More news you won’t hear from the mainstream news media.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have had some serious words for both imposter president Joe Biden and WEF chairman Klaus Schwab as well as others. It all has to do with debates over the Fourth Industrial Revolution related to energy storage. Battery storage of electricity and how fast electric vehicles (EVs) should become a standard as part of the World Economic Forum as part of WEF’s Global Battery Alliance.
The WEF is working to enact a Carbon 55 plan whereby they will legislate a 55% reduction in vehicle emissions by 2030 and achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2035. It is to be noted that anybody awake in high school science class knows you do not get energy out without putting energy in with some expenditure of waste as a byproduct but Klaus Schwab must be betting none of us were awake in this part of science class.
But CEOs like Barra play the game to keep their companies profitable and remain on the map. In a recent joint letter to Congress the CEOs of several major automakers, which included GM CEO Barra, they urging Congress to lift the Electric Vehicle (EV) tax credit cap. GM, Ford, and Chrysler all pledge to invest more than $170 billion through 2030 in the development of future electric vehicle technology, production, and sales.
The automakers cited recent economic pressures such as supply chain constraints as increasing manufacturing costs and raising prices for consumers.
As these credits stand now, the current $7,500 tax credit is phased out once a manufacturer reaches 200,000 EV units sold. GM hit the cap this year already and is now ineligible for further customer tax credits. Tesla has hit this target cap as well. Toyota and Ford also expect their EV tax credits to expire by the end of the year 2022.
GM recently had its stocks slide in value by 8% in the week ending June and there are other signs of trouble on the horizon for all automakers. Car sales for 2022 are now forecast to be down 17.3%, according to Cox Automotive. Cox revised down their 2022 sales forecast from 15.3 million vehicles to 14.4 million units which are actually below the 14.6 million sold in the Covid pandemic year of 2020.
American Politicians sticking their noses in things like business and industry is never a good thing as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D) (not a Native American) recently demonstrated real time. She came out with a statement that read:
“Converting our public transportation to electric is one of the best ways we can create jobs, modernize our crumbling infrastructure, and fight the climate crisis.”
She then went on with a Tweet:
“General Motors just announced plans to lay off nearly 15,000 workers and shut down plants across the US. This is the same @GM that got a huge tax break from the #GOPTaxScam and spent $4.5 billion on stock buybacks last year. It’s shameful.”
CEO Barra responded in a general way with a press release:
“The actions we are taking today continue our transformation to be highly agile, reliant, and profitable while giving us the flexibility to invest in the future.”
She went on:
“We recognize the need to stay in front of changing market conditions and customer preferences to position our company for long-term success.”
The restructuring of GM is said to save 6 billion dollars a year annually with some of that money going to future EV research and development.
Warren then joined UAW protesters when GM announced plant closures. Where Liz Warren is a proven unhinged progressive liberal out of touch with reality is the fact of the matter is GM CEO Barra recently came out publically stating GM cannot make trucks fast enough to satisfy market demand. So, at a time when America’s Democrat politicians push automakers to move to EVs, the American public is stating they want the opposite, fuel-thirsty pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles.
In a case going back to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when GM opened a plant in Uzbekistan Clinton offered a soundbite in 2011 of:
“It is a collaboration between Uzbek and American companies and it will serve as a symbol of our friendship and cooperation.”
The announcement came after the GM Foundation donated $684.455 in GM vehicles to the Clinton Foundation. Mary Barra came on board GM in 2013 and exposed Clinton’s charade.
That same plant in Uzbekistan is now involved in a criminal investigation involving fraud, money laundering, and embezzlement.
Peter Flaherty who is CEO of the watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center said, “This episode is another example of the Clintons of how, if you do business with them, they will do something for you.”
So why would the Clintons be interested in Uzbekistan?
Turns out they are major producers of cotton, oil, and precious metals starting with gold!
Then we get into Elon Musk and Twitter. Musk and his non-UAW Tesla operations have been unfairly shunned and treated less than by the union-loving Democrats.
Elon Musk has been critical of Twitter for allowing disinformation on its platform when it favors the Democrats and going so far as to outright ban Republicans who try to call them out.
In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party.
But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … 🍿
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2022
Musk uses a specific example of a Tweet by Hillary Clinton that remains where she outright lied trying to frame President Donald Trump for impeachment:
“Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”
Elon Musk @elonmusk recently revived that old Tweet by responding:
“You are absolutely correct. That tweet is a Clinton campaign hoax for which their campaign lawyer is undergoing a criminal trial.”
Musk then referenced a BBC story where Michael Sussmann was accused of trying to bait the FBI to investigate the bogus claim of the Clinton campaign.
Elon Musk @elonmusk then piled on with:
“Sussmann himself admitted billing the Clinton Campaign to pay for him to present the Russia hoax to the FBI! This is not even questioned by the defense.”
Musk has stated he donated money to the Clinton campaign and voted for her over Trump in 2016 and is now “doubly pissed off about those funds being used for lying.”
Musk has announced he has voted for Democrats in the past but will now vote for Republicans in the future.
Elon Musk has felt that his companies of Tesla and SpaceX have been improperly shunned by the Democrat politicians of Washington and that may have also led to his leaving the party.
An example occurred in this past month of May when Tesla, the world’s leading maker of electric vehicles, had been cut from Standard and Poor’s (S&P’s) Environmental Social & Governance (ESG) Index. The index is said to be a device of globalists pushing climate change and carbon footprints to have control over business and industry in the free world. created for environmentally conscious investors owing to flaws in its business conduct and, ironically, aspects of the company’s low-carbon strategy. The move inflamed Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who caviled, “ESG is a scam.”
Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500, while Tesla didn’t make the list!
ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2022
Musk has an above-average intellect and he may not be wrong. The ESG system began from the UN in 2004. The Internet offers this information:
“Who Cares Wins (WCW) was initiated by the UN Secretary General and UN Global Compact in 2004 in collaboration with the Swiss government. The initiative was endorsed by 23 financial institutions collectively representing more than US $6 trillion in assets.”
The problem many people in the free world have with the measure of carbon footprints and the ESG system is it neglects the most air polluting portion of the world, Asia, and specifically China. The other issue with this initiative is a significant number of the population does not believe climate change is man-made.
Since Musk is the richest man in the western world at some 220 billion, he could be the one man to actually destroy the new socialist Democrat party of America.
Interestingly, when Tesla lost its ESG ranking in the ESG index, Tesla stock went down. It is easy to see why Barra and Musk can get so angry when games are played behind their backs by globalists who know or care little about business and industry.
Barra always remains classy as Musk can get a little trashy. This could explain America’s love for Elon Musk.
Standard and Poor’s offered a piss poor explanation why Tesla slid off the index list not worth printing here.
Copyright © 2022 by Mark S. Schwendau
Mark S. Schwendau is a retired technology professor who has always had a sideline in news editorial writing where his byline has been, “Bringing little known news to people who simply want to know the truth.” He classifies himself as a Christian conservative who God cast to be a realist. Mark is an award-winning educator who has published 7 books and numerous peer-reviewed trade journal articles some of which can be found on the Internet. His father was a fireman/paramedic while his mother was a registered nurse. He holds multiple degrees in technology education, industrial management, OSHA Safety, and Driver’s Education. His personal website is www.IDrawIWrite.Tech.
Image by Fortune Live Media, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr, and JD Lasica from Pleasanton, CA, US, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
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