WHY ARE EGYPTIANS HUNGRY?
Reposted from journal. Cross posted in 123_food_4_food. Does not mention factor of ETHANOL on corn, (which hasn't been as much as generally thought, however).
Ed Schultz was comparing the pro-Mubarek dissenters to stupid, anti-change Fox News viewers. And I was like, "Noooo!!!!" I mean YES, they are, but there are so many other factors - like they may be conservatives, but they tend to be pro-West - and many of them revere Obama's words to be patient. But - hell - those dissenters also include THOUSANDS of SECRET POLICE trying to provoke violence so that Mubarek can step in to "save the day". And they also include, I would think, a lot of paid Moslem Brothers. The Moslem Brotherhood is surely playing both sides of the game at the moment.
But then the Ed Show went into its second hour, (http://www.bigeddieradio.com/archive/) and it was far more intelligent: It was about the topic of FOOD - why the prices are ballooning in Egypy, and other parts of the world. I highly recommend peeps check out this hour #2, 2/2/11 - with Dylan Ratigan http://www.bigeddieradio.com/archive/
So - I feel like offering a thumbnail description of the emerging food crisis. REALLY THUMBNAIL.
Back when we were the masters of the world, we imported cheap food from Latin America, etc., and sold them higher tech goods, at a premium. We needed an upper class there, in order to afford to buy these products from us. We needed a class of POOR workers there, to keep the food, (and simple goods we bought), super cheap for us. Because, after all, we subsidise our own foods, so we wanted prices, (in bananas, coffee, coconut, (~sugar), cocoa, palm oil, tea, etc.), which stayed down in the low range alongside our cheap bread, corn, veggies, rice, broccoli, milk, et al. We also wanted our corporations doing the trading down there, and, lo and behold, being the actual MIDDLE MEN down there, to also make a lot of money. So - many native peeps in Latin America, etc., flocked to the dream cities in hopes of living a wealthy life, like the upper class folks on TV, then they got to the cities and were plunged into mass poverty. And we secretly fought to keep dictators there in power, to protect the exploitations of our low-wage corporations. Ergo, food coming out of Latin America was super cheap for us, and really expensive for them. And they basically were compelled to buy OUR available foods, preventing indigenous wheat, corn, etc., from being produced by local farmers.
That's Part One. Part Two is the macroeconomics: With cheap goods coming in, and good profits coming in from our exports, our dollar was strong - meaning it bought A LOT compared to other currencies. In countries where dollars were squeezing out local currencies, it was hard to buy much WITH those local currencies - in other words, the currencies were DEFLATING, met with INFLATION in the goods they tried to buy - goods measured along the stable DOLLAR standard. So, of course, in addition to our corporate crooks down there, you're going to end up with corrupt regimes in such conditions, trying to skim off wealth for their upper class friends.
Meanwhile, after the gold and silver rushes and all that, we were mass-producing dollars, and sending them oversees buy buying all this cheap stuff. Eventually, in 1971, we even stopped printing money BASED ON THE VALUE OF GOLD - (which is why Kennedy was shot, cuz he opposed this) - and we started printing money BASICALLY OUT OF THIN AIR. When you print cheap money, you've got a lot of it around, and goods end up costing more dollars and more dollars and more dollars - INFLATION. BUT WE WERE SHIPPING OUR INFLATION OVERSEAS, and we made THE DOLLAR the common currency of transaction - THE RESERVE CURRENCY - of most countries throughout the world, because it was so stable, and because we backed it with our military. Commie countries didn't want to accept this, and that's why we hated commies so much. Even recently, Iraq threatened to switch from the DOLLAR ot the EURO, as it's reserve currency, and, um, we therefore destroyed Iraq, yes?
Now, this is a PONZI SCHEME, which has two things helping to prop it up, other than our military (and our rude corporations). Like all Ponzi schemes, it relied on an ever-expanding pool of suckers to buy into it - OVERPOPULATION. Yes, impoverished countries are good at encouraging desperate and casual sex - because kids who DO survive can theoretically help the poor-farmer families, (at least that's the anthropological rationale). And a few dollars maybe buys you a little crap food and lots of idle time to imagine you're a sexy Westerner. Just like cockroaches sprayed with pesticides, desperately poor people turn to sex as a way to preserve the species. OVERPOPULATION - religious conservative taboos against contraception - male primacy - these things created an ample supply of POOR PEOPLE to feed the PONZI SCHEME.
