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http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/the-era-of-cheap-food-and-cheap-gasoline-is-over

The Era Of Cheap Food And Cheap Gasoline Is Over

All of our lifestyles are about to change in a major way, but the vast majority of the population still does not understand what is coming.  Throughout our entire lives, we have always been able to depend on a couple of things.  There would always be cheap gasoline to fuel our vehicles and there would always be mountains of cheap food at the grocery store.  No matter who was in the White House and no matter what else was going on in the world, those two things always remained the same.  Unfortunately, those days are now over and they aren’t coming back.

We have entered the greatest energy crisis that any of us have ever experienced, and it isn’t going to go away any time soon.

So you might as well get used to high gas prices.  Earlier this month, brand new all-time record highs were set all over southern California…

• Los Angeles-Long Beach – $6.46 (Record high)
• Orange County – $6.42 (Record high Saturday)
• Ventura County – $6.40
• Riverside County – $6.33 (Record high)
• San Bernardino County $6.32

But that isn’t the real problem.

The real problem is with natural gas.

Thanks to the war in Ukraine, supplies of natural gas in Europe have become extremely tight, and this has pushed prices into the stratosphere.

Needless to say, this is going to greatly affect food productions in the months ahead.  According to Bloomberg, over two-thirds of all fertilizer production capacity in Europe has already been shut down due to soaring natural gas costs…

Europe’s fertilizer crunch is deepening with more than two-thirds of production capacity halted by soaring gas costs, threatening farmers and consumers far beyond the region’s borders.

This is an absolutely massive story, but hardly anyone in the United States is covering it.

Global fertilizer production is going to be greatly reduced, and that is going to have very serious implications for agricultural production all over the world…

“Nitrogen plant shutdowns in Europe are not simply a problem in Europe,” she said. “Reduced supply on the scale seen this week not only raises the marginal cost of production of nitrogen fertilizers, but will also tighten the global market, putting pressure on plant nutrients’ availability in Europe and beyond.”

We’re already seeing prices elsewhere rise again. The price of the common nitrogen fertilizer urea in New Orleans rose over 20% in weekly prices Friday, the most since March, a few weeks after the war began, according to Green Markets.

I know that fertilizer may not be the most exciting topic for a lot of people, but the truth is that approximately half the global population would starve if we didn’t have any…

In fact, it’s estimated that nitrogen fertilizer now supports approximately half of the global population. In other words, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch — the pioneers of this technological breakthrough — are estimated to have enabled the lives of several billion people, who otherwise would have died prematurely, or never been born at all.

Let that paragraph sink in for a moment.

The only way we can even come close to feeding everyone on the planet is by using vast quantities of fertilizer, but now fertilizer plants all over Europe are being forced to shut down because of the price of natural gas.

As long as this global energy crisis persists, the global food crisis will also persist.

Russia is normally the largest exporter of natural gas in the entire world, and an end to the war in Ukraine would go a long way toward solving our current problems.

But there isn’t going to be an end to the war in Ukraine.

Once again, western leaders are assuring us that the war will not end until Russia is forced out of every inch of Ukrainian territory.

That includes Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.

Of course the Russians would use tactical nukes long before we ever get to that point.

And once the Russians use tactical nukes, the west will do the same.

As it currently stands, there is no “off ramp” for this war.

Instead, we are simply counting down the days until it goes nuclear.

I am sorry to tell you that, but it is the truth.

If the American people truly understood what was at stake, there would be massive peace protests all over the nation right now.

Meanwhile, the worst multi-year megadrought in 1,200 years continues to absolutely ravage agricultural production in the western half of the United States.

A reporter from FOX recently visited the cornfields of Wayne County, Nebraska and what he discovered is extremely chilling…

“I’m standing in the middle of a cornfield that, if this was a normal year or in other words, if the corn was growing the way it was supposed to be, you wouldn’t even really be able to see me right now,” FOX Business’ Connell McShane reported from Wakefield, Nebraska. “It would be way up above my head. But now I look at this, maybe knee-high at best.”

McShane visited field after field in Wayne County and found the same short stalks with very sparse ears. Over 99% of that county is in exceptional drought.

This drought has been going on for years and years.

And it just keeps getting worse.

On the west coast, we are being warned that production of tomatoes, garlic and onions will be very disappointing this year due to the drought.

As a result, prices are going to go much higher in 2023…

In addition to tomatoes, other crops like garlic and onion are also expected to be impacted.

“What you’re seeing harvested this summer that really hasn’t even hit the grocery shelf is a 25% increase in the cost of the product to the processors — the canners, the buyers downstream,” California State Board of Food and Agriculture President Don Cameron told Reuters. “The onions and garlic have already been negotiated for 2023 with another 25% increase in price.”

This is really happening.

Food prices may seem high to you right now, but the truth is that this is the lowest that they are going to get.

The cost of living is becoming extremely oppressive, and countless people out there are really struggling to make it from month to month.

Earlier today, I came across a tweet from a 47-year-old lawyer that really hammered this point home…

-20 years ago, working as a server, I lived in a corner 1 bdrm apt downtown with amazing water views for $700/month.

