Simon Rosenberg

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Simon Rosenberg

Simon Rosenberg

@SimonWDC

Political Strategist, Commentator, Hopium Purveyor | NDN, DNC, DCCC, Clinton War Room, ABC News | Slava Ukraini! | My home - https://t.co/TkYENB1lNw

ÜT: 38.927579,-77.106007 Katılım Mayıs 2009
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Simon Rosenberg retweetledi
Joe Garcia
Joe Garcia@JoeGarcia·
(Great article on the state of play in #Cuba right now.) On March 16th Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, a great-nephew of Fidel Castro, appeared on “Mesa Redonda”, a state-television programme. He announced that #Cubans living abroad would now be permitted to own businesses and invest in infrastructure on the island. It was the second major concession from the regime in a matter of weeks. In February the government quietly began to allow private firms to import fuel, breaking the state’s long-held monopoly. #Cuba economist.com/the-americas/2… @EmbaCubaUS @USEmbCuba @CarlosFdeCossio @HugoCancio @AllianceForCuba @CiberCuba @MillieHerrera @Nelidafara @23yflagler @OdriozolaJohana @JohanaTablada @RepMariaSalazar @RepCarlos @MarioDB @USLatAmEnvoy @brhodes @TheFHRC @vozdelafnca @dmorca @SoberonGuzman @FelixLlerenaCUB @justfp @Ginamontaner @MiamiHerald @IleanaGarciaUSA @JasonPoblete @LeonKrauze @Kelley4Florida @lianystr @leivamiriam @nmasUnivision23 @pmmonreal @wsvn @OnCuba @viaSimonRomero @librocrepusculo @rachel_dz @SimonWDC @tomaskenn @Univision @martinoticias @dadams7308 @LeBatardShow @XochitlHinojosa @yoanisanchez @yuniortrebol @TheZuluRomeo @Zuky43
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Simon Rosenberg
Simon Rosenberg@SimonWDC·
Read this.
Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡@shanaka86

JUST IN: The most irreversible consequence of this war is not happening in Tehran. It is happening in a barn in Iowa. A farmer is standing over a kitchen table looking at two seed catalogues. One is corn. One is soybeans. Corn needs 180 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Nitrogen costs $610 per ton on the CBOT March futures settlement as of yesterday, up 35 percent in a month. Soybeans fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere through root bacteria called rhizobia. They need nothing from the Strait of Hormuz. The farmer is choosing soybeans. Millions of acres are choosing soybeans. And once the planter rolls into the field, the choice cannot be reversed until next year. USDA projected corn at roughly 94 million acres for 2026, down from 98.8 million. Soybeans at 85 million, up from 81.2 million. Those projections were published February 19, before urea surged past $683 at New Orleans. The actual shift will be larger. USDA Prospective Plantings reports March 31. By then the seeds will be in the ground. This is the transmission channel the world is not watching. A 21-mile strait enforced by provincial commanders with sealed radio orders just rewrote the planting economics of 90 million acres of the most productive farmland on Earth. Not through sanctions. Not through diplomacy. Through the price of a single molecule that corn cannot grow without and soybeans do not need. Now follow the cascade. The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol annually. That consumes roughly 43 percent of the entire US corn crop. The mandate is set by the EPA. It does not flex when corn acres shrink. It is inelastic demand consuming a fixed share of a declining supply. When supply tightens against a fixed mandate, the remaining corn reprices upward. Corn above $5 per bushel compresses every margin downstream. The US cattle herd stands at 86.2 million head, a 75-year low per USDA NASS. Poultry and pork operations face compression from higher corn prices. Feed is the single largest cost in livestock production. When feed reprices, protein reprices. When protein reprices, every grocery shelf in America absorbs the increase. This is the protein cascade. Corn to feed to meat to eggs to dairy to the checkout counter. Each link tightens because the link before it tightened. The originating cause is a urea molecule that cannot transit a strait because a provincial commander’s sealed orders say it cannot. The farmer did not start this war. The farmer cannot end it. The farmer responds to the price on the screen and the biology of the two crops in front of him. Corn needs the molecule. Soybeans do not. At $610 the arithmetic is settled. The planter rolls. The season is locked. Israel just authorised the assassination of every Iranian official on sight. The US has spent $16.5 billion. South Pars is burning. The Fed is holding rates because oil inflation will not break. Gold touched $5,000. Bitcoin is bleeding. China is running exercises near Taiwan. Sri Lanka shut down on Wednesdays. And underneath all of it, a man in a barn is making the decision that determines whether four billion people pay more for food this year. He has never heard of the Mosaic Doctrine. He does not know what a sealed contingency packet is. He knows what nitrogen costs. And he is planting soybeans. Full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

