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The British people are facing a serious cost-crunch in terms of their cost of living as heating costs surge up to 50% while taxes climb and inflation eats away at people’s earnings – all while Bank of England chief Andrew Bailey urges the British people not to ask for raises this year – a comment that landed him in hot water earlier this week.

Like in the US, inflation in the UK has surged to its highest annualized reading in December since March 1992 (5.4%, compared with 7% in the US).

Fortunately for Britons on the dole, their welfare payments will increase by 3.1% in April, HMG announced earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the latest official data showed that average earnings fell by around 1% in November from a year earlier, when adjusted to take inflation into account. That marked the first decline in wages since the height of the coronavirus pandemic. On the other hand, taxes on earned income increased by 1.25 percentage points from April to help HMG pay for social care costs, according to PM Boris Johnson.

On Friday, data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics revealed that between Jan. 19 and Jan. 30, one in five British adults said they had found it difficult to pay their bills over the prior month.

Here’s more from CNBC:

More than two-thirds of adults also said their cost of living had increased since November, with the most reported reason for this being the increased cost of food. The ONS interviewed almost 3,500 people.

In the four weeks to Jan. 23, grocery prices in the U.K. rose by 3.8% compared to the same period a year earlier, data from analytics firm Kantar shows. The company’s analysis looked at year-on-year price changes of more than 75,000 products.

“Taken over the course of a 12-month period, this rise in prices could add an extra £180 ($244) to the average household’s annual grocery bill,” Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar, said via email.

“We’re now likely to see shoppers striving to keep costs down by searching for cheaper products and promotions.”

And Tesco Chairman John Allan told the BBC during an interview on the channel’s Sunday morning program that “the worst is yet to come” in terms of rising food prices (for Americans who aren’t familiar, Tesco is one of Britain’s biggest supermarket chains). The rate of food inflation would likely hit 5% this spring, Allan said, as energy costs and other factors continued to rise.

What’s more, Sonali Punhani, UK economist at Credit Suisse, predicted that the Bank of England will tighten monetary policy further this year, which in turn would put the brakes on inflation by the second half of the year.

“We think the BoE could hike rates again by 25 basis points in March 2022, sooner than our previous forecast of May 2022,” he said in an emailed statement.

“In the second half of 2022, inflation is expected to fall, which could reduce the pressure on the BoE to hike rates. Our view is that despite the fall in inflation in H2 2022, further monetary tightening is warranted, and we forecast three further rate hikes in 2022 and three hikes in 2023. We think the drop in inflation is likely to slow the hiking cycle, but not stop it.”

As we explained earlier this week, the UK’s reliance on natural gas as its primary energy source has resulted in the country and its utilities being squeezed by surging LNG prices, since the country has become increasingly reliant on imported LNG. rather than using the abundant coal found throughout Great Britain.

The last two years have already devastated small businesses. Now, they will be forced to make another round of “impossible choices”, while millions of cash-strapped consumers are forced to do the same.

Authored by Jake Johnson via Common Dreams,

Documents published Wednesday by a prominent medical journal reveal that a foundation representing the German company BioNTech—Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine partner—has been working behind the scenes to undercut African scientists’ burgeoning effort to produce an mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine.

In August, according to The BMJ, the kENUP Foundation urged South African government officials to shut down a World Health Organization-backed initiative aiming to make an mRNA vaccine using Moderna’s shot as a template. “The WHO Vaccine Technology Transfer Hub’s project of copying the manufacturing process of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine should be terminated immediately. This is to prevent damage to Afrigen, BioVac, and Moderna,” the kENUP Foundation wrote in a 20-page document, referring to two South African companies taking part in the vaccine effort.

As an alternative, The BMJ reported, kENUP promoted “BioNTech’s proposal to ship mRNA factories housed in sea containers from Europe to Africa, initially staffed with BioNTech workers, and a proposed new regulatory pathway to approve the vaccines made in these factories.”

“The novel pathway has been described as paternalistic and unworkable by some experts, as it seems to bypass local regulators,” the outlet observed.

