How to blame U.N. incompetence and Hunger on democracy.
The sad thing is people will mistake this quasi journalism for reality. Reality is the entire world at some level is dependent on the USA and capitalism. Much of international business is dependent on American purchase power. Most of the world’s aid comes from American generosity. When our economy suffers, we withhold our money to pay our own bills. Less aid doesn’t diminish greed and despots all over the globe skim off the top of what monies are available and let their people suffer. In truth the world is not worse because of America it is doomed without her. This article is not about “capitalism” it is a poorly disguised attack on the US.
By TONY KARON, April 14, 2008, Time
The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War. Since then, the spectacle of hunger sparking revolutionary violence has been the stuff of Broadway musicals rather than the real world of politics. And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. Ironically, it may be the very success of capitalism in transforming regions previously restrained by various forms of socialism that has helped create the new crisis.
-Before blaming capitalism compare it to government controlled economies where only the elite benefit from the work of millions. Capitalism has brought hundreds of millions out of shacks and into privately owned homes. No other system comes even close.
Haiti is in flames as food riots have turned into a violent challenge to the vulnerable government; Egypt’s authoritarian regime faces a mounting political threat over its inability to maintain a steady supply of heavily subsidized bread to its impoverished citizens; Cote D’Ivoire, Cameroon, Mozambique, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia are among the countries that have recently seen violent food riots or demonstrations. World Bank president Robert Zoellick noted last week that world food prices had risen 80% over the past three years, and warned that at least 33 countries face social unrest as a result.
-Notice the high concentrations of muslim countries, which btw are not democracies, not poor and do not have a capitalistic economy. This is just propaganda to spin the America needs to share its wealth theme. Expect many more such articles to follow. The one thing you will not see is the U.N. providing any proof that there is a better way to manage resources. What has the U.N. ever accomplished without the help of the world’s most powerful capitalistic state?
The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That’s especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, “We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.”
-The mention of the U.N. should have sent red flags flying, when they can account for the money already spent then they can ask for more. The U.N. is the largest grouping of thieves, liars and con men in the history of the planet.
When all that stands between hungry people and a warehouse full of rice and beans is a couple of padlocks and a riot policeman (who may be the neighbor of those who’re trying to get past him, and whose own family may be hungry too), the invisible barricade of private-property laws can be easily ignored. Doing whatever it takes to feed oneself and a hungry child, after all, is a primal human instinct. So, with prices of basic foods skyrocketing to the point that even the global aid agencies – whose function is to provide emergency food supplies to those in need – are unable, for financial reasons, to sustain their current commitments to the growing army of the hungry, brittle regimes around the world have plenty of reason for anxiety.
-The people will always do what the governments will not, those corrupt regimes should be taken down and their leaders slowly starved while the oppressed eat in front of them. What the U.N. officials fear and rightly so is the entire house of cards coming down around them and the people holding them responsible for their greed and corruption. Oh damn, I violated the recent U.N. call to stop free speech and calls for violence, I hate when I do that.
The hunger has historically been an instigator of revolutions and civil wars, it is not a sufficient condition for such violence. For a mass outpouring of rage spurred by hunger to translate into a credible challenge to an established order requires an organized political leadership ready to harness that anger against the state. It may not be all that surprising, then, that Haiti has been one of the major flashpoints of the new wave of hunger-generated political crises; the outpouring of rage there has been channeled into preexisting furrows of political discontent. And that’s why there may be greater reason for concern in Egypt, where the bread crisis comes on top of a mounting challenge to the regime’s legitimacy by a range of opposition groups.
-Vive la revolution!
The social theories of Karl Marx were long ago discarded as of little value, even to revolutionaries. But he did warn that capitalism had a tendency to generate its own crises. Indeed, the spread of capitalism, and its accelerated industrialization and wealth-creation, may have fomented the food-inflation crisis – by dramatically accelerating competition for scarce resources. The rapid industrialization of China and India over the past two decades – and the resultant growth of a new middle class fast approaching the size of America’s – has driven demand for oil toward the limits of global supply capacity. That has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s, which has also raised pressure on food prices by driving up agricultural costs and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. Moreover, those new middle class people are eating a lot better than their parents did – particularly more meat. Producing a single calorie of beef can, by some estimates, require eight or more calories of grain feed, and expanded meat consumption therefore has a multiplier effect on demand for grains. Throw in climate disasters such as the Australian drought and recent rice crop failures, and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created to feed people in emergencies is warning that it lacks the funds to fulfill its mandate.
-Notice no mention of U.N. transferring wealth without regard for the people effected. No mention of super wealthy despots, no mention of supporting giant oil concerns over the people. No calls for a return of some of the biggest recorded profits in history or price controls of goods, resources and necessities, basically no mention of a plan or the ability to actually lead.
The reason officials such as Zoellick are sounding the alarm may be that the food crisis, and its attendant political risks, are not likely to be resolved or contained by the laissez-faire operation of capitalism’s market forces. Government intervention on behalf of the poor – so out of fashion during globalization’s roaring ’90s and the current decade – may be about to make a comeback. View this article on Time.com
-Power to the people, take your countries back.
Tags: U.N. propaganda
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.