interests and trapping India into food insecurity by compelling the country to eradicate its food buffer stocks – so vital to the nation’s food security – and then bid for food on a volatile global market from agribusiness traders with its foreign reserves.

The Indian government was only prevented from following this route by the massive, year-long farmer protest that occurred.

The current crisis is also being fuelled by speculation. Navdanya cites an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and The Wire to show how speculation by investment firms, banks and hedge funds on agricultural commodities are profiting off rising food prices. Commodity future prices are no longer linked to actual supply and demand in the market but are based purely on speculation.

Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus and investment funds like Black Rock and Vanguard continue to make huge financial killings, resulting in the price of bread almost doubling in some poorer countries.

The cynical ‘solution’ promoted by global agribusiness to the current food crisis is to urge farmers to produce more and seek better yields as if the crisis is that of underproduction. It means more chemical inputs, more genetic engineering techniques and suchlike, placing more farmers in debt and trapped in dependency.

It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted.

And it is the same old story – pushing out new technologies in search of a problem and then using crises as justification for their rollout while ignoring the underlying reasons for such crises.

Navdanya sets out possible solutions to the current situation based on principles of agroecology, short supply lines, food sovereignty and economic democracy – policies that have been described at length in many articles and official reports over the years.

As for fighting back against the onslaught on ordinary people’s living standards, support is gathering among the labour movement in places like the UK. Rail union leader Mick Lynch is calling for a working class movement based on solidarity and class consciousness to fight back against a billionaire class that is acutely aware of its own class interests.

For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse. It is only through organised, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.

An Engineered Food and Poverty Crisis to Secure Continued US Dominance 

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Dissident Voice

In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.

Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.

According to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, there is currently sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages.

We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.

The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.

Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.

Neoliberal policies since the 1980s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, the only way for the US to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.

Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolise it itself.

Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to US attempts to retain hegemony.

The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.

US policy makers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.

It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.

In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.

Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.

It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world.

Today, the US is again waging a war on vast swathes of humanity, whose impoverishment is intended to ensure they remain dependent on the US and the financial institutions it uses to create dependency and indebtedness – the World Bank and IMF.

Hundreds of millions will experience (are experiencing) poverty and hunger due to US policy. These people (the ones that the US and Pfizer et al supposedly cared so much about and wanted to get a jab into each of their arms) are regarded with contempt and collateral damage in the great geopolitical game.

Contrary to what many believe, the US has not miscalculated the outcome of the sanctions placed on Russia. Michael Hudson notes energy prices are increasing, benefiting US oil companies and US balance of payments as an energy exporter. Moreover, by sanctioning Russia, the aim is to curtail Russian exports (of wheat and gas used for fertiliser production) and for agricultural commodity prices to therefore increase. This too will also benefit the US as an agricultural exporter.

This is how the US seeks to maintain dominance over other countries.

Current policies are designed to create a food and debt crisis for poorer nations especially. The US can use this debt crisis to force countries to continue privatising and selling off their public assets in order to service the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports.

This imperialist strategy comes on the back of ‘COVID relief’ loans which have served a similar purpose. In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.

Oxfam and Development Finance International have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.

The closure of the world economy in March 2020 (‘lockdown’) served to trigger an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Conditionalities mean national governments will have to capitulate to the demands of Western financial institutions. These debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.

The US is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.

Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.

Back in 2014, Michael Hudson stated that the US has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.

The oil sector and agribusiness have been joined at the hip as part of US geopolitical strategy.

The dominant notion of ‘food security’ promoted by global agribusiness players like Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus and supported by the World Bank is based on the ability of people and nations to purchase food. It has nothing to do with self-sufficiency and everything to do with global markets and supply chains controlled by giant agribusiness players.

Along with oil, the control of global agriculture has been a linchpin of US geopolitical strategy for many decades. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agri-capital’s chemical- and oil-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development.

It entailed trapping nations into a globalised food system that relies on export commodity mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. What we have seen has been the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

And what we have also seen is countries being placed on commodity crop production treadmills. The need for foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food entrenches the need to increase cash crop production for exports.

The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) set out the trade regime necessary for this type of corporate dependency that masquerades as ‘global food security’.

This is explained in a July 2022 report by Navdanya International – Sowing Hunger, Reaping Profits – A Food Crisis by Design – which notes international trade laws and trade liberalisation has benefited large agribusiness and continue to piggyback off the implementation of the Green Revolution.

The report states that US lobby and trade negotiations were headed by former Cargill Investors Service CEO and Goldman Sachs executive – Dan Amstutz – who in 1988 was appointed chief negotiator for the Uruguay round of GATT by Ronald Reagan. This helped to enshrine the interests of US agribusiness into the new rules that would govern the global trade of commodities and subsequent waves of industrial agriculture expansion.

The AoA removed protection of farmers from global market prices and fluctuations. At the same time, exceptions were made for the US and the EU to continue subsidising their agriculture to the advantage of large agribusiness.

Navdanya notes:

With the removal of state tariff protections and subsidies, small farmers were left destitute. The result has been a disparity in what farmers earn for what they produce, versus what consumers pay, with farmers earning less and consumers paying more as agribusiness middlemen take the biggest cut.

