More stories about increasing prices on the horizon. The inflation we have been seeing for the past year is only the beginning. The president of Gristedes and D’Agostino Foods (A New York supermarket chain) thinks that food prices will rise dramatically in the next several weeks, and predicts a 10% increase in food costs over the next 60 days, just in time for the holidays.
No one can claim that the signs weren’t there, nor can they claim that they didn’t know this was coming. You were warned.
The news is getting more and more obvious about the supply shortages to come.
You get the picture. The USDA has this to say:
There are currently no nationwide shortages of food, although in some cases the inventory of certain foods at your grocery store might be temporarily low before stores can restock.
You get the picture. It would be a good idea to continue rushing your preparations to completion. The collapse will come rapidly, and to those who ignore these signs, seemingly without warning.
The warning signs of worsening shortages continue. Things like Christmas trees, sneakers, chicken tenders, alcohol, Lunchables, coffee, and pet food are all reported to be in short supply.
Companies including AMC theaters, KFC, Starbucks, General Mills, Nike, FedEx, and Costco are all reporting shortages that will last at least through the end of the year and into the next. With the decrease in supply, there will be price increases, the law of supply and demand predicts it.
In fact, FedEx has already announced a 6% increase in shipping rates.
To complicate shortages, trillions in government stimulus during the pandemic has increased personal wealth, with household net worth up 4.3% in the second quarter while the debt carried by Americans rose by 7.9%. So not only decreased supply, but increased demand- more money chasing fewer products. Lovely.
The Fed will have to acknowledge all of this and make some drastic changes in monetary policy. When that eventually happens, everyone will claim that this new policy “caught them by surprise,” which will cause a decrease in stock prices.
The Fed can’t raise interest rates too much, because the US government simply doesn’t have the money to pay the extra interest on the $28.5 trillion that is already owed.
Things are going to get much, much worse.
The Biden Administration, through the Federal Department of Health and Human Services, has cut off the shipment of monoclonal antibodies to Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama because of a claimed shortage. The federal government and mainstream media are promoting the restriction as “staving off shortages” due to “dwindling supplies.”
However, you will note that all seven of the states have Republican governors. One of those, Florida, is the governor that Biden threatened just last week. If you remember, he made the statement:
If they’ll not help, if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.
Make no mistake, Joe Biden and the rest of his administration is at war with the citizens of this country. This decision WILL kill people. This is every bit as despicable as providing small pox infected blankets. This is a deliberate attack against the citizens of the southern US.
If it’s administered within ten days of the initial infection, the treatment can reduce the need to hospitalize a COVID patient by 70 percent, according to medical experts. Governor Desantis has been recommending the treatment since August. My mother and brother both received the treatment and recovered fully with only minor symptoms.
Now the President is using medicine to conduct biological warfare against the south. The first civil war started over much less.
In the old Soviet Union, there was a constant power struggle between factions. There were three main centers of power in that country, and after bloody infighting, they wound up in an uneasy truce, sharing the power of the entire nation. That is why the Kremlin was guarded by three different forces, each one loyal to a different faction.
I think that the Conservative Treehouse is on to something. The US government (and to some extent, the political parties) is fractured and the factions are struggling for power. For convenience, let’s just go with what CT began with, but make a few tweaks:
♦ TEAM One – The Department of State is aligned with the CIA. Their media PR firms are the majority of the MSM, most of Big Tech (Facebook, Alphabet, Twitter, etc.), and the Washington Post. Their ideology is favorable to the United Nations. Their internal corruption is generally driven by relationship with foreign actors. Members of Team One: Hillary Clinton, Clinton Global Initiative, Muslim Brotherhood, Samantha Powers, Susan Rice, Cass Sunstein, Brookings Institute, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Council on Foreign Relations, the NFL, NBA, and a majority of the Federal Bureaucracy (Dept of Ed, Energy, HUD, etc).
♦ TEAM Two – The White House is aligned with the Pentagon (DoD) and National Security Council (NSC). Their media PR firms include Fox News, The Wall St Journal, and other “right wing” news sources. New York Times, Politico, etc. Their internal corruption is generally driven by domestic influence. Members of Team Two: Barack Obama, George Bush, Dan Quayle, Mike Pence, Wall St, Big Banks, Multinational Corporations, Defense Contractors, FBI, most of the Judicial Branch, Nancy Pelosi, the “Never Trump” wing of the Republican Party, and Mitch McConnel.
The Trump Presidency really made both teams angry. Since he was not an insider and thus not a part of either team, this represented a threat to both teams. He HAD to go. In a rare show of unity, they united to eliminate the threat he represented. He really wasn’t a great President and had his flaws, but he really pissed off both sides, and this was fun to watch. His Presidency was the last hope of avoiding the takeover of one team or the other, it just came too late.
China has its hands in both teams. They are the funding behind both teams, and are stirring the pot. We know that they are also funding dissidents in this country, so it isn’t so far fetched to think that they are funding BLM and Antifa. China doesn’t care who wins, as long as there is discord in the US. If the US is made weaker, China gets to do what it wants on its side of the world without concern for US interference.
