U.S. Intelligence Claims Russia Is Buying Weapons From North Korea

North Korea's Defense Ministry has denied that it has provided weapons and ammunition to Russia amid the war in Ukraine, calling the allegations "rumors" spread by "hostile forces" aimed at tarnishing Pyongyang's image.

"We have never exported weapons or ammunition to Russia before and we will not plan to export them," an unidentified senior defense official said in a September 21 statement carried by state media.

The statement came after Washington earlier this month confirmed a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment claiming that Russia was purchasing weapons from North Korea to ease supply shortages amid its war in Ukraine.

Such exports, said to include artillery shells and rockets, would violate UN resolutions stemming from North Korea's nuclear program that bar it from importing or exporting weapons.

Moscow has called the U.S. intelligence findings "fake."

In the state media report, the unidentified North Korean official told Washington to stop making "reckless remarks" and "keep its mouth shut."

Russia recently purchased military drones from Iran, another state under U.S. and international sanctions, to boost its military campaign against Ukraine, which has reportedly depleted Moscow's ammunition and military equipment stocks.

Sanctions limiting Russia's purchase of microchips and other equipment is also seen as contributing to Moscow's difficulties in maintaining military supplies.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby earlier this month said that Moscow could potentially purchase millions of rockets and artillery shells from North Korea, although he said that Washington had no evidence any sales had taken place.

Last week, British intelligence analysts said that Russia was "almost certainly increasingly sourcing weaponry" from Iran and North Korea.

AMERICA REMAINS A SIGNIFICANT SACRIFICE ZONE WITH ECONOMIC POLICIES THAT JUSTIFY THEIR PAINFUL IMPACT ON THE POOR AND MARGINALIZED AS NECESSARY FOR THE GREATER GOOD

In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we’re assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it. Small business owners must sacrifice their paychecks so that their companies will continue to grow, while politicians must similarly sacrifice key policy promises to get something (almost anything!) done.

We have become all too used to the notion that success only comes with sacrifice, even if this is anything but the truth for the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. After all, whether you focus on the gains of Wall Street or of this country’s best-known billionaires, the ever-rising Pentagon budget, or the endless subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, sacrifice is not exactly a theme for those atop this society. As it happens, sacrifice in the name of progress is too often relegated to the lives of the poor and those with little or no power. But what if, instead of believing that most of us must eternally “rob Peter to pay Paul,” we imagine a world in which everyone was in and no one out?

In that context, consider recent policy debates on Capitol Hill as the crucial midterm elections approach. To start with, the passage of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) promises real, historic advances when it comes to climate change, health care, and fair tax policy. It’s comprehensive in nature and far-reaching not just for climate resilience but for environmental justice, too. Still, the legislation is distinctly less than what climate experts tell us we need to keep this planet truly livable.

In addition, President Biden’s cancellation of up to $20,000 per person in student loans could wipe out the debt of nearly half of all borrowers. This unprecedented debt relief demonstrates that a policy agenda lifting from the bottom is both compassionate and will stimulate the broader economy. Still, it, too, doesn’t go far enough when it comes to those suffocating under a burden of debt that has long served as a dead weight on the aspirations of millions.

In fact, a dual response to those developments and others over the past months seems in order. As a start, a striking departure from the neoliberal dead zone in which our politics have been trapped for decades should certainly be celebrated. Rather than sit back with a sense of satisfaction, however, those advances should only be built upon.

Let’s begin by looking under the hood of the IRA. After all, that bill is being heralded as the most significant climate legislation in our history and its champions claim that, by 2030, it will have helped reduce this country’s carbon emissions by roughly 40% from their 2005 levels. Since a reduction of any kind seemed out of reach not so long ago, it represents a significant step forward.

Among other things, it ensures investments of more than $60 billion in clean energy manufacturing; an estimated $30 billion in production tax credits geared toward increasing the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and more; about $30 billion for grant and loan programs to speed up the transition to clean electricity; and $27 billion for a greenhouse gas reduction fund that will allow states to provide financial assistance to low-income communities so that they, too, can benefit from rooftop solar installations and other clean energy developments.

The IRA also seeks to lower energy costs and reduce utility bills for individual Americans through tax credits that will encourage purchases of energy-efficient homes, vehicles, and appliances. Among other non-climate-change advances, it caps out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs, reduces health insurance premiums for 13 million Americans, and provides free vaccinations for seniors.