‘Food security’ has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.

We need look no further than India to see this in action. The now repealed recent farm legislation in India was aimed at giving the country the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberalism that other countries have experienced.

The ‘liberalising’ legislation was in part aimed at benefiting US agribusiness interests and trapping India into food insecurity by compelling the country to eradicate its food buffer stocks – so vital to the nation’s food security – and then bid for food on a volatile global market from agribusiness traders with its foreign reserves.

The Indian government was only prevented from following this route by the massive, year-long farmer protest that occurred.

The current crisis is also being fuelled by speculation. Navdanya cites an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and The Wire to show how speculation by investment firms, banks and hedge funds on agricultural commodities are profiting off rising food prices. Commodity future prices are no longer linked to actual supply and demand in the market but are based purely on speculation.

Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus and investment funds like Black Rock and Vanguard continue to make huge financial killings, resulting in the price of bread almost doubling in some poorer countries.

The cynical ‘solution’ promoted by global agribusiness to the current food crisis is to urge farmers to produce more and seek better yields as if the crisis is that of underproduction. It means more chemical inputs, more genetic engineering techniques and suchlike, placing more farmers in debt and trapped in dependency.

It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted.

And it is the same old story – pushing out new technologies in search of a problem and then using crises as justification for their rollout while ignoring the underlying reasons for such crises.

Navdanya sets out possible solutions to the current situation based on principles of agroecology, short supply lines, food sovereignty and economic democracy – policies that have been described at length in many articles and official reports over the years.

As for fighting back against the onslaught on ordinary people’s living standards, support is gathering among the labour movement in places like the UK. Rail union leader Mick Lynch is calling for a working class movement based on solidarity and class consciousness to fight back against a billionaire class that is acutely aware of its own class interests.

For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse. It is only through organised, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.

Controlling The Savages: COVID, Lockdowns, Shortages, and The Great Reset

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By Brandon Turbeville

Source: Activist Post

Who controls the food supply controls the people. Who controls the energy can control whole continues. Who controls money can control the whole world. – Henry Kissinger

Around 1868, the Indian Wars had briefly paused and the soon to be butchered treaties remained in force. However, the US Federal government and private interests were well aware that the “Indian Question” and “problem of the savages” was still unanswered. In other words, the “problem of the savages” was that the savages still existed. Those “savages” had been beaten back for years by the US regular army but they were not completely vanquished. In fact, despite being outmanned and outgunned and with little to no competition for the advancements in weaponry of the US Army, the Native Americans routinely routed the American military, at times slaughtering whole detachments.

But now that the secessionists had been dealt with, it became apparent that it was now time to remove the gloves from the iron fist of the coming settlements and that the Native Americans had to be annihilated, subjugated, or displaced from their native lands. Railroads, telegraphs, mines, and the like were all being hampered by the very existence of Native Americans.

Enter William Sherman, the general famous for his brutal March to the Sea, the burning of Atlanta, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure in the US Civil War. Say what you want about Sherman, the man knew how to win a war. He knew that breaking the backs of the civilian population and the ability of the society as well as military to sustain itself was a successful method of warfare. He also knew that the Native Americans relied upon buffalo for food and shelter and indeed their very survival. In a letter penned in 1868, he wrote that as long as the buffalo were alive, “Indians will go there. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all.”

And so it became unofficial Federal policy that the buffalo had to be extinguished in order to solve the vexing “Indian problem.” Over the next ten years, the buffalo were hunted by privateers, highly encouraged by the US government, to the point of near extinction. Where buffalo once numbered about 30 million, by the end of the 1800s, that number had been reduced to just a few hundred.

In Andrew C. Isenberg’s book, The Destruction Of The Bison, Isenberg writes of a reporter who asks a railroad worker, “Do the Indians make a living gathering these bones?’ Yes, replied a railroad inspector, ‘but it is a mercy that they can’t eat bones. We were never able to control the savages until their supply of meat was cut off.”

Fast forward to 2022. After nearly three years of COVID hysteria, lockdowns, economic disruptions, and schizophrenic government responses, the United States as a whole, as well as the rest of the world, is facing a food shortage. Claims that once belonged only to “preppers” and “conspiracy theorists” are now mainstream news items, with corporate media outlets reporting that some items may be in short supply or simply not available at all. All that is necessary is a brief internet search to see a myriad of mainstream reports of shortages of meat, vegetables, baby formula and many other staple items. Just a cursory walk around the local grocery store will reveal a fairly obvious shortage of many items though the pain is now mostly at the point of being an inconvenience moreso than a reason for panic. For now.

But talk of a food shortage is more than scattered news reports. Even the United Nations is warning of  one, but not just in the United States. The UN is warning of a global food shortage. As ABC News reports,

The head of the United Nations warned Friday that the world faces “catastrophe” because of the growing shortage of food around the globe.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the war in Ukraine has added to the disruptions caused by climate change, the coronavirus pandemic and inequality to produce an “unprecedented global hunger crisis” already affecting hundreds of millions of people.

“There is a real risk that multiple famines will be declared in 2022,” he said in a video message to officials from dozens of rich and developing countries gathered in Berlin. “And 2023 could be even worse.”

