Saturday, July 23, 2022

We Starve Babies, Don't We?

Nothing exposes the rampant corruption in the American media more than the baby formula crisis. True, the media did offer a few sketchy reports about the problem when the Biden administration was pretending to deal with it. But now, as the Biden administration has failed and the problem continues and as new mothers are agonizing about how they will feed their babies, the story has disappeared from the headlines.

I should not need to mention it, but if a Republican president were in charge of dealing with the crisis we would be hearing about it nonstop. The front page of the New York Times would be filled with pictures of starving babies, accompanied by accusations that the Republicans were killing babies.


Given the fact that the mainstream media has become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, the truth is, we no longer have a free press. People around the world who look at what is happening to America can easily see that our claims to a free press are compromised by the fact that the media is more concerned with making Democrats look good and Republicans look bad. That makes it propaganda. In many ways, that’s its only mission.


So, young mothers cannot find baby formula, but the papers reported this morning that the big baby who supposedly runs our country cleaned his plate yesterday. Yes, indeed. Joe Biden ate it all, and acted like a toddler. If you thought that Biden’s mental age was in single digits, you were right.


Anyway, thank God for the Daily Mail. Today, the British tabloid reports the baby formula crisis. New mother Stacy Liberatore, a woman who must feed her baby formula, writes two stories about the crisis. Her reporting puts other media outlets to shame.


So, why not pass along some of the bad news.


America's baby formula shortage dominated headlines earlier this year when the Abbott plant, the country's largest manufacturer, suddenly shut down amid fears over contamination. 


There was round-the-clock coverage of the crisis and promises from the Biden administration that all red-tape would be slashed in order to feed babies and calm mothers' fears. 


But nearly six months later, the infant care shelves in drugstores around the US remain bare and this week, the shortage reached a new low with 28.5 percent of products now completely out of stock.  


Biden's solution has been to fly in foreign formula to try to plug the gap, but the 802,446 bottles that arrive per shipment barely line the stomachs of the 3million babies born every year.


In the last six months, the White House has flown in 60million bottles in total - enough to feed America's babies for just one week.


Six months of urgent flights has produced enough formula to feed babies for one week. And you thought that we were a serious country. One recalls that Tom Friedman was greeted with the usual chorus of derision when he declared that a country that could not build high speed rail was not a serious country.


How serious is the country when it cannot find enough baby formula and when no one aside from young mothers seems to care. Considering that this mostly involves women, you might imagine that feminists would be up in arms about this flagrant misogyny. In truth, they are up in arms about abortion, which would, dare we say, make formula less needed.


Liberatore describes her own experience as a young mother who must feed her baby formula:


Staring at row upon row of bare shelves where baby formula should be, I was gripped by a now-familiar cocktail of emotions - frustration, dread, exhaustion, panic – as I asked myself repeatedly how I was going to feed my five-month-old daughter.


I broke down in tears in the middle of the aisle in a CVS in New Jersey, pushed to my limit by the sheer helplessness of navigating the acute baby formula supply chain crisis that’s gripping America, leaving supermarket and pharmacy shelves bare and millions of new parents like me struggling to find enough produce to feed their children.


Desperation descends on her American family:


My fiancé John and I spend countless hours trawling mommy groups and online marketplaces, stopping at supermarkets and pharmacy chains in hopes of some new stock on the shelves.


In desperation, last week I paid $40 - almost double the retail cost - for two bottles of ready-feed that lasted us two days after trawling a website where people buy and sell formula for the only brand that doesn’t make my daughter ill. 


Am I helping support an underground market in these goods that's making this issue worse? Probably. Do I care about that right now? No, I do not. I'm desperate. I'm doing what I need to do to feed my child and if that means relying on strangers’ social media help through posts they share offering swaps or information on where they've seen certain brands, email alerts, hours trawling the internet and spending a small fortune on an essential product, that's that we must do. We have a child to feed and this urgent situation doesn’t feel like it's going to ease any time soon. 


How bad is it? By the numbers, please:


According to the market research firm IRI, which tracks inventory across 125,000 stores in the U.S, about 30 percent of powdered formula products were out of stock for the week ended July 3. That's less stock than in May when media coverage was at its peak. The variety of products on shelves has shrunk too.


The most recently available data, from the week ending June 17, shows 22 percent of all formula is still out of stock in the U.S. It's a marginal improvement but I don't see a difference on the shelves. In New Jersey, where I live, and in New York, where I work, stock is down 30 percent and 29 percent respectively. 


And then, Liberatore asks the salient question:


It's since become a familiar theme. Every day I ask: 'How can this be happening in America?'


I feel forgotten by my country. This shortage has been happening for months – affecting millions of parents in red and blue states from coast to coast - yet mine and others’ struggles feel like they just aren't important enough for those in power to have gotten a proper grip on.


When President Biden announced his big import drive, he made a point of saying he was not briefed on the issue before it became a crisis in April - even though formula manufacturers insist they warned him about the looming shortages in February. The FDA temporarily eased its strict rules on importing foreign-made formula to allow the government imports and though the White House has invoked the Defense Production Act that allows it to intervene in private industries, but it feels very much like a case of too little, too late.


