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Nearly 17 Million Dead Chickens And Turkeys And Counting – America’s Bird Flu Pandemic Reaches The “Catastrophic” Stage

March 31, 2022 by Michael

Can you imagine what this country is going to look like if we have severe shortages of chicken and turkey by the end of the year? I don’t know why more people are not alarmed about the horrific bird flu pandemic that is sweeping across America like wildfire right now. On February 8th, the very first case of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was confirmed in a domestic U.S. flock. Just over one month later, on March 9th, I released an article that lamented the fact that almost 2.8 million birds (mostly chickens and turkeys) had already died during the first month of the pandemic. Unfortunately, since that time things have gotten much, much worse. This pandemic is not even two months old yet, and the death toll for chickens and turkeys has now risen to nearly 17 million.

If this many chickens and turkeys have been wiped out already, what will the death toll be a few months down the road?

And what will this mean for the price of food?

Just think about how often you eat products that contain eggs, chicken or turkey.

If you had to suddenly remove all of them from your diet, what would you do?

The frightening thing is that bird flu just keeps popping up in more places around the country and nobody can tell us why it is spreading so rapidly. In fact, the USDA just announced five more outbreaks…

The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has confirmed the presence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in a non-commercial, mixed-species backyard flock (non-poultry) in Berkshire County, Massachusetts; a non-commercial, mixed-species backyard flock (non-poultry) in Johnson County, Wyoming; a commercial poultry flock in Johnston County, North Carolina; a non-commercial, backyard chicken flock (non-poultry) in Franklin County, Ohio; and a non-commercial, backyard chicken flock (poultry) in Kidder County, North Dakota.

And we have just learned that this pandemic has also now reached the state of Oklahoma…

State officials say they are investigating the first case of avian influenza in Oklahoma’s wild bird population.

Officials with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry say a wild duck in Payne County is the first wild bird in Oklahoma to be confirmed to be infected with Eurasian H5 type of highly pathogenic avian influenza.

Overall, cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza have now been confirmed in 23 different U.S. states.

This plague is completely and utterly out of control, and the word “catastrophic” is not nearly strong enough to describe what we are witnessing.

According to Bloomberg, the total death toll for chickens and turkeys has now reached nearly 17 million…

A deadly strain of bird flu that’s been raising egg prices ahead of Easter was discovered in five new U.S. states Wednesday, and the virus increasingly is threatening American poultry exports.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza was discovered at a commercial poultry farm in Johnston County, North Carolina, and in backyard flocks in Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio and Wyoming, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a release. Since mid-January, it’s been found in 23 states in flocks totaling nearly 17 million birds.

Once a single bird tests positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza, the entire flock must be put down.

In other words, not a single bird can be left alive.

Needless to say, those that raise chickens and turkeys all over the nation are scared out of their minds right now.

I just heard from a farmer that has about 400,000 chickens, and bird flu has been detected not too far from where his facility is located.

What would you do if you were in his shoes?

It just isn’t practical to try to relocate 400,000 chickens.

And even if you could, where would you go?

This flu is seemingly everywhere.

There are no easy answers, and the outlook becomes more grim with each passing day.

So what are we all going to do if this pandemic continues to spiral out of control?

Are we all suddenly going to become vegans?

The state of Iowa has been hit particularly hard. Just in that one state, the death toll has now reached nearly 8.2 million…

Iowa Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig said in a call with reporters that there now have been nine outbreaks in Iowa since the beginning of the month — two in backyard flocks and in seven commercial facilities.

The birds destroyed in the latest round push the statewide total to nearly 8.2 million, or about half of the birds killed nationwide to as a result of highly pathogenic avian influenza. Iowa is the nation’s largest producer of eggs and sixth-largest producer of turkeys.

Needless to say, the price of eggs is going to go through the roof.

If you normally eat eggs for breakfast, perhaps you can switch to Cap’n Crunch instead.

That probably doesn’t sound very appealing to many of you, so I would encourage you to pray for an end to this pandemic.

Because if the death toll continues to rise at an exponential rate we are going to be facing severe shortages.

And let us also hope that HPAI doesn’t mutate in a way that enables it to spread easily among humans.

Because according to the official CDC website, the death rate for bird flu in humans can be as high as 60 percent…

More than 700 human infections with Asian HPAI H5N1 viruses have been reported to WHO from primarily 15 countries in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Europe and the Near East since November 2003. Indonesia, Vietnam and Egypt have reported the highest number of human HPAI Asian H5N1 cases to date.

The first report of a human infection with Asian H5N1 in the Americas was in Canada on January 8, 2014 and occurred in a traveler recently returning from China. Although human infections with this virus are rare, approximately 60% of the cases have died.

I have focused on the United States in this article, but the truth is that bird flu outbreaks are raging all over the globe right now.

When you combine this pandemic with the war in Ukraine, skyrocketing fertilizer prices and disastrous harvests around the planet, it is easy to see that the stage is being set for the sort of nightmarish global food crisis that I have long warned about.

It seems like so many things are going horribly wrong all at once, but most people still don’t understand what is happening.