The American people, you will note, are not involved in this power struggle. If they will care enough to get involved remains to be seen.
What I can’t figure out is where some of the more minor players fit. AOC, BLM, and Antifa are good examples of those who appear to not be a part of either team, but still have some influence in the game. Perhaps there is a third team here at play?
General Milley’s actions in refusing to obey the orders of the President, along with the fact that his subordinates knowingly followed along changed the US military from a professional military force under Constitutional authority into an armed mob engaged in a military junta. Make no mistake about it, the four men pictured below engaged in a mutiny against legitimate Constitutional authority.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution worked to ensure the military would be under civilian control. When they wrote the Constitution, they separated the responsibilities for the military, placing the responsibilities firmly in civilian hands. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution states, “The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States when called into the actual Service of the United States.”
Oddly enough, Milley isn’t the first US military officer to attempt to overthrow the US government. In the early days of the Republic, before the concept of civilian control of the military sank in, some military officers actively plotted against the government.
General James Wilkinson was the senior military officer from June 15, 1800 to January 27, 1812. He fought in the Revolutionary War and outfitted the Continental Army. Wilkinson became a key figure in the plan to induce what was then the “southwest United States” to form a separate nation allied with Spain. He took an oath of allegiance to Spain, spied for his secret new patron, and received an annual Spanish pension of $4,000. He was the governor of the Louisiana Territory from 1805 to 1806.
He continued as the ranking officer in the Army through 1812, when his incompetence and scheming were finally recognized and he was relieved.
The fact that Milley unilaterally decided to disobey the orders of the Commander in Chief, along with his immediate subordinates means that the US military is no longer under civilian control. Not only that, but this also means that no one who is in the military has any obligation to obey the orders of their superiors.
Milley disobeyed orders repeatedly. He did so in 2019 when he lied to the President about troop strength in Syria. He refused orders in 2020 when ordered to deploy the National Guard to stop BLM rioters in the Capitol.
When Marine Lt Colonel Scheller resigned his commission, he cited a loss of trust and confidence in his superiors’ ability to lead. When Army Lt Colonel Hague resigned HIS commission, he complained of “an ideologically Marxist takeover of the United States government at their upper echelons.” It appears as though they both knew more than the rest of the American public were led to believe.
As I have said before, we haven’t even begun to see yet how bad things can get. As the wheels continue to fall off, things will get worse and worse. Sooner or later, some military units will mutiny. That’s when things get sporty.
That is exactly why the Biden administration freaked out when they began to think that the rank and file of the US military may not be following orders any longer.
Now it comes out that I have been right about the US President being ousted by a coup from within our government. The entire thing was orchestrated by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Speaker of the House, in concert with, and at the direction of, the Chinese government.
In July 2020, I warned that there was an apparent Communist insurgency attempting to overthrow the US government in what appeared to be a coup that was following the CIA’s insurgency manual. (That manual can be found on the “Training Manuals” link at the top of the page)
I posted about this coup for months. In fact, I was talking about it as early as 2019.
In December, I posted that opinion over at the “View from North Central Idaho” and other bloggers laughed it off.
On January 7, I made the following observations:
I saw this and came to the conclusion that the only way the orders given by Pence would be lawful was that President Trump had successfully been deposed and overthrown in a coup.
Time magazine later admitted to rigging the election.
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years,” Milley added. “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
After the calls, Milley ordered his top service chiefs to monitor everything “all the time,” contacted Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency, and said, “Needles up … keep watching, scan,” and told then-CIA Director Gina Haspel, “Aggressively watch everything, 360.”
“Milley was overseeing the mobilization of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world,” the book states.
The US government has fallen. We are now fully owned and administered by the Chinese Communist Party.
In a comment to a recent post on signs of the collapse, HomePlace asks:
When I see reports of shortages from what I believe are credible sources, I’ve been making sorties to see what I see locally. These trips in the last several weeks have been limited to grocery and home improvement stores. I haven’t seen evidence yet here in the midwest of shortages. Are shortages regional at this point? Thoughts, theories?
There are shortages, but they are being stealthy about it. My local grocery store isn’t doing anything so obvious as to leave shelves bare. A great example:
The canned soup section was most of one side of an entire aisle just before COVID began. Now the selection is much smaller, and the soup section has shrunk down to less than half the size that it was. The produce doesn’t look as good as it used to- more blemishes, more wilting on the leafy greens, that sort of thing. There are other signs, let’s take a look:
Back in 2007, there were hints that a financial disaster were coming, it’s just that many of them were simply missed, even though they were obvious in hindsight. As a firefighter, I saw them: Multiple families living in brand new, expensive homes without a stick of furniture. They could barely make the payment on their adjustable rate balloon mortgage, so they certainly couldn’t afford furniture. All it took was an increase in gas prices to set off the entire mortgage collapse.
There are again signs of an impending financial disaster, and they are everywhere. For example:
My in-laws were in Maine for the summer. They returned last week. Just before they returned, my wife went over to their house to prepare it for their arrival. While she was there, she smelled something odd, like rotting garbage. The smell was coming from the refrigerator. Even though the display on the door said it was cold, it was not. All of the food had rotted.
