Hunger Makes You Peasants Productive

Globalresearch  |  Hunger must be sustained to exploit manual labor, contends George Kent, a professor at the University of Hawaii’s political science department. who authored the November 2021 UN the document.

“We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people,” Kent notes. “Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is need for manual labour.”

Without “the threat of hunger,” essential low-paying jobs would become vacant, a labor shortage would emerge and the global economy would cease to exist, Kent continues.

“We in developed countries sometimes see poor people by the roadside holding up signs saying ‘Will Work For Food.” Actually, most people work for food. It is mainly because people need food to survive that they work so hard either in producing food for themselves in subsistence-level production, or by selling their services to others in exchange for money. How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?

“More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger? When we sell ourselves cheaply, we enrich others, those who own factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of wealth.”

According to the U.N., assumptions attributing poverty and low-paying jobs to hunger are “nonsense” because people deprived of nourishment have stronger incentive to work.

“Who would have established massive biofuel production operations in Brazil if they did not know there were thousands of hungry people desperate enough to take the awful jobs they would offer?” Kent asserts. “Who would build any sort of factory if they did not know that many people would be available to take the jobs at low-pay rates?

“Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.”

“Slaves to hunger” are “assets” to “people at the high end,” Kent concludes:

The non-governmental organization Free the Slaves defines slaves as people who are not allowed to walk away from their jobs. It estimates that there are about 27 million slaves in the world, including those who are literally locked into workrooms and held as bonded labourers in South Asia. However, they do not include people who might be described as slaves to hunger, that is, those who are free to walk away from their jobs but have nothing better to go to. Maybe most people who work are slaves to hunger?

For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.

The decades-oldop-ed was removed from the United Nation’s website on Wednesday hours it went viral.

The United Nation’s Chronicle subsequently issued a statement claiming the article is “satire.”

A 2020 report published by The Rockefeller Foundation that outlines a globalist plan to transform the food system is underway began circulating across the internet on Monday.

The Rockefeller Foundation document titled, “Reset The Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the U.S. Food System” argues the U.S. food system must be seized and transformed to advance “social justice” and “environmental protection.”

The report also calls for “numerous changes to policies, practices and norms” to modify the U.S. food supply, including data collection and online surveillance to track people’s the dietary habits.

Sri Lankans Show Bitch-Made Americans And Canadians How REAL PROTEST Is Done....,

michaelshellenberger |  Sri Lanka has fallen. Protesters breached the official residences of Sri Lanka's Prime Minister and President, who have fled to undisclosed locations out of fear of death. The proximate reason is that the nation is bankrupt, suffering its worst financial crisis in decades. Millions are struggling to purchase food, medicine and fuel. Energy shortages and inflation were major factors behind the crisis. Inflation in June in Sri Lanka was over 50%. Food prices rose by 80%. And a half-million people fell into poverty over the last year.

But the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture and “ESG,” which refers to investments made following supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. Sri Lanka has a near-perfect ESG score (98) which is higher than Sweden (96) or the United States (51), notes a commentator.

To be sure, there were other factors behind Sri Lanka’s fall. COVID-19 lockdowns and a 2019 bombing hurt tourism, a $3 billion to 5 billion-per-year industry. Sri Lanka’s leaders insisted on paying China back for various “Belt and Road” infrastructure projects when other nations refused to do so. And higher oil prices meant transportation prices rose 128% since May.

But the biggest and main problem causing Sri Lanka’s fall was its ban on chemical fertilizers in April 2021. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers and, after the ban, 85% experienced crop losses. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold. Tea, the nation’s main export, also suffered, thereby undermining the nation’s foreign currency and ability to purchase products from abroad.

While there are 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 70% of the nation’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming. “We are furious!” said one rice farmer in May. “Angry! Not just me - but all the farmers who cultivated here are angry.”

Eat Bugs Muhphukkas!!! (Best B'lee All Kinds Of Bugs Fitna Eat You!!!)

U.N. |  We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world's economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour.

We in developed countries sometimes see poor people by the roadside holding up signs saying "Will Work for Food". Actually, most people work for food. It is mainly because people need food to survive that they work so hard either in producing food for themselves in subsistence-level production, or by selling their services to others in exchange for money. How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?
More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger? When we sell our services cheaply, we enrich others, those who own the factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.