Most people just assume that our grocery stores will always be packed with mountains of extremely cheap food, and so the vast majority of them won’t take any steps to get prepared even though they have been warned again and again about what is coming.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible. I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.

Trump: The U.S. Is Now “Like A Third World Country” As The Supply Chain Crisis Gets Even WORSE

March 30, 2022March 30, 2022 by Michael

They keep promising us that things will start getting better. When will that actually happen? Once winter was over, the supply chain crisis was supposed to be on the way out. Instead, as you will see below, even CNN is being forced to admit that it is getting even worse. The war in Ukraine and a new wave of COVID lockdowns in China are being blamed, but those are only two pieces of the puzzle. The truth is that we are now in the third year of this epic supply chain crisis, and there is no end in sight.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump told an interviewer that he is greatly disturbed by what he is currently witnessing…

‘You go to a store, you don’t have bread. We’re like a third world country. They don’t have things. You go to buy something at Tiffany, you go to buy something at a hardware store — high, low — they don’t have product.’

Of course Trump is 100 percent correct.

Throughout our entire economy, there are shortages, delays and backlogs.

Trump himself has been personally affected by this. In fact, in the interview he appeared to refer to a wait of “nine months” for something that he had ordered…

‘They say — even me, when I order things, like for furnishings, for a building or something — they say it’s going to take nine months to get it,’ Trump said. ‘Used to be like, same day service.’

Prior to 2020, most Americans never would have imagined that this sort of supply chain crisis could be possible.

But here we are.

And according to CNN, experts are openly admitting that our supply chain problems are now “getting worse”…

Problems with global supply chains were supposed to be getting better by now. Instead, experts say they are getting worse.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which cut off exports from Ukraine and put Russian businesses under sanction, has set off a series of new supply-chain bottlenecks. So has a surge in Covid cases in China, which has led to temporary lockdowns in parts of the country.

So when will things finally start getting better?

When the war in Ukraine ends?

I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.

When the COVID pandemic is over?

If you are waiting for that to happen, you are going to be waiting for an awfully long time.

And what is going to happen if another major “black swan event” comes along?

We are so vulnerable right now, and we should have never allowed ourselves to become so deeply dependent on other nations.

For example, once upon a time the U.S. had a dominant position in global computer chip manufacturing. But now the vast majority of our chips come from overseas, and the war in Ukraine is threatening to take the chip shortage to an entirely new level…

Ukraine and Russia don’t produce computer chips used by global automakers. But Ukraine is the world’s leading source of neon, a gas needed for the lasers used in the chip-making process. While some chipmakers have stockpiled neon ahead of the fighting, there are concerns about the long-term availability of the gas.

“People expected the semiconductor shortage to continue. But nobody predicted Ukraine,” said Bernard Swiecki, director of research at the Center for Automotive Research, a Michigan think tank.

The chip shortage is already affecting almost every industry in America to at least a certain degree, and now we are being told that it could get a lot worse in the months ahead.

That is really bad news.

As shortages intensify, that is going to make our raging inflation crisis even more severe as well. There is way too much money chasing way too few goods and services, and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future.

What this means is the standard of living for most Americans is going to continue to go down. According to two prominent economists, “the average American should budget an extra $5,200 this year for higher prices”…

Meanwhile, economists with Bloomberg are warning that the average American should budget an extra $5,200 this year for higher prices – or an extra $433 every month.

Economists Andrew Husby and Anna Wong write that households can expect to pay thousands more in 2022 for the same basket of goods and services they used last year.

Needless to say, this is just the beginning.

This inflationary spiral is going to continue to escalate until we have a full-blown nightmare on our hands.

And with each passing month, money will just get tighter and tighter for hard working American families. In fact, one survey has found that 20 percent of all U.S. workers are now completely running out of money between paychecks…

Now, workers are running out of money faster, Salary Finance found.

Roughly 20% of employees regularly run out of money between paychecks, up from 15% last year, according to the survey of more than 3,000 working adults in February.

Making ends meet is going to become increasingly painful, and the shortages and the price hikes are just going to intensify in the months ahead.

Some of the things that we will soon see will be absolutely unprecedented. For example, one of Steve Quayle’s readers says that the price of eggs is about to double at her local store…

I know I sent an email out to you both in regard to the warnings I was given by several different store managers. Well I have another one. Yesterday the store manager at Price Less Foods told me that the price of eggs will be doubling and there will be a massive shortage of eggs. I am lucky to live in an area where I can purchase fresh eggs from several different people who have chickens, not everyone can.

The reason why the price of eggs is going to rise so dramatically is because of the new bird flu pandemic that has already killed more than 14 million chickens and turkeys.

We are being hit by so many things at once, and the American people are becoming quite restless.

Just this week, a new survey found that just 33 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the economy.

In April 2021, 52 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the economy.

So much has changed over the past year, and a lot of people out there think that things can’t possibly get any worse than they are right now.

But they will, because the truth is that we are only in the very early chapters of this nightmare.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

The Ruble, The Dollar And The Price Of Gold – Who Is Really Winning The Economic Chess Game?

