The current Senate bill is a reconciliation bill, meaning it involves taxes and spending – AND ONLY taxes and spending, because the bill originated in the House.

The constitutional framework for taxes & spending requires the House to originate all spending bills.  If a desired additional measure does not involve taxes and spending (a budgetary impact) it cannot be added to a reconciliation bill.  The senate must originate a new bill and then send it to the House.

According to Manchin the deal between himself, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden includes his support for the current green energy spending, in exchange for two new items in future legislation: 1) Streamlined energy permitting/regulation; and 2) Increased development of Oil, Coal, Gas.  Both of these pieces of legislation have to be handled in a separate Senate bill.

According to Manchin, his agreement to the current spending bill was contingent upon a promise that: (A) Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will generate a new bill for streamlined energy permitting and increased oil, gas and coal development; (B) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take up the Senate bill and whip enough of her House Democrat membership to join with Republicans in support of that Senate bill; and (C) Joe Biden will sign that increased energy production bill.

Here’s the important part.  Senator Manchin claims he has leverage over Biden, Pelosi and Schumer to ensure a new bill with those priorities is created and advanced.  Manchin further claims there are “consequences” for Biden, Pelosi and Schumer if they were to renege on the deal.  He is quite emphatic about that point if you listen to the NBC interview.

Now ask yourself…. What leverage would Senator Manchin have over Biden, Schumer and Pelosi that would ensure they would not double-cross him?

There is only one Occam’s razor answer:

Joe Manchin threatened to switch political parties if any of them reneged on the deal.

The NBC interview with Chuck Todd questioning Joe Manchin is very interesting.  It is actually the best interview of all five conducted, in part because it seems like Chuck Todd has full knowledge of the Manchin threat component.

Manchin was challenged in three of the five interviews about this promised future legislative component.  In each of the interviews Manchin affirms and reaffirms there would be consequences if Schumer, Pelosi and Biden try to renege on the deal.  However, it is the Meet the Press Chuck Todd interview that really gets in deeper and overlays some sunlight on this issue.

WATCH at 04:03 of this video, Chuck Todd has knowledge of the “deal” in detail and pushes Manchin on his “consequences” statement.   Then watch the very end of this interview (09:05) when Chuck Todd tries to pin Manchin down on the importance of Democrats holding the Senate.   Chuck Todd knows the unspoken threat that Manchin outlines as consequences.

Chuck Todd knows the “consequences”.  He tried to pin Manchin down.  Manchin obfuscated.

You put it all together and it starts making sense.

Senator Joe Manchin cut a deal for removal of regulatory roadblocks to current energy programs and expanded energy development.  Schumer has to generate the legislation permitting faster investment in current oil, gas, coal.  Nancy Pelosi has to pass it in the House. Joe Biden has to sign it and change EPA/Interior Dept policy. In exchange for that, Joe Manchin has agreed to the $370 billion green new deal energy spending programs.

If Schumer, Pelosi or Biden renege, then Manchin switches parties and the Senate flips into Republican control immediately.  That’s his leverage.

Someone needs to ask Manchin: (A) what is the time frame for the new legislative package; and (B) is this an accurate assessment of the “consequences” he outlined.

Here are the other interviews:

Right before the pandemic would hit a few months later…. Despite two years of doomsayer predictions from Wall Street’s professional punditry, all of them saying Trump’s 2017 steel and aluminum tariffs on China, Canada and the EU would create massive inflation, it just wasn’t happening!

Overall year-over-year inflation was hovering around 1.7 percent [Table-A BLS]; yup, that was our inflation rate.  The rate in the latter half of 2019 was firmed up with less month-over-month fluctuation, and the rate basically remained consistent.   [See Here]  The U.S. economy was on a smooth glide path, strong, stable and Main Street was growing with MAGAnomics at work.

A couple of important points.  First, unleashing the energy sector to drive down overall costs to consumers and industry outputs was a key part of President Trump’s America-First MAGAnomic initiative.  Lower energy prices help the worker economy, middle class and average American more than any other sector.

