Category Environmental Social Governance (ESG)
Pretending Continues – Fed Chair Raises Interest Rates 3/4 Point, Blames Russia for U.S Food Prices, Claims Consumer Demand Still Too High
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on November 2, 2022 | Sundance
It’s all a ruse; an economic shell game being played for politics – nothing more.
Consider this quote from Fed Chair Jerome Powell today, “Inflation remains well above our longer-run goal of 2 percent. Over the 12 months ending in September, total PCE prices rose 6.2 percent. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories core PCE prices rose 5.1 percent. And the recent inflation data again have come in higher than expected. Price pressures remain evident across a broad range of goods and services. Russia’s war against Ukraine has boosted prices for energy and food and has created additional upward pressure on inflation.” (source)
You can argue Powell’s points of demand side inflation all day long, it matters not. It’s nonsense. Take interest rates to 10%, or even eleventy percent, and that will not stop inflation because demand is not creating it. Current inflation is a supply side issue, driven by a radical change in energy policy. I have made this case for well over a year, sooner or later people are going to have to stop believing the demand side nonsense.

As Powell himself noted, “with today’s action, we’ve raised interest rates by 3 ¾ percentage points this year,” and yet inflation hasn’t flinched. Why? Because there was no excess consumer demand to tame all year. Demand for consumer goods has been in a freefall since the fall of 2021, while the prices of those goods have remained on an upward trajectory because costs associated with producing them continue rising. That’s a supply side inflation issue, not demand – but Powell cannot admit it.
Powell […] “Even so, we still have some ways to go. And incoming data since our last meeting suggests that the ultimate level of interest rates will be higher than previously expected. Our decisions will depend on the totality of incoming data and their implications for the outlook for economic activity and inflation. We will continue to make our decisions meeting by meeting and communicate our thinking as clearly as possible.
We’re taking forceful steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply. Our overarching focus is using our tools to bring inflation back down to our 2 percent goal and to keep longer-term inflation expectations well anchored.”
If you want to take the pretending out of the paragraph and make it truthful, insert the word energy:
“We’re taking forceful steps to moderate [energy] demand, so that it comes into better alignment with [policy driven energy] supply.”
There. THAT’S THE TRUTH !!
Ask yourself, or anyone else, this simple question:
...At what point in the process of raising interest rates does the price of gasoline, home heating, natural gas, electricity, diesel fuel or food start to drop?
How does a 15% federal interest rate lower food prices?

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An Epic Battle in North America is Looming as The USA and Canada Attempt to Pressure Mexico to Follow the Climate Change Energy Policy
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on November 2, 2022 | Sundance
Folks, we have all watched the North American economic moves with great interest ever since the first discussions about reforming NAFTA were triggered by Donald Trump. Well, things are about to get even more interesting, and we will have a front seat to see how this plays out.
Joe Biden and Canada’s Justin Trudeau are in ideological alignment, willing to destroy the entire North American economy as they construct the new climate change energy systems for the U.S and Canada. However, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador (AMLO) has already indicated -including direct statements to Joe Biden at the White House– that he is not willing to put the Mexican economy into collapse and try to engineer an economic future on solar panels and windmills.