As the nation’s biggest investment in the climate so far, it demonstrates the willingness of the Biden administration to address the climate crisis. It also highlights just how stalled this country has been on that issue for so long and how much more work there is to do. Of course, given our ever hotter planet and the role this country has played in it as the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter of all time, anything less than legislation that will lead to net-zero carbon emissions is a far cry from what’s necessary, as this country burns, floods, and overheats in a striking fashion.

Pipelines and Sacrifice Zones

Earlier iterations of what became the IRA recognized a historic opportunity to enact policies connecting the defense of the planet to the defense of human life and needs. Because of the resistance of Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as every Senate Republican, the final version of the reconciliation bill includes worrying sacrifices. It does not, for instance, have an extension or expansion of the Child Tax Credit, a lifeline for poor and low-income families, nor does it raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though that was a promise made in the 2020 election. Gone as well are plans for free pre-kindergarten and community college, in addition to the nation’s first paid family-leave program that would have provided up to $4,000 a month to cover births, deaths, and other pivotal moments in everyday life.

And don’t forget to add to what’s missing any real pain for fossil-fuel companies. After all, coal baron Manchin seems to have succeeded in cutting a side deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for a massive natural gas pipeline through his home state of West Virginia and that’s just to begin a list of concessions. Indeed, the sacrificial negotiations with Manchin to get the bill passed ensured significantly more domestic fossil-fuel production, including agreement that the Interior Department would auction off permits to drill for yet more oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, and possibly elsewhere, all of which will offset some of the emissions reductions from climate-change-related provisions in the bill.

It’s important to note as well that, although progress was made on reducing fossil-fuel emissions, expanding health care, and creating a fairer tax system, for the poor in this country, “sacrifice zones” are hardly a thing of the past. As journalist Andrew Kaufman suggests, “One thing that does seem assured, however, is that the arrival — at last — of a federal climate law has not heralded an end to the suffering [of] communities living near heavy fossil-fuel polluters.” And as Rafael Mojica, program director for the Michigan environmental justice group Soulardarity, put it, the IRA “is riddled with concessions to the big carbon-based industries that at present prey on our communities at the expense of their health, both physically and economically.”

Keep in mind that Michigan is already anything but a stranger to sacrifice zones. Case in point: the water crisis in the city of Flint as well as in Detroit. The Flint Democracy Defense League and the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization have battled lead-poisoning and water shut-offs for years in the face of deindustrialization and the lack of a right to clean water in this country. Such grassroots efforts helped sound the alarm during the Flint water crisis that began in 2014 and have since linked community groups nationwide dealing with high levels of toxins in their water supply so that they could learn from that city’s grassroots organizing experience. Meanwhile, so many years later, Michiganders are still protesting potential polluters like Enbridge’s aging Line 5 oil pipeline.

And there are many other examples of frontline community groups protesting the ways in which their homes are being sacrificed on the altar of the fossil-fuel industry. Take, for example, the communities in the stretch of Louisiana between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that contain hundreds of petrochemical facilities and has, eerily enough, come to be known as Cancer Alley. There, among a mostly poor and Black population, you can find some of the highest cancer rates in the country. In St. James Parish alone, there are 12 petrochemical plants and nearly every household has felt the impact of cancer. For years, Rise St. James and other local groups have been working to prevent the construction of a new plastics facility near local schools on land that once was a slave burial ground.

Then, of course, there are many other sacrifice zones where the issue isn’t fossil fuels.  Take the city of Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County, Washington, once home to a thriving timber and lumber economy. After its natural landscape was stripped and the local economy declined, that largely white, rural community fell into endemic poverty, homelessness, and drug abuse. Chaplains on the Harbor, one of the few community organizations with a presence in homeless encampments across the county, has now started a sustainable farm run by formerly homeless and incarcerated young people in Aberdeen as part of an attempt to create models for the building of green communities in places rejected by so many.

Or take Oak Flat, Arizona, the holiest site for the San Carlos Apache tribe. There, a group called the Apache Stronghold is leading a struggle to protect that tribe’s sacred lands against harm from Resolution Copper, a multinational mining company permitted to extract minerals on those lands thanks to a midnight rider put into the National Defense Authorization Act in 2015. Along with a growing number of First Nations people and their supporters, it has been fighting to protect that land from becoming another sacrifice zone on the altar of corporate greed.

