Free Republic

Te world only has 10 weeks worth of grain left, the lowest levels ever seen, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine is creating a "seismic" threat to global food supplies, Gro Intelligence CEO Sara Menker told the United Nations Security Council. "[T]he Russia-Ukraine war did not start the food security crisis. It simply added fuel to a fire that was long burning. A crisis we detected tremors from long before the COVID 19 pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains," Menker told the United Nations. Her software company, Gro Intelligence, uses human and artificial intelligence to predict food security and...

The Chinese government announced on May 19 that they are immediately putting much of the city of Tianjin under the martial-law style Covid lockdowns for which Chairman Xi Jinping will be remembered. As he has previously done in Wuhan, Shenzhen, and other major cities, residents are restricted to their homes and require special permission to leave. While businesses may not be formally closed, they cannot reopen without staff, so they are unable to function unless they are fortunate enough to be completely outside the shuttered zone, and rely on staffs also outside the shuttered zones. Tianjin is the primary seaport...

One of the biggest issues driving our economic problems is the supply chain crisis. If you remember last year, we dealt with backups at ports on both coasts, and this year the baby formula shortage has highlighted problems with the supply chain (and the government’s response to it). The prevailing wisdom is that the supply chain crisis is temporary and will resolve itself at some point in the near future. But is that the case? The CEO of a website that covers the trucking and logistics sector isn’t terribly optimistic. Craig Fuller, CEO of FreightWaves, has written an editorial at...

When Joe Biden became president, the United States was coming out of the worst pandemic in more than a century. The country needed a steady hand who could unify everyone. Biden promised to be that kind of president. But instead of implementing sound policies, Biden trashed the country. He declared open war on the U.S. energy industry on day one. He also pushed plans to print trillions more dollars and pump them into the ailing economy. It doesn’t take Warren Buffet to predict the impact of just those two decisions. It doesn’t take Jeff Bezos to recognize where this would...

US retail gasoline prices soared to another record on Monday as global refineries struggled with adding new capacity ahead of the driving season. Before diving into Goldman Sachs' new commodity note explaining how global refining will be tight for the foreseeable future, last week, Saudi Energy Minister said, "the bottleneck is now to do with refining ... many refineries in the world, especially in Europe and the US, have closed." Goldman's commodity analyst Neil Mehta outlines a rash of refinery retirements, reduced Russian energy exports, recovering jet fuel demand, and tight global inventories for products, particularly diesel, have supported higher...

Abbott, however, strikes back, and it makes things look even worse for the Biden administration. When news of the baby formula shortage first became widely known, one of the main causes, we were told, was that Abbott, the company that manufactures the formula, had put tainted formula onto the marketplace, killing two infants and forcing the FDA to shut down its plant. And indeed, that's exactly what Jen Psaki blamed during her final White House press conference before heading to MSNBC. Abbott, however, pushed back hard, with facts supporting something Psaki knew or should have known: a federal investigation has...

The East Coast of the U.S. is reporting its lowest seasonal diesel inventory on record. And some trucking companies appear spooked. The East Coast typically stores around 62 million barrels of diesel during the month of May, according to Department of Energy data. But as of last Friday, that region of the U.S. is reporting under 52 million barrels. The sharp increase of diesel prices has been a major stressor in America’s $800 billion trucking industry since the beginning of 2022. According to DOE figures, the price per gallon of diesel has reached record highs — a whopping $5.62 per...

The formula shortage is finally bringing attention to the FDA’s labeling games that have angered many moms for years.Months after distressed moms have been vocally upset and concerned about the baby formula shortage, the media is finally starting to ask, how could this happen? The short answer is lockdown supply chains and the shutdown of one of the country’s largest formula plants in Michigan over an alleged bacterial outbreak. The long answer is that, unlike the problem of sky-rocketing lumber prices or your West Elm furniture stuck on cargo ships, this crisis is intertwined with an already highly regulated industry...

No, the cowardly politicians who enabled foolish and unprecedented lockdowns do not deserve to blame the results on anything but themselves.In Joe Biden’s painful and inaccurate speech about inflation on Tuesday, he finally shifted from blaming racism for everything to blaming Covid for everything to now blaming “the supply chain” and “Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine” (that Biden baited Putin into) for everything.These “supply chain disruptions,” as everyone is painfully aware, are doing everything from starving babies to shooting up the price of everything, as Wednesday’s 8.3 percent annual inflation number affirmed again. They are also not random, and they’re...

I’ve never considered myself a particularly anxious mother. Maybe that’s why I have five kids. I’ve always understood that life happens, mistakes will be made, things can get messy, and you have to go with the flow. But now I’m faced with the possibility of not being able to feed my infant, and that makes me nervous. In case you haven’t heard the news, there is a baby formula shortage in America. In my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined that parents would be scrambling to find sustenance for their babies in the year 2022 in the United States.But...