March 29, 2022 by Michael

Russia has just made some moves that are going to change the global financial system forever. When the conflict in Ukraine originally erupted, the U.S. immediately attempted to crash the value of Russia’s currency. Those attempts were successful for a few days, but now the value of the ruble relative to the U.S. dollar is almost all the way back to where it was before the start of the war. This has absolutely stunned many of the experts, because they thought that U.S. sanctions would absolutely cripple Russia. So what happened? Well, it turns out that the Russians have made some very savvy moves that have turned the tables on the Biden administration.

For one thing, Russia has started to demand payment in rubles when it sells natural gas to non-friendly nations. A lot of countries in western Europe are quite upset about this, but they really have no choice, because they are exceedingly dependent on Russian gas. So from this point forward, western powers are actually going to be forced to help prop up the value of the ruble…

Russia wants “unfriendly countries” to pay for Russian natural gas in rubles. That’s a new directive from President Vladimir Putin as he attempts to leverage his country’s in-demand resources to counter a barrage of Western sanctions.

“I have decided to implement … a series of measures to switch payments — we’ll start with that — for our natural gas supplies to so-called unfriendly countries into Russian rubles,” Putin said in a televised government meeting, adding that trust in the dollar and euro had been “compromised” by the West’s seizure of Russian assets.

Secondly, the Russians have decided that U.S. dollars will no longer be accepted as payment for anything that they sell to other nations. Pavel Zavalny, the head of the Russian parliament, says that U.S. currency “has lost all interest for us”…

Much more interesting was Zavalny’s main point, even though it has been mostly overlooked. If other countries want to buy oil, gas, other resources or anything else from Russia, he said, “let them pay either in hard currency, and this is gold for us, or pay as it is convenient for us, this is the national currency.”

In other words, Russia is happy to accept your national currency — yuan, lira, ringgits or whatever — or rubles, or “hard currency,” and for them that no longer means U.S. dollars, it means gold.

“The dollar ceases to be a means of payment for us, it has lost all interest for us,” Zavalny added, calling the greenback no better than “candy wrappers.”

This is huge, but it isn’t being discussed much by the corporate media in the United States.

The Russians aren’t just saying that they do not recognize U.S. dollars as the reserve currency of the world any longer.

That would be bad enough.

At this point, they are actually saying that they will no longer accept U.S. dollars as a form of payment at all.

Wow.

Thirdly, the central bank in Russia has fixed the value of the ruble to the price of gold for at least the next three months…

The Russian central bank will restart buying gold from banks and will pay a fixed price of 5000 roubles ($52) per gramme between March 28 and June 30, the bank said on Friday.

But you won’t hear about this on CNN or MSNBC.

This is a move that could potentially change everything.

Once upon a time, the value of the U.S. dollar was tied to gold, and that helped the U.S. dollar become the dominant currency on the entire planet.

But then Nixon took us off the gold standard in the early 1970s, and things have gone haywire ever since.

Now Russia has linked the value of the ruble to the price of gold, and many believe that this is really going to shake things up…

“I am reminded of what the U.S. did in the middle of the Great Depression. For the next 40 years, gold’s price was pegged to the U.S. dollar at $35. There is a precedent for this. It leads me to believe that Russia’s intention would be for the value of the ruble to be linked directly to the value of gold,” Gainesville Coins precious metals expert Everett Millman told Kitco News. “Setting a fixed price for rubles per gram of gold seems to be the intention. That’s pretty important when it comes to how Russia could seek funding and manage its central bank financing outside of the U.S. dollar system.”

Others believe that this move will create great instability in the global financial system.

For example, Tom Luongo is warning that the following could soon happen…

1: At $1550 per ounce the first order effect here is that is implies a RUB/USD rate of around 75. Incentivizing those holding RUB to continue and those needing them to bid up the price from current levels.
2: This creates a positive incentive loop to bring the ruble back to pre-war levels. Then after that market effects take over as ruble demand becomes structural, based on Russia’s trade balance.
3: Once that happens and the RUB/USD falls below 75, then the USD price of gold rises structurally draining the paper gold markets and collapsing the financial system based on leveraged/hypothecated gold. Now we’re into the arb. phase @Lukegromen postulated w/ 1000bbls/oz.

Time will tell if Luongo is right or if he is wrong.

But without a doubt, things have not played out the way that Biden administration officials were hoping.

They had hoped that U.S. sanctions would crush the ruble, the Russian financial system and the entire Russian economy.

Instead, the Russians have been able to successfully prop up the value of the ruble and have made moves that directly threaten the dominance of the U.S. dollar.

No matter what happens with the ceasefire talks, I expect the United States and Russia to continue this economic conflict for the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, that will be bad for both of our nations.

And as history has shown, economic conflicts have a way of becoming shooting wars way too often. Needless to say, we definitely do not want a shooting war with Russia.