How can this be happening in America? Well, it isn’t your father’s America any more. It is Joe Biden’s America. And, dare we say, the media, intrepid watchdogs guarding us against the least manifestation of Trumpism, does not care if babies starve.


8 comments:

IamDevo said...

Why oh why does anybody still believe all of this is inadvertent? Or still due to "THE PANDEMIC"? Or caused by anything other than the INTENTIONAL activity of the cabal that usurped power under the guise of an "election" last November? How can there be any doubt that this is so when analyzing facts on the ground in light of the democrat/media obsession with "JANUARY 6 OMG THE INSURRECTION TRUMP MUST BE PROSECUTED/JAILED/PURGED" which is a transparently false narrative being used to screen real events going on behind this smokescreen? Must it be re[peated






Anybody out there still believe all this is happening by accident? Anybody? Bueller?










David Foster said...

"When President Biden announced his big import drive, he made a point of saying he was not briefed on the issue before it became a crisis in April - even though formula manufacturers insist they warned him about the looming shortages in February."

Doesn't matter very much whether he was briefed on the matter or not. As I wrote about Hillary Clinton and her self-justification following the Benghazi debacle:

"An executive is not only or even primarily responsible for his or her own individual tasks—he or she is responsible for the work of the people in the organization, and for organizing that work properly and effectively.

These responsibilities include establishing an information and decision-flow architecture…including clear assignment of responsibilities…to ensure that the right things are seen and acted upon by the right people at the right time. Failure to do this..and to maintain and tune the system over time…will predictably result in catastrophes."

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/34733.html

I also wrote in that post:

"Imagine if someone like Hillary Clinton was micromanaging America’s food distribution or energy industry. Think about how many emails, letters, purchase orders, invoices, and other kinds of messages are involved in getting food from the farm to the railroad, from the railroad to the processing plant, from the processing plant to the warehouse and finally to the shelves on the store. Or think about how many messages and decisions are involved in getting the natural gas or coal out of the ground and to the power plant and then delivering the electricity to your house. The numbers dwarf the “1.4 million cables” with which Ms Clinton has confessed herself unable to cope.

Under the above scenario we would all be hungry, cold, and in the dark very soon. And in the Congressional hearings, the Hillary-equivalent would assert that the responsibility really lay at the level of the assistant-something-or-other, and that “we get 150 million purchase orders and shipping notifications and so on every month”…ie, that the Hillary-equivalent who was supposedly in charge of it all was not to blame."

That is precisely what we are now seeing with the Biden administration.

JPL17 said...

"Why oh why does anybody still believe all of this is ... caused by anything other than the INTENTIONAL activity of the cabal that usurped power ... last November?"

OK, I'll bite: Why is the cabal intentionally provoking a baby formula shortage? Please note that answers like "Because it helps perpetuate their power" aren't helpful. I'm asking specifically how this policy helps perpetuate their power, or what particular goal of theirs it advances.

This isn't rhetorical. I'd really like an answer.

Anonymous said...

"Why is the cabal intentionally provoking a baby formula shortage?"

You are asking the wrong question. Why was government unable to handle this? Because Biden put all his lackeys in charge of all aspects of government and they have no life experience and no awareness of cause and effect. They didn't cause or provoke the formula shortage they dismissed it as unimportant because they saw their job as: 1 Making Trump look bad. 2 Providing free stuff for potential Democrat voters. 3 Going after anyone who worked in the Trump administration. 4. Getting payola from China (with 10% going to the nig guy). 5 Pushing their own agenda and the hell with America. The list goes on. The formula shortage was just a symptom of the problem. Next it might be health care shortage thanks to the massive illegal immigration.

SCOTTtheBADGER said...

JPL, I want to know, too!

IamDevo said...

Your answer was already provided by Cloward and Piven. Chaos precedes the Great Reset and is the required catalyst. You're welcome. You are free to disregard the answer and believe in the innate goodness and noble intentions of Your Social and Political Betters. However, I prefer to rely on Ian Fleming's insight about happenstance, coincidence and enemy action.

rotator said...

What I have read of events is first there were 4 episodes on babies developing severe infections from a set of bacteria and whom had been fed Abbott formula. Earlier there had been a report of bacteria found in a part of the baby food factory that was not anywhere near where the baby food was made and packaged. Abbott reported this, all of prior was in latter part of 2021. FDA dithers awhile and finally orders factory closed and purged. Meanwhile
genetic studies done on the Abbott bacteria and that found in the sick babies showed no possible relationship. Nevertheless FDA basically sat on a cleansed factory able to start up any time after ~April 2022 until late June when it allowed a restart, then a weather related snafu occurred and the factory is still ramping up, at last report. So a good bit of the delay has been CYA by the FDA, no one gets fired for malfeasance in government work. Other examples of FDA intransigence are the labeling requirements blocking european baby food majors from exporting to the US and the feds being the primary buyers of baby food in the US meaning political lobbying can be a factor. And then there are those who want to bash big pharma for any reason finding another one in this issue.

Anonymous said...

Given the fact that the mainstream media has become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, the truth is, we no longer have a free press. You know it, I know it, which we TOTALLY distrust the Dems and the media.