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Simon Rosenberg retweetledi
Chris Murphy 🟧
Chris Murphy 🟧@ChrisMurphyCT·
The day before the Iran War, a flurry of big prediction market bets were placed - likely from Trump staff - that the war would start the next day. That's outrageous, and today @RepCasar and I introduced legislation to ban these corrupt prediction markets.
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Simon Rosenberg retweetledi
Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡
Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡@shanaka86·
The UAE just closed its entire airspace. Not a runway. Not a terminal. The country’s airspace. All of it. The General Civil Aviation Authority called it an “exceptional precautionary measure” after UAE air defences engaged six Iranian ballistic missiles and 21 drones in a single day. A drone hit a fuel tank at Dubai International Airport yesterday. The busiest international aviation hub on Earth. Smoke across the city. Flights suspended. And now Emirates, Qatar Airways, Lufthansa, Air India, British Airways, United, Pegasus, Virgin Atlantic, IndiGo, and Wizz Air have all cancelled, suspended, or severely restricted routes to and from Dubai. Over 23,000 flights cancelled across the Middle East since late February. The reason most of these airlines are grounding routes is not the missiles themselves. It is the same force that closed the Strait of Hormuz to fertilizer vessels three weeks ago. Insurance. War-risk aviation premiums have repriced on the same actuarial logic as marine war risk. Solvency II capital buffers, already depleted by 26 months of Red Sea losses, cannot absorb correlated risk across both sea and air simultaneously. When insurers cannot underwrite the route, the route does not fly. When the route does not fly, the cargo does not move. When the cargo does not move, the supply chain fractures at a second altitude. The crisis just went three-dimensional. Hormuz closed the sea lanes. One-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade trapped. Twenty-three fertilizer vessels stranded in Gulf ports. Premiums surged from 0.25 percent to as high as 3 percent of hull value per transit. The $20 billion DFC sovereign reinsurance facility has zero confirmed fertilizer vessel utilization. Now the airspace is closing. Dubai is not just a passenger hub. It is a critical node for air cargo: pharmaceuticals, high-value agricultural inputs, electronics, spare parts for the logistics networks that move food from port to warehouse to shelf. Emirates SkyCargo alone handles over 2 million tonnes of freight annually. That capacity is now intermittent at best, suspended at worst, and repricing at rates that make marginal routes uneconomic. Iran did not need to build an air force that could challenge American fighters. It needed drones cheap enough to launch by the dozen and missiles numerous enough to force a sovereign nation to close its own skies. The cost asymmetry is staggering. A $10,000 drone forces the cancellation of commercial flights worth millions in revenue and cargo value. The actuarial mathematics do the rest. Insurers calculate. Airlines ground. Supply chains fracture. And the molecules that feed four billion people remain trapped behind a chokepoint that is no longer just a strait. It is an entire region rendered commercially uninsurable by sea and by air simultaneously. The coalition that was supposed to fix this does not exist. Germany refused. Japan declined. Australia declined. The US Navy is not yet ready for sea escorts, let alone providing the integrated air defence umbrella that would allow commercial aviation to normalize across Gulf airspace. Every hour the airspace stays closed compounds the sea closure. Pharmaceutical supplies to India deplete faster. Emergency food shipments to Egypt route longer. Agricultural input deliveries that might have moved by air cargo as a workaround for the sea blockade now have no workaround at all. The same formula closed the sea. The same formula is closing the sky. And between them, the spring planting calendar keeps counting down toward deadlines that neither actuaries nor air defences can extend. Full analysis: open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ tweet media
Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡@shanaka86

