MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
The mainstream media has once again believed they have been triumphant in quashing a so-called conspiracy theory, which even had CNN scrambling to prove that it was Fox News responsible for spreading lies about President Biden and his plans to curb greenhouse gasses.
They are calling it the Hamburglar conspiracy – where so-called evil conspiratorial right-wing journalists have been passing around false claims that Biden would place limits on how much red meat Americans can consume as part of his stated goal to sharply reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
It first was reported in the Daily Mail that Biden was trying to limit people to eating one hamburger a month — an allegation that could seriously undermine his climate change plan before he even announced it.
Yet two days after the Daily Mail brought up the topic in a report last Thursday, Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, was tweeting, “Why doesn’t Joe stay out of my kitchen?”
The Mail’s story, by Emily Crane, was headlined “How Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH, cost $3.5K a year per person in taxes, force you to spend $55K on an electric car and ‘crush’ American jobs.”
Crane cited a January 2020 study by the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, which discussed how a transition to a more plant-based diet by Americans could cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. The paper estimated the environmental impact of a 90% reduction in beef consumption.
The Associated Press stated that this story was nothing more than a conspiracy theory and that there was no proof that this was on the agenda of Biden’s Green Plan.
Whenever I see stories like this I often recall why these stories end up being reported in the first place – there is always a reason for a conspiracy theory and believe it or not most of them are generated by reports that the mainstream media create themselves.
The Biden administration can pretend all they want that there is no precedent for this conspiracy theory – but looking back at the comments by Kamala Harris and her fondness for cheeseburgers – maybe the reason this report has been revealed.
Need we remind everyone that last year CNN decided to give it a marathon-length town hall: seven hours in which 10 top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination shared their plans for cutting carbon emissions, dealing with potentially catastrophic weather, and saving the planet for the generations to come.
The conversation turned to the discussion of whether or not a person has a right to consume a cheeseburger.
While discussing red meats, dietary requirements, and beef production, it seemed they were debating whether the Democrats would uphold the right to backyard barbecues or require draconian enforcement of meat rationing to save the planet from greenhouse gasses.
Asked about climate activism and her stand on the beef and cheese industries, Amy Klobuchar, went out big. “I am hopeful that we’re going to be able to [cut carbon emissions] in a way—especially when I am president—that we can continue to have hamburgers and cheese.”
Kamala Harris, lest Americans think otherwise, conceded she loves cheeseburgers. She didn’t seem too proud of it—feigning her meat guilt in front of some militant Climate Change vegan.
But she went even bigger stating if she were president, she would definitely change the dietary guidelines “to reduce red meat specifically or to ban its consumption all together.”
She then later stated that meat production has a detrimental impact on the environment and that there should be plans in place to curtail the consumption of meat so that it will improve the environmental impact.
This is in line with the new Codex Alimentarius plan that was proposed in 2015 during the 2030 Summit where the United Nation’s stated that there should be dietary guidelines in place for the entire world which includes the regulations of animal based proteins.
Last year, there was a push by Climate Change adherents to limit or even ban the eating of dairy and beef products – there was a trend on social media of what is called steak and dairy shaming of people saying that it harms the environment.
Before Climate debate was replaced with the COVID-19 debate there was a push for the 2030 ideal diet proposed by the technocrats which literally limits and then virtually eliminates animal proteins from the human diet.
The thing that is most disconcerting is at least one in five people could not afford science’s ‘ideal diet’ designed to feed 10 billion people without hurting the planet, according to a study.
But the conspiracy theory so we are told has no basis in fact and that there was never a discussion about red meat consumption by anyone in the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, to add more conspiracy fodder, there was a story that has been floating around that the state of Oregon wants to put a ban on livestock.
Now, I am really wondering about the validity of this but allegedly Oregon Bill IP13 would criminalize raising food animals in the state and reclassify animal husbandry practices as “sexual assault.” The bill specifies that animals can only be eaten after dying of natural causes (at which point, aged/diseased meat is not good). Oregon’s 12,000 beef producers raising about 1.3 million head of cattle are slated for elimination, as traditional farming and ranching is shut down in favor of lab-grown meat and indoor farms owned by the technocrats—a perfect way to force the population into perfect slavery.
While this sounds crazy, it is of course coming from the state of Oregon where the idea of being progressive is a license for legislating stupidity.
Apart from all these rumors of where’s the beef also comes the threat of scarcity and how the supply chain of products that you buy is falling apart –and prices on these items are going to soar as well.
