May 18, 2023 - The Truth Central - Dr. Jerome Corsi
33:15
US Power Grid at Elevated Risk; Credit Card Debt Close to $1 Trillion
We are being warned the US power grid faces an elevated risk due to the Biden Administration's Climate Change-based energy policies. That is according to a report issued by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. In addition, we are facing a serious problem with waste from abandoned and dying solar and wind turbine farms.On the economic front, The Federal Reserve Board of New York says U.S. Credit Card Debt is closing in on $1 Trillion -- a direct result of today's high-inflationary environment driven by political policy.Dr. Jerome Corsi examines and breaks down what's happening and why on today's The Truth CentralFollow Dr. Jerome Corsi on Twitter: @corsijerome1Our website: https://www.thetruthcentral.comOur Sponsors:1MyVitalC: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/myvitalc-ess60-in-organic-olive-oil/Swiss America: https://www.swissamerica.com/offer/CorsiRMP.phpThe MacMillan Agency: https://www.thetruthcentral.com/the-macmillan-agency/Pro Rapid Review: https://prorrt.com/thetruthcentralmembers/RITA: https://members.sayrita.com/truthcentralreaders/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-truth-central-with-dr-jerome-corsi--5810661/support.
I'm traveling, I'm on location today, so we'll have to put up with the camera and the laptop, but I'm glad to be with you and we're going to cover a lot of news today.
Let's get right into it.
First story I want to cover has to do with the amount of solar and wind waste that we're going to have.
From all this massive buildup of the green energy, what are you going to do with all the solar panels when they quit working?
What are you going to do with all the wind, with turbines when they're junk?
And it's becoming a massive problem already, especially with the decision to ramp up our use of the so-called green energy.
I've been saying repeatedly that this is a boondoggle.
It still takes an enormous amount of hydrocarbon fuels to generate the electricity.
At any rate, what the projections are, and studies are being done on this, Although there's a massive waste problem.
If we don't deal with it soon, we're going to be overwhelmed by it because the recycling these solar panels and wind turbines when they no longer function.
Uh, is a massive issue.
The end-of-life management, they're saying, for solar photovoltaics, which is really what the, these are photovoltaic cells, which are solar panels.
There's millions of solar installations in operation in the U.S.
alone and hundreds of millions of panels in use.
It's important to decide what to do with this because by 2050, we're going to be having tons of this junk to have to dispose of.
And so, therefore, we even have this International Renewable Energy Agency.
There's a government agency for everything these days.
I mean, I'm seeing the tremendous expansion of administrative governments around the world, which is frightening because these unelected officials are happy to make rules all day long, which is the end of freedom and the ability to have private enterprise to be able to act independently.
At any rate, the projections are that we'll have about 1 million tons by the end of this decade of solar junk and wind panel junk.
The United States is expected to have the second largest number of end-of-life solar panels by 2050, and the government must establish regulations for dealing with waste solar equipment and turbines.
Well, of course, more regulations.
What to do with all this junk?
And essentially, since 2021, the Wind Energies Technology Office, another government agency, the part of the Department of Energy, they're establishing blade recycling technologies.
To get the entire wind turbine businesses, when they're junk, gone.
And of course, you've got lithium battery problems, which are, again, hard to dispose of.
These rare minerals can't just be thrown in a waste dump or recycled by putting into a landfill.
Essentially, we've got to have something that makes them detoxify.
So, you can take the companies like SolarCycle, which takes the solar panels and sells the silver and copper recovered as commodity on the commodity markets, as well as selling glass, silicon, and aluminum to panel manufacturers.
The problem also is that China's got about 90% of the market on making solar panels right now, and China, I'm sure, is not going to be interested in any recycling effort.
So what we do with all this junk is going to be an interesting issue, because the solar panels are going to have a limited life.
They're not going to last forever.
And that's, I think, just inevitable.
I want to start here.
OK, here we go.
So let's go on here to the next story.
And essentially, the power grid These are both, I think, issues.
I'm very concerned that the solar and wind idea is more of a fantasy.
It's really not a very well thought out idea.
And the technologies don't really work on the scale that they're going to have to work if we're going to support and have a modern industrial state.
One of my major themes has been to understand, and the book I've written, On the truth about energy, global warming, and climate change, this is really a neo-Marxist agenda to shut down capitalism.
We covered yesterday that the real solution, a growing solution, even a new film coming out by Oliver Stone, Nuclear Power is the Solution, the global warming crowd does not want a solution.
They want the destruction of the modern industrial state.