On the east coast, consider Union Hill, Virginia, where residents of a historic Black community fought for years to block the construction of three massive compressor stations for fracked gas flowing from the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Those facilities would have potentially subjected residents to staggering amounts of air pollution, but early in 2020 community organizers won the fight to stop construction.

Consider as well the work of Put People First PA!, which, in Pennsylvania communities like Grant Township and Erie, is on the tip of the spear in the fight against an invasive and devastating fracking industry that’s ripping up land and exposing Pennsylvanians to the sort of pollutants that leaders in Union Hill fought to prevent. Note as well that, in many similar places, hospitals are being privatized or shuttered, leaving residents without significant access to health care, even as the risk of respiratory illnesses and other industrially caused diseases grows.

Such disparate communities reflect a long-term history of suffering — from the violence inflicted on indigenous people, to the slave plantations of the South, to the expansion (and then steep decline) of industrial production in the North and West, to pipelines still snaking across the countryside. And now historic pain inflicted on low-income and poor Americans will increase thanks to a growing climate crisis, as the people of flooded and drinking-water-barren Jackson, Mississippi, discovered recently.

In a world of megadroughts, superstorms, wildfires, and horrific flooding guaranteed to wreak ever more havoc on lives and livelihoods, poor and low-income people are beginning to demand action commensurate with the crisis at hand.

Dark Clouds Blowing in from the “Equality State”

While reports on the passage of the IRA and student debt relief dominated the news cycle, another major policy announcement at the close of the summer and far from Capitol Hill slipped far more quietly into the news. It highlights yet again the “sacrifices” that poor Americans are implicitly expected to make to strengthen the economy. Just outside of Jackson, Wyoming, one of the wealthiest and most unequal towns in this country, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell committed his organization to take “forceful and rapid steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply and to keep inflation expectations anchored.”

Couched in typically wonkish language, his comments — made in the “equality state” — may sound benign, but he was suggesting capping wages, an act whose effects will, in the end, fall most heavily on poor and low-income people. Indeed, he warned, mildly enough, that this would mean “some pain for households and businesses” — even as he was ensuring that the livelihoods of poor and low-income people would once again be sacrificed for what passes as the greater good.

What does it mean, for instance, to “moderate demand” for food when more than 12 million families with children are already hungry each month? It should strike us as wrong to call for “some pain” for so many households facing crises like possible evictions or foreclosures, crushing debt, and a lack of access to decent health care. It should be considered inhumane to advocate for a “softer labor market” when one in three workers is already earning less than $15 an hour.

It is disingenuous to say that the economy is “overheating,” as if what’s being experienced is some strange, abstract anomaly rather than the result of decades of disinvestment in infrastructure and social programs that could have provided the basic necessities of life for everyone. Nonetheless, Powell continues to push a false narrative of scarcity and the threat of inflation to smother the powerful resurgence of courageous and creative labor organizing that we’ve seen, miraculously enough, in these pandemic years.

At this point, as a pastor and theologian, I can’t resist quoting Jesus’s choice words in the Gospel of Matthew about how poor people so often pay the price for the further enrichment of the already wealthy. In Matthew 9, Jesus asserts: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” The Greek word “mercy” is defined as loving kindness, taking care of the down and out. In Jesus’s parlance, mercy meant acts of mutual solidarity and societal policies that prioritized the needs of the poor, which would today translate into cancelling debts, raising wages, and investing in social programs.

Despite the encouraging policy-making that hit the headlines this summer, America remains a significant sacrifice zone with economic policies that justify their painful impact on the poor and marginalized as necessary for the greater good. It’s time for us to fight for a comprehensive, intersectional, bottom-up approach to the injustices that continually unfold around us.

The Food Production and Distribution Being Purposely Impeded by State Action, the Raising of Prices to Levels Most Cannot Fathom; Sickness, Hunger, Poverty, Starvation, and Death Will Occur

The subject of mass food shortages has always been a popular one amongst the prepping community. Regardless of the stated reason for the concern, many a writer has shared their thoughts about what life would be like when the grocery store shelves emptied. Even so, we were all a bit surprised in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the “Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020” began. We were even more surprised when that grew into general shortages, and the stores really did empty out. 

I have always thought that the pictures people used showing empty store shelves were faked somehow. But now I have a nice collection of pictures of empty store shelves, all of which I can guarantee you are quite real. 