Leaders on both sides should be attempting to find ways to achieve peace and to fix the tremendous damage that has already been done.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to want to continue to escalate matters, and that should deeply alarm all of us.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

U.S. Death Toll Rises To 14.6 Million As The New Bird Flu Plague Spreads Like Wildfire All Over The Globe

March 28, 2022March 28, 2022 by Michael

In the United States and all across the world, millions upon millions of chickens and turkeys are dying as a result of an absolutely horrifying new bird flu plague. Considering the fact that global food supplies have become extremely tight and even Joe Biden is admitting that food shortages are looming, this is definitely something that we don’t need right now. The very first confirmed case of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in a commercial flock in the U.S. was confirmed on February 8th, and in less than two months it has spread to facilities all over the nation. Sadly, we have just learned that it has now even reached the top turkey-producing state in the entire country…

For the first time, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was confirmed in Minnesota, the top turkey-producing state in the nation, said agricultural officials over the weekend. Some 14.6 million birds in domestic flocks have died of HPAI or in culling of infected herds to reduce the spread of the viral disease this year.

To me, that death toll is extremely alarming.

In less than two months, over 14 million chickens and turkeys in the United States have already been wiped out by this plague.

If things are this bad already, what will the total death toll look like six months from now?

One expert that was interviewed by NBC News says that he is anticipating an “explosion” of new cases in the weeks ahead…

The measures may do little to stop the spread of the virus, according to Henry Niman, a virologist and biochemist in Pittsburgh who has been tracking the bird flu’s spread. He is expecting an “explosion” of bird flu cases in birds in the coming weeks.

“This outbreak I think is likely going to be bigger than 2015,” he said, noting that the disease is already widespread in other regions of the world, such as Europe and Canada.

If he is correct, we are potentially facing a true national catastrophe.

Of course it isn’t just the U.S. that is dealing with this. In Canada, HPAI has now been confirmed in southern Ontario…

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says bird flu has been found at a poultry farm in southern Ontario.

The agency says the farm is under a strict quarantine, and the CFIA is establishing movement controls and recommending higher biosecurity at nearby farms.

Europe and Asia are being hit really hard as well. For example, a new outbreak was just detected at a large facility in Bulgaria…

An outbreak of bird flu on a Bulgarian farm with over 177,000 laying hens has forced authorities to begin slaughtering the remaining flock, the country’s food safety agency said on Monday.

The outbreak in the town of Asenovgrad is the sixth industrial farm hit by the highly pathogenic avian influenza type A in southern Bulgaria since December.

As you read this article, you may be wondering what this plague is going to do to the price of chicken and the price of turkey.

Needless to say, we are headed into unprecedented territory. Just look at what happened to the price of chicken wings in just one week…

Chicken wings averaged $3.82 per pound according to the USDA’s National Retail report last week, compared to $2.99 the week prior and $2.54 last year.

Normally, Americans eat an enormous amount of chicken and an enormous amount of turkey.

But now that we are facing potential shortages and much higher prices, both chicken and turkey may soon be considered “luxury meats”.

For our entire lives, most of us have been able to take extremely cheap meat for granted. It was always there in the grocery stores whenever we wanted it, and before the last couple of years I don’t remember ever hearing about any shortages.

But now everything is changing.

At first, U.S. consumers were willing to absorb higher prices as inflation began to ravage our economy, but now we are starting to witness a shift…

U.S. households have until recently mostly absorbed higher prices on everything from coffee to chicken to clothes, helping companies maintain fat profit margins despite higher input. But that doesn’t mean consumers were happy about paying more for the same goods, which is why the University of Michigan’s sentiment index has steadily deteriorated to the lowest since 2011.

A trip to the grocery store is becoming increasingly painful for most Americans.

If you have been lately, than you know exactly what I am talking about.

But the food inflation that we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

Let’s just hope that this new bird flu plague stays only in birds. According to the official CDC website, the death rate for H5N1 in humans can be extremely high…

More than 700 human infections with Asian HPAI H5N1 viruses have been reported to WHO from primarily 15 countries in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, Europe and the Near East since November 2003. Indonesia, Vietnam and Egypt have reported the highest number of human HPAI Asian H5N1 cases to date.

The first report of a human infection with Asian H5N1 in the Americas was in Canada on January 8, 2014 and occurred in a traveler recently returning from China. Although human infections with this virus are rare, approximately 60% of the cases have died.

The good news is that authorities are telling us that it is “unlikely” that a strain will emerge that can spread widely among humans.

But I think that it is interesting to note that the CDC has already “produced a candidate vaccine virus as a precaution”…

But H5N1 has a very high mortality rate, and the longer and larger the wave of outbreaks, the higher the chances it could mutate into a strain that is more infectious to humans. So US health officials are closely monitoring the situation.

The CDC has also produced a candidate vaccine virus as a precaution.

Needless to say, this new bird flu plague that is killing millions of chickens and turkeys is only one piece of the puzzle.

The truth is that we are in the midst of a “perfect storm” which just continues to increase in size and scope.

I recently heard from a farmer that told me that many in his industry are scared to death of this bird flu.

Once it is detected at a facility, all of the birds must be put down.

If that happens, that can be financially catastrophic for a farm.

I am going to keep a very close eye on this story, because this is really big.

Of course so many big things are happening right now, and I expect global events to accelerate even more throughout the rest of 2022.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

We Are In So Much Trouble

March 27, 2022 by Michael

What we are witnessing is truly the beginning of the end. In recent months I have focused a lot on the economic implosion that is now taking place, but what we are facing is so much broader than that. Our society is literally falling to pieces all around us, and now World War 3 has begun. Many regard the war that has erupted on the other side of the globe as just a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, but the truth is that it is really a proxy war between the United States and Russia. And since neither side seems much interested in diplomacy at this point, this proxy war could eventually become a shooting war between the two greatest nuclear powers on the entire planet.