There's going to be a massive pushback by the climate change crowd of saying nuclear energy is dangerous because they know it's a solution.
They don't want solutions.
The reality is, and this next article I think covers it extremely well, is that More than two-thirds of North America is projected to see electrical outages when temperatures spike this summer, because many utilities in parts of the country do not have sufficient reserve generation capacity to meet surges in demand.
And according to the annual summer reliability assessment, which is done about May 17th every year
by this North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which is NERC, NERC.
Again, a North American, there's a big push going on quietly
to have a putting together of the United States, Mexico and Canada.
That move has never stopped what I call the North American Union.
I was on it in 2010 when George W. Bush had the Security and Prosperity Partnership
with North America.
Well, right now we're getting another, the rail unions are coming together
to put the railroads of Mexico, United States and Canada
in one giant North American rail system for moving containers.
That's happening.
Reported on that here before, we'll continue to report on it.
But what this North American Electric Reliability Corporation said is that the power grid in at least eight regions of the United States, and one in Ontario, Canada, face elevated risks of brownouts and blackouts during the summer heat waves between June and September, attributed at least partly to the disruption being caused by the growing reliance on so-called green energies that advocates want to see supplant fossil fuels.
And what this NERC organization said, the elevated risk profiles that we are seeing are driven by a combination of conventional generation retirements over the last couple of years, a substantial increase in forecasted peak demand and new loads coming.
We are electrifying more than we ever had in the past.
This whole idea of electrifying, electricity is clean because it doesn't burn fossil fuel, doesn't understand that you've just pushed the fossil fuel issue in the background.
It's still there.
You still have to generate the electricity and wind and solar don't do it.
They're only going to generate about 12.5% of all the electricity, the energy needs in the United States today, despite all the billions of dollars get thrown into these technologies.
We don't have a solar battery that the size of a flashlight battery that can power a city.
And the wind doesn't blow all the time, the sun doesn't shine all the time, and you have to store this energy in batteries.
You can't just have it available like hydrocarbon fuels to burn when you need it.
It's extremely inefficient, but yet it's more of a phenomenon.
It's more like a fad, a popular delusion.
That we're having the planet because of global warming.
So I've said over and over again, carbon dioxide is a very, very trace molecule in the atmosphere.
And yesterday we covered as well the attack on nitrogen, which is going to collapse farming.
Farms are being closed in countries like Denmark, 3000 farms.
I mean, This is insanity.
We don't have the idea that how are we going to support billions of people in the world if we don't have cheap, reliable energy?
And it's available, both in hydrocarbon fuels and in nuclear.
If we deny ourselves the power to run these modern industrial states, we're only going to achieve the globalist goal of killing billions of people in the world.
And I'm trying to warn everybody that this is insanity.
It's really suicidal.
Chris, do you have any comments?
I wanted to talk about those rolling blackouts and the fact that some of these people with
smart thermostats had to deal with Colorado freezing them at one point. This is why I'm
not a big fan of the smart home or any of these things where somebody else can control what I
have. You brought up something interesting about the environmental issues when it comes to
dilapidated solar farms and wind farms. I have to ask, what happens to these places?
You just leave this stuff there? And another thing, this whole war on farming,
is this another way to try to weasel land for things like this?
And then, as I said before, what happens?
They leave this stuff here, they don't recycle, they don't improve the land afterwards?
They just leave the junk.
I mean, and Sloan goes bankrupt, and Obama spent billions of dollars to make these programs work, and there's just junk all over the place because they don't work.
And they get abandoned.
And you can see in the picture you've got, which is a very good one, of the strewn solar panels abandoned and not being used.
This is the future of where we're at.
Now, the point I want to make, and increasingly, please pay attention to our sponsors at the top of the page, and Swiss America.
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I mean, we're, I'm going to cover it in a minute.
The debt crisis.
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Okay, let's get back to the news.
The next couple stories here I think are also very important.
I was kind of shocked to see this one.
The American workers are now testing 25% of American workers.
That's a 25-year record.
Legal marijuana is expanding, of course, across the country and overall drug use among workers tested by employees has increased steadily last year.
Well, I guess it would because of all the economic crisis we're going through.
You know, we're not allowed to talk about the Durham report anymore.
I see people are getting banned on sites like LinkedIn just for mentioning the Durham report.
The Durham Report made it clear that this entire Russian collusion was a hoax.
We knew it.
I knew it.
I was part of the Mueller investigation.
They wanted me to say I had a tie to Julian Assange, the prosecutors.
I didn't.