Guterres noted that harvests across Asia, Africa and the Americas will take a hit as farmers around the world struggle to cope with rising fertilizer and energy prices.

“This year’s food access issues could become next year’s global food shortage,” he said. “No country will be immune to the social and economic repercussions of such a catastrophe.”

Notice that Gueterres also mentions the rising prices of fuel and fertilizer. This is something else that is being experienced worldwide, not just in the United States. Of course, Western media and the ruling party would have the population believe that Vladmir Putin is hoarding all the world’s gas via Ukraine, imposing restrictions and taxes on the vulnerable people of the United States who were on their way to energy independence just three short years. Now, however, they somehow woke up begging other countries for fuel, licking the boots of the Saudis, and blaming Vlad for the doubling of the price at the pump. Clearly, it has nothing to do with intentionally shutting off oil pipelines and punishing businesses and working people on behalf of the climate and faulty notion that man-made CO2 is causing temperatures to rise and the planet to reach a point of irreversible calamity.

Again, however, fuel prices aren’t just rising in the United States. They are rising across the world along with fertilizer and food costs and along with the price of just about any consumer good. Inflation, too – the hidden tax that is making itself well known in the United States – is popping up in the majority of countries across the globe. Who knew printing large amounts of money would cause that money to be worth less and thus cause prices to rise to compensate?

Living standards, too, are dropping all across the world with polio now rearing its head in the UK again for the first time since the 1980s. Polio, of course, is a disease that thrives on the low living standards and poor sanitation of the third world, a world which was partially imported to the UK all the while the standards of living (healthcare, sanitation, nutrition, etc.) have been gradually eroded. It’s not just the UK either. Living standards have been falling in the US for decades but accelerating recently. That is, of course, unless one chooses to believe silly “happiness indexes” repeated out of the UN to promote globalism and Free Trade policies.

Even basic services are falling apart. Labor shortages from pilots to the service industry are causing disruptions in the economy, rising prices, and chaos at airports. All happening globally.

Food shortages are happening globally. Food prices are rising globally. Fuel and fertilizer are rising globally. Living standards are falling globally. Inflation is rising globally. Labor shortages are global. Transportation is falling apart globally. See a pattern yet?

Everything disruption happening nationally is also happening globally. Are we expected to believe that every government across the world simply made the same stupid decisions at the same time? That none of them could figure out the source of the problem? Shouldn’t at least one of them have stumbled on the right path forward and lead the others through the mist? Or should we assume that there are more factors at play here and remember that anytime we see the same thing happening across the world at the same time agendas that are global in nature and have no respect for national boundaries are marching forward? I would argue the latter.

Keep in mind, all of these “global crises” came to be out of the “global pandemic,” itself at best an opportunity that was not allowed to go to waste. At worst, a global hoax designed to usher in the Great Reset. COVID, after all, is still a virus that has yet to be fully identified in a lab, yet the entire world was locked down at the same time, a prison planet brought in to being, upon this dubious evidence and weak justifications. Regardless, COVID’s biggest casualty was freedom.

None of the current crises have arisen on the basis of a chain of befuddled reactionaries acting in ignorant unison across the globe to an emerging “pandemic.” In fact, the only ones ignorant of the pandemic and coming responses were the unsuspecting civilians who willingly gave up their most basic rights over fear of a virus that has never been isolated in a lab and still is not able to be accurately tested for.

Still think COVID just surprised everyone in power as much as it did the unsuspecting citizens? Consider briefly how, in the months before the alleged pandemic arose, a simulation exercise was held at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in concert with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation regarding the emergence of a global coronavirus pandemic that results in mass disruption of life and culture as we know it, economic chaos, and disruption of basic services.

As Tim Hinchcliffe wrote in his article, “A Timeline Of The Great Reset Agenda: From Foundation To Event 201 And The Pandemic of 2020,”

On May 15, 2018, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted the “Clade X” pandemic exercise in partnership with the WEF.

The Clade X exercise included mock video footage of actors giving scripted news reports about a fake pandemic scenario

. . . . .

The Clade X event also included discussion panels with real policymakers who assessed that governments and industry were not adequately prepared for the fictitious global pandemic.

“In the end, the outcome was tragic: the most catastrophic pandemic in history with hundreds of millions of deaths, economic collapse and societal upheaval,” according to a WEF report on Clade X.

“There are major unmet global vulnerabilities and international system challenges posed by pandemics that will require new robust forms of public-private cooperation to address” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)

Then on October 18, 2019, in partnership with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WEF ran Event 201.

During the scenario, the entire global economy was shaken, there were riots on the streets, and high-tech surveillance measures were needed to “stop the spread.”

. . . . .

Two fake pandemics were simulated in the two years leading up to the real coronavirus crisis.

“Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security issued a public statement on January 24, 2020, explicitly addressing that Event 201 wasn’t meant to predict the future.

“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic.”

Intentional or not, Event 201 “highlighted” the “fictional” challenges of a pandemic, along with recommendations that go hand-in-hand with the great reset agenda that has set up camp in the nefarious “new normal.”

“The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)

Together, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation submitted seven recommendations for governments, international organizations, and global business to follow in the event of a pandemic.