As a direct result of following an independent path, the Mexican currency has strengthened against the U.S. dollar providing AMLO with evidence his current strategy to stay away from the U.S. energy policy has benefit. Factually, AMLO is a soft-socialist (immigration); however, he is also a strong economic nationalist who has previously expressed a strong dislike for the influence of multinational corporations in Mexico. AMLO is not a World Economic Forum acolyte. AMLO ideologically aligned toward team BRICS.
The U.S. and Canada are going to push every possible political pressure point in order to force Mexico to change energy policy. The stakes are high. It is going to be remarkable to watch what happens as this battle takes place. The Wall Street Journal starts to notice:
(Wall Street Journal) – A shake-up of Mexican trade officials has clouded prospects for a quick resolution of a dispute with the U.S. and Canada over what are seen as Mexico’s nationalist energy policies.
The changes at the Economy Ministry are part of an effort by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to put people who support his stance in charge of negotiations, according to people familiar with the situation.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is scheduled to meet with Mexico’s new top trade official, Economy Minister Raquel Buenrostro, on Thursday. But there is a tacit agreement to extend dispute resolution talks until December, when the leaders of the U.S., Mexico and Canada are expected to meet in Mexico to review the implementation of the North American trade deal known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the people familiar said.
The U.S. Trade Representative’s office in July requested dispute-settlement consultations with Mexico under the USMCA, alleging that Mexico’s energy policies undermine U.S. companies in favor of Mexico’s state-run electric utility CFE and oil company Petróleos Mexicanos.
Canada also joined the consultations, which represent a challenge to one of Mr. López Obrador’s top policy priorities: greater state intervention and control over Mexico’s oil and electricity markets.
[…] Mr. López Obrador opposed his predecessor’s opening of the energy sector to private and foreign investment. Since the consultations began he has stepped up his nationalist rhetoric on energy.
“Our sovereign energy policy…isn’t subject to negotiation, it’s a matter of principles,” he said last month.
Mr. López Obrador has also said that he hopes to avoid a costly trade dispute. “We’re looking for an agreement, an understanding, and to avoid confrontation,” he said. (read more)
The ideologues in the Biden administration will not accept Mexico continuing to exploit cheap natural energy products like oil, coal and gas. As the USA and Canada punish citizens with inflation and massive economic consequences from Green New Deal energy policy, they cannot allow Mexico to be a source of stable low-priced goods and services. Amid other economic outcomes, the next-door neighbor contrast would be too politically damaging.
We can expect the Biden administration to work with Wall Street corporations on a level of economic targeting of Mexico similar to the western alliance sanctions against Russia. It will be extremely interesting to see just how strong AMLO can be in the face of serious threats from the USA and Canada.
I’m not talking about little threats, or ordinary economic pressure points; watch closely how the U.S threats are established. The ideologues around Joe Biden will seek to destroy AMLO if he does not go along with the energy change effort.
Watch this closely. The leftist hypocrisies are going to be off the charts as they target the Mexicans for punishment.
♦ Flashback to July, 2022: AMLO tells Biden that Mexico will continue investing in expanded refining of gasoline, and he is willing to sell that gasoline to American companies because Joe Biden will not issue permits to expand gasoline refining capacity in the United States. Additionally, AMLO affirms his position on further oil development in Mexico and then, here comes the kicker,…. offers to expand electricity sales to the United States, including supplying Texas with electricity because both the Biden administration and Texas are not developing their own energy resources.

[Transcript] – PRESIDENT LÓPEZ OBRADOR: (As interpreted.) Yes, I fully coincide with what you have proposed, President Biden. And I could summarize everything we’ve been saying in five basic items of cooperation.
Number one, since the energy crisis started, Mexico has used 72 percent of its crude and fuel oil exports to United States refineries — 800,000 barrels a day.
Therefore, we decided that while we’re waiting for prices of gasoline to go down in the United States — and I hope that Congress approves or passes your proposal, Mr. President —
PRESIDENT BIDEN: It has gone down for 30 days in a row. (Laughs.)
PRESIDENT LÓPEZ OBRADOR: (As interpreted.) — of lowering — lowering prices, yes. That’s it.
In the meantime, while we’re waiting for prices to go down, we have decided that it was necessary for us to allow Americans who live close to the borderline so that they could go and get their gasoline on the Mexican side at lower prices.
And right now, a lot of the drivers — a lot of the Americans — are going to Mexico, to the Mexican border, to get their gasoline.
However, we could increase our inventories immediately. We are committed to guaranteeing twice as much supply of fuel. That would be considerable support.
Right now, a gallon of regular costs $4.78 average on this side of the border. And in our territory, $3.12.
Let me clarify something, and I also want to take advantage of this opportunity to thank you, Mr. President. Most of this gasoline, we are producing it in the Pemex refinery that you allowed us to buy in Deer Park, Texas.
Two, we are putting at the disposal — or sending at the disposal of your administration over 1,000 kilometers of gas pipelines throughout the southern border with Mexico to transport gas from Texas to New Mexico, Arizona, and California for a volume that can generate up to 750 megawatts of electric energy and supply about 3 million people.
Three, even though the USMCA has made progress for the elimination of tariffs, there are still some others that could be immediately suspended. And we could do the same with some regulations, regulatory measures, and tedious procedures or red tape in terms of trade related to foodstuffs and other products so that we can lower prices for consumers in both our countries, always being very careful in the protection of health and the environment.
Four, starting a private-public investment plan between our two countries to produce all those goods that will be strengthening our markets so that we can avoid having importations from other regions or continents.
In our country, we shall continue producing oil throughout the energy transition. With the U.S. investors, we are going to be establishing gas-liquefying plants, fertilizer plants, and we shall continue promoting the creation of solar energy parks in the state of Sonora and other border states as well.
And we’re going to accomplish this with the support of thermal electric plants and also through transmission lines to produce energy in the domestic market, as well as for exports, to neighboring states in the American union, as for instance, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
It’s also important to mention that, two months ago, we took the sovereign decision of nationalizing lithium in Mexico. This is a fundamental mineral, a fundamental input to advance in our purpose not to depend on fossil fuels. And this will be available for the technological modernization of the automotive industry among our great countries — the countries of the USMCA.
Five, orderly migration flow and allowing arrival in the United States of workers, technicians, and professionals of different disciplines. I’m talking about Mexicans and Central Americans with temporary work visas to ensure not paralyzing the economy because of the lack of labor force.
The purpose of this plan would be to support and to have the right labor force that will be demanded by the plan you proposed and that was passed by Congress of using $1 trillion for the construction of infrastructure works. (read more)
Mexican President Lopez-Obrador was offering to bail out the United States energy crisis.
A crisis that Joe Biden has created.