They offered me a plea deal.
They were going to indict me for lying.
They were the liars.
I never got indicted.
I refused their plea deal.
I could not stand before a judge and plead to a lie to keep myself out of jail.
I couldn't do it.
I couldn't swear before God to a lie.
And I think my faith really saved me in that one, but the point is we now know it's the government that was the criminals, and the Department of Justice is completely biased towards Democrats, and Hillary Clinton got a pass on the Clinton Foundation, and we've been hearing reports that the Those investigating the Biden family are being dismissed or reassigned within the FBI.
We've got political justice going on, which is no justice at all, like the KGB and the Stasi.
And again, reporting on any of this is toxic, but not reporting on it is lethal.
And we need to preserve our freedoms, and it's time to demand that we either close down the FBI, which is what I've been recommending for years, Close down the entire federal government, move it all to Death Valley, and see how many of these bureaucrats want to relocate.
At any rate, the marijuana testing, which is more than 6 million general workforce tests that Quest Diagnostic did last year, screening for it, of marijuana workers, 4.3% of the workers came back positive.
So from 3.9 the year prior year, this is the largest marijuana positivity rate since 1997.
And again, marijuana is the main driver of the rise in these drug tests.
More tests came back positive for amphetamines.
positive tests from amphetamines rose to 1.5 percent in 2022 up from 1.3 percent.
Two-thirds of U.S.
states have legalized recreational or medicinal use of marijuana.
And again, the push has some employers questioning whether to keep testing for the drugs as they weigh safety risks and legal liabilities.
So they'll probably just eventually quit testing.
And if marijuana is going to be legal with the younger generations now coming of age, going to work, Smoking marijuana has gotten to be, in those coming through high school and college these days, much more of just a normal thing to do, without realizing the benefits of sobriety and the fact that working does demand the ability to think clearly.
This whole idea of using marijuana to muddy your thinking is, to me, another one of these suicidal ideas that we're currently engaging in.
And I'm astounded every time I have to report on this.
Let's continue.
I've got a couple more stories I really want to cover for sure today.
I've posted a lot of news.
The debt ceiling.
The debt ceiling is Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury, who I have not much respect for, to be honest with you, I think she is completely another Democratic operative, has been saying that we're getting less revenue in from the income tax from 2022.
Of course we are, because fewer people are working and people in the middle class are getting pounded.
The rich are getting increasingly rich.
This divide between the super rich and everyone else is growing and the middle class is getting dramatically squeezed.
Our national debt since 1990 has really tripled.
since 1990 has really tripled.
We're now over $30 trillion.
And if we don't possibly by the beginning of June, raise the debt ceiling,
the government is not gonna have any ability to have.
Have more money to print to meet obligations.
I've got an article here from the Congressional Budget Office and saying that the debt ceiling is the maximum amount of debt that the Department of Treasury can issue to the public or other federal agencies.
They sell the debt in terms of bonds.
Use the cash to operate the government and right now the push is the non-discretionary spending Medicare Social Security these transfer payments which are not exactly welfare because Social Security you're supposed to have paid for while you've been working and there's a trust fund which of course the government has raided and filled that with treasury notes too and they've taken the money and put treasury notes you know into the trust fund of social security at any rate
They want to raise the debt limit $2.5 billion.
They did this in 2021.
It was raised $2.5 trillion to a total of $31.4 trillion, but we've reached that limit on January 19, 2023.
point 5 trillion to a total of 31.4 trillion.
But, um, we've reached that limit on Jan, January 19th, 2023.
And the treasury announced a debt issuance suspension period, which
we're in and then use these extraordinary measures to borrow additional
funds while breaching the debt ceiling.
So we're in a very dangerous period of time right now.
And the Congressional Budget Office was projecting that if the debt limit remains unchanged, there's a significant risk that at some point in the next, the first two weeks of June, the government will no longer be able to pay all of its obligations.
The extent to which the Treasury will be able to fund ongoing operations will remain uncertain throughout May, even if the Treasury ultimately runs out of funds in early June.
And that uncertainty exists because the timing and the amount of revenue collections and outlays over the intervening weeks between now and the middle of June could differ from Congressional Budget Office projections.
Now, there's lots of things that will happen if we don't have the ability of the federal government to continue issuing more debt.
Interest payments are made around the 15th and the last day of each month.
The mid-month outlays are about $3 billion, but once per quarter, payments of interest on 10-year notes and on bonds, which will be next paid in May this month, Increased mid-month outlays to $50 billion.
End of month payments have ranged from $10 billion to $16 billion.