The conventional thinking is that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs. For example, an article reports on "Brazil's ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom".¹ While it is true that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs, we need to understand that hunger at the same time causes low-paying jobs to be created. Who would have established massive biofuel production operations in Brazil if they did not know there were thousands of hungry people desperate enough to take the awful jobs they would offer? Who would build any sort of factory if they did not know that many people would be available to take the jobs at low-pay rates?

Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.

The non-governmental organization Free the Slaves defines slaves as people who are not allowed to walk away from their jobs. It estimates that there are about 27 million slaves in the world,² including those who are literally locked into workrooms and held as bonded labourers in South Asia. However, they do not include people who might be described as slaves to hunger, that is, those who are free to walk away from their jobs but have nothing better to go to. Maybe most people who work are slaves to hunger?

For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.

The Coming Surge In Food Prices Will Devastate The Poor

TAC  |  s a twenty-something living in Washington, you have to find ways to cut costs. A lot of people here go without cable. Others sell their cars and rely on public transport. I like television and the open road, so I gave up food instead.

I eat the same thing every week. It’s a joke around the office. On Saturday, I’ll buy chicken breasts, ground turkey, sweet potatoes, asparagus, protein bars, eggs, and wheat bread at the supermarket. If I play my cards right, I can walk out of the store having paid less than $60. For five days’ worth of food, that’s not bad. I cook some of it Sunday and the rest on Wednesday night. I hate it, but it’s been pretty good on my waistline.

Even on the Club Fed diet, I’m feeling the pinch of rising food prices. Bread has become more expensive in the past three months. Eggs have, too. Buying store-brand chicken is like buying Ibérico ham.

I’ll survive. I can always cut cable. For wannabe proles in the laptop class, the rise in food prices has been at most an inconvenience. But the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the coming disruptions in global food markets will immiserate the actual working class in this country and may kill thousands of the world’s poor.

Well before war broke out in Ukraine, prices in the food industry were surging. U.S. food prices rose a whopping 7.5 percent between 2021 and 2022. Indexed global food prices hit an all-time high last month.

The causes are familiar. Supply-chain disruptions have slowed production and slashed supply. The sight of barren grocery shelves has incentivized consumers to buy in bulk, sending aggregate demand skyward. Labor-retention issues and slumping workforce participation rates have reduced output and further cut supply. Labor issues have reached a point where meatpacking companies like Tyson plan to automate their processing plants to weather labor shortages.

At the same time, the prices of industry inputs like oil, animal feed, and fertilizer have soared. The price of urea—a popular, highly soluble nitrogen-based fertilizer—nearly doubled at the pivotal New Orleans port last year. In input-dependent industries like agriculture, where producers net only 15 percent of final retail cost, consumers inevitably bear most of the increase in input costs.

The effects of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed against the Russian government and economy threaten to accelerate these trends. Russia is the world’s leading producer of wheat; Ukraine is fifth. Together, they are responsible for some 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports. War will almost certainly disrupt planting season in both Russia and Ukraine.

Why Does A 92 Year Old Man "Serve" As Gatekeeper Of The Left Or Talk To Ana Kasparian?

jacobin | In 1967, Noam Chomsky emerged as a leading critic of the Vietnam War with a New York Review of Books essay critiquing US foreign policy’s ivory tower establishment. As many academics rationalized genocide, Chomsky defended a simple principle: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”

A groundbreaking linguist, Chomsky has done more to live up to this maxim than almost any other contemporary intellectual. His political writings have laid bare the horrors of neoliberalism, the injustices of endless war, and the propaganda of the corporate media, earning him a place on Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” and in the surveillance files of the CIA. At ninety-two, Chomsky remains an essential voice in the anti-capitalist movements his ideas helped inspire.

Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila interviewed Chomsky for Jacobin’s Weekends YouTube show earlier this year. In their conversation, Chomsky reminds us that history is a process of continuous struggle, and that the working-class politics needed to secure universal health care, climate justice, and denuclearization are out there — if we’re willing to fight for them.

AK  Let’s start with a big question — why does Congress continuously tell the American people that it will not deliver on policies that have overwhelming public support?

NC Well, one place to look always is: “Where’s the money? Who funds Congress?” Actually, there’s a very fine, careful study of this by the leading scholar who deals with funding issues and politics, Thomas Ferguson. He and his colleagues did a study in which they investigated a simple question: “What’s the correlation over many years between campaign funding and electability to Congress?” The correlation is almost a straight line. That’s the kind of close correlation that you rarely get in the social sciences: greater the funding, higher the electability.