The Democrat party broke the economy: Mark Levin
Ainsley Earhardt Published originally on Rumble on November 2, 2022
Mark Levin, host of ‘Life, Liberty & Levin,’ discusses how the Democratic ideology ’does not work’ on ‘Fox & Friends.’

Biden Tweets Energy Policy – Lower Oil Prices and Increase Production, or He Will Raise Taxes and Increase Regulation
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on November 1, 2022 | Sundance
Joe Biden does not write his tweets, that is certain. However, whoever is writing on his behalf sure has an odd way of promoting administration energy policy.
In a Tweet last night [link here] Joe Biden demands oil companies’ lower prices and increase production, or he will raise their taxes and increase regulation:

In essence, lower the prices and increase production or Joe Biden will increase the prices and lower production. How does this make sense?



A Nation Divided Cannot Stand
Armstrong Economics Blog/Politics Re-Posted Oct 31, 2022 by Martin Armstrong
QUESTION: What do you think about the attack on Pelosi’s husband?
GH
ANSWER: While the media is calling it right-wing fringe and their old standby QAnon, that is just the standby explanation. However, I would suspect that it may have been targeting him because of all the inside trading claims that have involved the Pelosis. The real problem here is that the country is becoming way too divided. Both sides are going to be at risk I fear after the election for I think you will find that neither side accepts the result. Violent attacks like this are outrageous and they will only fuel the divide even more. This is part of the civil unrest the computer is projecting and I fear this will only get worse in 2023. Politicians are supposed to represent the country – not one group pitting them against another. Unfortunately, this is just part of how empires, nations, and city-states collapse. Just look at how divided this is now. Post-2032 will look like a whole different political landscape.
It was Abraham Lincoln who said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” That was over slavery. This time it is over Marxism relying on climate change.
Interview: RUSSIA, THE KEY TO THE GREAT RESET – CBDC’S – SOVEREIGN DEFAULTS & MORE
Armstrong Economics Blog/Armstrong in the Media Re-Posted Oct 30, 2022 by Martin Armstrong
Watch the video above or click here to watch my most recent interview with Patrick Timpone from One Radio Network.
Neil Oliver, “Don’t Pee Down My Back and Tell Me It’s Raining”
Posted originally in the conservative tree house on October 29, 2022 | Sundance
Against the backdrop of Rishi Sunak being installed as the U.K. Prime Minister, during his weekly monologue today, a fired-up friend of the Treehouse, Neil Oliver, asks two questions: #1) Why should WE put up with the pain predicted in our future by the same people who made it inevitable?… And #2) How quickly do they think we forget what only just happened? WATCH:
[Transcript] – I have two questions this week:
Question one: Why should WE put up with the pain predicted in our future by the same people who made it inevitable?
And question two: How quickly do they think we forget what only just happened? First the pain.
Rishi Sunak conjured up and blew away a mountain of money – hundreds of billions of pounds worth of the funny, all-but-fraudulent money that is the gift only of the private bankers who have him and every other western leader in their pocket.
Now he’s got an even bigger job than before and gets to tell us we’ll have to endure tough times ahead, real pain. That’s real pain for us proles of course – and champagne for him and his pals. All of this mess is of his creation – him and his pinstriped cronies – and yet we, who did nothing wrong, are the patsies handed the bill.