Which brings us to the second important point.  Notice how food prices had very low year-over-year inflation, 0.5 percent.  That is a combination of two key issues: low energy costs, and the fracturing of Big Ag hold on the farm production and the export dynamic:

(BLS) […] The index for food at home declined for the third month in a row, falling 0.2 percent. The index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs decreased 0.7 percent in August as the index for eggs fell 2.6 percent. The index for fruits and vegetables, which rose in July, fell 0.5 percent in August; the index for fresh fruits declined 1.4 percent, but the index for fresh vegetables rose 0.4 percent. The index for cereals and bakery products fell 0.3 percent in August after rising 0.3 percent in July. (link)

For the previous twenty years food prices had been increasingly controlled by Big Ag, and not by normal supply and demand.   The commodity market became a ‘controlled market’. U.S. food outputs (farm production) was controlled and exported to keep the U.S. consumer paying optimal prices.

President Trump’s trade reset was disrupting this process.  As farm products were less exported the cost of the food in our supermarket became reconnected to a ‘more normal’ supply and demand cycle.  Food prices dropped and our pantry costs were lowered.

The Commerce Dept. then announced that retail sales climbed by 0.4 percent in August 2019, twice as high as the 0.2 percent analysts had predicted. The result highlighted retail sales strength of more than 4 percent year-over-year.   These excellent results came on the heels of blowout data in July, when households boosted purchases of cars and clothing.

The better-than-expected number stemmed largely from a 1.8 percent jump in spending vehicles. Online sales, meanwhile, also continued to climb, rising 1.6 percent. That’s similar to July, 2019, when Amazon held its two-day, blowout Prime Day sale. (link)

Despite the efforts to remove and impeach President Trump, it did not look like middle-class America was overly concerned about the noise coming from the pundits.   Likely that’s because blue-collar wages were higher, Main Street inflation was lower, and overall consumer confidence was strong.  Yes, MAGAnomics was working.

Additionally, remember all those MSM hours and newspaper column inches where the professional financial pundits were claiming Trump’s tariffs were going to cause massive increases in prices of consumer goods?

Well, exactly the opposite happened [BLS report] Import prices were continuing to drop.

This was a really interesting dynamic that no-one in the professional punditry would dare explain.

Donald Trump’s tariffs were targeted to specific sectors of imported products.  [Steel, Aluminum, and a host of smaller sectors etc.]  However, when the EU and China responded by devaluing their currency, that approach hit all products imported, not just the tariff goods.

Because the EU and China were driving up the value of the dollar, everything we were importing became cheaper.   Not just imports from Europe and China, but actually imports from everywhere.   All imports were entering the U.S. at substantially lower prices.

This meant when we imported products, we were also importing deflation.

This price result is exactly the opposite of what the economic experts and Wall Street pundits predicted back in 2017 and 2018 when they were pushing the rapid price increase narrative.

Because all the export dependent economies were reacting with such urgency to retain their access to the U.S. market, aggregate import prices were actually lower than they were when the Trump tariffs began:

[…]  Prices for imports from China edged down 0.1 percent in August following decreases of 0.2 percent in both July and June. Import prices from China have not advanced on a monthly basis since ticking up 0.1 percent in May 2018. The price index for imports from China fell 1.6 percent for the year ended in August.

[…]  Import prices from the European Union fell 0.2 percent in August and 0.3 percent over the past 12 months.

[Page #4 – BLS Report, pdf] – BLS press release

Who is surprised that he US government’s war on the American people is not going any better than its sponsored war in Ukraine? The only thing the government is really good at is covering up its crimes, which mainly requires them to do nothing — don’t investigate anything, don’t furnish documents to anyone, don’t answer official letters, slow-walk every required action, and otherwise dodge, duck, deny, deflect, and dissemble.

Now, even that game-plan is falling apart. Some senior officials in the FBI turned whistleblower this week, perhaps desperate to preserve their self-respect, and finally cleared up one of the great mystifications of our time, namely: How is it that the Hunter Biden laptop, stuffed with incriminating memoranda of bribery, treason, and diverse felonies, and in the FBI’s possession for two-and-a-half years now, just sat gathering dust in some sub-sub-basement cubby-hole — while “Joe Biden,” the putative president (or, more likely, the enigmatic claque behind him) was allowed to carry out a demolition of America’s economy and culture?