-A similar apt now $3,600/month, more than 5x as much.

-As a lawyer at age 47 I am unable to afford living in the apartment I did at age 27 while waiting tables

Sadly, what we have been through so far is just the beginning.

The cost of gasoline is going to continue to go up.

The cost of natural gas is going to continue to go up.

The cost of food is going to continue to go up.

In fact, the cost of just about everything is going to continue to go up.

The artificially-inflated lifestyles that we were able to enjoy for decades are now disappearing, and there is a tremendous amount of pain on the horizon.

We were warned that this would happen, and now a day of reckoning is here.

I would encourage you to prepare accordingly.

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https://thecritic.co.uk/the-next-great-depression/

The next Great Depression?

Economic warfare has severe implications

The Western world today faces a serious risk of slipping into another Great Depression. This risk has arisen not because of a poor budget drawn up by a blundering government — or even due to some nefarious speculation taking place in financial markets. Rather, it has arisen due to global economic relations deteriorating to the point of all out warfare. To understand why this is provoking a risk of depression, we must reach back into the annals of history to recall what cursed the world in the 1930s.

Once upon a time, the most important question in economics was, “What caused the Great Depression?” This question started to be asked during the depression itself and continued being asked for years afterwards — roughly up until the 1980s. After the 2008 financial crisis and the so-called Great Recession, the question bubbled up again but, likely because the Great Recession was no Great Depression, it was only asked for a few years. 

Economists, being economists, always sought a simple answer, with different schools vying for influence over the best. Keynesians attributed the depression to a lack of government support of a flagging economy. Monetarists claimed that it was due to mismanagement of the money supply by the central banks. Austrians claimed that the depression was a natural economic response to too much reckless spending in the 1920s and should have been allowed to purge the system completely.

The reality is that these simple answers were never convincing. The Great Depression was an historical event, and it always demanded an historical explanation. Before the economic schools congealed around their various dogmas, this was well-known. Keynes himself would have chuckled at the later simplistic “Keynesian” explanations of the depression, for example. He had written a book in 1919, entitled The Economic Consequences of the Peace, about the Paris Peace Conference — to which he was a delegate — where he warned that the Treaty of Versailles would lead to a depression.

The depression, as Keynes predicted, arose out of the lopsided economic structure that emerged from the First World War. War on such an awful scale had completely upended economic relations — both domestically, due to regearing the economy for war production; and internationally, as various allied blocs hunkered down and shut out the rest of the world. The wise thing to do after the war would have been to try to restore economic relations to normality as soon as possible.

The delegates at the Paris Peace Conference did precisely the opposite. They viewed the Treaty of Versailles as being, to paraphrase Clausewitz, a continuation of war by other means. The Allied powers wanted to punish Germany, who they blamed for the war. They saddled the country with an impossible debt load and later occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s most productive region. The Americans wanted to be paid, too. The Allies had racked up massive debt with the Americans as they bought armaments from them during the war. Instead of taking the high ground and cancelling the debt — as allies had typically done up until then — the Americans demanded to be paid back at relatively high interest rates. 

The 1920s were a decade of debt and decadence because the international system was built on an unstable pyramid of debt. In 1929, that all came crashing down. But it was just a trigger. The debts that had been building up were the mirror image of inequitable and unsustainable economic relations between countries. Europe was a basket case economy being allowed to muddle through by the provision of ever more American loans. When the pyramid collapsed, Europe went with it.

The depression really set in when Europe’s collapse gave rise to a collapse of global trade. Between 1929 and 1933, global trade fell by around 30 per cent. In effect, Europe became an economic black hole. All the transactions she had with other countries dried up, and so her economic problems spread like cancer through the global economy. This cancer proved especially virulent in America, who was at the time Europe’s largest trade partner. Various countries, desperate to protect their domestic economies, then engaged in trade wars by imposing tariffs on foreign goods. Global trade fell even more sharply. 

Today we see very similar dynamics at play in the world today. Debt has been building up in the Western economies for decades but has become particularly acute in the past three years. This is due, firstly, to the enormous spending required to keep people fed during the lockdowns and, secondly, due to the mounting costs — especially energy costs — that are being borne due to the war in Ukraine. 

Now we look set to move into the second phase of historical repetition: the collapse of Europe. The collapse of Europe will take place because Europe no longer has access to sufficient energy for its economic needs. At first, when Russia moved to starve Europe of much-needed gas, many people — myself included — could dismiss it as a temporary development. Once the war was resolved, we assumed that the gas would be turned back on. But recently the pipelines carrying gas from Russia to Europe have been blown up in what looks like an act of sabotage. There is no going back for Europe now.

With insufficient access to energy, the price of energy in Europe will remain extremely high for years to come. European industry, for which energy is a key input, will become uncompetitive. If European manufacturers want to continue to do business, they will have to raise the prices of their goods. That will render these goods uncompetitive with foreign goods — from America, say, or China. Both are not suffering nearly as much from energy shortages. This will put European manufacturers out of business, Europe will haemorrhage key jobs, the rot will spread as would-be manufacturing employees have no wages to spend in the economy, and we get a depression in Europe.