And in fact, we all know what happens when a congressional representative gets elected. Their first day in office, they start making phone calls to the potential donors for their next election. Meanwhile, hordes of corporate lobbyists descend on their offices. Their staff are often young kids, totally overwhelmed by the resources, the wealth, the power, of the massive lobbyists who pour in. Out of that comes legislation, which the representative later signs — maybe even looks at occasionally, when he can get off the phone with the donors. What kind of system do you expect to emerge from this?

One recent study found that for about 90 percent of the population, there’s essentially no correlation between their income and decisions by their representatives — that is, they’re fundamentally unrepresented. This extends earlier work by Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page, and others who found pretty similar results, and the general picture is clear: the working class and most of the middle class are basically unrepresented.

 

Po Folk Best Behave Themselves If They Want Any Of This Food!!!

theweek  |  Over the last week, just under 1 million people filed for ordinary unemployment benefits, plus another half-million under the special pandemic unemployment program for people who don't ordinarily qualify, a substantial decline from some of the numbers seen since the beginning of the pandemic. At this rate, by mid-September or so, new unemployment claims will be merely as bad as they were during the worst of the Great Recession.

Those unemployment benefits, however, because this country has systematically stripped and sabotaged its safety net, are extremely meager and often nearly impossible to actually get. Hundreds of thousands of private citizens who have lost their jobs are flocking to Reddit for help and advice, as state unemployment bureaucracies are so janky and swamped they often can't deal with the flood of applications.

In the past week, the r/unemployment subreddit has taken a dark turn with the expiration of the CARES Act's super-unemployment and the failure of Republicans to even come to an agreement about what they want in the next round of pandemic relief. It's become a de facto support group for people whose lives are collapsing around them for simple lack of income or jobs, and talk of suicide is common.

One wonders: Is America about to see bread protests, or even riots?

People around the country have been testifying how they are down to their last dollar or flat broke, facing eviction or living on the street, unable to afford vital prescriptions or even food. "I've got $18.91 in my bank account this morning. My cupboards are getting low, my dog will have to eat whatever me and my kids eat and my gas light will be back on shortly," wrote one Redditor recently. 

"My car payment was due today and I'm still $200 short, 500 counting last month's. My phone bill is due in a few days. I'm a month behind on the electric bill. I have about $60 to my name, I'm not going to make rent and my [landlords] have already said they will not be giving any allowances," wrote another. "Well I've waited and now my power turns off at the end of today, in a house where my entire family has moved in with me … worst of all I have two toddlers and virtually nowhere to go. 

'Rona and the government have picked off my family one by one and this seems to be the final nail in the coffin," wrote a third.

What Is The Purpose Of Food-Powered Make-Work?

evonomics |  There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.  Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

Moloch and Ishtar

We are waking up as no society that we've ever been taught about, has had to do. No society that we've ever been taught about has been where we are today.  Our current situation is not a pretty thing.  We know about some of the changes, events, and developments that we're allowed to know about. These are the underlying causes for societal dysfunction that are blamed for our current predicament, and even these permitted causes of societal dysfunction cannot be addressed in any agreeable way. Too many needy people appeared as if out of nowhere too fast. All our budgets are strained with expenditures far outpacing revenues. The welfare of those who brought about this predicament will not be sacrificed. It will never be sacrificed for those already stigmatized as society's weakest links, no matter who is really to blame for their condition.

The proprietors cannot proceed into the world of tomorrow dragging a heavy burden of the unproductive and unprofitable forward with them.  They cannot compete with other elite proprietor's in the global 1% and maintain their influence within that global elite if they spend their last borrowed dime on the unproductive and unprofitable. What our elites are faced with today is a perfect storm of aging boomers, unsustainable national debt and continued borrowing, legislative dysfunction, automation, continued job-shedding with 95 million already on the sidelines, apathy, all of which lead to the type of events which unfolded last weekend in Charlottesville. You're kidding yourself if you think this situation is going to get any better. From here forward, it can only get worse.

Only ignorant peasants wonder why the war on drugs has never been won, why the situation worsens by the day, and why those governance pretend at helplessness to do anything about it. That is because the entire human livestock management scheme is designed. Drugs are just one aspect of the human livestock management scheme. The unproductive and unprofitable have overstayed their welcome. 99% of this herd is subject to accelerated cull. The challenge, to the extent there is one, is putting down these two-legged cattle without being too obviously to blame for the cull.  This is the way the corporate neofeudal system works. Top people, thought-leaders are rewarded and accorded status for their cleverness at squeezing out profits under by any means necessary but under cover of law - and doing so in a manner designed to shield them and the proprietors they represent from any liability for any externalities that may be involved in yielding that profit.