I’ve quoted The Outlaw Josey Wales before on here, but time and again I find the same words going round and round in my head.
“Don’t pee down my back and tell me it’s raining.”
The same characters – those that clapped and cheered as the disastrous lockdown measures were put in place – are still clumped around him, with shiny new jobs or at least their old jobs and every bit as pointless as they were before. None of them has added so much as a jot to their store of wisdom.
They have learned nothing – except of course the priceless knowledge relevant only to senior MPs … that if you just brass it out in the face of the most monumental cock-up of your career it turns out you can pretty much get away with murder.
We can see this – in fact our noses are rubbed in the reality of it daily, every time we have to look at the same old faces … unrepentant, blind and deaf to any notion that there might be confessions required, responsibility taken for the most inexcusable mistakes, grovelling apologies offered for unimaginable damage done, hurts inflicted that cannot and will not heal.
They should be in exile on Elba, the sorry lot of them, and yet there they are – business as usual and telling us the bill is past due.
Of course the bill is past due, the gormless fools – it was them that ran it up in the first place while some of us, some of us, looked on in horror at the truck crash happening in slow motion.
But remember at all times that it’s not Covid’s fault we’re flat broke, or Putin’s fault or the climate’s fault. You cannot blame the rain if you get soaked. The rain is inevitable. You get soaked because you gave away your coat and you didn’t buy an umbrella.
We’re getting soaked, drowning, because of two years in which the establishment shut down the country and the economy. We are out in the cold because of a decade and more of destructive energy policies that mean we have none of our own and have to go cap in hand to others to keep the lights on.
The fault is theirs, our political class and their masters … those that designed, choreographed and executed the plan. The fact we are in the deepest financial hole ever dug is down to those that shut us in our homes – or at least tried to – and then conjured up unimaginable sums of money that didn’t exist and sprayed it all over the floor, up the walls and down the drains.

Sunak and his ilk paid people – not all people, of course, but millions of people – to stay at home when they could and should have been out earning and keeping the economy going. Those deemed unworthy of help watched the businesses they couldn’t attend to going bust and lost everything.
Those usual suspects threw billions into the pointless, ineffectual money pit of track and trace. They blew billions more on useless and unused PPE and on gazillions of masks that made no difference other than to stoke the fear of millions of men, women and children and litter the countryside and choke the oceans.
They coerced millions into taking medical products that – as time has told – did not work as advertised. Nonetheless they nudged and pushed and finally bullied and threatened the majority of people into putting themselves under the needle – not once but several times. Now their propagandists are out and about again – pushing the same old drugs, with an influenza chaser just for good measure.
If it wasn’t so coldly calculated, you’d have to say it was insane.
As far as I’m concerned, it should be described as criminally insane.
Hundreds of billions of pounds wasted. All part of the greatest transfer of wealth to the already rich in the history of the world.
To my mind it’s not and never was any sort of accident that dumped us here, soaked to the skin and freezing. Too many of the same mistakes were made by too many of the same people, to the same effect. Too many people all reading from the same script.
To take but a couple of examples at random, EU overlord Ursula Von Der Leyen blew 71 billion euros buying the so-called vaccines – enough of the dope to give every man, woman and child in the EU 10 doses. TEN.
More pain for more people.
And across The Pond, addled President Biden, yet to take back so much as a syllable of his nonsense about safe and effective, has more recently overseen the destruction of America’s once limitless domestic energy supply to such an extent that his nation has just 20-odd days of diesel left.
That means in less than a month trains, buses and private cars – not to mention the trucks that move all the food and other necessities around the entire country – could grind to a halt and, with them, the entire US economy. Why is America committing suicide, ceasing to be what most of us even recognise as America? That’s a question for another day.
And now, to add insult to all the injury – and let’s not forget the millions of adverse effects suffered around the world, the deaths attributed to the jabs – we have to listen to the architects of our imminent financial misery and demise telling us we just have to endure the pain … the pain they knowingly caused, are continuing to cause and that they are manoeuvring to make even worse.
In Egypt at COP27 – the UN’s annual conference for climate change bedwetters – the agenda is stuffed with plans to eviscerate farming around the world. Against a backdrop of manufactured fear about how cows are destroying the planet by burping and how the fertilisers that have enabled us to feed the billions now promise only doom on a global scale, they talk about cutting farming here, there and everywhere by as much as half. Let’s all pay attention – we are talking here about the very stuff of life upon which every soul depends.
From the same deranged ideologues who have ensured energy insecurity, comes global food insecurity. All across the developed world, farmers and their supporters – which in truth should be everyone who has even vague plans to still be eating actual real fresh food in the years to come – are protesting in ever growing numbers.
Do we see this defiance reported on the news? Do we hear those farmers given airtime to explain the folly of what the bureaucrats have planned? No, we do not, and decisions affecting all our lives in every conceivable way – about food, and money, and round the clock surveillance – continue to be discussed and made by unelected, unaccountable advocates of One World Government.
Over and over we’re told he world is coming to an end on account of climate change that’s all humankind’s fault. And yet the measures being contemplated at COP27 will surely mean the end anyway for hundreds of millions … billions of people driven into the cold and bony arms of starvation, disease, war and death by suicidal policies born of vanity, hubris and the pursuit of yet more wealth by the few … for the few.
All of which brings me back to my second question, about the apparently misfiring memories of those desperate, utterly desperate, to pretend the last two years never happened – or if they did happen, that they happened altogether differently than I remember.

