Battle for Hearts & Minds – MIA Workers Found? – Oil Fundamentals – Europe in Focus – Look Out Below – Letter from Great Britain [08-13-22]
"If I don't know - I can't act" - Knowledge is power
THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: Years ago my benefactor and mentor, 'Admin' at 'The Burning Platform', generously gave me my first break to get my book out there against all the odds. Now he has posted a classic review of recent history explained in a stunning collage of pictures. His compilation gives us all hope and courage as we navigate these trying times each in our own way: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/05/its-a-big-club-you-aint-in-it-3/
BREAKING NEWS: Nigel Farage laid out 'The Battle of Our Lifetime' in a stirring speech to roars of the crowd in Dallas last week. A 13 minute video clip: https://www.onenewspage.com/video/20220807/14732733/Nigel-Farage-speaking-at-CPAC-2022-Dallas-Texas.htm - Epoch Times has the story:
"If America Falls to Marxists, Western Civilization Will Follow” - Britain’s Nigel Farage urges CPAC conservatives to fight for their country. Marxism is threatening democracies across the globe—not just America—warned Britain’s Nigel Farage during a Saturday speech to conservatives in Dallas, Texas. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are under attack,” said Farage, the past leader of Great Britain’s Brexit Party. “The biggest threat we face is from within.” https://www.theepochtimes.com/if-america-falls-to-marxists-western-civilization-will-follow-farage_4648091.html
BUT NOW THE MARXIST WOKESTERS are happily destroying themselves! "They'll never admit to it openly, but getting woke makes companies broke. There's a weakness within woke productions that the alternative media has been pointing out for a long time – they don't make profits because they are designed to appease a minority of leftist Zennials that don't have any money. This is the wrong crowd to rely on for cash flow.
Chief executive David Zaslav at Discovery is now dumping far left content like the poison it is. Another event that shocked leftists was Netflix taking an axe to "First Kill," a lesbian vampire series that no one asked for and apparently no one watched. Since 2016 the strategy of media has been to ATTACK customers in response to criticism rather than listening and learning. This hasn't gone over well. Today these businesses are paying the price for their trespasses against the free market."
It is unlikely that they will be able to win back audiences anytime soon, if ever. ZH has the happy story: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/entertainment-companies-start-dumping-woke-content-viewership-tumbles Here's an hilarious example in 9 minutes; have a good laugh to start your day:
AND Headline – "Sweet Karma: Rabid ‘Social Justice’ Movement Implodes, Self-Cannibalizes". Read on to discover how: "The façade is crumbling because it lacks any foundation. The SJW house — built on weird, self-contradictory, incoherent academic dogma — victimizes itself with its own inertia." https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articles/news-analysis/sweet-karma-rabid-social-justice-movement-implodes-self-cannibalizes/
HOWEVER I CONTINUE TO ASK: where are all the missing workers? I am not alone. In Britain Dame Sharon White, the chair of John Lewis department store chain and a former Treasury civil servant, urged the next government to encourage people in their 50s to return to work after retiring during the pandemic; she told BBC Radio 4:
“With one million fewer people in work or looking for work, higher inflation is inevitable. I guess I would encourage any government to really think much more about how to we encourage more people back into work. There’s not a business in the UK that’s not finding it very difficult to recruit at the moment because there are so many more jobs and so far fewer people looking for work. It’s a big issue."
Charles Hugh Smith has one answer: [lightly edited]. "What you are really seeing is deep signs of stagflation. Production is down because labour supply is way down. Besides not being able to get parts and materials due to Covid, and sanction-related supply chain breakage, manufacturers also cannot get enough workers. This means gross domestic production output has to fall. That means prices are likely to increase due to scarcity. This is a recession by any definition and when prices are rising anyway because of scarcity worldwide you have a stagflationary recession.
The bottom line: if workers don’t return to work the ratio of producers to consumers will remain seriously deficient, which means there will not be enough goods or services for all of us who want to consume them, forcing prices to remain high, even as the economy shrinks.