But what’s surprised me more than the stores emptying out is that after two years, things still aren’t back to normal. There’s been one thing after another that has kept our supply chain from operating as we are all accustomed to it happening, and to be honest, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. If anything, I would say that we can expect the shortages to continue and even get worse. 

Before getting into specifics, allow me to say that I would never have thought that one food processing plant going down would really make that much difference. There were a number of food processing plants that shut down during the pandemic, but there was so much going on that it was impossible to see the impact of any one factory. Yet we are now faced with a nationwide shortage of baby formula because of one factory being shut down due to the risk of a bacterial infection. 

Granted, that one factory produced about 40% of the baby formula used in this country; but that’s part of the surprise. Even though we’re all used to nationwide brand recognition, I never realized just what that meant from a supply point of view. If the plant producing any one major brand of anything goes down, for whatever reason, it has a wide-reaching impact. 

That’s the risk we’re facing right now, and it exists for just about anything you can think of. Many small, local brands are nothing more than national brands that have been packaged for local grocery chains, putting their label on the nationwide brand’s product. So, what we might think of as an alternate source, really isn’t one. That leaves us vulnerable to more shortages. 

But just where are these shortages coming from? There are lots of different places, but I’d like to examine just a few. 

The War

The most obvious problem that’s currently going on is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Between the two countries, they account for a large amount of the world’s wheat and fertilizer production, along with a number of other agricultural products. While we don’t use most of those products here, they do affect the world food market. That means that we’re likely to end up providing some food to countries that are affected, which could drive food prices up even more here at home.

There is one thing that we apparently do use from Russia, which could cause some major problems for our agricultural industry; that’s potash for fertilizer. Something like 92% of our agricultural fertilizers depends on Russian supplies. As of right now, the State Department has exempted Russian fertilizer products from the embargo, so we’re okay. But that could all change if Putin decides to “punish us” by cutting off shipments to us. 

Fires

Now let me go onto what I think is the most curious of the current problems; that of so many food processing plants catching fire. If you search for this online, you’ll get swamped by articles from “fact-checkers” who are saying that all the conspiracy theories are false. They never seem to deal with the 25 different food processing plants that have caught fire since December. I have the list of them. 

According to Snopes (who I normally don’t believe), none of those fires were started as an act of arson. They’re supposedly basing that on reports from investigators on the scene. So, until I hear otherwise, I’m going to give Snopes the benefit of the doubt on this one; but it still smells fishy. 

I’m not one to pay much attention to conspiracy theories, but if I was, this just might get me believing in them. While fires in such plants are supposedly not something uncommon, so many of them happening in such a short period of time seems extremely suspicious. I don’t know if these fires are going to continue or not, but the probabilities are stacking up.

One thing that has occurred to me is that if an enemy wanted to do us harm on the cheap, this would be a good way to do so. With our southern border as porous as it is right now, it wouldn’t be hard for a terrorist organization or some country’s intelligence organization to infiltrate a couple dozen operatives into our country. Those facilities can’t be guarded all that well, so starting a fire wouldn’t be any big deal. The only question is whether they could manage to start the fire in such a way that investigators wouldn’t be able to tell what they were doing. 

Please note that I’m not proposing that as a conspiracy theory; I’m just stating that the risk exists. With everything else going on and the current state of our supply chain, a rather small group of trained people would have the potential to wreak havoc on our supply lines. As it is, the fries we’re having are probably alreadyhaving more of an impact than we see. 

Cyberattacks 

While we’re talking about enemy attacks, we must include cyberattacks. The news media has been keeping quiet about it, but there are constant cyberattacks going on against our farmers and our food processing plants, just like there are against lots of other businesses here in the states. 

Remember the ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline last year? That one gained the hackers 4.4 million dollars. But it wasn’t the only company that had been attacked in that way. There have been a lot more of these attacks than any of us realize, including some against food companies. 

Ransomware attacks are a particularly difficult type of cyber attack to protect against. To start with, most companies’ computer networks are old, or at least contain a lot of old components. Even when the company has the latest and greatest for their main computer center, they likely have a lot of outdated equipment feeding information into their main systems, often from automated operations. It’s not physically or financially practical to update those system components every time there’s a new threat, so most companies leave them in place and in the process, leave an attack vector open. 

Hackers have become extremely astute in how they use ransomware. Often, it’s installed into the system as a software update. Then it’s allowed to sit there quietly for months. That way, when they trigger the ransomware, the IT department can’t just upload the backups from the day before. It might take them a week to figure out how far back they would have to go in their backups, and that probably won’t help them, as using backups a few months old means losing all the data from the business’ operations in the meantime. 