Before the war started, events were already starting to accelerate substantially. Inflation was out of control, a new energy crisis had flared up, and global food supplies were getting tighter and tighter. But now we are truly in unprecedented territory. If you doubt this, just look at what is happening to the price of fertilizer.

Fertilizer prices 1993-present

The spike in the middle is the 2008 financial crisis

>it’s so over pic.twitter.com/MW0Csb1mXj

— Alexei Arora (@AlexeiArora) March 26, 2022

That chart should chill you to the core, because it clearly tells us that food shortages are coming.

In fact, even Joe Biden is now publicly admitting that food shortages are coming. On his show the other night, Tucker Carlson broke this down in a way that only Tucker Carlson can…

Before the war, some fertilizers had doubled in price and some had tripled in price.

In the video that you just watched, we are told that some fertilizer prices are now four to five times higher than they were a year ago.

Here in the western world, most farmers will simply bite the bullet and pay the higher prices. In turn, we will pay higher prices for food at the grocery store.

But in poorer parts of the globe, many farmers will use a whole lot less fertilizer or none at all. As a result, global food production will be way down in the months ahead.

To turn this crisis around, what we really need is for the proxy war in Ukraine to end. Unfortunately, both sides just continue to escalate matters instead.

For example, on Saturday Joe Biden shocked the entire world when he stated that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”…

President Joe Biden on Saturday said Russian leader Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” ratcheting up international pressure and further uniting NATO allies against Putin over his invasion of Ukraine.

“A dictator, bent on rebuilding an empire, will never erase the people’s love for liberty,” Biden said at the end of a sweeping speech in Poland. “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, for free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness.”

That was a call for regime change in Russia.

Russian leaders were already paranoid about western intentions before, and now their paranoia is going to be off the charts.

Biden administration officials are trying to walk back Biden’s comments, but the damage has already been done.

Meanwhile, we just learned that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have not spoken at all since February 15th…

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov have not spoken since February 15, over a week before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the State Department told Antiwar.com on Friday.

Earlier this week The Washington Post cited US officials who said Blinken hasn’t attempted to speak with Lavrov since the start of the conflict. When asked to confirm the story, a State Department spokesperson said, “We can confirm that the last time Secretary Blinken and Foreign Minister Lavrov spoke was on February 15.”

Even during the darkest days of the Cuban missile crisis, U.S. officials always kept talking to the Russians.

So this is something that should alarm all of us greatly.

On top of everything else, Joe Biden just told U.S. troops in Poland that they will see what conditions in Ukraine are like “when you’re there”…

According to The Associated Press, Biden’s remarks were given in front of U.S. troops who “had been sent near Poland’s border [with Ukraine] to assist with the humanitarian emergency and to bolster the U.S. military presence on the eastern flank of NATO.” The words, “and you’re gonna see when you’re there,” were spoken right after the president mentioned the bravery of Ukrainian citizens. Later, the White House once again told reporters that U.S. troops would not be deployed to fight in the war in Ukraine.

Every time Biden opens his mouth, he makes things even worse.

If he isn’t careful, he could drag the entire world into a global war. Earlier today, I was horrified to learn that Biden has decided to reaffirm “America’s right to use nukes in a first-strike scenario” at such a tense moment…

President Joe Biden is abandoning a campaign vow to alter longstanding US nuclear doctrine, and will instead embrace existing policy that reserves America’s right to use nukes in a first-strike scenario, according to multiple reports.

As Russian forces continue their bloody assault on Ukraine, Biden is under pressure from NATO allies not to abandon the right to use nuclear weapons to deter conventional attacks.

Many had thought that the war in Ukraine would help to unite America and would provide a boost to Biden’s extremely poor approval ratings.

And in the initial days of the war, that seemed to happen.

But now Biden’s approval ratings are falling once again…

President Joe Biden’s job approval ratings keep falling in his second year in the White House, with just 40% of Americans approving of the job that he is doing, a new NBC News survey finds.

That is the lowest rating Biden has seen in his presidency.

We were warned that 2022 would be a very troubled year, and we are still in the very early chapters.

If the Biden administration continues with all of this insanity, things are going to get a whole lot worse. I really like how Gerald Celente summarized matters during his recent interview with Greg Hunter…

“We are headed for an economic calamity the likes of which we have never seen in our lifetime. They are getting our minds off it with the war in Ukraine. . . . You know, I wrote in the magazine in the beginning of the year, we said that the Covid war would wind down by late March and mid-April. It’s winding down. . . . So, now, as we said in the magazine, we went from the Covid war to the Ukraine war, and now to world war. We are headed to World War III. . . . There is not a peep about a cease-fire. Biden is only bragging about more weapons being sent in. Biden says we are going to defeat the Russians. We are not backing down. No one is talking about a cease-fire, and no one is talking about peace. If we don’t unite for peace, we are all going to die in war.”