Some might assume that this might provide an opportunity for other Western countries. Many think that, for example, America might be able to “reshore” European manufacturing. This is unlikely to be the case. If European industry crumbles, Europe once again becomes an economic black hole — as it did in the 1930s. Trade will dry up and its key trade partners will feel the burn. In short, if America tries to ship European manufacturing to its shores, it will soon find that there is no one to buy the products.

Consider the statistics. The Office of the United States Trade Representative estimates that in 2019, the United States engaged in over $5.6tn of trade — roughly 26 per cent of GDP. In the same year, trade with the European Union was estimated at $1.1tn — around 20 per cent of total trade. If Europe sinks into the abyss, much of this trade will dry up.

What will this look like for the United States? For one, exports to Europe will fall and American workers will lose jobs. This will not be a simple cyclical loss of jobs, as happens in a recession, where the jobs come back as business returns to normal. No, these jobs will be lost so long as Europe is labouring (or, more accurately, not labouring) under impossibly high energy costs. There will also be some imports that the United States will rely on Europe for, which cannot be substituted for by trading with another nation or producing them domestically. The United States will be forced to buy these goods at a higher price, thereby lowering real income for American citizens.

When Europe wakes up to the mess they are in, they will likely have to respond by trying to save their industries through tariffs. In such a situation, the least bad option for Europe — not for the global economy, but for Europe specifically — will be to raise tariffs on trade to render international products as expensive as the domestic products suffering from energy cost inflation. Once again, we are back to the 1930s where it is in each country’s individual interest to engage in trade war, yet it is in no one’s collective interest. A nightmare scenario.

Yet there is one key difference between the world of the 1920s and 1930s and today. Back in the interwar period, there was no real rival economic bloc to the West. Russia was a small player, China was an agricultural economy, and what we now call the “developing economies” (Brazil, India, South Africa etc.) were anything but developing. That is no longer the case. In the wake of the war in Ukraine, the developing world has started to band together as the BRICS+ alliance. This alliance seems to be aiming at decoupling from the Western economy as much as possible.

BRICS+ is a force to be reckoned with. It has ample access to energy — with Russia and Saudi Arabia being two of the largest oil producers in the world. It has access to core resources — Brazil is the world’s premier iron ore producer. And it has an impressive manufacturing economy to turn the stuff in the ground into stuff on the shelf: China.

It is not clear that the BRICS+ alliance will be pulled down with the West if the latter falls into a depression. It does not suffer the same problems with debt, for example. Nor are any large parts of the BRICS+ alliance faced with an impending industrial collapse due to impossibly high energy prices, as Europe is today. Apart from some potential for serious geopolitical conflict — in Ukraine and Taiwan — BRICS+ looks like it has a relatively clean bill of economic health and much room to grow in the future.

The decisions made that led to the great European energy war of 2022 will likely go down in history as some of the greatest economic and geopolitical miscalculations in the history of mankind. They will join the Treaty of Versailles and the tariff wars of the 1930s in the basket of policy pariahs that future generations will be taught to avoid at all costs. How did we get here? How have such poor decisions been made on our behalf? I will leave it to future historians to work that out — probably when the archives are opened.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-the-plan-who-plans-to-have-10-years-of-pandemics-2020-2030-proof-that-the-pandemic-was-planned-with-a-purpose/5782105

The Plan. WHO Plans to Have 10 Years of Pandemics (2020-2030). “Proof that the Pandemic was Planned with a Purpose”

This is revealed by a WHO virologist, Marion Koopmans. You will also see shocking evidence that the first pandemic was planned and abundantly announced right before it happened.

Make sure to watch, and share this everywhere.

More information, and to see all the documents in THE PLAN, go to: https://www.stopworldcontrol.com/proof

Video: The Plan ( at article )

A group of almost one thousand medical doctors in Germany called ‘Doctors for Information’, which is supported by more than 7,000 professionals including attorneys, scientists, teachers etc., made a shocking statement during a national press conference: (1)

‘The Corona panic is a play. It’s a scam. A swindle. It’s high time we understood that we’re in the midst of a global crime.’

This large group of medical experts publishes a newspaper with circulation of 500,000 copies every week, to alert the public about the misinformation in the mainstream media about the coronavirus.

They also organize mass protests with millions of people throughout Europe.

Hundreds of Spanish medical doctors say the pandemic was created

‘Covid-19 is a false pandemic created for political purposes. This is a world dictatorship with a sanitary excuse. We urge doctors, the media and political authorities to stop this criminal operation by spreading the truth.’ (2)

World Doctors Alliance: ‘Greatest Crime in History’ 

‘Doctors for Information’ and ‘Doctors for Truth’ have joined forces with similar groups of practitioners around the world in the ‘World Doctors Alliance’ (2A).

This historic alliance connects more than one hundred thousand medical professionals around the world.

They reveal how the pandemic is the greatest crime in history, and offer solid scientific evidence for this claim. They also take legal actions against governments who are playing along with this criminal operation.