A drone struck a fuel tank at Dubai International Airport. The world’s busiest international hub. Flights temporarily suspended. Smoke visible across the city per live footage. ADNOC, the UAE’s national oil company, has shut in more than 50 percent of crude output. Fujairah loading halted. This is no longer a crisis contained to a 21-mile strait. Proxy forces attributed to Iranian-backed groups are now striking civilian energy and aviation infrastructure in a Gulf state that is not a direct belligerent in this conflict. The UAE did not conduct strikes in Operation Epic Fury. Yet it hosts Fertiglobe, one of the largest nitrogen fertilizer operations in the region at 6.6 million tonnes of annual capacity, whose entire export volume is now trapped behind a strait that is mined, uninsured, and unescorted. The ADNOC shut-ins are not the result of direct hits on oil facilities. They are the result of a Hormuz transit collapse so total that production without export capacity becomes a liability. When you cannot ship it, you stop pumping it. This is the escalation path that markets have not priced. The consensus assumption is that the Hormuz crisis is a transit problem. Reopen the strait, restart the flow. But what happens when the conflict expands beyond the chokepoint itself and begins striking the energy infrastructure of the Gulf states that sit behind it? The transit problem becomes a confidence problem. Even if the strait reopened tomorrow, would commercial operators trust that the facilities loading their cargo are safe from the next drone? Would insurers underwrite a vessel loading at Fujairah when a fuel tank at Dubai airport was struck this morning? Tehran does not need to match American airpower. What Iranian-backed forces are demonstrating is that asymmetric pressure on Gulf civilian infrastructure accomplishes three objectives simultaneously. It raises the cost of Gulf states hosting American operations. It undermines commercial confidence in the production and loading infrastructure that would restart exports. And it stretches US defensive resources across yet another front, from Baghdad embassies to Gulf fuel depots, further delaying the Hormuz escorts that remain the only pathway to restoring fertilizer flows. The US military is now defending personnel and facilities across Iraq, partner infrastructure in the Gulf, and its own carrier groups in the Arabian Sea. All while trying to assemble a multinational escort coalition that Germany formally refused today, Japan previously declined, and Australia has not joined. Washington is shouldering this burden largely alone against an adversary executing a multi-front resource-denial strategy with disciplined patience. Meanwhile the fertilizer arithmetic grows worse by the hour. One-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through Hormuz per UNCTAD. Transit down 97 percent. Nearly 49 percent of traded urea tied to conflict-exposed Gulf exporters. Bangladesh has shut four to five of its six major urea factories. India is running plants at 60 percent capacity and has formally asked China for emergency urea. China has banned phosphate exports through August. Egypt faces $28 billion in debt repayments while feeding 69 million people on bread subsidies hemorrhaging at prices nobody budgeted. 318 million were at crisis-level hunger before February 28. The Corn Belt needs nitrogen by mid-April. India needs Kharif prep by May. Australia needs urea by June. Every drone that hits Gulf infrastructure is not just an act of aggression against a sovereign state. It is an extension of the same siege that is strangling the food system sustaining four billion people. The planting calendar does not distinguish between a blocked strait and a burning fuel depot. Both produce the same outcome: molecules that do not arrive in time. The window is not just closing because the strait is blocked. It is closing because the crisis is expanding beyond it. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

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Simon Rosenberg retweetledi
Stephen Wertheim
Stephen Wertheim@stephenwertheim·
Behold the National Security Strategy from less than four months ago: “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was. It is rather emerging as a place of partnership, friendship, and investment.” “Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.” “We should encourage and applaud reform when and where it emerges organically, without trying to impose it from without. The key to successful relations with the Middle East is accepting the region, its leaders, and its nations as they are while working together on areas of common interest.”
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Simon Rosenberg retweetledi
Christopher Steele
Christopher Steele@Chris_D_Steele·
@Manny_Street I’m told by reliable sources in both the US and Russia that the Kremlin has had the Epstein files, and more similar, for years.
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Simon Rosenberg
Simon Rosenberg@SimonWDC·
Sharing a terrific new discussion with Florida Democratic Party Chair @NikkiFried about the very real progress Dems are making in Florida - flipping red cities blue, strong candidates across the state, year round organizing. Watch, share, enjoy! open.substack.com/pub/simonwdc/p…
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