Bare shelves Biden: shortages in stores lead the US into a "digital concentration camp"

The frightening spectre of a total food shortage was once again revealed to millions of people in the United States this week. In the American segment of Twitter in recent days, the hashtag #BareShelvesBiden broke into the top ten. Participants of the flash mob take photos of empty shelves in stores across the United States and post eloquent shots online.

In response, supporters of the current president shout about a staged action, accuse "Kremlin trolls" of it, and shake photos of the abundance of goods… But all this does not cancel the food crisis, which broke out due to the disruption of logistics chains and turned America into an analog of the late USSR.

And the situation can only get worse, as there is a shortage of labour in port terminals, warehouses and transportation in the United States due to the new wave of COVID-19. When the entire country's food market is monopolised by several cartels, disruptions in the supply chain of even one of them, such as Walmart, affect the lives and health of tens of millions of people.

At the same time, inflation in the United States is breaking forty-year records and has reached double digits in many positions. Because of the sharp rise in prices, Americans are getting poorer before our eyes, and not all of them can afford to buy even what is still being sold.

But any crisis is a disaster for some and a great opportunity to earn extra money for others. According to one theory, the food crisis in the United States is beneficial to the country's largest landowners, led by Bill Gates, who are just waiting for the hour to get the nation, and the rest of the world behind it, hooked on their "modified" food. And some, like the Rockefeller Foundation, even have plans to transform the American food system almost into a "digital concentration camp”.

Following in the footsteps of Marie Antoinette

The RUSSTRAT Institute at the end of 2021 already wrote about the threat of famine in the United States. According to an October assessment by the US Food Industry Association, more than half of the country's residents shared their anxiety about rising food prices, and 43% of respondents were afraid of shortages. How did Washington react? At first, the authorities showed a lot of activity, and when that did not bring results, they preferred to pretend that everything was fine.

President Biden, holding a Zoom conference with the Task Force on Supply Chain Disruptions on December 22, announced to the whole of America that the crisis with empty shelves in stores that swept the country had passed.

"Packages are moving. Gifts are being delivered. Shelves are not empty,” the owner of the White House reported. "I’m sure you can go and find some shelf where it’s empty because particular sorts of gifts are very popular.”

These mocking words, which reduce the problem of scarcity to the "popularity" of goods, are somewhat reminiscent of the legendary phrase "Let them eat brioche!" attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, who ended her life on the guillotine. This is how, according to popular rumour, she reacted to the report that the poor in Paris are starving without bread.

However, the very next day after the Sleepy Joe conference, it became clear that the situation with sales lines in the United States is far from being corrected. It turned out that the number of unloaded container ships in ports is only growing - mainly due to a lack of workers.

It turned out that the goods of local farmers can not get on the shelves: domestic transport companies also lost hundreds and thousands of employees due to COVID-19. And in some cases, working farms even had to get rid of their products because they were denied access to new marketing schemes.

Despite the obvious problems, the country's federal authorities continued to respond in a Biden-like manner: it's all about the pre-holiday rush, soon abundance will return! As for inflation, Washington has come up with nothing better than simply changing the rules for calculating the consumer price index from January 2022.

But now the Christmas celebrations have died down, the year 2022 has arrived, and a few more days have passed, during which supermarkets, in theory, should have filled up the range of goods. But what did the Americans see when they went shopping in the malls?

The same empty shelves.

"We are Russian bots for them"

On January 9, 2022, Mark Bednar, a spokesman for House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy, tweeted a photo of a surprisingly empty grocery store window in Washington. Several people responded to his tweet with similar images. Other followers of Bednar responded to the puzzled remarks of their opponents "Where is it?" : "All over the country, actually."

The next day, Ryan Saavedra, a reporter for the conservative publication The Daily Wire, addressed his 300,000 readers: "Take pictures and tweet empty shelves at stores where you live”. And the TV host-Trumpist Jack Posobiec, whom Wikipedia simply calls an "Internet troll", provided his retweet of Saavedra captioned: "Lets gooooo #BareShelvesBiden”.

For a couple of days, several tens of thousands of Americans from different parts of the country posted their photos under this tag. It turned out that the problem is not found in one retail chain and applies to all categories of products: meat, milk, vegetables and fruits, groceries, sweets, baby food, animal feed…

People provided their photos not only with a hashtag, but also with talking captions - up to the phrase "Apocalypse now". This was written by CNBC correspondent Kayla Tausche, who, by the way, is a member of the White House pool.

It must be said that this was not the first campaign under the "Biden" tag. In mid-October, a similar flash mob full of memes and jokes about "Sleepy Joe" already conquered Twitter, gaining more than 47,000 entries in a day. But this time, it seems, people were more unhappy - perhaps because of Biden's aforementioned lie about " ending the crisis”.

Of course, the Democrats could not pass by such "frenzied propaganda". Some of the more stupid ones, like the feminist Caroline Orr Bueno, rushed to accuse the campaigners of being contrived and demand that Twitter censors immediately ban everyone. "This person has been claiming we are all Russian bots for 6 years now and will never, ever stop," said Posobiec, to the delight of his 1.5 million readers.