South Africa’s mRNA project, which has recently started to bear fruit, was made necessary by the pharmaceutical industry’s persistent refusal to share its technology with the world, denying lower-income countries the ability to produce their own shots. Without support from Big Pharma or rich governments, South African scientists and the WHO opted to try to replicate Moderna’s vaccine using publicly available information, including the shot’s mRNA sequence.

Safety trials for the new vaccine are expected to begin later this year. Public health campaigners who have praised the work of South African scientists responded to the kENUP Foundation’s campaign with outrage.

“To push for the termination of this lifesaving project in order to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies is shameful, at a time when over 90% of people in the poorest countries still haven’t been fully vaccinated,” Anna Marriott, health policy manager at Oxfam International, said in a statement Thursday. “What needs terminating are the pharmaceutical monopolies locking the lifesaving vaccines out of reach for millions of people across low- and middle-income countries.”

“The failure of rich country governments to step in and break these all-powerful monopolies is unforgivable,” Marriott added. “They must end their blind faith that profit-hungry pharma corporations will voluntarily do the right thing by humanity.”

BREAKING: BIG PHARMA CAUGHT TRYING TO THWART @WHO & PAN-AFRICAN EFFORTS TO MAKE COVID-19 VACCINES@BioNTech-hired consultancy kENUP called for termination of WHO-backed MRNA hub whilst promoting BioNTech’s ‘paternalistic and unworkable’ proposal.

This is #VaccineApartheid pic.twitter.com/EJOHiavDPy

— The People’s Vaccine (@peoplesvaccine) February 10, 2022

In its August missive to South African officials, the kENUP Foundation argued that the “sustainability outlook” for the WHO-backed mRNA project “is not favorable,” warning that Moderna could resume enforcement of patent rights once it deems the pandemic over, posing potentially serious legal challenges. But officials working on the project insist that it is not running afoul of patent protections.

“There’s no infringement taking place here whatsoever,” Martin Friede, a WHO official helping to coordinate the initiative, told Politico last week. In a November statement, the Medicines Patent Pool—a United Nations-backed organization supporting the South Africa project—dismissed “unfounded rumors” that the mRNA vaccine technology hub “intends to infringe patents.”

“The Medicines Patent Pool, which is responsible for the intellectual property and licensing elements of the hub, wishes to make it clear that this is not the case,” the organization said. “MPP will ensure that technology used in the hub is either not covered by patents or that licenses and/or commitments-not-to-enforce are in place to enable freedom to operate.”

Charles Gore, executive director of MPP, told The BMJ that “clearly, somebody has been going around Africa saying that we’re going to infringe patents, which is extremely unfortunate since it’s completely untrue.” As The BMJ explained, “South African law contains a provision authorizing scientists and manufacturers to carry out research and development regardless of patent protection, meaning that the hub’s reverse engineering of Moderna’s vaccine is legal.”

“Moderna has also publicly promised not to enforce its Covid-19 related patents during the pandemic and said that it was willing to license its intellectual property after that period,” the publication noted. “The hub is in talks with Moderna to obtain such a license.”

Fatima Hassan, founder and director of the South Africa-based Health Justice Initiative, said Thursday that “for two years, Western pharmaceutical giants have peddled falsehoods claiming that intellectual property rules are not a barrier to global vaccine production.”

“Yet, now that lower-income countries have started developing Covid-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical industry goons are threatening South African manufacturers with patent infringement,” Hassan continued. “This shameful scaremongering is further evidence that world leaders need to suspend intellectual property on all Covid-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments to unlock the productive capacity needed to end this pandemic.”

“If we don’t,” Hassan added, “Big Pharma will try to bully and intimidate Global South manufacturers into submission.”

Russia and Belarus on Thursday launched hugely provocative planned joint military drills, which were promptly condemned by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian as “a very violent gesture.” UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson responded Thursday by saying Europe faces its “biggest security crisis in decades.” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said it was part of Moscow’s efforts at applying “psychological pressure” amid a broader troop build-up threatening the country’s borders.