The other thing that propped up the PONZI SCHEME was: BORROWING. Borrowing money from the U.S.A. Borrowing money to somehow stay afloat in this rigged economic game, and keep the upper classes in power and wealthy - even while their whole country was being made into a poster boy for the whole concept of SCARCITY. As we know, students, virtual SCARCITY is what drives Capitalism - as when Banksters buy up corn futures, make corn expensive and scarce and more expensive - and scarce - so they can reap a nice prifit when they sell those future, (popping the bubble). Meanwhile, lots of people overseas die of hunger, but hey.
Tying two of these megatrends together... A major way we create money out of thin air is through "QUANTITATIVE EASING", by selling U.S.Treasury Bonds (ownership of loans-to-us) to the Federal Reserve, (which is a bunch of private BANKSTERS controlling the world economy). The FED basically uses money-out-of-thin-air to provide this cash as loans. The FED charges us interest, and makes a profit. (It's a racket).
The FED also makes loans to Third World Countries, charging THEM interest, and makes a profit. The FED also takes the U.S.Treasury Bonds it holds, (U.S.Debt), and sells that them to other players, like China, and makes a profit. (In that case, we no longer owe the debt to the FED, but to China).
With all this profit, the Fed can buy up more U.S.Bonds if the government says please, or it can raise the PRIME INTEREST RATE cuz there's just too much borrowing going on. Too much money and inflation floating around. But, since we're in a depression, nobody else is borrowing, so they keep interest rates low.
China kind of liked the whole scheme of the U.S. making loans to the Third World so much, China started making loans to the U.S. Treasury, to control OUR economy, and keep IT'S currency low relative to the dollar, to prop up its expanding export economy, (processed by our very own traitor corporations). They made loans to us by BUYING U.S. treasury bonds, and freeing up U.S. cash dollars back into our economy = inflation. But CHina doesn't want to do this too much anymore. And China wants to switch more to a consumer economy. And so China may call up a lot of money it has loaned us. And their demands include things like: "Build us Superhighways and Free Trade Zones so we can better exploit your economy!"... Huhhhhhhhh....... The point of this is that, as I predicted, we are being turned into a Third World Economy.
Our country may be sliding towards poverty, but, like a Third World Country, it still has a lot of wealth in it's UPPER CLASS. Companies here, and U.S. Companies in China, haven't been so interested in spending or investing or all the extra money they have on hand, to like, grow jobs, ever since this silly DEPRESSION took hold, (with all the U.S./FED bail-outs to the Banksters, loaning out THAT money to other corporations). But there's all this money floating to the top of the PONZI scheme, and the rich feel they are BRED to do something with it, (see past posts), so they invest it in bubbles - like false securities, derivatives, mortgages, oil, and other speculations - like FOOD. They are now gambling up the prices of food, (and gold, btw).
OK - I have told you that we are due for inflation once the economy starts "picking up", and corporations start spilling all their pent up capital not just into bubbles, but into the economy in general. So, Wall Street, and some other economic indicators look better, but there's all these extra dollars flooding the economy, and so the price of goods go UP relative to this glut. That not only means prices of OUR goods go up, but so do the prices of goods overseas, EVEN MORESO, because the PONZI scheme is still rigged in our favour. I told you so. (btw, we still have some major faws in the economy, and are due for another crash)...
I would like to get to my most important theme: Real scarcities, generally caused by global climate change...
Few people appreciate the subtle relevance of weather and climate on such things as the 2000-2008 MORTGAGE BUBBLE. In fact, when speculators sense prices will rise in something, like mortgages, they swarm to it, buy it up, and so spiral the price up and up, until the whole thing comes crashing down, making the people leading the BUBBLE PONZI SCHEME very rich. So, weather, etc., events can cause merely a small rise in prices, but this - because of REGANITE ETC. DEREGULATIONS - now leads to a spiral of prices upwards, because of Wall Street, NASDAQ, and Securities speculators. It really is a huge obscenity, in the case of food. Food futures were initially created to provide farmers with a way of being able to more securely plan the selling price of their crops. Now it is just MASS WHOREDOM...