The other day I had a friend tell me that she was trying to find Cat litter in the yellow tub with the red lid. She said that no matter where she went, she couldn’t find the brand she needed or wanted.
I could relate because I had to also buy cat litter and I preferred the yellow tuna with the red lid but instead, I had to buy something I didn’t want because I went to two stores and they did not have it.
Lately, I have noticed that when I shop it is becoming a crap shoot and more and more I am being forced to avoid name brands items I can count on and being forced to buy store brand items.
It is not that the store brand items are not good – it is just that when you invest yourself into a certain brand – store brand items just don’t seem to be the same.
Maybe it is psychological but more and more I am beginning to see the supply chains of products diminishing and I was curious as to why?
A while back when I used the ketchup packet as an object lesson in scarcity, there was an uproar of sorts from a few people that wrote me and told me that I was overreacting and that my warnings of a food shortage to come was some underhanded attack against President Biden and a ploy to sell food prep.
I was told that I was pushing fake news and that there was no ketchup shortage. To be honest I looked back at the transcript of the show and lo and behold – I was not selling my audience on a Ketchup shortage; in fact, the so-called packet shortage was attributed to Heinz ketchup only and that they said that they would have to increase capacity.
I was hopefully quite clear about what I was talking about and that is cumulative shortages could lead to a bigger and worse food implosion.
Even when I opened the phones, the listeners called to say that they were noticing random foods that were missing or out of stock for no real reason. One guy even complained that he could not find his favorite mozzarella sauce. We finally realized that he was looking for Alfredo sauce –and to this day I still get emails and private messages joking about that call.
Over the weekend I was looking for ground beef and I wanted to get a couple of pounds of it but I wanted it to have more fat because everyone knows that ground beef has more flavor when it has more fat. However, the butcher said that all they had was the leaner burger and it was nearly 6 dollars a pound.
So two pounds cost a little under what a rib eye steak would cost. I also wanted to plan a chicken dinner for my wife but there were no whole chickens in the bin and so I bought a whole bunch of thighs – more than we could possibly eat because that was all that was available.
It just seems that more and more we are seeing less and less of what we want at the supermarket –and more and more excuses as to why.
The more I thought about the more I felt it was time for a follow up to the show I did called “Death By Ketchup.”
And yes in case you are wondering I will unabashedly use it as an excuse to tell you about the deals you can get at http://www.preparewithgroundzero.com – in fact I would bank on the idea that we may eventually see a limited supply of that food soon.
Now that I have made my shameless plug – I wanted to share with you what I have discovered and what is to come as we wonder why certain foods are having a hard time leaving the farm and heading for our table.
One contributor is that fact that US importers are facing extreme delays as container capacity is maxing out on the coast.
It has been reported that the number of container ships stuck at anchor off Los Angeles and Long Beach is down to around 20 per day, from 30 a few months ago. But according to the experts there is no sign that things will improve.
Nerijus Poskus, who is the vice president of global ocean at freight forwarder Flexport. Is saying “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse.”
He reported that for the month of May, everything on the Trans-Pacific is basically sold out. We had one client who needed something loaded in May that was extremely urgent and who was ready to pay $15,000 per container. I couldn’t get it loaded — and we are a growing company that ships a lot of TEUs [twenty-foot equivalent units]. Price doesn’t always even matter anymore.”
So things are just waiting to be loaded and sent but it isn’t making it to the stores.
This includes perishable items – so some things are just sitting in the docks and spoiling.
Poskus said that Trans-Pacific import volumes are still rising. He noted that January trans-Pacific imports were up 10% versus 2019 (comparisons to 2020 numbers are skewed by COVID) and 13.5% in February, then jumped 51% in March. “So, we’re now at 1.5 times pre-pandemic levels.”
With imports far outpacing retail sales growth, he attributed volumes to inventory restocking. “The restocking is actually affecting the trade even more than growth in demand. That tells me that this will last even longer. Let’s say U.S. consumer demand slows down in Q3 and Q4. That’s not expected, but even if it does, [capacity availability and rates] shouldn’t improve quickly, simply because of the huge restocking demand.”
Poskus also believes there is a growing export backlog piling up each day in Asia, awaiting available ship slots. If that backlog grows too big, he said, “I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.”
As a result of the backlog and restocking demand, he thinks “prices will remain high and shipping will probably remain difficult for the rest of this year. And then after that, you have the peak for Chinese New Year in 2022.”