Zelensky said “the accumulation of forces at the border is psychological pressure from our neighbors” – though he also days ago admitted to The Wall Street Journal that a Russian invasion remains “unlikely”. “The exercises – known as Allied Resolve 2022 – are taking place close to the Belarusian border with Ukraine, which is a little over 1,000km (620 miles) long. Thursday was the start of the active phase of the drills,” BBC detailed of the exercises. “There are fears that if Russia tries to invade Ukraine, the exercises put Russian troops close to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, making an attack on the city easier.”

At the same time Russia has just sent six warships from the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea ahead of the drills, and a beefed up Russian naval presence is expected in the Sea of Azov as well. Russia’s Defense Ministry has stated the aim of the drills as centering around “suppressing and repelling external aggression.”

NATO denounced the drills as representing a “dangerous moment” for European security. The US has estimated it believes some 30,000 Russian troops will surge into Belarus as part of the war games.

However, Moscow has not confirmed the numbers, and has sought to assure its troops will return home upon the end of the drills, after Feb.20. Long-range bombers among other aircraft, as well as anti-air defenses have been deployed as part of the exercises. 

Joint Russian – Belarusian exercises “Allied Resolve – 2022” began at training grounds in #Belarus – Russian Ministry of Defense pic.twitter.com/W3krjHEwvy

— marqs (@MarQs__) February 10, 2022

В рамках первого этапа учения экипажи дальних бомбардировщиков Ту-22М3 выполнили перебазирование с аэродрома дислокации в Прибайкалье в Амурскую область https://t.co/7m2zIx7rL9#Минобороны #АрмияРоссии #Учения #Полеты #ВКСРоссии pic.twitter.com/iGT7LD2TUR

— Минобороны России (@mod_russia) February 10, 2022

Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov is currently in the former Soviet nation overseeing the games with his Belarussian counterpart.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has revealed it held rare military-to-military communications with Belarus for the purpose of avoiding a “miscalculation”, the AFP reports.

The avoidance of an unnecessary or inadvertent encounter is of prime importance especially given the drills will involve “live-fire” action on the part of the Russians and Belarussian military.

#UPDATE US and Belarusian defense chiefs have held rare telephone talks to avoid a “miscalculation” during Russia-Belarus joint military drills, the Pentagon said Thursday, at a time of heightened tensions over the Kremlin’s massing of troops near Ukraine pic.twitter.com/h6jaKvB2wa

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) February 10, 2022

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg earlier warned, “The number of Russian forces is going up. The warning time for a possible attack is going down,” a news conference with UK PM Johnson. “Renewed Russian aggression will lead to more NATO presence, not less,” he said.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

A monthly summary from the Yemen Data Project of the Saudi-led coalition’s air war in Yemen found January 2022 was the most violent month for civilians since 2016. According to the data, 139 civilians were killed by Saudi air raids, and another 287 were wounded. It was the highest number of civilian casualties recorded in a single month since October 2016.

The deadliest air raid of the month hit a migrant detention facility in Sadaa on January 21st, which killed at least 91 civilians and wounded at least 237. The prison bombing was preceded by Saudi airstrikes on telecommunication infrastructure that also killed civilians and caused nationwide internet outages.

Yemen Data Project said the internet outage “had widespread impact on civilian communications and media coverage in another blow to accountability. Within hours the Saudi-led coalition carried out one of the deadliest bombings of the seven-year air campaign.”

Other major incidents include air raids on residential areas of the Maain district in the capital Sanaa, which killed 14 civilians, including five women and a child. Three separate airstrikes on vehicles and buses killed at least 17 civilians, including three children. Saudi airstrikes also hit hospitals, a food truck, and a food storage unit.

The Saudi escalation came after the Houthis launched missile and drone attacks against the UAE, a response to Abu Dhabi’s role in the war on Yemen that has been raging since 2015. The UAE likes to downplay its role in the war, but Abu Dhabi’s support for militants on the ground in Yemen has brought the Saudi-backed government recent success on the battlefield against the Houthis.