A thermonuclear war with Russia would be more horrible than most people could possibly imagine, and our leaders should be doing all that they can to prevent that from happening.

But right now Biden administration officials apparently don’t even see any point in talking with the Russians.

We are steamrolling down a road that leads to nuclear war, and meanwhile the global economy is starting to implode at frightening speed.

If you are still delusional enough to believe that everything will work out “just fine” somehow, then I really feel sorry for you.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

The Skyrocketing Price Of Fertilizer Has Caused A Worldwide Nightmare That Global Leaders Can No Longer Deny

March 24, 2022March 24, 2022 by Michael

Please read this article very carefully, because it contains very important information that is going to affect you and your family. In fact, it is going to affect every man, woman and child on the face of the planet. For the past couple of years, I have been specifically warning that a major global food crisis was coming. In fact, in recent months I have been writing about this multiple times per week. At first, I think that a lot of people out there thought that I was exaggerating, but at this point the reality that we are heading into a major global food crisis has become undeniable. In fact, Joe Biden just told a press conference in Brussels that worldwide food shortages are “going to be real”…

President Joe Biden said that the world will experience food shortages as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and production increases were a subject of discussions at a Group of Seven meeting on Thursday.

“It’s going to be real,” Biden said at a news conference in Brussels. “The price of the sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.”

And Biden is definitely not alone.

If you can believe it, things are already so serious in France that the government is actually considering implementing a food voucher system…

French President Emmanuel Macron said his government is considering food vouchers to help middle and low-income families afford to eat, calling the problem a “worldwide food crisis.”

“I want to put in place a food voucher [system] to help the most modest households and the middle class facing these additional costs,” Macron said in an interview with France Bleu radio on Tuesday.

Wow.

I was floored when I read that.

People need to understand that this is not a game.

One of the biggest reasons why the outlook for the months ahead is so grim is due to the soaring cost of fertilizer. The American Farm Bureau Federation is telling us that in some cases the price of fertilizer has risen 300 percent…

Fertilizer is a necessity for farmers, allowing them to achieve the high yields needed to meet demand and keep their operations afloat. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, fertilizer costs have risen as much as 300% in some areas — adding significant pressure to farmers’ pocketbooks.

As global energy prices continue to go higher, so will the price of fertilizer.

And now the war in Ukraine threatens to make things even worse, because Russia is such a key exporter of various fertilizers…

In 2021, Russia was the world’s top exporter of nitrogen fertilizers and the second-largest supplier of both potassic and phosphorous fertilizers, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Most Americans don’t understand that when we sanction other nations such as Russia we are also sanctioning ourselves.

We have unwisely become very dependent on the rest of the world for so many things, and that puts us in a very vulnerable position.

For the foreseeable future, the price of fertilizer is going to be incredibly high. As a result, farmers all over the globe will be using less fertilizer, and this will result in reduced agricultural production.

In other words, a lot less food will be grown.

And in some instances, farmers that are still willing to pay for fertilizer are not able to get it. In fact, in certain cases that is now even happening in the United States…

Corn and soybean farmer Jon Bakehouse faces a daunting question. In years past, he’s never had to ask for what he could get or what he could apply to his crops within the usual agriculture system. But now, the situation has completely shifted.

“For the first time, we’re talking about ‘it’s simply not available, fertilizer is simply not available, some chemicals are simply not available.’ For the first time, you kind of recognize you’re standing on a three-legged stool with one of the legs starting to weaken,” Bakehouse said.

In all my years, I have never heard of a corn farmer in Iowa being unable to buy fertilizer.

But here we are.

And Bakehouse is admitting that a lack of fertilizer would really impact the amount of corn that he is able to produce this year…

“If, for instance, we were only able to get half of our fertilizer needs, it would cut into the corn yields substantially, probably at least 30%, perhaps higher depending on the year,” Bakehouse said.

That is very alarming to hear.

Sadly, there are millions upon millions of other farmers all over the world that are being faced with incredibly difficult choices right now…

The pivot can be seen in agricultural powerhouse Brazil, where some farmers are applying less fertilizer to their corn, and some federal legislators are pushing to open protected indigenous lands for the mining of potash. In Zimbabwe and Kenya, small farmers are reverting to using manure to nourish their crops. In Canada, one canola farmer has already stockpiled fertilizer for the 2023 season in anticipation of even higher prices ahead.

Meanwhile, there are other major disasters that are also threatening food production.

The new bird flu pandemic that erupted inside the United States in February continues to escalate. In fact, we just learned that more than half a million broiler chickens in Nebraska will have to be put down…

The Nebraska Department of Agriculture (NDA) announced on Tuesday that it has confirmed a case of the highly contagious bird flu in a commercial flock of 570,000 broiler chickens and that the birds will be “humanely depopulated and disposed of.”

NDA, in conjunction with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), said in a press release the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was confirmed in a chicken flock in Butler County, Neb.

Overall, more than 12 million chickens and turkeys in the U.S. have already died as a result of this horrifying outbreak.

Needless to say, that will drive up the price of meat to even higher levels.

On the other side of the world, colossal swarms of locusts are devouring crops in Africa once again this year.

