, ,

Biggest tax increase of our lives

SANCTIONS ARE HURTING US, NOT RUSSIA

The West banned Oil imports from Russia and the price of oil immediately skyrocketed.

Australia’s RBA Governor, Philip Lowe, said on Tuesday that oil prices have risen 66% since last year.

Australia, he said, is facing the highest level of inflation seen in “many years”.

Now countries worldwide are being hit with crippling fuel shortages.

Many are scrambling to put in place national transportation emergency measures, including the UK, Australia, Canada and US.

Air travel has been smashed as airports across the UK, US and Europe cancel up to 60 percent of their flights because they don’t have enough jet fuel.

Can someone please explain how all this is a moral victory against Putin?

As far as I can see, all it has done is make Putin, the Saudis, Iran and Venezuela much, much richer – and us, a lot poorer.

Why?

Because higher oil prices only make them richer.

The loser won’t be Putin, it will be US – the so-called ‘advanced economies’ of the West.

And it’s not just oil.

Thanks to sanctions, commodities are up dramatically across the board: potash, fertilisers, wheat – wheat is huge.  Nickel went up 250% in 2 days after sanctions were first announced.

Who’s going to pay for all this?  You are.

It will be the biggest tax increase of your lives.  And by the way, it could soon get worse.

Why?

Because, contrary to what you’ve been told, a large section of the world has not joined the West’s boycott and Russia is still able to sell its oil, wheat and gas on global markets.

Here’s the bigger truth.  World trade and the global financial system benefit countries like Australia, the most.

That may not be fair, but it’s true.  It is the basis of Western power and wealth.

So if you destroy it in an effort to ‘get Putin’, who are you really destroying?

You’re destroying the West, and that’s what’s happening right now.

When you attack and destabilise world trade and the global financial system, you are attacking and destabilising Western economies, NOT Putin.

The West’s response to the invasion of Ukraine is probably the single most damaging thing any group of leaders has ever done to their own countries and the world.

Not to Putin.  To their own people.  And a lot of small countries who didn’t deserve it.

One day when all the hysteria finally lifts, I think we will review this moment with clear heads and when we do, we will be horrified.

/0 Comments/by
,

We were sold a huge lie

HUNDREDS OF LIFE-SAVING DRUGS HAVE EITHER RUN OUT, OR ARE ABOUT TO RUN OUT – WHY?

Australia is experiencing crippling mass shortages of hundreds of life-saving medications and a range of other healthcare products.

Since 2020, the TGA has listed in excess of 700 medicines as in limited supply.  Today, there are 290 medicines that are either ‘unavailable’ or in short supply.

Why is this happening?

Well it turns out that virtually all the world’s active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and chemicals needed to manufacture essential medicines, are made in China.

In some cases, they are produced by just one Chinese factory!

Take piperacillin-tazobactam.  It is a critically important antibiotic that is made by a single factory in Hubei.

In 2016, an explosion destroyed it, causing a worldwide shortage that was later blamed for multiple deaths across Africa and Brazil.

Then there’s the single factory in Shanghai that makes a contrast dye needed for MRIs, CT scans and other life-saving diagnostic x-rays.

That factory has been shut down for months, again causing an ongoing worldwide shortage, including here in Australia.

The world is now over 90% dependent on China’s APIs for most of its essential medicines, including antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs and medications that treat cancer, HIV, asthma, heart problems, blood pressure, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression and seizures.

Even India, a major pharmaceutical manufacturer, relies on China for around 80% of the active ingredients used in its products.

As one researcher put it: “it’s the nightmare scenario”, with the world starting to run out of drugs with no easy alternative sources.

A lot of the problem is secrecy.

Regulators don’t even know the full picture of where all the ingredients in our medications actually come from.

And that’s because companies consider their API manufacturers to be proprietary information.

In February, the FDA announced that one drug was in short supply but wouldn’t say which, because naming it would have revealed “supply chain trade secrets”.

Many companies even hold plant locations as a closely held trade secret.

According to the Senior Director of a US Pharmacist Association that tracks shortages, it’s the murkiness of the supply chain that makes it hard to prevent shortages.

“And again, we don’t know where a lot of those drugs are made” he said.

The implications of all this for Australia’s national security are simply staggering.

AS Air Vice-Marshall Blackburn said at a Joint Standing Committee in 2020:

“We import about 90 per cent of our liquid fuels, 90 percent of our medicines and we rely on foreign-owned and flagged ships for about 98 per cent of our trade.  The import dependency has been further compounded by the failure of past governments to mandate stockholding levels for any of these imports.”

Those “past governments” have left Australia in an utterly untenable position.

/0 Comments/by