The US has responded to the Houthi attacks by escalating its role in the war and is sending a warship and F-22 fighter jets to the UAE. This support has been framed as “defensive” in nature.

Latest Saudi coalition airstrikes data: January was the most violent month in the air war in over 5 years. 139 civilians were killed and 287 injured in airstrikes in January, taking the civilian casualty toll in Saudi-led bombings to over 19,000 since 2015 https://t.co/F4stzSOyUF pic.twitter.com/dFj4XnOwb2

— Yemen Data Project (@YemenData) February 9, 2022

But again, the Houthis wouldn’t be attacking their neighbors if not for the Saudi-led war, which is only able to continue due to US support. Experts agree that if the US stopped servicing Saudi warplanes, Riyadh’s air force would quickly be grounded.

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

– Frank Zappa

We are no longer free.

We are living in a world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy, but it’s an illusion.

We think we have the freedom to elect our leaders, but we’re only allowed to participate in the reassurance ritual of voting. There can be no true electoral choice or real representation when we’re limited in our options to one of two candidates culled from two parties that both march in lockstep with the Deep State and answer to an oligarchic elite.

We think we have freedom of speech, but we’re only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners allow.

We think we have the right to freely exercise our religious beliefs, but those rights are quickly overruled if and when they conflict with the government’s priorities, whether it’s COVID-19 mandates or societal values about gender equality, sex and marriage.

We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Punitive programs strip citizens of their passports and right to travel over unpaid taxes.

We think we have property interests in our homes and our bodies, but there can be no such freedom when the government can seize your property, raid your home, and dictate what you do with your bodies.

We think we have the freedom to defend ourselves against outside threats, but there is no right to self-defense against militarized police who are authorized to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, and granted immunity from accountability with the general blessing of the courts. Certainly, there can be no right to gun ownership in the face of red flag gun laws which allow the police to remove guns from people merely suspected of being threats.

We think we have the right to an assumption of innocence until we are proven guilty, but that burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all lawbreakers. Police-run facial recognition software that mistakenly labels law-abiding citizens as criminals. A social credit system (similar to China’s) that rewards behavior deemed “acceptable” and punishes behavior the government and its corporate allies find offensive, illegal or inappropriate.

We think we have the right to due process, but that assurance of justice has been stripped of its power by a judicial system hardwired to act as judge, jury and jailer, leaving us with little recourse for appeal. A perfect example of this rush to judgment can be found in the proliferation of profit-driven speed and red light cameras that do little for safety while padding the pockets of government agencies.

We have been saddled with a government that pays lip service to the nation’s freedom principles while working overtime to shred the Constitution.

By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect the constitutional rights of the citizenry while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants.

We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”

Under the new terms of this revised, one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the people” have none.

Only in our case, sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, we’ve allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.

The problem with these devil’s bargains, however, is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.” In exchange for the promise of safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, lower taxes, lower crime rates, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization and government corruption.

In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.

We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.

We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red-light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in hefty fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.

We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people” are being reminded that we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis.

Indeed, there are chilling parallels between the authoritarian prison that is life in the American police state and The Prisoner, a dystopian television series that first broadcast in Great Britain more than 50 years ago.

The series centers around a British secret agent (played by Patrick McGoohan) who finds himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village. While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.

Much like the American Police State, The Prisoner’s Village gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

Described as “an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia,” The Prisoner is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of mankind to meekly accept his lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of his own making.

The Prisoner is an operations manual for how you condition a populace to life as prisoners in a police state: by brainwashing them into believing they are free so that they will march in lockstep with the state and be incapable of recognizing the prison walls that surround them.

We can no longer maintain the illusion of freedom.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have become “we the prisoners.”

Some European countries have recently barged ahead by introducing wide-ranging Covid-19 vaccine mandates, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, such major vaccination obligations also exist in Latin America and Asia.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Austria’s new law that mandates all adults to be vaccinated against the coronavirus went into effect last week amid controversy, while neighboring Germany is mulling a similar move. Aging societies Italy, Greece and Czechia meanwhile opted for mandatory vaccines among at-risk age groups. These are defined as those over the age of 60 in Greece and the Czech Republic and those over the age of 50 in Italy.