Well, things like Katrina; the fires out West (the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history, prior to BP); a wheat-killing drought in Australia - these things all began price rises in land, mortgages, insurance, wood, and FOOD. And, ever since, the money has been moving more and more into the FOOD BUBBLE.
Since then, there has been massive flooding in Brazil; massive flooding in Australia; and various other droughts, most devastatingly, a drought in Russia and China. Russia is the world's third largest exporter of wheat - and Egypt buys most of its wheat from Russia. Real scarcities mean more expensive crops, and related comodoties, goods and services or transportation. With overpopulation, and GLOBAL WARMING, weather variability is increasingly impinging on crop successes, and the increasing risk of investing in agriculture is itself raising prices. However, rising population ALSO INCREASE WORLD DEMAND, and so lots of people are investing in more-risky agriculture, and its bubbles, anyway.
After the drought, DEMAND for wheat, corn, meat, etc., in CHINA has been increasing widely. This drives up the price of those commodities, and so wheat is, again, made even more expensive for Egypt.
So... In addition to the demented, PONZI SCHEME, terms of trade discussed in the first half of this post, here are the other factors, today, driving up commodities prices, and inviting unrest and uprisings in North Africa, and elsewhere:
Our exported inflation.
Our printing of money out of thin air.
Real scarcities, associated with weather and climate changes.
Increased world demand, associated with overpopulation and other factors.
Commodities BUBBLES created by profligately rich gamblers.
Lastly, (an extensive topic): Banksters who thrive off of both sides of any disaster, scarcity or war. This may also be associated with government corruption and inefficiencies.
So, much of these latter points are nicely covered in hour #2 of the Ed Schultz show - and so many other places. The MSNBC "ED SHOW", and Dylan Ratigan's show, (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31510813/) also surely touch on these topics a lot recently.
A FINE point which Dylan Ratigan made at the end of the hour was that THINGS HAVE CHANGED. The shifting conditions and demands of climate change, (etc.), means that our economic ways of operating don't work so well now...
Because everything is INTERLINKED: Climate, Weather, Supply, Demand, Population, Media/Internet, Wall Street, U.S.A./World, etc... But, most importantly: CLIMATE.
People need to understand that.
ASAP.
Questions for your own study:
Why has China seemed to prosper under this global scheme, unlike other poor and developing countries?
Why & when did the U.S.A. involve itself in WORLD TRADE in the first place - and was this good or bad for us?
Who REALLY bombed the Werld Traed Ctr.?
Has "FREE TRADE" actually HELPED nations? How? Which nations?
On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world each day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition. So it goes. In addition 123,000 persons will die for other reasons. So it goes. This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000.
‘I suppose they will all want dignity,
” I said. ‘I suppose,’ said O’Hare.”
- from SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, Kurt Vonnegut
"Well it seems our lovely home of Australia is slowly falling about, what with QLD having the floods, then a few weeks later they've got Australia's worst cyclone to ever hit (size of the USA) it's meant to hit Cairns/Innisfail around 11pm/12am category five winds are currently 300km an hour. My heart seriously goes out to those poor people in Northern QLD being a Darwin girl I know the feeling of a huge cyclone coming towards you, but thankfully nothing has hit us since I've been alive. And to top of the cherry off Australia falling about is Sydney going through it's worse heatwave on record it is fricken disgusting here, here out west yesterday it got upto 42 (c) degrees and last night only went down to just above 30 (c) I'm melting they don't know about aircons in bedroom here, I have one in the lounge room so it's become my best friend these last few days. Anyway the news is telling us not to go outside or even exercise (not like I do that crap anyway) as it is so hot they are worried about people dying. I heard this after I walked the 15 minutes (42 degree heat remember) to coles to get dinner supplies and back, my skinny arse nearly died on the return leg."