After a rather nasty cleaning session, the in-laws returned home. They went shopping for a new refrigerator, and there were not many to be had. It turns out that there is no supply coming from overseas, where most of them are made. The ones that ARE getting through are not enough to meet demand. There are lengthy backorders.
Yet another sign that the economy is grinding to a halt is coming from the auto industry. GM and Ford have suspended the production of pickup trucks because of the shortage in computer chips. This is a disaster for Ford Motor Company. All Ford makes is trucks, SUVs, and the Mustang. Ford reports that its sales are down 32 percent.
Total Ford Motor Company sales during July 2021 decreased 32 percent from last July, selling only 120,053 units. Sales of cars were hit hardest, with a 78% reduction to 4,365 units. Trucks were down 38 percent to 72,574 units, and SUV sales dropped 35 percent to 43,114 units.
That news was bad enough, but was ever worse for August, as Ford sales dropped 33 percent in August from the same month last year.
If this is a disaster for Ford, it is also a disaster for the US economy. Ford is the 21st largest company in the USA, and GM is the 22nd.
We are seeing shortages in all sorts of things: supplies are hard to find. Chicken, lumber, microchips, gas, steel, metals, chlorine, and ketchup packets are all in short supply. We shut down the world’s economy, and it is not wanting to restart. We can’t even get people to return to work.
“Experts” can argue about it for months, but no matter the cause, the result is the same. This slowdown of the economy is going to continue for months, perhaps several years. How many businesses will fail as a result is anyone’s guess. One thing is for sure, though. The economy is going to get much, much worse. Inflation is going to increase markedly as the law of supply and demand begins to take hold. Once Suzy Soccermom figures out that there is a problem, expect panic buying and even more shortages as she begins to panic shop for things.
The things that begin to skyrocket in price and see scarcity will probably not make sense. Remember the toilet paper shortage of last year? Like that, but with more products being involved.
I am getting completely out of the stock market. We began a complete sell off last week. As soon as funds are released, we are moving into other investments, things that are not based in the US dollar.
Exactly twenty years ago. I still remember that morning in more detail than all but of a few of the mornings that have come since. The sky was a beautiful blue, the sun was warm, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A typical Central Florida day. My shift, C shift, had just started our 24 hour workday.
I was driving Engine 2 that morning. Dennis was riding in the seat next to me as the Lieutenant, and Justin was the back seat firefighter. Our shift had begun at 7:30 that morning as it always did. We did our morning routine as we always do. At 8:30, we left the station to do annual flow testing of fire hydrants.
By 8:45, we were behind the Winn Dixie and just about to test our first hydrant. Our Battalion Chief called us and told us to return to the station and turn on the TV. I remember jokingly asking Dennis who the guy on the radio was and what they had done to the Chief, since he would never tell us to watch TV during the day.
We arrived back in the station just in time to see the second plane hit the south tower. I remember watching Fox news and seeing them switch to the DC bureau, where reporters said they could see a column of smoke. Things were happening so fast, I couldn’t figure out what that smoke was coming from. It was then that a fellow firefighter told me that the Pentagon had been hit.
The chief called us, and when I was on the phone with him, the first tower fell. The chief said to me, “Oh my God. 30,000 people just died.” I remember being stunned that so many people could be in a building.
By noon, we had an armed SWAT officer with an MP-5 riding along with us on all of our calls “for security.”
For weeks, we firefighters were stunned at the loss of 343 firefighters. I felt a sense of awe that the guys who went into that second tower after watching the first one fall went into that building, in awe of the guys who were in the second tower when that first one fell, all the while knowing that they would never come out of the second tower. What was going through their minds? I asked myself if I could make the same choice, if I *knew* that I would not come out?
We all wanted to be able to say yes. It isn’t the same thing when you go into an ordinary fire. Firefighters are a cocky, professional bunch. When we run into a burning building, we tell ourselves that we are trained and experienced enough that it will not happen to us. Not so those guys in the towers. They went in KNOWING that they wouldn’t come out. That is a time that you don’t know what you would do until the moment of truth comes.
I just hoped that I would have the fortitude to make the choice that needed to be made, to have the courage to choose duty and honor over self preservation, and the fortune to never be placed in that position. I hoped that I would never have to make that choice.
I spent the majority of my adult life in one uniform or another, dedicated to the protection of American lives and values. I spent six years in the Navy, doing two combat tours in the Persian gulf. I wasn’t a big hero or anything. I, like millions of others did my job. After that, I spent two decades in a firefighter’s uniform. I that time, I ran into hundreds of burning buildings, jumped into a dozen lakes, thousands of medical scenes, and 22 natural disasters. I was injured three times in the line of duty. I saw a couple of thousand dead bodies, dozens of shootings and stabbings, and saved more than a few lives.
In 2011, I retired. I had seen enough death, misery, and blood for one lifetime. I thought that the time of risking life and limb for the good of this nation and its people was over. I had given enough. I deserved to be left alone to grow old and enjoy the rest of my life in as much peace as I could manage.
All I want is to be left alone to grow old in peace. The events of the past 18 months make me believe that this won’t happen. I fear that I may have to make that choice after all.