The Event 201 recommendations call for greater collaboration between the public and private sectors while emphasizing the importance of establishing partnerships with un-elected, global institutions such as the WHO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Air Transport Organization, to carry out a centralized response.

. . . . .

One of the recommendations calls for governments to partner with social media companies and news organization to censor content and control the flow of information.

“Media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though [sic] the use of technology” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)

According to the report, “Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation.

“National public health agencies should work in close collaboration with WHO to create the capability to rapidly develop and release consistent health messages.

“For their part, media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though [sic] the use of technology.”

Sound familiar?

Throughout 2020, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been censoring, suppressing, and flagging any coronavirus-related information that goes against WHO recommendations as a matter of policy, just as Event 201 had recommended.

Big tech companies have also deployed the same content suppression tactics during the 2020 US presidential election — slapping “disputed” claims on content that question election integrity.

Take a look at the predictions made by Event 201:

  • Governments implementing lockdowns worldwide
  • The collapse of many industries
  • Growing mistrust between governments and citizens
  • A greater adoption of biometric surveillance technologies
  • Social media censorship in the name of combating misinformation
  • The desire to flood communication channels with “authoritative” sources
  • A global lack of personal protective equipment
  • The breakdown of international supply chains
  • Mass unemployment
  • Rioting in the streets (see source)

Only the last two are yet to have checkmarks beside them, though mainstream economists are pointing toward September as a possible date for the mass unemployment. Surely, unless there is some inflationary printing by governments, the riots will then follow.

At the core of the COVID scam as well as the subsequent crises mentioned above is the ushering in of an entirely new society, that depicted by UN Agenda 21 and the Great Reset, itself the beginning of a global society reminiscent of that depicted in the The Hunger Games.

So what is the Great Reset? Essentially, the term comes from both a June 3, 2020 event sponsored by the WEF entitled The Great Reset which featured statements from leaders of the IMF, World Bank, and members of the corporate and banking sectors of the United States and UK as well as book written by Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF, entitled COVID19: The Great Reset. Both the book and the event echoed the same sentiment, i.e. that the world economy must be shut down and “reset” in order to usher in a new economy based upon the ideals of Agenda 21 and the Green New Deal.

Hinchcliffe again, in a separate article, “’The Great Reset Will Dramatically Expand The Surveillance State Via Real-Time Tracking’: Ron Paul,” writes,

The overall goal of the WEF’s so-called great reset agenda has always been to reshape the global economy and revamp every aspect of society, with or without COVID.

Trust becomes a major concern when you realize that the idea of tracking and tracing every human being on the planet was already championed by the WEF Founder Klaus Schwab years before COVID-19 arrived on the scene.

Another concern is whether to believe that the lockdowns, the limited mobility, the destruction of small businesses, the crashing of the economy, the home evictions, and the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world are all necessary to stop an “invisible enemy,” along with the subsequent curtailing of freedom that hasn’t been seen in the free world since the beginning of the so-called War on Terror.

“This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us” — WEF report

According to Schwab, the post-COVID fourth industrial revolution will lead to “a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities.”

In his books, “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” (2020) and “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” (2017), Schwab envisioned a future of tracking and tracing every individual through digital identities connected to the Internet of Bodies (IoB) ecosystem.

For example, in “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Schwab noted:

Any package, pallet or container can now be equipped with a sensor, transmitter or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that allows a company to track where it is as it moves through the supply chain—how it is performing, how it is being used, and so on.

In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people.

. . . . .

The digital identity agenda picked-up speed throughout 2020, starting with contact tracing and continuing with immunity passports to monitor and control citizen mobility for the greater good.

After attempting to justify mass surveillance in the interest of public health and safety, Schwab wrote in “COVID-19: The Great Reset” that in the post-pandemic era “the genie of tech surveillance will not be put back in the bottle,” and that “dystopian scenarios are not a fatality.”

Below are just a few quotes from “COVID19: The Great Reset:”

Now that information and communication technologies permeate almost every aspect of our lives and forms of social participation, any digital experience that we have can be turned into a “product” destined to monitor and anticipate our behavior.

. . . . .

The pandemic could open an era of active health surveillance made possible by location-detecting smartphones, facial-recognition cameras and other technologies that identify sources of infection and track the spread of a disease in quasi real time.

. . . . .

Dystopian scenarios are not a fatality. It is true that in the post-pandemic era, personal health and wellbeing will become a much greater priority for society, which is why the genie of tech surveillance will not be put back into the bottle.

. . . . .

The combination of AI, the IoT and sensors and wearable technology will produce new insights into personal well-being. They will monitor how we are and feel, and will progressively blur the boundaries between public healthcare systems and personalized health creation systems – a distinction that will eventually break down.

Hinchcliffe also writes:

Between 2014 and 2017, the WEF called to reshape, restart, reboot, and reset the global order every single year, each aimed at solving various “crises.”

2014: WEF publishes meeting agenda entitled “The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business.”

2015: WEF publishes article in collaboration with VOX EU called “We need to press restart on the global economy.”

2016: WEF holds panel called “How to reboot the global economy.”

2017: WEF publishes article saying “Our world needs a reset in how we operate.”