The biggest baby formula supplier in the U.S., whose Michigan plant was shutdown nearly three months ago, claims the bacterial infection that killed at least two infants did not come from their products. In mid-February Abbott Laboratories issued a nationwide baby formula recall and ceased operations at its plant in Sturgis, Michigan amid reports of babies contracting bacterial infections from its products. An Abbott spokesperson told DailyMail.com Tuesday that 'thorough investigation' by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Abbott revealed 'infant formula produced at our Sturgis facility is not the likely source of infection in the reported cases...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Jose Diaz-Balart Reports,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) stated that one reason for the shortage of baby formula is “all the supply chain issues that are happening because we have an economy that basically shut down in the United States and around the world because of COVID. It needed to.” She also stated that the FDA’s delay in issuing a recall on contaminated formula and consolidation in the production of formula are other factors.

Main point of the article:“PSR has [made] engineer’s trains almost impossible to control. Shareholders roll the dice with communities, cities and the environment daily. They don’t live here. Trains have more than doubled in length. Imagine a train 16,400 feet in length weighing 17,500 tons: That is three miles, 560 feet and 35 million pounds. One train. And it is hauling hazmat, tanks of say, chlorine gas, or anhydrous ammonia. Just one tank car alone weighs 131 tons, that is 262,000 pounds. To give an example from history, 262,000 pounds of chlorine gas is approximately two-thirds of what the German...

Wind and solar companies have reported massive profit declines over the last year as clean energy prices have risen and new installations have been delayed thanks to supply chain shortfalls, market uncertainty and the Ukraine crisis.“One of the problems with this industry as a whole is that, since at its very foundation it is based on government subsidies and government mandates, its market value is never truly known,” said Daniel Turner, the executive director of Power the Future.“90% to 95% of the supply chain does not exist,” RJ Scaringe, CEO of electric vehicle maker Rivian, told reporters in April, according...

A pattern of fires striking food facilities across the United States suggests that arson team are targeting food facilities for destruction. This theory, if confirmed, is consistent with other engineered tactics now being deployed to destroy food abundance in America: (snip) The partial halting of grain and fertilizer deliveries by Union Pacific railroad, which is largely owned by Blackrock and Vanguard investment funds. The mass culling of chickens and turkeys, using fraudulent PCR testing to claim there’s another “bird flu epidemic” that requires the mass destruction of egg-producing chickens (and other birds used for meat). The government paying farmers to...

As you may recall, ten days ago I warned that rail carriers were declaring “force majeure” and halting shipments of grain to dairy herds and other cow herds across America. In that announcement, I also warned that this was an engineered collapse of the food supply, where rail carriers were essentially being ordered to drop certain loads in order to maximize the coming wave of food scarcity and famine.Now, devastating news from CF Industries — one of the largest fertilizer producers in the world — confirms the engineered food collapse plan is being expanded to include fertilizer shipments.According to an...

Is famine in our future? Could that possibly happen here in America, the land of prosperity and plenty?And, if the answer is “yes,” then how near might that awful future be? And what might be done to prevent or mitigate it? Right now, tens of millions of people in the world’s poorest countries are facing starvation. The blame for much of that human desolation can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the World Health Organization, the United Nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the national “health” bureaucracies that have used politicized “science” to force deadly lockdowns on...

Major U.S. automaker Ford blamed its sizable investment in electric vehicle (EV) company Rivian for its dramatic revenue decline in the first quarter of 2022. Ford reported revenue of $34.5 billion between January and March, a 5% decline relative to the same period in 2021, and a net loss of $3.1 billion, according to the company’s earnings report released Wednesday. The Detroit automaker said its large investment in Rivian accounted for $5.4 billion in losses during the first quarter. “A net loss of $3.1 billion was primarily attributable to a mark-to-market loss of $5.4 billion on the company’s investment in...

Politicians, the Federal Reserve, and Fed and administration apologists like to claim that the inflation we face is caused by supply constraints. This claim goes against the facts on the ground. According to the World Trade Organization, even though there was a collapse in trade at the beginning of the pandemic, trade in intermediate goods -- critical inputs in finalized products -- quickly recovered despite port and shipping bottlenecks. Sure, it increased at a slower rate than before, but trade was still rising. In addition, data from the main U.S. ports show that after declining at the beginning of the...

The world’s largest ocean and inland freight transportation company warns about gathering storm clouds above the global economy as potential stagflation risks emerge and shuttering of China’s factories because of the COVID-19 outbreak even as it reported record profits for the first quarter. Maersk’s chief executive Søren Skou was quoted by Financial Times as saying the second quarter is expected to be in line with the first quarter, which allowed the shipper to record the highest profits in its 114-year history. However, Skou delivered this warning: “We are assuming a slowdown in the second half, a normalization. The visibility is...