We're paying huge amounts.
We've got to pay the interest on all this massive federal debt.
And while Social Security and Medicare have, again, they're financed by trust funds, large distributions may be irregular in terms of amount and timing so there could be a disruption in social security and medicare payments the federal funding federal government funding will probably need up to 2.2 trillion dollars to finance ongoing operations for the fiscal year 2023
Okay, so through April, 1.1 trillion in resources was a combination of increased debt, extraordinary measures and cash drawdown have been used.
Congressional Budget Office estimates that cash and extraordinary measures will be available.
For the rest of the fiscal year, it will be $5.5 trillion, about two-thirds of which is currently available.
But this leaves a gap between resources needed through the end of September and those available before then.
That gap is about a third of a trillion dollars.
So, again, we're at a desperate level.
Congress will, I think, ultimately just extend the debt ceiling.
They always play this kabuki dance of making it difficult, and then at the last minute, Republicans capitulate and they increase the debt ceiling.
Chris, my producer, would you like to comment on this, Chris?
I've been watching these committee hearings and these press conferences and the back and forth between the left and the right on the debt ceiling.
The fact is, the Democrats, Schumer and Jeffries, of course Biden, are railing against the idea of not raising the debt ceiling, but never talk about the idea that they're trying to keep spending levels at the pandemic size, okay?
The emergency spending that was deemed necessary by those in power is not that necessary anymore, and this is what the Republican side is trying to say over there.
Again, like you said, it's going to be a dance at this point.
It's all political posturing, but the fact is Congress really does need to go back to a level before pandemic spending, which right now they refuse to.
So you give them something, they're going to take it and run with it rather than give it back.
Yeah, I mean once Congress learns that they can spend the public treasury to give away money to people.
And this was the Cloward-Piven theory, two sociologists at Columbia who basically taught Barack Obama and a generation of the left that the way to destroy capitalism, another way to destroy capitalism, was to simply have all the welfare programs in place, which are well-intentioned.
So, you know, the Kerr-Mills bill, which was the 1960s, was the first Medicare, and it
was supposed to be just for the indigent, and it was passed under Johnson's administration.
But, of course, that immediately gets expanded to Medicare and Medicaid, and now the Democrats
want Medicare for everybody, not just those who are retired, but everyone.
And so these are great ideas.
I mean, sure, you know, the collar pivot idea was everyone should get a government check.
They should have a guaranteed annual government salary.
Just send everybody, send everybody a trillion dollars.
They call it universal basic income now.
Right.
And it was actually presented as a legitimate idea in the Democratic primary a couple of years, 2020 presidential Democratic primary.
Bernie Sanders would be in favor of this kind of an idea.
Andrew Yang!
Andrew Yang was in favor of this.
He said we should put together a universal basic income.
It doesn't make a lot of sense.
What it does is force us to print more money.
Well, it means more inflation and I think that the Federal Reserve, which said they were going to pause on increasing rates, there's already pressure from Wall Street seeing that inflation is not going down and they report They report it inaccurately.
They don't report accurately the inflation numbers, so we don't have a really good sense of it.
But the point is, the next story, which I'm also watching, is that the credit card debt in the United States is nearing a trillion dollars.
Now, that's another milestone, because again, trillion dollars, we've never had a trillion dollars in debt in credit cards, and it's happening.
OK, now with a trillion dollars in debt, what we will see is that essentially what has been the pattern is that people run up their credit cards during the holiday season and then they pay it off in the first quarter.
Well, that didn't happen this year.
What happened is that the debt did increase during the holiday season, but it's continuing to increase.
So, essentially, inflation is not slowing enough.
It's still squeezing people's budgets.
That's the problem.
You have this Elizabeth Hanson, Professor of Economics at American University.
She was the author of Bankrupt in America and History of Debtors and Their Creditors and the Law in the Twentieth Century.
She's saying, essentially, that it seems likely that the fourth quarter Uh, run up in balances went towards groceries and everyday bills rather than holiday expenses.
And people are having a harder time paying that debt back.
So what happens is people, okay.
Find the higher prices.
They don't want to lose.
They don't want to listen to their standard of living who does.
And so they, for a while begin using credit cards in order to subsidize their standard of living.
Well, that's great.
As long as you.
You know, decide you're going to live on credit, but the problem is you're also going to be paying interest on that credit.
And credit card debt interest is very high, as high as 20%.
So as soon as you get into credit card debt, it's hard to get out of it because it takes a massive amount of spending and available income in order to reduce the debt that you've lived on.