- posted by an Australian LJ friend today
Ed Schultz was comparing the pro-Mubarek dissenters to stupid, anti-change Fox News viewers. And I was like, "Noooo!!!!" I mean YES, they are, but there are so many other factors - like they may be conservatives, but they tend to be pro-West - and many of them revere Obama's words to be patient. But - hell - those dissenters also include THOUSANDS of SECRET POLICE trying to provoke violence so that Mubarek can step in to "save the day". And they also include, I would think, a lot of paid Moslem Brothers. The Moslem Brotherhood is surely playing both sides of the game at the moment.
But then the Ed Show went into its second hour, (http://www.bigeddieradio.com/archive/) and it was far more intelligent: It was about the topic of FOOD - why the prices are ballooning in Egypy, and other parts of the world. I highly recommend peeps check out this hour #2, 2/2/11 - with Dylan Ratigan http://www.bigeddieradio.com/archive/
So - I feel like offering a thumbnail description of the emerging food crisis. REALLY THUMBNAIL.
Back when we were the masters of the world, we imported cheap food from Latin America, etc., and sold them higher tech goods, at a premium. We needed an upper class there, in order to afford to buy these products from us. We needed a class of POOR workers there, to keep the food, (and simple goods we bought), super cheap for us. Because, after all, we subsidise our own foods, so we wanted prices, (in bananas, coffee, coconut, (~sugar), cocoa, palm oil, tea, etc.), which stayed down in the low range alongside our cheap bread, corn, veggies, rice, broccoli, milk, et al. We also wanted our corporations doing the trading down there, and, lo and behold, being the actual MIDDLE MEN down there, to also make a lot of money. So - many native peeps in Latin America, etc., flocked to the dream cities in hopes of living a wealthy life, like the upper class folks on TV, then they got to the cities and were plunged into mass poverty. And we secretly fought to keep dictators there in power, to protect the exploitations of our low-wage corporations. Ergo, food coming out of Latin America was super cheap for us, and really expensive for them. And they basically were compelled to buy OUR available foods, preventing indigenous wheat, corn, etc., from being produced by local farmers.
That's Part One. Part Two is the macroeconomics: With cheap goods coming in, and good profits coming in from our exports, our dollar was strong - meaning it bought A LOT compared to other currencies. In countries where dollars were squeezing out local currencies, it was hard to buy much WITH those local currencies - in other words, the currencies were DEFLATING, met with INFLATION in the goods they tried to buy - goods measured along the stable DOLLAR standard. So, of course, in addition to our corporate crooks down there, you're going to end up with corrupt regimes in such conditions, trying to skim off wealth for their upper class friends.
Meanwhile, after the gold and silver rushes and all that, we were mass-producing dollars, and sending them oversees buy buying all this cheap stuff. Eventually, in 1971, we even stopped printing money BASED ON THE VALUE OF GOLD - (which is why Kennedy was shot, cuz he opposed this) - and we started printing money BASICALLY OUT OF THIN AIR. When you print cheap money, you've got a lot of it around, and goods end up costing more dollars and more dollars and more dollars - INFLATION. BUT WE WERE SHIPPING OUR INFLATION OVERSEAS, and we made THE DOLLAR the common currency of transaction - THE RESERVE CURRENCY - of most countries throughout the world, because it was so stable, and because we backed it with our military. Commie countries didn't want to accept this, and that's why we hated commies so much. Even recently, Iraq threatened to switch from the DOLLAR ot the EURO, as it's reserve currency, and, um, we therefore destroyed Iraq, yes?
Now, this is a PONZI SCHEME, which has two things helping to prop it up, other than our military (and our rude corporations). Like all Ponzi schemes, it relied on an ever-expanding pool of suckers to buy into it - OVERPOPULATION. Yes, impoverished countries are good at encouraging desperate and casual sex - because kids who DO survive can theoretically help the poor-farmer families, (at least that's the anthropological rationale). And a few dollars maybe buys you a little crap food and lots of idle time to imagine you're a sexy Westerner. Just like cockroaches sprayed with pesticides, desperately poor people turn to sex as a way to preserve the species. OVERPOPULATION - religious conservative taboos against contraception - male primacy - these things created an ample supply of POOR PEOPLE to feed the PONZI SCHEME.