Companies are left with two options: either pay the ransom or shut down operations long enough to replace their systems. That can take a considerable amount of time. Just recently, the factory which produces just about all the cream cheese for the country was hit by a ransomware attack. They couldn’t afford the ransom, so they ended up shutting down. There wasn’t any cream cheese in the stores for over three months.

Imagine what would happen if those hackers managed to hit 100 food-related companies at the same time. That would mean 100 companies that couldn’t produce their products. We’d find alternatives, but that would end up causing second-order shortages, as those other companies couldn’t keep up with demand. The entire supply chain could turn into a train wreck.

Shipping

But there’s something still worse than that going on. That’s the shipping problem. While the backlog of ships off California’s coast is reducing, that was only part of the problem. There’s still a nationwide shortage of truckers, and with the price of gasoline and diesel, that’s not likely to clear up anytime soon. 

Over 90% of the trucking companies in the country have six trucks or less, and about 93% have less than 20 trucks. Those small companies can’t afford what’s happening with fuel prices today. With diesel selling for a nationwide average of $5.50 per gallon, it costs between $1,200 and $1,600 to fill the tanks of a truck. With an average fuel mileage of about 6.5 miles per gallon, those 150 gallons of fuel won’t quite take that truck 1,000 miles. 

There has been an 18.3% increase in the price of shipping by truck and a 29% increase in maritime shipping since January of last year. That might sound like a big increase, but the cost of diesel has more than doubled in the same amount of time. At that rate, the increase in what trucking companies charge is just barely covering the increase in fuel costs. 

It’s hard to say how long that can keep on, especially since the various factors that are causing high fuel prices seem like they’re just going to keep prices rising. If diesel prices rise to the point where truckers can’t afford to keep driving their rigs, we won’t be complaining about how the high cost of shipping is pushing up the cost of food, but we’ll be complaining that there’s no food on the shelves once again. 

The thing is, this can happen to us at any time. Realistically, it will probably be a gradual thing, as different truckers decide that they just can’t keep on trucking. But each one that does will make it a bit harder for the system as a whole to keep up with our needs. Eventually, we’ll see the impact in the stores. 

What Should We Do? 

Between all these risks and the rising price of food, I can see only one option that makes sense – buy whatever you can, whenever you can, stocking up as much as possible. I realize that preppers stock up anyway, but maybe your stockpile is a bit low after the lockdowns and shortages during the pandemic. Well, with the current inflation rate, it sure doesn’t make any sense to just sit on money, watching it lose value; you may as well invest it in food and other necessities. 

I’ve long said that food is one of the best possible investments for people who don’t have a lot of money to invest. Food typically outpaces the overall inflation rate, and it’s something we can always use. You don’t have to sell food to make money on it, all you have to do is eat it. That saves you money on buying food, which you can then use for other things. 

But there’s more to this idea of buying more food than that. I noticed during the pandemic that many preppers didn’t use their stockpiles to meet their family’s needs, even though that’s what we have those stockpiles for. Rather than use them, though, these people decided to save their stockpile for the next disaster. In other words, they didn’t see the pandemic as enough of a disaster to get into their stockpile, even with the stores running out of food. 

So, here’s what I recommend; if your stockpile is down, then go ahead and bring it back up to where it needs to be. But if you’re one of those people who didn’t get into your stockpile, then leave it alone and increase your pantry; if possible, increase it to a month’s worth of food. That way, you’ll have more food to eat if something goes wrong before you have to get into your stockpile. 

I’ve already done this, including filling my freezer to the bulging point with meat. While most of us don’t normally stockpile frozen meat, the pandemic has shown me that there are some disasters that can occur, that will still leave us with electricity. So, even though I might lose power, I consider it worthwhile so that I can have a stockpile of meat. 

That’s also given me the additional responsibility of making sure that I have a plan of what to do with that meat should the power go out. To start with, I have two generators and a supply of gasoline that’s big enough to last several days. That will keep the freezer going while I preserve that meat. I’ll be using a combination of dehydration and smoking to preserve it, as I have two smokers (one wood and one electric), as well as two dehydrators (one electric and one solar). I’m not sure just how much meat I can process in one day, but I’m pretty sure I can preserve it all before I run out of gas for my generators.