The top lives off the yield from the bottom...the roof or top of the structure is supported by the bottom or foundation of the structure.

If the bottom can't support the top...the structure collapses.

Oh I get it you all think you support those below...

You think the top or roof supports the foundation of the structure...well I guess in your mind where LAW that governs the Universe does not apply you could imagine such.

The bottom produces everything and the top monetizes it...They then mark up everything and sell it back to the bottom to get their money back.

The top owns the money system...it and all the money belongs to them...it's their money that monetizes the wholesale production operation...not yours...all the money in circulation does not belong to any of you...You just think it does.

The difference between the wholesale cost and the retail price is the yield the top lives off of...well then how does the bottom make up the difference?

By supplying the top with more than the top gives...forever...Until the bottom can't supply the top with the yield they demand.

Somebody has been glorifying the use of drugs, especially alcohol, for quite some time now. Think, "most interesting man in the world", when was the last time you saw a commercial that showcased the actual results of alcohol indulgence? Colleges are ranked by how hard they "party".  Endless televised coverage of the young and beautiful doing themselves in all the while leaving viewers with the impression they are missing out on something wonderful. The drug and degeneracy problem could not have grown to this extent without the complicity of those in power or connected, whether locally or nationally, running things behind the scenes. Most do it for the profit while others for more sinister reasons. Like so many cattle, Americans don't really have to be forced any more to go to their own slaughter. The pied-piper of our celebrity addiction has made it so that Americans seemingly can't get enough.

Self-pity, fringe sexual acts, drugs and alcohol, excessive eating, conspicuous consumption, these humans have become so lacking in meaning and purpose that they destroy themselves (and everything around them) in pursuit of fashionable degeneracy. All this degeneracy has  turned us against and blinded us to the fundamental necessity of WORK. WORK is the only thing that rewards and fulfills our being. Not the money we receive from the fruits of our work, not the luxury this money may afford, but the sense of accomplishment and mastery that one discovers within himself. In comparison with this fundamental being-duty, everything else is merely conversation....,

Degeneracy is a deceiver. It lies, telling you how smart, how deserving, how rewarding, how fulfilling it is.  Even those who try to WORK can be turned from the truth within, misdirected toward getting money instead of life. These misdirected souls seek money and spend money on the empty things and degeneracy they've been conditioned to believe that others value. This is what hypnotic marketing does to our "monkey-see monkey-do" species ethology. Marketing doesn't tell you humans what you want or need, rather, it convinces you to want what everyone else has been or is being convinced to want. Marketing has built this false consensus, making you believe what the proprietors want you to believe and do what is profitable for them to have you do. Foolish humans, addicted to an unsatisfiable set of urges that cannot be explained by simple biological necessity.

This is our world now, and we're not at the beginning of this process, we are in fact fast approaching its culmination. The contagion of degeneracy and aversion to WORK has become apocalyptic.

Rep. Adrian Smith Should Have Gone Old Testament and Answered NO!

WaPo  |  Perhaps the most upsetting headline I saw, though, was generated not by Trump but by a 10-year veteran of the House Republican majority. In an astonishing interview Saturday on NPR, this lawmaker repeatedly demurred when asked whether Americans are entitled to the most basic human need.

NPR’s Scott Simon, a genial interviewer, asked Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), a member of the Ways and Means Committee and an influential figure on agriculture policy, about Trump’s proposal to make vast cuts to food stamps. Smith posited that the program could be cut in ways that “do not harm the most vulnerable.”

“Well, let me ask you this bluntly: Is every American entitled to eat?” Simon queried.

Smith was stumped. “Well, they — nutrition, obviously, we know is very important. And I would hope that we can look to — ”

Simon interrupted: “Well, not just important, it’s essential for life. Is every American entitled to eat?”

Smith agreed that nutrition “is essential” but continued to ignore the question about whether Americans are entitled to eat.

Simon tried a third time: “So is every American entitled to eat, and is food stamps something that ought to be that ultimate guarantor?”

Once again, the lawmaker demurred: “I think that we know that, given the necessity of nutrition, there could be a number of ways that we could address that.”

There was more, but it all came down to this: In the United States, in 2017, a powerful member of Congress refuses to grant that Americans should be able to count on eating food. 

venezuela's profitable elite-engineered collapse and anarchy...,

telesur |  In 2004 and 2005, after winning the recall referendum against him, Chavez launched an offensive to boost local production. “Endogenous development” went hand in hand with declaring that the Bolivarian revolution was heading toward socialism. Land reform began in earnest. Mission Vuelvan Caras began to train the urban poor in agricultural and other skills. Tens of thousands of cooperatives were set up. Almost all of these failed.