The answer is one Brian Auten, FBI Senior Analyst, who engineered a scheme to label Hunter’s laptop “Russian disinformation,” which allowed FBI Director Christopher Wray to throw a switch that turned off any further inquiry in the matter beginning in August before the 2020 presidential election. In turn, other senior FBI officials had all the documents pertaining to the decision process on that matter locked up in a special file that would never see the light of day. Auten’s action led to the release of a letter signed by “fifty former intelligence officials” labeling the laptop as a Russian disinfo op — which became the basis for social media to conspire to censor any discussion of the laptop and its contents. And so it was that a political puppet deeply in the pay of foreign interests, got shoehorned into the White House. Well, that and widespread election fraud.

Turns out that Agent Brian Auten was also involved in favorably vetting the Steele Dossier when it was used to justify FISA court warrants against figures in Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, part of the RussiaGate operation that disordered and disabled President Trump’s entire four-year term. Well now you know. Perhaps Special Counsel John Durham knows this, too. (If he didn’t before, he must now.) Eventually, Mr. Auten will have to answer for all this, maybe after the mid-term elections. We must imagine that he will implicate many other familiar figures in the process who were on-the-scene at the time, including Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey, comfortably sitting on the sidelines lo these many years enjoying their book royalties and cable news salaries.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, says he will hold hearings about this. When? The Senate is scheduled to be in recess August 6 to September 6 for politicking back home. Maybe after that Senator Grassley will actually produce his whistleblowers in open session — unlike the 2019 first impeachment of Donald Trump, in which chief whistleblower CIA agent Eric Ciaramella, amazingly, never made an appearance. That will be refreshing.

It would also be nice to hear from FBI Director Wray. Did he approve of the decision to label Hunter’s laptop “disnformation?” Was he familiar with the contents of the laptop, the emails between Hunter and his business associates and agents of the CCP? Did Mr. Wray happen to examine any of the pornographic videos of orgies with Hunter’s stable of Russian whores plus the crack-smoking? Did Mr. Wray wonder whether equally bad or worse material was in the hands of Uncle Xi’s regime? Did it occur to Mr. Wray that all this might compromise “the Big Guy” in the Oval Office?

It also would be edifying to hear from Mr. Wray’s boss, Attorney General Merrick Garland. During his 20 months on-the-job, has he ever inquired of his FBI what’s up with that Hunter Biden laptop? Was he acquainted with the contents. Half the country has seen the videos of Hunter cavorting naked in hotel rooms and lighting up the crystal meth, but not Mr. Garland? There’s rumored-to-be more depraved material on the laptop involving minors that even conscientious auditors outside of government have seen and deemed too atrocious to release. (Copies of Hunter’s hard-drive are in possession of many people outside government.)

I hope Senator Grassley also calls Lisa Monaco, the Deputy Attorney General, now at Mr. Garland’s right hand, who was formerly President Barack Obama’s White House Homeland Security Advisor — a fancy way of describing her role in weaponizing the apparatus of the security state against the Democratic Party’s political opponents. Lisa Monaco’s current role is the DOJ Fixer — the person who makes sure that federal law enforcement does nothing about the crimes carried out by Mr. Obama, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and many other now well-known names in the RussiaGate cosmos, as well as continuing to squelch any inquiry on the Biden family’s criminal operations.

All of this is going to blow open, of course, and all at the same time that two other big things blow up: 1) the realization that the government lied about everything in the Covid-19 story, including especially covering-up the harmful effects of their vaunted mRNA shots, and 2) deepening US economic chaos, including the implosion of markets, derivatives, banks, and the US dollar.

Some observers say that “Joe Biden” has nothing left except to shove the USA into a hot war. Kind of looks like he’s trying — sending US Special Forces to Ukraine’s border, and all. I don’t think he’ll dare cross that line, though. To me, it’s more likely that our government will summon, shall we say, a special sort of doctor from the Intel Community to administer a permanent sleeping med to the Big Guy. Did you see how bug-eyed he was on video the other day? Didn’t even blink for the longest time. Looks like he badly needs sleep… a big sleep… the biggest sleep there is. Wait for it. (read more)