Government induced economic lockdowns taught low income wage earners an important lesson. In today’s economy, work doesn’t pay. As a result, more and more workers are choosing to stay away and engage in the black economy – but they are not economically inactive. The solution to high prices, of course, is higher prices. High prices encourage increased production. High prices also reduce demand – without intervention the system eventually adjusts to equilibrium – that's how markets work.
In a healthy economy, one not operating under extreme levels of government intervention, supply and demand eventually come into balance. But in an economy that’s been crippled by extreme fiscal profligacy and monetary madness, high prices are prevented from adjusting to market conditions. In today’s case, businesses cannot find the workers they need to increase the supply of goods and services. Therefore as the economy contracts, consumer prices remain high, forcing further contraction.
Unfortunately, at this point, the only solution to high consumer prices is a severe 1930s-style Great Depression. A garden variety recession won’t cut it. A decade of high unemployment, declining GDP, and a dearth of good paying jobs will be needed to eventually arrest inflation. And to get there central banks will need to increase interest rates by several hundred basis points."
We can expect mass public and private defaults and bankruptcies, and a brutal stock and bond bear market. Ellen Brown agrees – here is the 'heavy' technical background: https://scheerpost.com/2022/07/27/ellen-brown-interest-rate-hikes-will-not-save-us-from-inflation/ AND so to one of the fundamental problems:
FACTS ABOUT OIL: This is one for the 'Green Lobby'. I've been thinking about oil in the context of oil prices and their relationship in the energy equation, ‘EROEI’. The rise in oil prices would seem to affirm that statement. Oil prices are back around the levels they were before the Ukraine SMO, highlighting that a global recession and demand destruction are now working towards my hypothesis of a pending economic depression going forward.
We seem to be caught between these two opposite statements. The double-edged sword that is the oil industry really came home to roost this week, with some of the oil companies reporting their second quarter profits. Exxon Mobil made $18-billion in just three months, while Shell and Chevron both each made nearly $12-billion.
It's easy to castigate the oil companies for making "windfall profits”, but it's worth remembering that nobody was calling for the oil companies to be granted assistance when the oil price was $21 per barrel back in 2020. The other thing about which there is a huge misconception is that oil companies make “extortionate” profits. It's true in some cases and they are currently pretty high, but the big oil companies have gross margins of somewhere between 25% and 30%. Compare that to Apple: gross margin 43%, Alphabet (Google), 56%, and Amazon, 42%.
The hydrocarbon industry is dominated by global companies, cartels, huge state corporations, and has become a global geo-political bargaining chip. Can we hope to ever be rid of the oil companies? The hard answer is probably not in the foreseeable future. The world used about 90 million barrels per day in 2021. The known reserves of oil are about 1.7 Trillion barrels (with a 'T'). In other words, if no more oil was ever discovered, it would still take half a century to use what we know exists, although it's not always economical to extract and process
Global oil consumption fell in 2020 at the high-point of the scamdemic recession but by my guess not as much as believed. Between 2009 and 2019, global oil consumption rose every year on the back of QE; 2020 just took us back to 2011.
But in my view, from next year the gradual fall in global consumption, due to a growing deflationary depression, caused by falling consumption in our current stagflationary environment, will see oil and gas price increases even higher than today. But we can't live without hydrocarbons entirely if we try to maintain a semblance of our lifestyles, even when the global economy is tanking. We will need many of the 6,000 odd products that are derived from crude oil, like the ubiquitous washing up liquid for example, but they will just be much less affordable for Joe Public.
Take electric cars for example, around 25% of refined global oil production is used for passenger cars. The proportion of the industry made up of electric cars is currently increasing but remains only about 4.5% of the contracting global new-car market and the whole effort will be pointless if electricity to power the cars is generated by fossil fuels.
Using America as a benchmark, this review is sobering: "Combining all of these factors and data points produces what the likely number of total vehicles will be in operation in 2030 and broken down by EV and ICE vehicles. And the result isn’t pretty for electric vehicle advocates and policymakers.