The reasons were many, but one of the most potent was that oil prices began to rise sharply. It was just so much easier to import everything, than to build a whole new system of production. And with more people consuming much more, there was a lot that needed to be imported.

This presented Venezuela's traditional elite with an unexpected opportunity. For they still owned most of the companies that did the importing. Since losing control over the state oil company, they had been desperate to claw back their share of its income.

They set about developing one of the greatest scams of all time. It was based on acquiring cheap dollars from the Central Bank for false or manipulated imports, and then speculating on the growing gap in exchange rates.

This is how it worked. Private importer Mr. A applies for US$ 1,000 to import 100 cases of groceries. This costs him 6,300 bolivars (at the government's main preferential rate of US$ 1.00 = Bs. 6.30, in place until earlier this year). Mr. A then has several options. He could decide actually to import all 100 cases. But instead of selling them to his wholesalers at a price based on what he paid, US$ 10 or Bs. 63 per case, he sells them at a price based on the illegal, parallel exchange rate (US$ 1.00 = Bs. 500.00, early last year), that is Bs. 5,000 per case. In other words, he makes a killing in bolivars. But it is much more likely that Mr. A imports only 50 cases, or less, which he sells in the same way and still makes a handsome profit. With the rest of the dollars he was given, 500 or more, he can do several things. He can change them back into bolivars at the parallel rate, but he'd probably rather keep them for a while offshore until the rate goes up even further. Or invest them in something else abroad. Or keep them in his own private dollar account for a rainy day. In other cases, Mr A didn't import anything at all. He basically stole all of the dollars.

Big private companies in Venezuela did the same thing on a much larger scale. In 2013, the then head of the Venezuelan Central Bank, Edmee Betancourt, said that the country had lost between $15 and $20 billion dollars the previous year through such fraudulent import deals. The Central Bank's own figures show that between 2003 and 2013, the Venezuelan private sector increased its holdings in foreign bank accounts by over US$ 122 billion, or almost 230 percent. In 2014, Chavistas campaigning for an audit of the public debt estimated the total amount lost over the same period through fake imports and similar mechanisms amounted to an incredible US$ 259 billion.

It is likely that many of the 750 offshore companies linked to Venezuela in the database released from the Panama Papers have been used to recycle this money.

Venezuela's largest food manufacturer, Polar, has interrupted production several times in recent weeks because, it says, the government hasn't given it the dollars it needs to import its raw materials. But over the years, Polar has been one of the very biggest recipients of preferential dollars for imports. And from somewhere it has found enough dollars to develop new production facilities in the United States and Colombia.

money can't solve stupid, incompetent, self-serving, and mismanaged...,

nationalinterest |  In recent weeks, there’s been a steady drumbeat in the media of calls to increase defense spending. In newspapers, TV and radio, this chorus contends that a shrinking military budget is putting U.S. national security at risk. Repeal the Budget Control Act and boost Pentagon spending, they warn, or suffer the consequences of a less secure nation. The time has come to expose the fact these claims are without merit and instead shine a light on the real cause of our dwindling military capabilities.

The American military’s shrinking capabilities have very little to do with money. Rather, they are the result of internal mismanagement. The only way to strengthen our national security is not to spend more money, but rather to reform the way the Department of Defense does business. 

It boggles the mind that the DoD cannot account for the hundreds of billions of dollars a year that it spends. A full twenty-six years after a federal law was passed requiring all parts of the federal government to provide Congress with an audit of its spending, there remains only a single government agency that has not complied: the Department of Defense. Even after being publicly rebuked by the Senate in 2013 for this failure—and wasting billions of dollars on failed auditing software—the Pentagon remains noncompliant. Although it’s a major problem that we don’t know how the Pentagon spends its money, an examination of the known expenses is even more alarming.

Look no further than the $500 million spent to train Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. That program was scrapped after putting only a handful of trainees on the ground. Or the $468 million spent on planes for the Afghan Air Force that we were forced to destroy because the Afghans could not fly or maintain them.

Even worse, consider the $20 billion spent by the Army on its Future Combat System, which was supposed to develop the next generation of armored vehicles, but produced exactly zero new pieces of equipment. The weakened state of today’s military has not been caused by insufficient appropriations, but by sometimes breathtaking mismanagement within the Department of Defense.

