However, Americans have been hearing Chicken-Little-esque stories of food shortages since the pandemic began, which has not exactly inspired confidence in the words of the authorities any more than the predictions of millions of Covid-19 deaths within the first few months of the virus – calculations based on a faulty model. 

This time, however, the sky may actually be falling. While some aspects of the prophecies shared by Meyersohn and his ilk are self-fulfilling – stores putting up Christmas displays earlier than ever are signaling to customers that they’d better do their shopping now, triggering dozens of stories about how festive goods are flying off the shelves at an unheard-of rate and sending shoppers into a panic – others are not so easily put to bed. Suspicious toilet paper shortages can be triggered at the drop of a hat, even though it’s one of the easiest and quickest consumer products to manufacture, and the onset of another TP Tsunami can be reliably interpreted as a signal that a country is to begin panicking immediately. 

The problem this time around, however, appears to go deeper than neurotic marketing fails and cheap appeals to the fight-or-flight response. Despite throwing up industrial-strength information blockades, narrative managers are no longer capable of covering up logistical snarls like truckers’ strikes, both in the US and in its Five Eyes allies.

Some drivers’ unions oppose the mandatory vaccination regime imposed upon them by President Joe Biden, on top of the usual list of grievances, and they are joined by factory workers like those at the Kellogg Company in demanding better working conditions. With both corporate and rank-and-file workers convinced they have leverage against the other, the power struggle is likely to continue for months, to the disadvantage of the American people.

While it’s tempting to write off these manmade “shortages” as part of the seemingly endless array of pandemic-related fictional catastrophizing, they are very real. Photos of empty shelves at Walgreens, Rite Aid, Stop & Shop and other American drugstore and grocery chains are all over the internet, depicting sometimes puzzling absences – do potato chips really have such a high resale value? – and giving rise to a multitude of theories. 

Not all the absences are silly, of course – the vitamin aisle is frequently picked clean for reasons that should be obvious during a disease outbreak – but the disappearance of kids’ toys from Walgreens shelves in Brooklyn, along with similar runs on non-perishable goods like bug spray and Ensure shakes, indicates there’s more at hand than needy locals stuffing their pockets out of desperation.

Many, particularly on the right, have blamed a ‘shoplifting pandemic’ for the supply shortages, arguing New York is going the way of San Francisco – where a lenient justice system and a massive drug epidemic have collided to produce a sprawling quasi-organized criminal underclass. Retail executives in New York have told The Wall Street Journal that these crime rings boost merchandise by day and sell it via e-tailing megacorporation Amazon by night, sparking the worst level of retail theft since records began in 1995 – a crime spree that has generated as much as $45 billion.

Certainly, the Cuomo and now Hochul administrations have created problems for themselves with virtue-signaling “catch and release” programs that incentivize shoplifting by allowing offenders to return to society the day of their arrest, often without paying a penny in bail. And it’s hard to teach repeat offenders that “stealing is wrong” when everyone from the lowest junkie to the highest central banker is lining their pockets with ill-gotten gains with no tangible adverse consequences. Nine of the inmates Hochul freed from the city’s Rikers Island prison with great fanfare last month have already been re-arrested, and many of those who are finally picked up for shoplifting are found to have dozens of arrests on their records already – and are soon released to steal again.

Authorities who might otherwise be prepared to help store owners in need have their hands full enforcing idiotic rules like Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recently amped-up mask mandate, slapping restaurants with killer fines for not demanding patrons’ Papers, Please™ upon entry, or babysitting the mayor’s Fifth Avenue Black Lives Matter mural.

And law enforcement is engaged in its own semi-involuntary stand-down as many police unions draw the line at mandatory jabs. Even the most egregious bootlickers are forced to choose where to place their loyalty – the (corrupt) government or the (corrupt) corporations that call upon the New York Police Department to do their dirty work? And even if cops desperately want to enforce anti-shoplifting laws, the New York state government has made that a lot more difficult, forbidding prosecutors from setting bail in petty larceny cases. What constitutes “petty” depends on the jurisdiction, but in San Francisco, anyone walking out of a store with $999 worth of goodies is permitted to go on their merry way.

New York’s supply chain issues, along with those of the rest of the country, are unlikely to go away anytime soon. Meanwhile, the government would be wise to stop shooting itself in the foot by demanding those workers who do show up with a willingness to work aren’t chased out with pitchforks and red tape for refusing the vaccine. While the ruling class may think it has control of the situation, there are more truckers, more nurses, more drugstore cashiers and more angry working-class Americans than there ever will be of their ruling class counterparts. The fallout will be less Chicken Little than game of chicken, and no matter who flinches first, the American public ultimately loses.

Source:   Helen Buyniski, an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23 and on Telegram, writes for RT, where this article was published. 

Describing the disastrous economic conditions as “an economy that’s in transition,” Adeyemo acknowledged that “we are seeing high prices for some of the things that people have to buy.” While he praised the administration’s stimulus payments, he also pinned the blame squarely on the unvaccinated.

While the ABC reporter repeatedly suggested that the country’s shortages of toilet paper and other panic-buy items could be traced to international supply chain disruptions, a growing number of Americans are demanding answers regarding the weirdly specific nature of certain products missing from store shelves. Some have even voiced doubt concerning whether the shortages are being introduced deliberately, either to gin up hatred against the unvaccinated or keep Americans economically off-balance as they grow accustomed to the wild disruptions of the pandemic.

Adeyemo did the Biden cabinet no favors by adding fuel to the conspiratorial fire, explaining the primary reason Biden continued to push for everyone to be vaccinated was that only then could the White House “provide the resources the American people need to make it to the other side” of the supply chain problem.

Despite blaming the international shipping industry for empty shelves in the US, the media establishment has acknowledged that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach - which together process 40% of the nation’s imports - had their busiest years on record last year, giving the lie to the notion that the products missing from American shelves simply don’t exist. However, many truckers working for shipping companies have balked at the idea of mandatory vaccination, leaving their firms’ fleets woefully understaffed, and others have gone on strike to demand better working conditions.

The Biden administration has attempted to address the supply chain problem by calling for the Port of Los Angeles to run 24 hours, but while he praised his own promised move as a “game changer,” the executive director of the port has made it clear that there is no timetable in place for the promised schedule shift. Meanwhile, Biden’s cabinet has come across as woefully out of touch - White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, for example, pooh-poohed the issue of empty shelves as a “high class” problem earlier this week, eliciting criticism from both Left and Right. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been quietly vacationing on paternity leave since mid-August, leaving the country without even a semblance of logistical oversight as the cargo clog shows no signs of dissipating.

Labor shortages are being felt far beyond the US, though often for similar reasons. In Italy, thousands of protesters turned out to block cargo ships from unloading their bounty earlier this week. The demonstrators were outraged over the country’s adoption of a mandatory vax-to-work policy similar to that threatened by the Biden administration. And the UK government has begged lorry drivers to return to work, even luring foreign drivers in with temporary visas as the country frets over its own empty shelves issues.

Australian ‘truckies’ have united with other unions to exert pressure on the government, which has kept cities like Melbourne under lockdown for months despite vanishingly few reported cases of Covid-19. The government was already floating policies like ‘no jab, no job’ over a year ago and has led the way in leveraging the pandemic to turn Five Eyes ‘democracies’ into police states. 

Source: RT

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