In 2020, the coronavirus was the catalyst needed to enact the great reset plan that had been bubbling under the surface for years, and immunity passports are just another step in the overall plan to track and trace every citizen through their digital identity.

Without digressing too far, I would suggest reading my article, “Social Media, Universal Basic Income, and Cashless Society: How China’s Social Credit System Is Coming To America,” to see just how far characters like Klaus would like to drag the world’s population. It truly is essential reading at this stage of the game.

One of the few statements made by the WEF related to its future goals was a bizarre article published by Forbes entitled, “ Welcome To 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has Never Been Better,” where the WEF contributor describes a futuristic society (eight years away) that resembles a feudalist communist utopia where there is no such thing as privacy or private property and AI runs society. The article is so bizarre because, while it attempts to paint a utopia, even the fictional narrator can’t seem to keep from sounding like a brainwashed cult member. It reads

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.

Combined with the Social Credit System, UBI, and digital passports, UN Agenda 21, mentioned above, the next step after the world’s economic and cultural systems are “reset,” will be implemented, creating what is essentially a global version of the Soviet Union, gulags and all. For those who are unaware, UN Agenda 21 is an established and published plan developed by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Affairs. The plan, according to the UN website, is a “comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations system, government, and major groups, in every area in which humans have impact on the environment.”

The plan essentially calls for government control of all land, where human and animal lifestyle and activity is strictly limited and controlled, humans rounded up into “habitat areas,” and individual rights are a thing of the past. Travel will be restricted to essential vehicles only and diet will be mandated by the dictates of the “needs” of the environment.

This is precisely why we are seeing chaos at airports for lack of pilots, why the supply chain is broken and why food is becoming scarce. This is not by accident. In fact, food-processing facilities have been burned,vandalized, and rendered inoperable all across the United States in seemingly random acts. But how random are they? Did a sudden mass psychosis take hold which prodded people into carrying out attacks against food-processing facilities? Or, again, is there an agenda afoot?

Is it any coincidence that the very goals set forth by Agenda 21 and the Great Reset have been met one by one in the last two years?

  • Economic shutdown and “reset” – COVID Lockdowns and furloughs, artificial labor shortages.
  • Food shortages – disruption of supply chain by lockdowns, labor shortage, “random” attacks on    food facilities, destruction of crops, culling of farm animals, rising fuel prices.
  • Restriction of travel – rising fuel prices, fewer cars functional due to trade disruption, harder to find parts, COVID travel restrictions, vaccine passports, digital monitoring of travel, pilot  shortages.
  • Loss of individual rights – slow burn for decades but COVID lockdowns, vaccine passports,   travel restrictions, right to gather all drastically infringed upon under “emergency measures” have eviscerated the concept of individual rights.
  • Unemployment – global economy already struggling before COVID, after the “pandemic,” however, many businesses simply disappeared.

But there is some light in all this. Where many people simply panicked at the outset of the “pandemic” and willingly gave up their rights and their critical thinking skills, the subsequent infringement upon their daily lives for such a sustained amount of time with little to no logical standards for actually preventing disease, many eventually began opening their eyes to the fact that another agenda was being put in place. In fact, more people than ever before have begun to openly question and oppose what their governments are doing in the name of keeping them safe and healthy.

So, after two years of having their most basic rights shredded and destroyed, the savages have become restless. They’ve started to realize that the treaties of the status quo between themselves and the global ruling glass were not being honored and so they began to question the legitimacy of that ruling class. They voted, they protested, they demonstrated, and refused to comply.

And what is the response of the ruling class? “We were never able to fully control the savages until their supply of meat was cut off.” It’s not very inventive but it is effective. So the question dear reader is, if you are a savage and your meat supply is being cut off, what should you do? Well, ask yourself what should the native Americans have done? I’ll leave that up to you but, I think you already know the answer.

As Food Shortages Loom, US Kids Starve, Biden to Send $33 Billion MORE to Ukraine to Keep War Going

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

In 2019, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was elected to president of Ukraine after running on a platform of ending the conflict in the Donbass region and making peace with Russia. Unfortunately, however, these goals were not in synch with the US hegemony and instead of pushing for peace, the US supported the far right neo-Nazis who promised to kill Zelensky if he sought peace. 

Over the next two years, the United States continued to funnel weapons, money, and training into Ukraine, ensuring a future conflict with Russia by instigating military conflict directly on their border. In February of this year, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that a line had been crossed and he then invaded Ukraine, kicking off a violent and deadly war.

Just a few weeks into the war, Russia offered concessions as spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that Moscow will end the invasion immediately if Ukraine amends its constitution to ensure it stays neutral and doesn’t join NATO, it acknowledges Crimea as Russian territory, and recognizes the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states.

Since then, the United States has recommended that Ukraine not accept a peace deal and instead continue to allow their people to be used as cannon fodder while US taxpayers are fleeced for billions to fight a proxy war with Russia.

Since the war began in February, Biden has authorized more than $14 billion in your tax dollars to arm literal Nazis in the region. This week, because very few people have spoken out against this war, that request more than doubled and Biden asked Congress for a whopping $33 billion more. 

While encouraging Ukraine to take the deal offered by Russia would be far more effective than US tax dollars at ending the suffering and helping Ukrainians, the military industrial complex is uninterested in such a move.