George Orwell wrote about memory holing in his novel 1984 – the process by which information that no longer helps the official narrative is made to disappear as if it had never existed.
Just as a for instance they are trying to tell us now that no one ever said the so-called vaccines would prevent the spread of Covid from person to person. They damn well did say that – over and over again. That was the entire basis for the Granny Killer selfish Covidiot abuse directed at those of us who never did and never will submit to those jabs.
To claim now that such claims were never made is the most blatant and shameless of lies – damned lies – and yet it is pushed now by politicians, medical professionals and mainstream media alike.
It can only be a matter of time – presumably when the numbers of vaccine dead and injured simply get too terrifyingly big to ignore – before the same characters are saying the jabs were voluntary anyway and that it was always and only a matter of personal choice whether you took them or not. Don’t come crying to me … they’ll say in unison.
In Orwell’s novel of a dystopian future, the totalitarian government of Oceania was constantly at war with one of the other two totalitarian superpowers that dominated the world: Eurasia and Eastasia. It wasn’t about ever winning or ending the war but rather maintaining a constant state of war in order to keep the citizens under control. Every citizen had to memory hole what each knew to be true and just accept the latest version of reality.
Orwell called this doublethink:
“To know and not to know,” he wrote. “To be conscious of complete truthfulness, while telling carefully constructed lies … to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment it was needed.”
This is where we are now: listening to those who know the truth telling carefully constructed lies. Worse still, we are supposed to lie to each other and to ourselves about what just happened.
We are expected to forget that those promising to fix the disaster are the same people that caused the disaster. We are supposed to forget that the MPs, medics and media told us we had to surrender our rights, our livelihoods, let loved ones die alone on account of a disease only a minuscule percentage of the population was ever at serious risk from – and they knew it.
And yet we are expected to believe instead that they never said any such thing.
Soon enough we might be expected to forget that we ever used to pay in cash and that our transactions were once our own private business … and accept instead Digital IDs, and CBDCs and social credit scores. In a year or two it might be as though there never was cash, or privacy, or dissent, or protest. We will be expected to forget.
If we are already expected to forget how all this mess happened … then in a year or two we might be expected to forget we were ever sovereign individuals with private lives and private thoughts.
But here’s the thing: I for one won’t be forgetting any of it. I remember everything. What’s been done, stays done. What’s been said, stays said. It’s up to us to remember – to remember everything that happened – and to keep reminding everyone else as well. (link)

Lithuania holds military drills with NATO allies
Reuters Published originally on Rumble on October 28, 2022
Lithuania is staging its largest ever military training maneuvers alongside NATO allies. Lithuanian Chief of Defense, General Valdemaras Rupsys and Lieutenant Colonel Marco Maulbecker, a German commander at the NATO multinational battlegroup both said the exercise is a chance to show that NATO is ready to defend its area.

Delete PayPal
Armstrong Economics Blog/Corruption Re-Posted Oct 28, 2022 by Martin Armstrong
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There are growing calls from users to delete the payment app PayPal. Two weeks ago, the company came under fire for hiding a clause in its terms and conditions that permits the company to fine users $2,500 for misinformation. This is what the original term consisted of:
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that…involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable, (b) depict or appear to depict nudity, sexual or other intimate activities, (c) depict or promote illegal drug use, (d) depict or promote violence, criminal activity, cruelty, or self-harm (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) (f) present a risk to user safety or wellbeing, (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation, or are unlawful, (h) infringe the privacy, intellectual property rights, or other proprietary rights of any party, or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.
Two weeks after removing the penalty after mass backlash, PayPal has reintroduced the language into their terms and conditions. Basically, PayPal can use their “sole discretion” to rob its customers for any reason. Former PayPal CEO David Marcus criticized the company’s woke policy. “It’s hard for me to openly criticize a company I used to love and gave so much to. But @PayPal’s new AUP goes against everything I believe in. A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity,” he tweeted. Elon Musk, also a former PayPal CEO and co-founder, said he agreed with Marcus.
Why would anyone want to link their bank account to a company that could fine their users for thousands of dollars at any time? There are plenty of alternatives. As a reminder, PayPal also owns Venmo.
One of my employees attempted to close her account yesterday and received the following message. PayPal is making it difficult for users to delete their accounts and unlink their debit cards. This is completely unethical and shows that the service cannot be trusted.