As impressive as the EV sales growth reaching ~30% of new vehicle sales is, the percentage of cumulative electric vehicles in operation in 2030 would still be tiny and a drop in the bucket at approximately 8%.; said another way, in 2030 only 8 out of 100 vehicles in operation will be electric." https://evadoption.com/2030-20-million-more-ice-vehicles-will-be-on-the-roads-in-the-us-than-in-2021/
Also the oil industry is closely allied with the global chemicals industry as well as pharmaceuticals, agriculture, military ordnance, mining, transportation – in fact just about every other industry you can think of! As I have opined for a long time, oil and gas are the raw materials for everything our 21st century lifestyle requires to be sustained.
If our ruling class decision-makers would reflect for a mere second or two, we will almost certainly have to live with the oil industry for generations and sod climate change even if it's real in the long term. These arguments are among many which cause me to consider that there could be another agenda at work – but that's a story for another day.
HOWEVER OIL IS NOT THE ONLY CRITICAL ISSUE: "Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan was about more than just Taiwan’s critical place in the “tech war.” But the dominance of its most important company has given the island a new and critical geopolitical importance that is likely to heighten existing tensions between the U.S. and China over the status of the island. It has also intensified U.S. efforts to “re-shore” its semiconductor supply chain.
The British government had initially decided to use Huawei equipment in certain parts of the U.K.’s 5G network. The Trump administration’s sanctions forced London to reverse that decision. A key U.S. goal appears to be ending its dependency on supply chains in China or Taiwan for “emerging and foundational technologies,” which includes advanced semiconductors needed for 5G systems, but may include other advanced tech in future." A short report: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/08/05/big-chip-in-us-china-crisis/
EUROPE IN FOCUS: At the start of the Ukraine conflict, the EU, which before the war got some 40% of its gas from Russia, announced its intention to reduce those gas imports two-thirds by the end of 2022 and phase out Russian gas entirely by 2027. Indeed, for the past six months European leaders have been boasting about weaning themselves off gas in order to “hit Putin where it hurts the most”. And yet today they moan about inflation and rising prices — what did they think would happen? In fact they were gripped by panic and moral outrage when Gazprom announced that it would be cutting its gas flows to Europe and demanded payment in rubles or gold.
Russia is using the flow of gas in a tug of war with Europe; most wars are resource wars in the final analysis. But Europeans started this game with sanctions, figuring they could engage in a unilateral energy war with Russia, at their own pace and conditions (which is why they excluded Russian oil and gas exports from the sanctions regime), without any repercussions. To make matters even more grotesque, not only has the “gas war” not weakened Russia, it appears to have actually strengthened Russia by massively increasing its flow of foreign reserves on the back of rising energy prices.
The livelihoods of millions of Europeans have already been sacrificed on the altar of ‘gross incompetence’ displayed by European leaders or maybe by design. It has further impacted Britain, among many others, even though we have North Sea oil and gas. In 2021 UK relied on Russian supplies for 4% of gas, 9% of oil and 27% of coal.
Already other countries are restricting energy exports to preserve their own economies. "One of the EU's founding myths has been that national sovereignty is an outmoded concept and that the national interests of the EU's 27 member states can be subsumed under a new "European interest." The war in Ukraine and the differing responses to it have proven that national interests still matter and will continue to do so." This is a repeat of the classic protectionism we witnessed during the Great Depression. As with individuals, nations will always look to their own in times of stress and it looks as if we are seeing it happen again.
"As the war has dragged on, European unity has collapsed and efforts to transform the European Union into a European superstate — a United States of Europe — have been exposed for what they are: delusions of grandeur." Some recent quotes from European leaders displaying their fantasy-land rhetoric: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18610/eu-superpower-delusion
COLLAPSE MONITOR: Do you remember this man I highlighted the other week? Yes he's back at it pushing CBDCs as the antidote to the coming collapse:
The BIS is the controlling node for all of the other central planning entitles such as The Fed, ECB, BoJ, BoE etc. It controls most of the transferable money in the world, which it uses to drive sovereign governments into debt on behalf of the IMF.