As our map shows, the obligation to be vaccinated against Covid-19 also exists for all adults in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vatican City, which were the first countries to introduce these mandates. Indonesia and Micronesia followed later, as well as Ecuador, which mandates coronavirus vaccinations for everyone above the age of five. In Costa Rica, it is eligible minors for whom coronavirus vaccines are mandatory.

Elsewhere, obligatory vaccinations are in place for healthcare workers or certain other professions requiring a high level of human contact. Some countries also opt not to issue mandates but enact tight regulations surrounding unvaccinated individuals that amount to a de-fact vaccine mandate.

Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations (emphasis ours),

After months of delay, the Department of Homeland Security replied late last month to a Congressional demand for information about the number of illegal migrants the department has flown from border towns to communities around the country. In 2021, it said, 71,617 were dropped off in nearly 20 cities including locales as far from the Mexican border as Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.

Immigration experts critical of the Biden administration’s permissive immigration policies believe those numbers are incomplete, especially regarding the most vulnerable migrants, those under 18, whom DHS classifies as “unaccompanied children.” The agency says some 40,000 of the total transported are such minors, but that number is only a fraction of the 147,000 “encounters” the agency reports having with unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border between January and October 2021.

Paramount among the questions raised by the transports is what happens to the unaccompanied children once they leave the airport?  The major cities DHS lists, the experts say, are probably simply way stations rather than final destinations.

“Everyone wants to know where they’re going, but nobody knows,” said Todd Bensman, a national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “Well, somebody knows,” he adds. “The government knows. But they are being as opaque and ‘darkened-windows’ as they can be about the entire matter.”

🚨 🚨🚨Gov’t contractor talking about the secret midnight flights from southern border into Westchester (NY) Airport:

“If it gets out… the government is betraying the American people.”

Stop lying to us.
Secure the border.
Uphold rule of law.https://t.co/Gd7UmTz7Ct pic.twitter.com/vAyGO1GvkQ

— Rob Astorino (@RobAstorino) January 27, 2022

The lack of information raises a host of questions regarding the health and welfare of the children, and more:

• What security checks are being performed — and background checks to ensure these minors are going to safe homes? How can checks be conducted on family members in the U.S. illegally who wind up taking custody of the children (a problem highlighted in a 2019 study)? 
• What processes are in place to ensure that these children have enough to eat, are receiving any necessary medical care, or are enrolled in school?
• What traumas or crimes have they suffered along the way, at the hands of human traffickers, for example, and how are the cases being handled? (Through a public records request, Judicial Watch last year obtained a list of 33 incidents of alleged sexual abuse in a one-month period in 2021.)
• What pandemic precautions have been taken, beyond masks seen in some furtively taken images of the transportees, by an administration that professes to be aggressively dedicated to eradicating COVID-19? (Illegal immigrants dispersed on commercial flights in 2021 were not tested for covid, and agencies did not follow preventive procedures, according to preliminary findings of a DHS Inspector General’s report reviewed by RealClearInvestigations.)
• Who is responsible for making sure the migrants, children in particular, check in with the government and show up for court immigration hearings?

The difficulty of getting answers from the Biden administration is frustrating many state and local officials who say that tracking the thousands of illegal immigrants apparently melting into their communities is a maddening endeavor.

“The Biden administration is running a clandestine, covert, middle-of-the-night, special ops mission using the same tradecraft the military does in operations against foreign enemies,” said Larry Keefe, a senior policy adviser to Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. “We don’t know what’s going on because the states are not designed to mount intelligence-gathering operations against our own government.”

The situation is complicated by the layers of groups involved. After a gumbo of federal agencies – CBP, DHS, DHHS, ICE, ORR – the government largely relies on nonprofit contractors to handle unaccompanied minors. While those groups present a rosy picture on their websites, it is unclear how they can handle what has proved a massive increase.