Living on credit cards is simply a bad idea.
And unfortunately, all of us have had to do it from time to time.
But again, unless you're disciplining yourself to really understand how dangerous this is, you can't do it forever.
And if the middle class is living on credit cards, we've got a very dangerous situation in this country where the inflation is basically going to cause a fundamental crash.
Well, we're self-destructing.
We're destroying food cycles.
We're making energy much more expensive.
We're not utilizing nuclear energy, which could be a solution to readily available and cheaper energy.
We're not using hydrocarbon fuels.
We're attacking gas burning stoves.
I mean, this is insanity.
The Democratic Party here is on a suicide mission, and the Democratic Party has become a neo-Marxist program.
And these ideologies, this save the Earth, which we're teaching the children, so kids are now in school afraid that mommy and daddy are going to kill them because we're going to have global warming and they're not going to survive.
This is nonsense.
The planet is 4.6 billion years old.
Human beings have been here for only a few million years.
We didn't have to save the planet.
The planet saved itself.
And our puny ability to impact the climate is a vast and complex system.
And if people would just, again, study the science, even a little bit.
I mean, I've tried to explain the science in pretty much common sense terms in that book about the truth about energy, global warming and climate change.
And I'm very pleased it's done well.
But if you don't take the time to learn the climate science, or at least educate yourself, and again, dumbing down the schools, not teaching the kids about gender and sex, rather than teaching them how to read and do basic arithmetic and how to think and calculate, we're teaching a group of children ideology and we're not educating them.
Chris, any final comments today before we wrap up?
You hit it on the mark, as always, Jerry.
We're educating kids to believe that global warming is actually happening, and it was always man-made.
Forget the predictions, the many predictions from the alarmists that have not come true.
Forget the fact that polar bears are not swimming in warm tropics anymore.
Okay, I'm exaggerating that point, but you understand where I'm coming from here.
Al Gore in his Inconvenient Truth, or Michael Mann with his books about All these dangerous perils we're going to suffer.
Earthquakes and the floods.
They say, oh drought, that's because of global warming.
Anything that happens is because of climate change.
Snowfall, excess, climate change.
Drought, climate change.
Anything that happens, they just blame climate change.
Inflation, climate change.
Bad television, climate change.
Everything is climate change.
Climate change or racism.
Take your pick.
Can't teach arithmetic because it's racist.
Can't bring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to school.
Same reason.
Insanity.
The rest of the world is laughing at us for taking the greatest economy the world has ever known, the freest country, and enslaving it on a bunch of popular delusions that, you know, are like selling rich craft in the middle ages.
You know, people are still not sufficiently educated to know when they're being lied to.
And this is a massive repeated lie that has become, you can't even oppose it in the social media
or the press without being de-platformed.
And the Department of Justice is going to prosecute you for telling the truth.
It's hard to believe we are in such insanity in the United States of America.
And I think the rest of the world is laughing at us.
But the BRICS nation are taking steps, and they're going to have a union between Russia, China, and Iran, which is happening.
And I fear for where the world is going.
To me, it looks like towards nuclear war.
And I'm watching Ukraine, in which now NATO is saying we should give Ukraine F-16 fighter jets.
And Zelensky's saying he wants to bomb Russia.
They've already had drones attack Russian oil depots.
This war is escalating.
And if NATO has a proxy war, which we're fighting, and the United States against Russia, and we have this counter-offensive, make any massive gains, Russia will escalate rapidly.
And we're headed towards nuclear war, and it doesn't seem to be a rational solution to it, given the insanity that is now dealing with our ruling classes.
Chris, any final comments?
If you look through history, ask yourself this question.
How many societies around the world has the left, the political left, destroyed?
Whether they've been in control or they've been infiltrating the culture.
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Thank you for supporting us.
In conclusion, I'd like to say that, first of all, today is Thursday, May 18, 2023.
Traveling, we'll be continuing to do the show tomorrow.
Tomorrow is Friday, so we'll be concluding the week with another broadcast.
Thank you for joining us.
In the end, God always wins.
Some of this looks dark.
May be difficult, and we'll get through it.
God will win this.
God created all this.
He can pull the plug on it any time he wants.
And so therefore, in the end, God always wins, and God rules.
So, in the spirit of 2 Chronicles 7, 14, I encourage us all to get in our knees and pray.
This is a problem that God can and will solve, with or without us.
And I'd rather that we be with God.
Thank you for joining us.
This is Dr. Jerome Corsi with TheTruthCentral.com.