Ironically, the BIS General Manager, Agustin Carstens, happens to be a man whose lack of impulse control as it pertains to his eating addictions directly carries over to his insatiable compulsion for tyranny, he says: “We do not know who is using a hundred dollar bill today.”
Busybodies like him have less than zero authority to know anything about what anyone is using, or doing, or anything about them, whether it be cash, medical records, communications or anything else for that matter.
THE NARRATIVE BATTLE: The autumn is approaching – look out below!
AND The United Nations would like everyone to be on the lookout for "worrying and dangerous" conspiracy theories - especially those that might lead people to the conclusion that SARS-COV-2 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China... you know, the thing the WHO just admitted could very well be the case, and which Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has launched recent investigations into.
We know from government contracts, FOIA records, and leaked emails that the US government was conducting risky gain-of-function research on US soil until former President Obama banned it in 2014 over ethical questions raised by the scientific community.
The 'research' included manipulating a bat coronavirus to be more transmissible to humans, and following Obama's ban, was funnelled overseas through New York non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance, whose CEO Peter Daszak secured lucrative contracts to study and manipulate bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China four months before Obama's ban.
Daszak was the guy behind The Lancet's "it couldn't have come from a lab" Natural Origin statement - for which he reportedly engaged in a "bullying campaign" - before generating significant controversy over conflicts of interest involving many of its authors and co-signatories: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/un-warns-worrying-and-dangerous-conspiracy-theories
FOR MORE, READ: “The Financial Jigsaw”, published at my academic network. Scroll for full view: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358117070_THE_FINANCIAL_JIGSAW_-_PART_1_-_4th_Edition_2020 Email for a free PDF at: peter@underco.co.uk
MAKING A DONATION will spread knowledge and understanding far and wide and empower humanity to keep the peace: https://www.gofundme.com/f/fnahvp-free-book
UNTIL NEXT WEEK: Tell Your Truth to Power: PROTECT & SURVIVE: https://substack.com/profile/29503050-protect-and-survive?utm_source=user-menu ALSO SPREAD THE WORD: YOUR DAILY COVID NEWS (cmnnews.org)
Battle for Hearts & Minds – MIA Workers Found? – Oil Fundamentals – Europe in Focus – Look Out Below – Letter from Great Britain [08-13-22]
United States D.O.D issued a contract for ‘COVID-19 Research’ in Ukraine 3 months before COVID-19 officially existed
https://expose-news.com/2022/05/18/us-dod-covid-research-contract-nov-2019/
The economic issues fill my mind. I no longer care about the diseases humans have created nor the efforts to combat them as health care costs escalates. To my mind aside from the efforts to kill us, I can hope to stay healthy by avoiding infection and maintaining my immune system.
OTOH the economics trouble me given my current inability to join work - too old, too obsolete, bla, bla. So I am dependent on the market now as the financial geniuses decided zero interest made money free. While that was a benefit to the financial engineers, Mr Joe was stuck. Watching the efforts of ESG dry up risk money for fuels means those companies will backoff investments needed for the future which will ensure high energy costs. In no possible way can green arrive at any scale in the next 20 years to cover the energy needs unless their is a huge population decrease that we will not likely allow. That energy shortage will drive up those costs. Demand destruction has already happened.
Then as you note supply chain disruptions remain a factor. Producers facing a decline in labor and oddly a real decline in productivity in those who do work means increasing labor costs and increasing material costs. The Chinese are now in a decline of their own driven by really foolish policies along with wastage in military efforts. Only one policeman is really needed and in the past the US has had the excess money to clamp down on large adventurers. But as the US declines, will that job still get done? So stagflation here we come. But this time governments around the world face their own debt crises and not likely to meet future obligations. The toolkit become empty. I fear a lot of losses and great difficulties ahead.
The new dollar, devalued to old X100, maybe replaced by those digits?