In 2021, DHS shelters near the border and further inland took in 122,000 unaccompanied children, according to its figures, which shattered the previous record 69,000 in 2019. The unaccompanied children are but a portion of the illegal immigrants who flooded across the southern border in 2021. For the fiscal year ending last October, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 1.6 million “encounters” — an all-time record and four times the figure the previous year. Although the number of encounters does not equal the number of people who crossed, given that some are repeat offenders, the actual figures are even higher, because CBP does not release the number of “got-aways” it records.

Neither Homeland Security nor Health and Human Services nor the Office of Refugee Resettlement would answer questions about the resettlement process from RealClearInvestigations.

But the huge increase in numbers means the organizations dealing with them are swamped. In many cases, responsibilities for placing unaccompanied children with families or sponsors are subcontracted through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR. In 2020, the most recent year for which figures were available, under the far more restrictive immigration policies of the Trump administration, taxpayers spent more than $1.5 billion among 42 various non-profit and religious groups that offer help with housing, educational, medical, legal and other services.

More than $1 billion of that 2020 total was paid to six groups. The major recipient, Southwest Key Programs, received $400 million and a global nonprofit called BCFS received at least $253.1 million, according to tracking of ORR contracts by Maya Pagni Barak, a professor of criminology and criminal studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

None of the six groups would answer questions from RealClearInvestigations, instead referring them back to federal agencies in the kind of loop that has bedeviled others seeking information.

“This is all being done under the cover of darkness and no one really knows what is happening,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA, a group that favors immigration limits. “Plus, there’s so much confusion over who has custody over which groups.”

The groups handling unaccompanied children have sites scattered across the U.S., according to their websites. Southwest Key, for example, says it runs such shelters in 18 states, while BCFS lists shelters in a dozen states, from California and New York, to Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee and elsewhere. A fact sheet from ICE notes that altogether there are sites for unaccompanied children in 22 states.

Regarding shelter conditions, the operators’ blanket silence beyond rosy website depictions is not a new development. In 2018, when the Trump administration’s border policies were under scrutiny, Southwest Key barred Democratic Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley from inspecting its Casa Padre facility in a former Walmart in Brownsville, Texas. At that time, Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi declared the system “barbaric.”

In an effort to shed some light on the situation in Florida, Gov. DeSantis issued an executive order in September that told state law enforcement and other officials to begin gathering information on the number of illegal immigrants federal agencies were bringing to Florida and where they wind up.

DeSantis took that step after accusing President Biden of abandoning any pretense of protecting the southern border.

In the face of what Keefe and other Florida officials described as continued intransigence on the part of federal agencies flying and busing illegal immigrants into the Sunshine State, DeSantis has proposed a package of laws now pending before the legislature in Tallahassee that would codify the steps laid out in his executive order. The proposed measures would also “prohibit state and local agencies from doing business with any private entities that facilitate the resettlement of illegal aliens in the state of Florida from the southern border.”

Florida’s Department of Children and Families published an emergency rule in December that directly addresses the various non-profits and religious groups that contract with the federal government. The rule “prohibits the issuance or renewal of any license to provide services to UAC who seek to be resettled in Florida,” unless the state and the federal agencies can craft some “cooperative agreement.”

Keefe said the governor’s moves will also put a crimp in human smuggling. Because the children lack documentation to board international flights from Central American airports and others, someone is paying to have them brought from their country of origin to the U.S. border. These are often criminal organizations that are most likely paid by family members – with whom the children may be eventually reunited – or human trafficking syndicates posing as legitimate sponsors that might exploit them for nefarious purposes.

“We don’t have laws in place to investigate the federal government,” Keefe said. “We’re being kept in the dark by our own country on something that’s definitely contributing to human smuggling because this is about bringing their kids here. Somebody drops the kids off at the border and then HHS is handing off to taxpayers the cost of flying them to illegal immigrant parents.”

Pennsylvania lawmakers are facing a similar situation. Keystone state senators remain dissatisfied with answers they have sought on flights packed with immigrants from the southern border that landed in the middle of the night in Scranton and other Pennsylvania airfields.