This time around, it is South Africa that is being hit the hardest…

Farmers in the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Eastern Cape Karoo are struggling to control the locust swarms that have damaged and consumed thousands of hectares of grazing land.

According to Agri SA, this is one of the biggest locust swarms in years and, with the assistance of donors and the Department of Agriculture, farmers are trying everything to save their land and food.

There is so much more that I could say about the global food crisis, but I will stop there for today.

The head of the UN World Food Program has said that this is the worst global food crisis that we have seen since World War II, and I very much agree with him.

But even though global leaders are now admitting that things are going to get really bad, most people in the western world still seem to think that everything is going to work out just fine somehow.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

Shocking Numbers That Show That The Middle Class In The U.S. Is Being Systematically Destroyed

March 23, 2022March 23, 2022 by Michael

People often wonder why I get so upset about inflation. Well, the truth is that there are many reasons, but one of the big ones is because it destroys the middle class. This has been true for a long time, but here in 2022 prices are rising at a far faster rate than most of our paychecks are. That means that our standard of living is steadily going down. It is taking more out of our incomes to pay for essentials such as housing, food and gasoline, and that is leaving a lot less money for other things. Of course there are many Americans that are going into tremendous amounts of debt in order to maintain the standard of living that they are currently enjoying. But going into debt only brings more pain in the long run.

As our leaders have absolutely flooded the system with new money, those at the very top of the economic food chain have greatly prospered.

Meanwhile, the colossal gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us just continues to grow.

Today, almost 52 million American workers make less than $15 an hour…

With an effort by Democrats to boost the national minimum wage stalled, a new report finds that on average one in three U.S. workers is still making less than $15 an hour, while the share of women and people of color earning that amount is even greater.

Nearly 52 million U.S. workers — or 32% of the country’s workforce — earn less than $15 an hour, according to a report published Tuesday by Oxfam America. The data help quantify how many Americans could be impacted by the Raise the Wage Act, which would set a $15 federal hourly minimum and has been pending in Congress since January 2021.

Once upon a time, $15 an hour was a really good wage.

But thanks to inflation, in 2022 you simply cannot live a middle class lifestyle in the United States on less than $15 an hour.

The Social Security Administration compiles extremely detailed information about how much money American workers make each year. The final numbers for 2021 won’t be out for a number of months, but for 2020 the median yearly wage in the U.S. was just $34,612.04.

In other words, half of all American workers made more than $34,612.04 and half of all American workers made less than $34,612.04.

If you are making less than $34,612.04 per year, life is certainly not easy. When you break that down, that is less than $3,000 a month, and that is before taxes are taken out.

That isn’t a lot of money.

In the old days, the vast majority of U.S. adults could look forward to owning a nice home, but now housing prices are soaring to absolutely absurd levels. In fact, we just learned that the average price of a new home in the United States just rose above $500,000 for the first time ever…

New Home Sales are still down 6.2% YoY (down YoY for the ninth straight month)

And the average new home sales price topped $500k for the first time ever.

The primary reason why new home prices are spiking so dramatically is due to building costs.

Just about everything that goes into the construction of a new home has become insanely expensive, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

So buying a brand new home is now out of reach for many formerly middle class Americans, and this has caused the inventory of unsold homes to balloon to a very alarming level…

The inventory of new single-family houses for sale rose to 407,000 houses in February (seasonally adjusted), the largest unsold inventory since August 2008, up by 40% from a year ago. This represents 6.3 months of supply at the current rate of sales, according to data from the Census Bureau today.

Of course it isn’t just housing costs that are soaring to unprecedented heights.

As I have covered extensively in recent weeks, the price of food and the price of gasoline have both been surging.

Our lawmakers in Washington realize that U.S. consumers are deeply suffering, and so some of them want to send out another round of stimulus checks…

Americans already faced searing inflation when gas prices surged to an all-time high earlier this month. Now, some lawmakers want the federal government to offer stimulus payments or rebate checks to help reduce the pain at the pump.

Families with two children could get as much $300 per month as long as the nation’s average gas price exceeds $4 a gallon, according to one new bill proposed by Reps. Mike Thompson of California, John Larson of Connecticut and Lauren Underwood of Illinois. All three lawmakers are Democrats.

When members of Congress were considering the very first round of stimulus checks all the way back in 2020, I warned that if we let the genie out of the bottle we would never be able to put it back in.

Every time there is even a bit of pain or discomfort, there will be some that will clamor for more stimulus checks.

But every time our lawmakers borrow and spend money that we do not have, that creates even more inflation.

We just can’t keep flooding the system with more cash. It is complete and utter insanity. I really like how one prominent economics professor recently made this point…

“They’re flying blind, and are too little, too late,” Steve Hanke says in disbelief, an Applied Economics professor of John Hopkins University. “It’s utter rubbish and nonsense” that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell sees supply chain issues as a root cause for inflation, he tells me, as we decipher the Federal Reserve’s latest official statements on the shape of the U.S. economy.

“The money supply in excess causes inflation, and the Federal Reserve appears to be almost clueless,” Hanke shares with me as we discuss last week’s conversation between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Obviously the Chinese know this,” which is why their inflation rating is less than 1%, the former Senior Economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers articulates to me.