Others, like the authors of the Washington Post, began tediously listing the reasons for the new failure: the Omicron outbreak, bad weather, record December sales… In short, "winter came suddenly”.

Someone else quite inappropriately recalled the deficit under Donald Trump: in the spring of 2020, panicked Americans rushed to sweep everything from store shelves that could help survive the lockdown. But then the "response" arrived - the Republicans remembered how on May 21, 2020, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeted about the then-storefronts:

"We don't have a food shortage problem — we have a leadership problem."

Thus, the new master of the White House found himself in the position of a non-commissioned officer's widow who whipped herself.

But perhaps the most despicable thing was some supporters of the Democratic Party, who ran to photograph the full shelves in stores that the crisis has not yet reached, while declaring in plain text to their opponents: we're covered in chocolate, and what's going on there is your problem.

Bill Gates: From Windows to larvae

Still, the US commodity shortage would still be exotic news to the rest of the world if it weren't for important circumstances. It seems that the current supply chain crisis may well have beneficiaries. Simply put, some people really want the usual supply routes for traditional food to collapse - and not just in America. And if this is one of the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, then why not?

The RUSSTRAT Institute has already talked about the little-known side of the life of Microsoft founder and Windows creator, "programmer and philanthropist" Bill Gates. Recall that this billionaire with a fortune of $134.2 billion is also the largest landowner. He owns 269,000 acres of land in the United States — more than 1,000 square kilometres. It is noteworthy that the "programmer" is not only interested in traditional agriculture. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invests in GMO crops and genetically modified mosquitoes, grows food from larvae, and buys patents on seeds and synthetic food, especially artificial meat.

The latter topic is interesting because other IT corporations are also fixated on it. In a 2020 article, Forbes lists firms whose founders, like Gates, invested in synthetic biology: Google, PayPal, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo! etc. What is it that attracted them so much to "plant-based meat"? The answer is obvious: thanks to new cheap gene technologies, such products promise huge profits.

Why bother raising cows, pigs, sheep, or chickens? It is enough to cook a substance of indeterminate origin in some vats, adding dyes and flavour enhancers. And along the way, to root in society a new fashionable course on "ecological consciousness" under the mantra of "saving animals".

There is only one problem - the formed tastes of consumers. It's not easy to stop Americans from eating beef in a burger or turkey on Thanksgiving. And here the most banal thing can come to the rescue - a shortage. What happens if, after a year or two of perpetual food shortages, the meat departments of stores are suddenly decorated with juicy-looking semi-finished products in beautiful packaging - "steaks", "escalopes" and other "like meat"? And just try not to buy it when fashion bloggers on social networks, work colleagues, doctors in clinics and school teachers of your children are all buzzing about a "revolution in healthy eating"!

But perhaps the inexhaustible thirst for money is not the main reason that pushes big US businesses to invest in cheap substitutes for normal food? What about overpopulation, wars, cataclysms? Isn't synthetic food the salvation of humanity from the threat of famine?

What the Rockefeller Foundation dreams of

“Not really,” the Rockefeller Foundation’s report “Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System,” hinted transparently in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic. It cites the growing threat of hunger in America, predicts supply chain problems, and is blunt about the “promising and inspiring solutions” that COVID-19 has spurred on.

As one of these solutions, a new principle for the reconstruction of American supply lines is proposed, based "on the values of fairness, ethics and sustainability”. Priority should be given to those manufacturers and suppliers who embody these values, advises the Rockefeller Foundation. What is it about?

This is when not only in food chains, but also in the production of food itself, as well as its distribution, racism and irresponsible attitudes to the environment, including climate change, are eliminated, the report's authors say. This is when the "cheap and empty calories" of traditional American food, which brought health problems to consumers, losses to coloured and indigenous farmers, and harm to nature (through environmentally destructive food production methods), will become a thing of the past.

"Well-planned reforms of the food system can also advance compensation models around reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and conservation of agricultural lands, minimising the inequities that would otherwise be exacerbated by a changing climate," the authors say.

It is argued that the new system should focus on the dietary nature of food. Moreover, nutrition and health systems should work as a single mechanism. What is needed is "nutrition research" that can increase public resilience to future pandemics, the report says.

In general, experts of the Rockefeller Foundation say, the US food system needs to be unbundled, decentralised and regionalised. But it also needs a single federal coordinator, like the Department of Homeland Security or the Office of National Intelligence, which emerged after 9/11. And at the same time — a single digital system that would track in real time the needs of households along with their income and other census data (and this urgently needs to connect 42 million Americans to the Internet).

In fact, we are looking at a version of the "digital concentration camp" of the future, in which consumers will receive "healthy food" under the full control of Big Brother, strictly dosed by specially trained doctors. This food, in turn, will have to be grown in the framework of the "new normal" and "sustainable ecology", where "white supremacist” farmers and "farting cows" only interfere.

In this brave new world, store shelves are likely to be bursting with merchandise, and customers are likely to glow with happiness. After all, pure protein from maggots is fashionable, useful, and most importantly, politically correct!