In December, there were at least two so-called “ghost” flights into the Lehigh Valley, a tiny fraction of the more than 900 such domestic or “lateral” flights ICE’s air arm flew around the U.S. in 2021.

Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano and others sought answers from Pennsylvania Gov.  Tom Wolf and Attorney General Josh Shapiro, both Democrats. While Wolf said Scranton was simply a transit point, he offered no information on passengers that landed in the early morning darkness in Scranton. In a familiar refrain, the state lawmakers were told to direct their questions to the feds.

Mastriano has now filed a series of FOIA requests of DHS and ICE, but he remains perplexed and angered at the reluctance of those involved in the system to provide clear answers.

“On two flights from El Paso to Scranton there were 120 passengers, many of which were minors,” Mastriano said. “Imagine that. I don’t know who pays for their schooling or the impact on our community, and there is something fishy going on with all of it.”

The scant information that has been provided is unlikely to offer a complete picture, Mastriano told RCI.

“I think these findings are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “We need to further examine the total number of illegal immigrants being sent [here] by plane and bus. It’s not just minors they are sending to Pennsylvania, its adults, too.”

Countdown to Super Bowl 56 is four days away (as of Thursday morning). The annual playoff championship game of the National Football League (NFL) will feature the Los Angeles Rams versus Cincinnati Bengals. There are estimates that 117 million viewers will watch the game, increasing 21% compared to the 2021 Super Bowl. It’s a US tradition that many households host Super Bowl parties, an excuse to drink beer and eat game-day finger foods with friends, family, and even co-workers. 

For the millions of Americans hosting SuperBowl parties, they’re likely to pay some of the highest food costs on record as global food prices surge to near-record highs. We want to concentrate on everyone’s favorite game-day finger foods besides chicken wings, that is, guacamole and chips. 

According to Bloomberg data, the price of a 20-pound box of avocados from the state of Michoacan, Mexico (the central hub of Mexican avocado production) is around $26.89, the highest ever for this time of year with data going back to 1998. 

This year alone, avocado prices are up 31%. 

There are many reasons for rising avocado prices, including widespread supply-chain bottlenecks, increased freight costs, labor shortages, and higher commodity costs to operate farms, among many other variables. 

One sure thing is higher food costs for SuperBowl parties will impact the pocketbooks of Americans. On Thursday morning, the consumer price index came in like a smoking hot tamale, +7.3% YoY (Core +5.9% YoY), but was underestimated as the headline printed a shocking +7.5% YoY – the highest since March 1982.

Below shows how food prices are soaring and becoming significant drivers drivers of overall inflation. 

Let’s not stop at avocado. Americans will also be paying exorbitantly high prices for chicken. 

By Michael Washburn of The Epoch Times

China’s failure to meet the import targets agreed to under the “phase one” trade agreement with the United States signed in January 2020 can’t be blamed wholly on the global COVID-19 pandemic and supply-chain disruptions, according to a new report issued by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).

The failure reflects unrealistic import targets that China was never actually on track to meet, while some degree of bad faith on both sides of the deal also came into play, the report states.

Under the “phase one” trade agreement, Beijing committed to increasing its purchase of U.S. products across the agricultural, energy, and manufacturing sectors in 2020 and 2021 by at least $200 billion beyond what China had purchased in 2017. The targets were at least $227.9 billion worth of U.S. products in 2020 and at least $274.5 billion in 2021, totaling $502.4 billion for the two years in question.

Besides the import targets, the deal contained provisions about opening up China’s financial services sector and better protecting the intellectual property of Western businesses that engage with China. Then-President Donald Trump hailed the deal as a breakthrough, calling Chinese leader Xi Jinping his “very, very good friend.”

In particular, Trump hoped to turn the United States from a minor supplier of energy to China to a major one and incorporated especially high targets for coal, crude oil, liquefied natural gas, and refined energy products in the agreement. It was expected that the deal would help put an end to the escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing, during which hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tariffs were put in place by both sides.