It is no surprise that the stock market associated with the military industrial complex is booming as the rest of the market plummets.

What’s more, as the politically elite send billions to the other side of the world, 3.7 million children have been pushed into poverty here at home.

According to a recently released Columbia University report, by late January 3.7 million U.S. children were plunged back into poverty, as the government ended the child tax credit.

What’s more, the elite have been publicly warning the world of massive food shortages and supply chain issues — yet here we are sending billions Nazis to prevent Ukraine from seeking peace.

Just last month, the extremely creepy yet exceedingly influential Klaus Schwab warned that “History is truly at a turning point. We do not yet know the full extent and the systemic and structural changes which will happen” but he said that “we do know the global energy systems, food systems, and supply chains will be deeply affected.”

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1509246112934289421

It’s not just the real-life version of Dr. Evil making these warnings either. As we reported at the time, the president of the ominously connected multi-trillion-dollar asset fund, BlackRock, Rob Kapito told oil and gas executives the same week that “entitled” Americans are about to deal with shortages of food and other goods, and should prepare accordingly.

“For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want,” Kapito told a meeting of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. “And we have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.”

“I would put on your seat belts because this is something that we haven’t seen,” Kapito added, warning that Americans will soon face “scarcity inflation” – or rising prices compounded by shortages of everything from food and consumer goods to oil and gas.

President Joe Biden has been telling Americans for months now that they have to foot the bill for the war in Ukraine and “do their part” by sending billions to Zelensky and paying high prices for oil. Around the same time Schwab and Kapito made their warnings, Biden took his position to a whole new level, telling Americans that food shortages are “gonna be real.”

This week, Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanue has issued a similar warning: “We are on the precipice of a global food crisis.”

In a Wednesday interview, Unanue told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, “Americans will have to tighten their belts and consume less,” in response to her question about a potential food shortage crisis.

Though the government has been telling us these higher prices and supply chain issues are Russia’s fault, those who have been paying attention have warned since last year that Biden’s policies – which involved spending more in his first eight months than former President Donald Trump did in 2018 and 2019 combined, and throttling domestic energy production – would trigger price spikes and supply chain disruptions for ordinary Americans.

Trump definitely played a role as well by printing nearly 7 trillion in his last year in office. This is why inflation was already at a 40-year high, before the war began and as spending increases, hard times are seemingly inevitable. The Ukraine invasion is most assuredly playing a role in this debacle but it will be the straw that broke the camels back, not the main driver.

Whatever actually sets off this shortage, rest assured that the people warning us about it will be the last to suffer from it. It will be the poor and middle class who suffer the most from these issues.

As Max Blumenthal reminds us, “200,000 small businesses were wrecked and millions left jobless and alone in the name of public health. Now gas and food prices must surge to protect freedom and stand for Ukraine. You will own nothing and be happy and if you don’t like it, you might be a Russian conspiracist.”

5 signs they are CREATING a food crisis

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By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

It’s no secret that, according to politicians and the corporate press, “food shortages” and a “food supply crises” have been on the way for a while now. They have been regularly predicted for several years.

What’s really strange is that despite its near-constant incipience, the food shortage never seems to actually arrive and is always blamed on something new.

As long ago as 2012, “scientists” were predicting that climate change and a lack of clean water would create “food shortages” that would “turn the world vegetarian by 2050”.

In 2019, UN “experts” warned that “climate change was threatening the world’s food supply”.

Later the same year, the UK was warned that they could expect a food shortage as a result of “post-Brexit chaos”.

By early March 2020 supermarkets were already “warning” that the government had been too slow to act on the coronavirus outbreak, and they might run out of food. (They never actually did).

A month later, in April 2020 when the “pandemic” was less than three months old, “officials” warned Covid was going to create a global food crisis. Three months later it had ballooned into “the worst food crisis for 50 years”.

In the Summer of 2021 the British press was predicting the “worst food shortages since world war 2” and “rolling power cuts”, allegedly due to a lack of truck drivers blamed equally on Covid and Brexit (neither the shortages nor power cuts ever really materialised).

By September 2021, the UK was told the gas price spike would create a shortage of frozen food, and just a month later, that we may have to ration meat ahead of Christmas, due to the gas crisis. (There never was any rationing)

In January 2022, Australia saw “empty supermarket shelves” blamed on the Omicron variant crippling the supply chain, while the US had the same empty shelves blamed on bad winter weather.

Moving into the spring of 2022, the food crisis is still on its way…only now it’s because of the war in Ukraine, or China’s “Zero Covid” policies, or the bird flu outbreak.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that – since the food crisis is always expected but never arrives, and is always blamed on the current thing – that it doesn’t really exist. That it’s nothing but a psy-op designed to spread panic and give suppliers an excuse to jack up their prices in response to fake “scarcity” created by the press.

However, there are indications that this may be about to change.

In a Brussels press conference on March 25th of this year, Joe Biden said…

Regarding food shortages – yes, we did talk about shortages, and they’re going to be real.”

…which is a decidedly odd thing to say.

Most of the time the only reason to strongly affirm something is “going to be real” from now on, is that up to that point it was not.