The other thing that propped up the PONZI SCHEME was: BORROWING. Borrowing money from the U.S.A. Borrowing money to somehow stay afloat in this rigged economic game, and keep the upper classes in power and wealthy - even while their whole country was being made into a poster boy for the whole concept of SCARCITY. As we know, students, virtual SCARCITY is what drives Capitalism - as when Banksters buy up corn futures, make corn expensive and scarce and more expensive - and scarce - so they can reap a nice prifit when they sell those future, (popping the bubble). Meanwhile, lots of people overseas die of hunger, but hey.
Tying two of these megatrends together... A major way we create money out of thin air is through "QUANTITATIVE EASING", by selling U.S.Treasury Bonds (ownership of loans-to-us) to the Federal Reserve, (which is a bunch of private BANKSTERS controlling the world economy). The FED basically uses money-out-of-thin-air to provide this cash as loans. The FED charges us interest, and makes a profit. (It's a racket).
The FED also makes loans to Third World Countries, charging THEM interest, and makes a profit. The FED also takes the U.S.Treasury Bonds it holds, (U.S.Debt), and sells that them to other players, like China, and makes a profit. (In that case, we no longer owe the debt to the FED, but to China).
With all this profit, the Fed can buy up more U.S.Bonds if the government says please, or it can raise the PRIME INTEREST RATE cuz there's just too much borrowing going on. Too much money and inflation floating around. But, since we're in a depression, nobody else is borrowing, so they keep interest rates low.
China kind of liked the whole scheme of the U.S. making loans to the Third World so much, China started making loans to the U.S. Treasury, to control OUR economy, and keep IT'S currency low relative to the dollar, to prop up its expanding export economy, (processed by our very own traitor corporations). They made loans to us by BUYING U.S. treasury bonds, and freeing up U.S. cash dollars back into our economy = inflation. But CHina doesn't want to do this too much anymore. And China wants to switch more to a consumer economy. And so China may call up a lot of money it has loaned us. And their demands include things like: "Build us Superhighways and Free Trade Zones so we can better exploit your economy!"... Huhhhhhhhh....... The point of this is that, as I predicted, we are being turned into a Third World Economy.
Our country may be sliding towards poverty, but, like a Third World Country, it still has a lot of wealth in it's UPPER CLASS. Companies here, and U.S. Companies in China, haven't been so interested in spending or investing or all the extra money they have on hand, to like, grow jobs, ever since this silly DEPRESSION took hold, (with all the U.S./FED bail-outs to the Banksters, loaning out THAT money to other corporations). But there's all this money floating to the top of the PONZI scheme, and the rich feel they are BRED to do something with it, (see past posts), so they invest it in bubbles - like false securities, derivatives, mortgages, oil, and other speculations - like FOOD. They are now gambling up the prices of food, (and gold, btw).
OK - I have told you that we are due for inflation once the economy starts "picking up", and corporations start spilling all their pent up capital not just into bubbles, but into the economy in general. So, Wall Street, and some other economic indicators look better, but there's all these extra dollars flooding the economy, and so the price of goods go UP relative to this glut. That not only means prices of OUR goods go up, but so do the prices of goods overseas, EVEN MORESO, because the PONZI scheme is still rigged in our favour. I told you so. (btw, we still have some major faws in the economy, and are due for another crash)...
I would like to get to my most important theme: Real scarcities, generally caused by global climate change...
Few people appreciate the subtle relevance of weather and climate on such things as the 2000-2008 MORTGAGE BUBBLE. In fact, when speculators sense prices will rise in something, like mortgages, they swarm to it, buy it up, and so spiral the price up and up, until the whole thing comes crashing down, making the people leading the BUBBLE PONZI SCHEME very rich. So, weather, etc., events can cause merely a small rise in prices, but this - because of REGANITE ETC. DEREGULATIONS - now leads to a spiral of prices upwards, because of Wall Street, NASDAQ, and Securities speculators. It really is a huge obscenity, in the case of food. Food futures were initially created to provide farmers with a way of being able to more securely plan the selling price of their crops. Now it is just MASS WHOREDOM...