He said that the situation today is the worst he’s witnessed — and he believes it’s about to get even more severe.
“Buckle up. The month of May will be the worst people have ever seen,” he predicted. Because some shippers will have to wait in line behind the growing backlog in Asia, he expects “what’s going to happen soon is that some importers won’t even be able to get on the boat. For them, it will almost feel like trade is coming to a halt.”
This could be one of several reasons why you can’t get your mozzarella sauce or even your red lidded cat litter – but this is not the only thing that will be a scarcity – agribusinesses are gearing up for what is being called the biggest staged scarcity ploy ever pulled on the world – and the players involved are all familiar.
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and new genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.
Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavor – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is repackaging the dis-possessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.
Controlling what we eat and what we use is part of the strategies that have been proposed by the World Economic Forum.
Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.
Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture and farmers’ corporate dependency with the roll-out of genetically engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms).
It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.
Regardless, the industry and its well-funded lobbyists and bought career scientists continue to spin the line that GM crops are a marvelous success and that the world needs even more of them to avoid a global food shortage. GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.
New gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.
It does not want plants, animals and micro-organisms created with gene-editing to be subject to safety checks, monitoring or consumer labeling. This is concerning given the real dangers that these techniques pose.
Many peer-reviewed research papers now call into question industry claims about the ‘precision’, safety and benefits of gene-edited organisms
These new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. Intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.
In addition to these concerns, a new paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.
The industry wants its new techniques to be unregulated, thereby making gene-edited GMOs faster to develop, more profitable and hidden from consumers when purchasing items in stores. At the same time, the costly herbicide treadmill will be reinforced for farmers.
None of this is meant to imply that new technology is bad in itself. The issue is who owns and controls the technology and what are the underlying intentions. By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and profit and contempt for democratic accountability.
Much like the new vaccines treat our bodies like operating systems the foods we eat will be like eating digital genetically modified bits – and who knows what that will eventually do to our bodies.
The idea of full spectrum control is the goal of the technocrats. They already are convincing you that they can control the air, modify the climate, genetically modify foods and create scarcity for the people to demand their food and water sources.
Whether through all aspects of data control (soil quality, consumer preferences, weather, etc), e-commerce monopolies, corporate land ownership, seed biopiracy and patenting, synthetic food or the eradication of the public sector’s role in ensuring food security and national food sovereignty (as we could see in India with new farm legislation), Bill Gates and his corporate cronies seek to gain full control over the global food system.
Smallholder peasant farming is to be eradicated as the big-tech giants and agribusiness impose lab-grown food, GM seeds, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.
We could see farmerless industrial-scale farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food.
The displacement of a food-producing peasantry (and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and local food security) was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.
In the meantime – the change to all of this synthetic manipulation will hit people hard financially as food sources will go up in price and scarcity scares will create panic buying.
We are also being told that Climate Change is responsible for water scarcity as well.
Drought conditions are worsening in the state of California. Hundreds of farmers who rely on a massive irrigation project that spans the Oregon-California border learned Wednesday they will get a tiny fraction of the water they need amid the worst drought in decades, as federal regulators attempt to balance the needs of agriculture against federally threatened and endangered fish species that are central to the heritage of several tribes.
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency in two Northern California counties where grape growers and wineries are major users, an order that came in response to arid conditions affecting much of the state and the U.S. West.
The declaration is targeted to Mendocino and Sonoma counties, where drought conditions are especially bad, rather than statewide, as some officials and farmers in the agricultural-rich Central Valley had hoped. But Newsom said a broader drought declaration could come as conditions change.
California water officials have moved to stop Nestlé from siphoning millions of gallons of water out of California’s San Bernardino forest, which it bottles and sells as Arrowhead brand waterundefined this will most definitely affect the bottled water market – water that people stock up on in case of emergencies.
Nestle’s bottled water fight in California mirrors similar fights in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Maine and Michigan. Across the US, conservationists have accused Nestlé of leveraging vast lobbying funds to bend local and federal officials to its will.
Now you can believe me and prepare for what is coming and what is already happening.
Americans should be trusted to make their own choices about how they want to live, what news to read, and what food to eat.
But we are now seeing a limited amount of scarcity now and rumors of meat reductions, food reductions, supply chain failures and lack of water.
As I said back when ketchup packets were all we had to worry about, what is happening is all cumulative.
It may have been a small metaphor but as you can see big things end up coming in small packages.