Inflation is always destructive.

Most of our leaders seem to think that “more money” is the solution to all of our problems, but they are systematically destroying the middle class and they are systematically destroying the reserve currency of the world.

We are literally committing national financial suicide, and so I don’t understand why more Americans are not deeply upset about all of this.

Once upon a time, the U.S. had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world.

Now the middle class is dying, and our politicians seem absolutely determined to speed up that process.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

Is The U.S. Economy On The Brink Of Yet Another Recession?

March 22, 2022 by Michael

Memories of the very painful recession of 2020 are still quite fresh, and now we are being warned to brace ourselves for the possibility of yet another recession in 2022. Unfortunately, a lot of things are going wrong all at the same time. The Federal Reserve and other global central banks are likely to continue to raise interest rates in an attempt to bring inflation down, a major war has erupted on the other side of the globe, and we are simultaneously facing an epic global energy crisis and an epic global food crisis. The Biden administration had been promising us that better days were ahead, but instead it appears that a tremendous amount of economic trouble is on the horizon.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, perhaps you will believe Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi…

The risks of recession have risen quite considerably… With Russia invading Ukraine, the spike in oil and other commodity prices, inflation expectations have taken off here and the Federal Reserve, as we could see from [Jerome] Powell’s speech yesterday is now on high alert.

That certainly doesn’t sound good.

And legendary investor Carl Icahn just told CNBC that he believes that what we are heading into could be “a recession or even worse”…

Famed investor Carl Icahn said Tuesday an economic downturn could be on the horizon and he is loaded on protection against a steep sell-off in the market.

“I think there could very well could be a recession or even worse,” Icahn said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” to Scott Wapner. “I have kept everything hedged for the last few years. We have a strong hedge on against the long positions and we try to be activist to get that edge… I am negative as you can hear. Short term I don’t even predict.”

The Federal Reserve flooded the system with trillions of fresh dollars to help pull us out of the last recession, and that is one of the factors that has created a tsunami of inflation.

Now the Fed is under pressure to get inflation under control, but at the same time the U.S. economy is slowing down once again. CNBC’s Jim Cramer is convinced that Fed chief Jerome Powell has been “dealt an insanely bad hand”…

“Powell’s been dealt an insanely bad hand. So of course he’s fallen behind. Hence why he’s said that the Fed will move with alacrity from here on out,” the “Mad Money” host said. “So feel free to blame him for not seeing what was coming. If he has to do a [50 basis point interest rate hike], he will.”

“Never forget that Powell’s been asked to do the impossible here: Figure out how fast to raise interest rates when so many things should be slowing the economy and cooling inflation naturally, yet nothing has worked out the way we expected,” he added.

Perhaps Powell is holding a bad hand.

But to a very large degree it is a hand of his own making.

The Fed has gone absolutely nuts over the past two years, and now we are feeling the consequences on a daily basis. For example, on Tuesday the average price of a gallon of gasoline in Los Angeles crossed the six dollar threshold…

Los Angeles on Tuesday became the first major city in the U.S. to reach an average gas price of $6 or more.

As the price of gasoline shoots higher, criminals are increasingly drilling into gas tanks in order to steal fuel. Here is an example from Ohio that I came across earlier today…

The site user wrote: “My friend went to get into his work truck this morning and found that someone drilled a hole in the gas tank and stole all of his gas.”

Commenters suggested that the thieves drilled the plastic tank because he had a tamper-proof fuel cap.

The man could be left with a bill of $2000 to $4000 to replace the tank.

The price of food continues to surge higher as well. Fertilizer prices have doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in price, and this is pushing food prices up to stunning levels all over the planet.

But the good news is that the elite are alarmed by what is happening and they want us to know that they are here to help. In fact, an economics professor that is affiliated with the World Economic Forum has some practical advice for you…

To deal with gas prices, it’s worth reconsidering public transportation if it’s an option where you live. Fares are up about 8% compared with 38% for gasoline. Now may even be the time to sell your car. It certainly isn’t the time to buy a new or used one. Prices have stabilized a bit, but used-car prices are still up more than 40% from a year ago, and new ones are up 12%.

When it comes to food, don’t be afraid to explore. Prices for animal-based food products will certainly increase. Ukraine and Russia supply a significant amount of corn and barley to the world market, mainly to feed livestock for human food. Meat prices have increased about 14% from February 2021 and will go up even more. Though your palate may not be used to it, tasty meat substitutes include vegetables (where prices are up a little over 4%, or lentils and beans, which are up about 9%). Plan to cut out the middle creature and consume plants directly. It’s a more efficient, healthier and cheaper way to get calories.

You don’t really need a car, do you?

And you don’t really need to eat meat, do you?

Needless to say, the elite have no plans to alter their lifestyles. They just want people like you and me to adjust how we live.

Unfortunately, many Americans will soon be forced to make major changes because we are moving into very rough times.

We will be quite fortunate if a “recession” is all that we have to deal with for the rest of 2022, because it certainly wouldn’t take too much to push us into a full-blown depression.

Things are going haywire all around us, and each new day seems to bring even more bad news. We truly are in a “perfect storm”, but most Americans still do not fully understand what is happening.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

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