Indeed, there are a few signs that the food supply is about to genuinely come under attack.

1. UKRAINE WAR & WESTERN SANCTIONS

It’s well documented that Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine has driven up the prices of oil, gas and wheat. Partly due to disruption on the ground, but mostly due to Western sanctions.

Russia is the largest exporter of wheat and other grains in the world, and these products are used not just for making food for humans, but also as animal feed. Western nations boycotting Russian wheat will therefore potentially drive up the price of a huge variety of foodstuffs.

We have already seen rationing of sunflower oil (a major Ukrainian export), with reports that this could extend to all kinds of other products including sausages, chicken, pasta and beer.

This war did not need to happen, it could have been prevented (and could still be stopped) by a simple agreement on Ukrainian neutrality. Combine that with the sweeping nature of the anti-Russian sanctions – unmatched in recent history – and you can reason that the chaos on the ground and concomitant increase in food prices is part of a deliberate policy serving the Great Reset agenda.

2. INCREASING THE PRICE OF OIL

The increased price of oil has natural and obvious knock-on effects for every industrial sector – most especially transport, logistics and agriculture. Despite fears of a cost of living crisis, warnings of food shortages and Russia’s status as the largest exporter of oil and gas in the world, Western nations and their allies have made virtually zero effort to lower the cost of oil.

The high oil price has already seen the Russian ruble bounce back to pre-war strength, and yet Saudi Arabia has been increasing their prices, not flooding the market to tank the price as they did in 2014/15.

Keeping the cost of petroleum high is a deliberate policy decision, and one that shows the cost of living crisis – and any resultant food shortages – are being engineered on purpose.

3. BIRD FLU

The press is claiming there is a major bird flu outbreak going on. As we published last week, the dynamics of “bird flu” seem to be identical to Covid. Birds are tested for the virus using PCR tests, culled if they are “positive”, and these culls are then labelled “bird flu deaths”.

This process has already seen at least 27 million poultry birds destroyed in the US alone, the world’s largest exporter of both chicken and eggs. France, Canada and the UK have also culled millions of birds.

Bird flu has already (allegedly) caused the price of chicken and eggs to skyrocket.

(As a potentially important aside, a new report has also warned that pigs can pass “superbugs” to humans, so pigs may be for the chop sometime soon, too)

4. UK & US PAYING FARMERS TO STOP FARMING

Going back to last May, the Biden administration began pushing farmers to add agricultural land to the “conservation reserve program”, a federally funded program allegedly aimed at preserving the environment. The program is essentially paying farmers not to farm. A very odd policy decision, given the widely predicted food shortages.

A state-level plan in California is going to pay farmers to grow less, this time in the name of saving water.

Interestingly, the UK has a similar program going on for (again, allegedly) totally different reasons. Starting this past February, the British government is paying lump sums of up £100,000 to any farmers who want to retire from farming. Again, a strange policy during a period of geopolitical unrest impacting the food supply.

5. MANUFACTURED FERTILISER SHORTAGES

Russia and Belarus are two of the biggest exporters of fertiliser and fertiliser-related products in the world, accounting for around 10 billion dollars worth of trade manually. So, the war in Ukraine (and the sanctions) are already hitting the fertiliser market hard, with prices hitting new all-time highs in March.

China, the third biggest exporter of fertiliser in the world, has had a self-imposed export ban on the product since last summer, allegedly in an effort to keep domestic food prices low.

Given that, it is very strange that America’s Union Pacific Railway has suddenly placed a limit on the number of fertiliser deliveries it will make, informing fertiliser giant CF Industries they will need to cut their train car use by as much as 20%.

In their public response, CF Industries stated:

The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers…Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers.”

BONUS: FIRES AT FOOD PROCESSING PLANTS

This get’s a bonus slot, not an official spot, because of the multiple unknowns in this case.

In the strangest and most ephemeral story on the list, it seems there has been a rash of fires at food processing plants all over the United States in the last six months. Since August 2021 at least 16 major fires have broken out at food processing plants all across the country.

In September last year a meat processor in Nebraska burned down, impacting 5% of the country’s beef supply. In March of this year fire shut down a Nestle frozen food plant in Arkansas and a major potato processing site in Belfast, Maine was almost levelled by a huge fire.

The examples just keep on coming.

In just the last week two different single-engine planes have crashed into two different food plants, causing major fires. One at a potato processing plant in Idaho, another at a General Mills plant in Georgia.

Right now we can’t prove this is a deliberate campaign, or even statistically unusual, but it certainly warrants some further investigation.

There’s a good write-up on this story on Tim Pool’s website, and an in-depth twitter thread covering all the recent events from Dr Ben Braddock here.

*

In summary…

  1. A war which did not need to happen is driving up food and oil prices.
  2. Sanctions which did not need to be put in place are also driving up food and oil prices.
  3. Western allies are intentionally raising their oil prices.
  4. Despite warning of a food crisis, US and UK are paying farmers not to farm.
  5. A “bird flu epidemic” very much like the fake Covid “pandemic” is driving up the price of poultry and eggs.
  6. Western companies are actively making the fertiliser shortages worse.
  7. Bizarre fires are crippling large sections of the US food industry.