Well, things like Katrina; the fires out West (the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history, prior to BP); a wheat-killing drought in Australia - these things all began price rises in land, mortgages, insurance, wood, and FOOD. And, ever since, the money has been moving more and more into the FOOD BUBBLE.
Since then, there has been massive flooding in Brazil; massive flooding in Australia; and various other droughts, most devastatingly, a drought in Russia and China. Russia is the world's third largest exporter of wheat - and Egypt buys most of its wheat from Russia. Real scarcities mean more expensive crops, and related comodoties, goods and services or transportation. With overpopulation, and GLOBAL WARMING, weather variability is increasingly impinging on crop successes, and the increasing risk of investing in agriculture is itself raising prices. However, rising population ALSO INCREASE WORLD DEMAND, and so lots of people are investing in more-risky agriculture, and its bubbles, anyway.
After the drought, DEMAND for wheat, corn, meat, etc., in CHINA has been increasing widely. This drives up the price of those commodities, and so wheat is, again, made even more expensive for Egypt.
So... In addition to the demented, PONZI SCHEME, terms of trade discussed in the first half of this post, here are the other factors, today, driving up commodities prices, and inviting unrest and uprisings in North Africa, and elsewhere:
Our exported inflation.
Our printing of money out of thin air.
Real scarcities, associated with weather and climate changes.
Increased world demand, associated with overpopulation and other factors.
Commodities BUBBLES created by profligately rich gamblers.
Lastly, (an extensive topic): Banksters who thrive off of both sides of any disaster, scarcity or war. This may also be associated with government corruption and inefficiencies.
So, much of these latter points are nicely covered in hour #2 of the Ed Schultz show - and so many other places. The MSNBC "ED SHOW", and Dylan Ratigan's show, (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31510813/) also surely touch on these topics a lot recently.
A FINE point which Dylan Ratigan made at the end of the hour was that THINGS HAVE CHANGED. The shifting conditions and demands of climate change, (etc.), means that our economic ways of operating don't work so well now...
Because everything is INTERLINKED: Climate, Weather, Supply, Demand, Population, Media/Internet, Wall Street, U.S.A./World, etc... But, most importantly: CLIMATE.
People need to understand that.
ASAP.
Questions for your own study:
Why has China seemed to prosper under this global scheme, unlike other poor and developing countries?
Why & when did the U.S.A. involve itself in WORLD TRADE in the first place - and was this good or bad for us?
Who REALLY bombed the Werld Traed Ctr.?
Has "FREE TRADE" actually HELPED nations? How? Which nations?
On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world each day. During that same day, 10,000 persons, on an average, will have starved to death or died from malnutrition. So it goes. In addition 123,000 persons will die for other reasons. So it goes. This leaves a net gain of about 191,000 each day in the world. The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world’s total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000.
‘I suppose they will all want dignity,
” I said. ‘I suppose,’ said O’Hare.”
- from SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, Kurt Vonnegut
"Well it seems our lovely home of Australia is slowly falling about, what with QLD having the floods, then a few weeks later they've got Australia's worst cyclone to ever hit (size of the USA) it's meant to hit Cairns/Innisfail around 11pm/12am category five winds are currently 300km an hour. My heart seriously goes out to those poor people in Northern QLD being a Darwin girl I know the feeling of a huge cyclone coming towards you, but thankfully nothing has hit us since I've been alive. And to top of the cherry off Australia falling about is Sydney going through it's worse heatwave on record it is fricken disgusting here, here out west yesterday it got upto 42 (c) degrees and last night only went down to just above 30 (c) I'm melting they don't know about aircons in bedroom here, I have one in the lounge room so it's become my best friend these last few days. Anyway the news is telling us not to go outside or even exercise (not like I do that crap anyway) as it is so hot they are worried about people dying. I heard this after I walked the 15 minutes (42 degree heat remember) to coles to get dinner supplies and back, my skinny arse nearly died on the return leg."
- posted by an Australian LJ friend today