Food Crisis: "The greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model"

[Joanne98]

"If the government cannot lower the cost of living it simply has to leave. If the police and UN troops want to shoot at us, that's OK, because in the end, if we are not killed by bullets, we'll die of hunger." — A demonstrator in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

In Haiti, where most people get 22% fewer calories than the minimum needed for good health, some are staving off their hunger pangs by eating "mud biscuits" made by mixing clay and water with a bit of vegetable oil and salt.<1>

Meanwhile, in Canada, the federal government is currently paying $225 for each pig killed in a mass cull of breeding swine, as part of a plan to reduce hog production. Hog farmers, squeezed by low hog prices and high feed costs, have responded so enthusiastically that the kill will likely use up all the allocated funds before the program ends in September.

Some of the slaughtered hogs may be given to local Food Banks, but most will be destroyed or made into pet food. None will go to Haiti.

This is the brutal world of capitalist agriculture — a world where some people destroy food because prices are too low, and others literally eat dirt because food prices are too high.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8836

[Cant trust em]

1. This world is interconnected in so many ways that I couldn't even imagine

Thanks.

This was a great article.

[izquierdista]

2. Typical

Capitalism was never meant to smooth out inequities, but to take advantage of them. They even have a special word for it -- arbitrage. But for arbitrage to work, for the arbitraguer to buy hogs in Canada and ship them to Haiti, there has to be capital in Haiti to complete the cycle. Maybe if the Haitians sold their houses back and forth until everyone owed everyone else a mortgage, they took those mortgages and packaged them into collateralized debt obligations, traded the debt to Goldman Sachs in a T-bond swap, they could then take the T-bonds and do a short T-bond/long Live Hog spread and take delivery on the hogs.

But for the Canadians to give the hogs to the Haitians, well, that just doesn't make sense.

[angstlessk]

3. had to look up 'arbitrage'...indeed seems to be sorta like 'three card monte' given a 'respectable'

term???

ar·bi·trage Audio Help (är'bĭ-träzh') Pronunciation Key
n. The purchase of securities on one market for immediate resale on another market in order to profit from a price discrepancy.

[izquierdista]

5. I would be glad to give you lessons

Bring a big bankroll, I'll bring the securities. :hi:

[angstlessk]

6. at this point in time..my money is on three card monte...at least I could

guess and be correct 1 in say 900 times???

[notesdev]

4. That's not capitalism you're talking about

What you are describing is called Fascism.

[Joe Chi Minh]

7. Same difference, alas. Capitalism recognises no external control, no limitation on its

acquisitiveness/avarice, unless imposed upon it externally, inevitably against its will. Fascism is always the logical conclusion of it, as we have seen by its now routine, historical, cyclical recrudescence; "boom and bust" in a far more real and catastrophic sense than our delightful, economic correspondents have been wont to use the term.

There is a weird irony in the way in which Japan prospered so mightily after WWII as a result of the edicts and precepts of two remarkable (in a historical sense) Americans, respectively, General Douglas MacArthur and business consultant, J Edwards Demming.

I think, since he had been part of the fascist plot against Roosevelt, it must have been in order to punish Japan's militarist industrialists that MacArthur ordained that the remuneration of the CEO, at least, of any large company, should not exceed what would be considered in our corrupt corporatist West, as an exceedingly low multiple of the remuneration of the lowest-paid worker. It might be way out, but the figure, 18, comes to mind. I think in the US, it's now well above 1000.

Although, I suppose it is possible that that enlightened measure might have commended itself to him, because he understood, however reluctantly - obviously the biggest of "no-nos" in the domestic US context - that allowing inordinate, private enrichment and aggrandisement would inevitably have been at the cost of the country, itself, severely prejudicing the reconstruction of Japan's infastructure, just as its prevalence cripples those of our own countries under non-Socialist regimes.

On the other hand, Demming, the business consultant, as well as instilling in the Japanese work force a belief in their own abilities to design, as well as to copy, sophisticated manufactured products, advised them to adopt a spirit of cooperation between workers, instead of mutually-inimical, in-house competition. However, he recognised that such a wise recourse would never be acceptable in his own country, fatally flawed as it was, and has continued to be, by the hegemony of its much-prized "law of the jungle" business mentality. "Ethos" hardly fits the context.