Taken individually maybe these points could all be seen as mistakes or coincidences, but when you put them all together it’s not hard to spot the pattern. The press may claim we are “sleepwalking” into a food crisis, but it looks more like they’re running head-first into it.

After years of saying there’s a food shortage on the way, it looks like they might be about to finally actually create one.

The Inflation Crisis Of 2022 Is Now Worse Than Anything That We Experienced During The 1970s

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Activist Post

Most Americans don’t realize this, but we truly have entered historic territory.  As you will see below, the inflation crisis of 2022 has now escalated to a level that is beyond anything that we experienced during the horrible Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s.  If you are old enough to have been alive back then, you probably remember the constant headlines about inflation.  And you also probably remember that it seemed like the impotent administration in power in Washington was powerless to do anything about it.  In other words, it was a lot like what we are going through today.  Unfortunately for us, this new economic crisis is still only in the very early chapters.

Of course the mainstream media would like us to believe that what we are experiencing today is not even close to what Americans went through in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  According to CNN, the U.S. inflation rate hit a peak of 14.6 percent in the first half of 1980…

The inflation rate hit a record high of 14.6% in March and April of 1980. It helped to lead to Carter’s defeat in that fall’s election. It also led to some significant changes in the US economy.

Compared to that, the numbers we have been given in early 2022 seem rather tame.  On Tuesday, we learned that the official rate of inflation in the U.S. hit 8.5 percent in the month of March…

Prices that consumers pay for everyday items surged in March to their highest levels since the early days of the Reagan administration, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.

The consumer price index, which measures a wide-ranging basket of goods and services, jumped 8.5% from a year ago on an unadjusted basis, above even the already elevated Dow Jones estimate for 8.4%.

8.5 percent is much lower than 14.6 percent, and so to most people it would seem logical to conclude that we are still a long way from the kind of nightmarish crisis that our nation endured during the waning days of the Carter administration.

But is that the truth?

In reality, we can’t make a straight comparison between the official rate of inflation in 2022 and the official rate of inflation in 1980.  The way that the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than 20 times since 1980, and every time it was changed the goal was to make the official rate of inflation appear to be lower.

What we really need is an apples-to-apples comparison; fortunately, John Williams over at shadowstats.com has done the math for us.

According to Williams, if the inflation rate was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere around 17 percent right now.

17 percent!

That means that the inflation that we are seeing now is even worse than anything that Americans went through during the Jimmy Carter era.

And government figures for individual categories seem to confirm that inflation is now wildly out of control.  For example, the price of gasoline has risen by 48 percent over the past year…

The price of gasoline rose by 48.0 percent from March 2021 to March 2022, according to numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In just one month—from February to March—the seasonally adjusted price of gasoline went up 18.3 percent.

Vehicle prices have escalated to absurd levels as well.  If you can believe it, the average retail selling price of a used vehicle at CarMax has risen by 39.7 percent in just 12 months…

CarMax experienced a slowdown in fourth-quarter used car sales volume as its average retail selling price jumped 39.7% year-over-year to $29,312, an increase of approximately $8,300 per unit.

And I discussed yesterday, home prices in the United States have jumped 32.6 percent over the past two years.

We have entered a full-blown inflationary nightmare, and the Biden administration is trying to blame Vladimir Putin for it.

Needless to say, that is extremely disingenuous of Biden, because prices were already skyrocketing even before the war in Ukraine started.

But it is true that the war is making economic problems even worse all over the globe, and that isn’t going to end any time soon.

A couple of weeks ago there was a bit of optimism that some sort of a ceasefire agreement could be reached, but now there appears to be no hope that there will be one any time soon.

On Tuesday, Putin told the press that peace talks have reached “a dead end”…

Talks with Ukraine have reached “a dead end,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in fresh Tuesday remarks. “We will not stop military operations in Ukraine until they succeed.” He explained that Ukraine has “deviated” from agreements and any possible prior progress reached during the Istanbul meetings, according to state-run RIA.

The strong remarks aimed at both Kiev and the West were given during a joint presser with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko. He further hailed that the military operations is still going “according to plan,” Bloomberg reports, however while admitting to the domestic population that “Russian logistics and payment systems remain a weakness and the long-term impact of western measures could be more painful.” But he also said the county has withstood the economic “blitzkrieg” from the West.

And Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now saying that the return of Crimea is a “red line” for him…

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named recognition of the annexation of the Crimea region as one of his red lines for Moscow in any potential peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end war between the two countries.

Russia annexed the southern region of Crimea in 2014. Russian-backed separatists and forces, as well Ukrainian soldiers, have since been fighting in the eastern region of Ukraine.

Russia will never, ever willingly give Crimea back to Ukraine.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply being delusional.

So unless someone changes their tune, this war between Russia and Ukraine is going to keep going until someone achieves total victory.

And that could take a really long time.

Meanwhile, global food supplies will get tighter and tighter, and global economic conditions will continue to rapidly deteriorate.

In other words, the kind of nightmare scenario that I have been warning about for years is now upon us.

And so what happens if another “black swan event” or two hits us later in 2022?

We are so vulnerable right now, and it wouldn’t take much at all to push us over the edge and into an unprecedented worldwide crisis of epic proportions.