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Taking Cue From Robber Barron Oil, Mega Agra-businesses Gouging The Poor to Set Obscene Record Profits Tens of millions of people are being driven into starvation, and middle to lower middle class citizens of the USA are going hungry and even the working public is struggling to keep up with the attempt s to break the unions, and redistribute the wealth through unprecedented profits as the behemoth agribusinesses grab titanic profits on the world food crisis. Market investor's speculations for profits speculation are driving the prices of the very staples of food out of the reach of the hungry. The cost of corn, rice and wheat, have soared over the past year driving the world's poor who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food into hunger and destitution. Corn and soybeans are also inflated in price because of the bio-fuels influx.
According to the World Bank, 100 million more people are now facing severe hunger. At the same time, some of the world's wealthiest food companies are grabbing record profits.
Profiteers Facing Hell? You Bet Your Giant Red Apple They Are! Here are a few examples and for the same period for the quarter ending in February: Monsanto more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m ( £275m) to $1.12bn. Its annual profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn. Cargill's net earnings up by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn.
Archer Daniels Midland, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent for the qtr. from $363m to $517m. The profits of its grain merchandising and handling divisions jumped 16 time $21m to $341m.
The Mosaic fertilizer Company, for the qtr rose more than 12-fold, from $42.2m to $520.8m, in the shortage of fertilizer. Some fertilizers have more than tripled in the last year as demand has outstripped supply. Why? Costs were actually lower because of volume and productivity, but seeing how the oil companies, who made a 21,500 % profit have faired, sensing that the politicians who are also getting fat on the profits, congressmen in both Houses profited more than $196,000,000 on war, oil and related stocks, are happy with their profits and don't seem to care about the rest of the nation let alone the rest of the world.
Late last week Benedict Southworth, director of the World Development Movement, called the escalating earnings and profits "immoral." He said that the benefits of the food price increases were being kept by the big companies, and were not finding their way down to farmers in the developing world.
The soaring prices of food and fertilizers mainly come from increased demand. This has partly been caused by the boom in biofuels, which require vast amounts of grain, but even more by increasing appetites for meat, especially in India and China; producing 1lb of beef in a feedlot, for example, takes 7lbs of grain.
Experts are saying that speculation is also driving prices higher. Index-fund investments in grain and meat has increased almost five times to over $47 Billion this last year says AgResource Co, the Chicago research firm. The official US Commodity Futures Trading Commission held special hearings in Washington two weeks ago to examine how much speculators were helping to push up food prices.
Cargill estimates that its results "reflect the cumulative effect of having invested more than $18 billion in fixed and working capital over the past several years to expand our physical facilities, service capabilities, and knowledge around the world."
Outrage over the massive greed and those who see this for what it really is, an attempt to profit while accelerating depopulation and undoing the New Deal by redistributing the wealth in a reverse Robin Hood arrangement an avowed goal of the Neo-cons/fascists.
Last week Shell and BP disclosed that between them recorded profits of £14 billion in the first three months of the year or £3 Million an hour are being made as their oil is selling at a 21,500 % mark-up and no one seems to care.
Now those who did not listen to the many, myself included who stated the one of the main purposes of the Patriot Act was to suppress the Hunger and water riots which would be sure to come, and to put down any attempts to undo the Fascist redistribution of the wealth program, designed to drain the wealth of the middle and lower classes, confiscate their properties and leave them starving and without medical care, in the expressed goals of the New World Order/Mein Kampf, ala Orwell.
My suggestion. Go back to the actions of FDR and more lately, Jimmy Carter. FDR stopped the attempt by Prescott Bush and others to do what is being done right now. FDR, when Secretary of the Navy in WW I, and later as president in WW II and his staff began a "Recapture the Profits" program, and price limits on all necessities. Carter placed a per-barrel price limit on oil and imposed a large "Windfall Profits" tax on the oil companies. I would go a step further and cap CEO salaries at $2.5 Million annually or no more than 25 times the average income of all employees instead of the present 550-1100 times the average income of all employees. I would include therein in the 25 times the average employees salaries, to include contractors and subcontractors salaries. Perhaps the French had it right. Is it time to roll our Madam' Guillotine and give the axe to all corporations which produce necessities of life by Nationalizing them? Nationalize fuel, water, certain basic food production, drug companies, all medical services companies, prisons and turn them over to the Colleges and universities to run. Then let us make the supreme effort to treat Avarice-(GREED) as we do murder. Avarice is the worst crime in the history of mankind, "Love of money is the root cause of all evil!" Take away greed and the world becomes 90% improved.
