The Wall Street Journal asked a question last Friday regarding President Joe Biden (D) and the weekend G-7 meeting.
What would you like to see come out of the G-7 summit?
I would have liked Biden to repeat former President Donald Trump’s (R) offer of a completely tariff-free trade regime among the seven.
But he didn’t make the offer. Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democrats are all about higher taxes, not lower.
Or blatant aiding and abetting. Or both. Here is the critical part of how things went down in the JBS Corporation hacker attack and JBS’…surrender…to the hackers:
After identifying the incursion early on Sunday, May 30, JBS said it alerted US authorities…. By that afternoon, the company had concluded that encrypted backups of its data were intact, said Andre Nogueira, chief executive officer of JBS USA Holdings Inc.
Then
Tuesday evening, progress getting JBS’s systems back online using its backup data made Mr Nogueira confident enough to issue a statement announcing that the majority of JBS plants would be operational on Wednesday, June 2.
The company’s consultants had continued negotiating with the hackers. Though forensic analyses by JBS and its specialists showed that no customer, supplier or employee data had been compromised, Mr Nogueira said, the cybercriminals claimed they had captured some.
JBS’s cybersecurity experts warned that the attackers may have left themselves some way to pry back in. After JBS negotiators and the hackers arrived at an $11 million sum….
Promptly getting back on the air with sound backups, JBS unharmed even if sorely inconvenienced, Nogueira continued negotiating with the hackers, and ultimately, Nogueira paid off anyway. And all, apparently, because the hackers claimed to have gained “some” data and that, according to his consultants, maybe—maybe—the hackers had left a back door for later use.
Never mind that the hackers claimed, after payment, that no, they didn’t have any stolen data. Who can trust the words of criminals? Never mind that, payment or not, the hackers’ back door remains—if it exists at all. Where’s JBS’ IT? Where’s JBS’ training—with enforced sanctions—of its employees regarding phishing and malware in general?
Then there’s this bit of cynicism:
The cost of the attack, he [Nogueira] said, would be immaterial to JBS….
Except for the part about Nogueira has made JBS an open target for further hacks, and their costs. Never mind the exposure Nogueira’s behavior has created for other businesses by demonstrating that such hacks actually work with impunity and as revenue-generators for the criminals (and political gain-generators for their State sponsors). Never mind, either, the costs this particular hack imposed on JBS’ customers and on the company’s suppliers.
In response to the ransomware attack against JBS USA Holdings that briefly disrupted some of the company’s Australian and American operations, JBS paid the hackers $11 million—more than twice that paid by Colonial Pipeline in its cowardly reward to its attackers.
JBS paid those $11 million dollars in its own craven reward for its own privilege of having been hacked.
In many—most?—milieus, aiding and abetting a criminal in the performance of the criminal’s activities is a felony.
It needs to be one here, too. Rather than compensating ransomware hackers—which compensation is directly, if not solely, responsible for the current sharp rise in ransomware attacks—these criminals need a different sort of reward, one that withdraws current criminals from the board and that discourages others from deciding to play.
The House Problem Solvers Caucus, with 29 Progressive-Democrats and 29 Republicans, are proposing their own “infrastructure” bill—to the tune of $1.25 trillion dollars, more than double the Senate Republicans’ original proposal of some $570 billion (and which, in their own abject meekness, they exploded into a nearly trillion dollar supplication).
The Republicans in this “problem solver” gang are engaged in their own surrender to the spending and taxing Party.
Of course President Joe Biden (D) and his Congressional Party leadership aren’t negotiating in good faith—they don’t need to. They can hold out for everything in their original demand because they know they’ll get it.
President Joe Biden (D) has killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, is blocking oil production from Federal lands, killed oil production in northern Alaska, is working to kill fracking altogether, is working to kill American oil (and natural gas) production, and has given the go ahead to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In sum, he’s actively working to kill American energy independence.
All of that is driving up American citizens’ energy costs, and that is reflected in the market’s anticipation of spiking oil costs. Here are a couple of graphs illustrating that. They illustrate the expectation that oil will soon cost $100/barrel, after several years of $50-$65/barrel. The first presents the spike since the start of the year in the number of West Texas Intermediate $100/barrel futures contracts against a current $70 price.
This graph reflects the price of a $100/barrel call option on WTI for delivery in December this year and next.
The expectation of actual market pricing of $100 is rising, also, sharply enough to drive up the price of the option.
This is what expert traders (some of whom are trading on the trends themselves and not on underlying oil prices, to be sure) are seeing as the future price of oil for our citizens. Even if oil settles out at its current price of $70 or just a little higher (and the anticipations turn out to be overstated), this current price represents a sharp increase over the last several years, when Government wasn’t moving so zealously to restrict our nation’s oil supply.
This is what Biden has wrought for our nation’s energy supply and cost of energy.