But the final figures tell a different story. In the end, China ended up purchasing only 57 percent of the U.S. exports it had agreed to buy, achieving a total of only $288.8 billion worth of imports. Energy was a particular area of failure, with imports in only one area, liquefied natural gas, reaching its target number, coming in at 129 percent of the targeted figure. Imports of crude oil reached only 33 percent of the target, coal only 73 percent of the target, and refined energy products only 22 percent of the target.

The PIIE report set out to analyze all of the factors behind this failure.

The Role of the Pandemic

The report makes no attempt to discount the disruptive effects of COVID-19, which spread throughout the world in 2020. For all the optimism, the agreement had the misfortune of being signed just two months before the global pandemic really took hold, causing lockdowns and staff shortages worldwide.

“The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic undermined any chance of success. Public health-related lockdowns and a short economic recession were accompanied by a temporary collapse in goods trade globally, even if China’s imports were mostly spared. Restrictions on mobility also decimated U.S. services exports like tourism and business travel,” the report reads.

The economic recession that beset the United States in April 2020 and May 2020 hurt gross domestic product growth for the year, and in the first of those two months, global trade briefly broke down, according to the report. Companies struggled to adjust to new remote work arrangements and to find their way in the uncertain environment.

Having said all of that, the report shows abundant data that militate against trying to blame China’s import shortfall on the pandemic.

“Global goods trade rebounded in the second half of 2020 and boomed in 2021, in part because COVID-19 shifted consumer demand toward goods and away from services,” the report reads.

While this did put stress on supply chains, especially on the U.S.–China route, some price inflation might actually have helped China meet purchase goals, given that the “phase one” agreement’s targets are stated in value (a dollar amount) rather than volume of goods, the report states.

Hence, the failure to meet “phase one” targets can’t simply be dismissed as an expected and perhaps inevitable consequence of the pandemic.

Warning Signs

It should have been clear as far back as 2020 that China wouldn’t reach the import targets established under the deal, given the rate of its imports of U.S. goods, according to the report.

“The Biden administration was not to blame, as China was never on pace to meet its purchase commitments,” the report reads.

After the deal’s signing on Jan. 15, 2020, it should have been clear from prorated import goals and totals that the rate and total value of imports were falling short, the report states. At the end of June 2020, China had taken in 54 percent of the prorated target for that juncture. When the end of 2020 rolled around, China had realized only 59 percent of the year-end commitment. It wasn’t possible to catch up from that point given the rate of imports.

By this point, the trade deal took on a “back-loaded” character, according to the report. Further commitments for 2021 were more than 60 percent higher than commitments for 2020.

It should have been clear to CCP officials that China wasn’t taking in enough goods to meet the “phase one” pledge and that a net shortfall at the time of the deal’s expiration was inevitable, absent a marked shift in trade policy and a vastly accelerated intake of goods.

“China ended up buying none of that extra $200 billion of U.S. exports it had promised to purchase,” the report reads.

Dennis Shea, a former deputy U.S. trade representative and U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization (WTO), told NTD Television, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times, that structural problems within the Chinese economy account for the import shortfall.

“There are state enterprises that are funded by state-owned banks and are pursuing state-created industrial policies and are benefiting, frankly, from state cyber-espionage and industrial theft. These structural problems within the Chinese economy are massive,” Shea said.

In light of China’s deal-breaking, Shea urged the Biden administration to “show strength,” and be willing to “impose costs” on the regime.

“China has just not lived up to its commitments. Its non-market economic system is completely incompatible with WTO norms of transparency, openness, and market orientation grounded in the rule of law,” he said. “These are the norms and values that are supposed to underpin the multinational trading system and the WTO. And clearly, China’s economic system is incompatible with those sets of norms.”

Myron Brilliant, head of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Reuters on Feb. 9 that closer collaboration between the United States and allies, with a view to presenting a strong united front against Beijing over its failure to follow fair and transparent trade practices, is one of a number of options on the table for the Biden administration.