The time has come to genuinely reform the Pentagon in ways that are commensurate with the caliber of the mismanagement. There are many changes that need to be made but three fundamental changes stand out as being necessary to enable our military to successfully navigate an uncertain global future.

peasants allow lying, cheating, murderous oxygen-thieves to rule U.S.

resourceinsights |  Was it corruption that led to the bailout instead of a takeover? Or was it an honest difference of opinion about what would work best under emergency circumstances?

We can argue whether these examples of transfers of funds from one group to another are fair. But by themselves they do not constitute a systemic risk to the stability of the entire economic and social system. In fact, some would argue that such transfers enhance that stability. However one evaluates these transfers, I would contend that a much worse corruption is to subject our society knowingly to systemic failures such as severe climate change and widespread crop failures.

To understand this contention, we must review the material basis for our modern society. Despite all the hype about the service economy, the activities which make the service economy even possible are agriculture, fishing, forestry, mining and manufacturing. These sectors create the surplus food and fiber, the surplus energy and minerals, and the surplus goods that allow so many of us to do something other than farm, fish, log, mine or manufacture goods.

By "surplus" I mean that those engaged in the five essential underlying activities of the modern economy provide more food and fiber, extract more energy and other mineral resources, and make more things than they themselves will use. In fact, in so-called developed societies, the people in these occupations create surpluses in their respective areas that are nothing short of astonishing.

In the United States for example, those working in agriculture, fishing and forestry number 2.4 million or about 1.6 percent of the working population of 149 million as of 2015 according the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those working in mining including oil and natural gas production (which, after all, is really just another type of mining) number 917,000 or about 0.6 percent of the working population. These two groups provide most of the raw materials for the rest of the economy while constituting just 2.2 percent of the workforce. Some raw materials, notably oil and metal ores, are supplemented with imports. But that is counterbalanced in part by agricultural exports that are about one-third of all crops grown.

Those working in manufacturing number 15.3 million, dwarfing the number who actually provide the feedstocks for that manufacturing. But manufacturing workers still only constitute 10.3 percent of the total U.S. workforce. We also supplement our manufactured goods with imports. But we export high-value goods such as airplanes, pharmaceuticals and advanced machinery.

So, the percentage of the U.S. workforce that provides the actual material basis for the economy amounts to only 12.5 percent.

all-volunteer warsocialism a recipe for military, government, and societal failure...,

therealnews |  I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. Larry Wilkerson is a retired United States Army colonel and former chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Larry, thank you so much for joining us today.

LARRY WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Thanks for having me, Sharmini.

PERIES: Larry, you've been reading a very important book, Skin In the Game: Poor Kids and Patriots by Gen. Dennis Laich, where he makes a compelling case that the all-volunteer military force no longer works in a world defined by terrorism and high debt and widening class differences. Tell us more about the book and the case he makes in it.

WILKERSON: Gen. Laich, Dennis Laich, is a 30-plus year member of the United States Army Reserves. Obviously became a general officer, and now he's written this book. And this book very vividly and very dramatically illustrates how what the Gates Commission created for Richard Nixon in 1972-73, the all-volunteer force, is no longer sustainable. It demonstrates it's not sustainable physically, that is to say it's not sustainable in dollar terms, and it probably is not sustainable in terms of the moral impact on the nation.

As we've seen throughout these last 14 years of war, we've had poor people, essentially, less than 1 percent of the nation, bleeding and dying and defending the other 99 percent. This is an ethical and moral position I think that's unsustainable. The fiscal position, though, is such that if you just do a linear progression of the defense budget and the cost of people out to about 2025, 2030, you wind up spending almost the entire Army and Marine Corps budget on people. So it's impossible to sustain this force. Another indicator is how we've gone from 2.7 percent women in the ranks to over 15 percent women in the ranks because we can't find enough men. This is not the way to fill out your military. However equitable and egalitarian you may think it is, it's not the way to fill out your military. And it's not the way to build a military that is sustainable over the next few years.

We've come up with a solution, I think, and the solution's rather unique. It's drafting by lottery into the reserve components. Not into the active components. Therefore I think deflecting some of the political criticism and political opposition we'd get, though we don't hesitate to say this is going to be a difficult task to achieve.

PERIES: And one of the other issues surrounding this question is the fact that the United States used to have a military, and military that is equipped to respond in a situation of war if needed. But now we seem to be in a perpetual state of war where we are constantly financing the military and arms and the military forces to be able to respond to all the time. What do you make of that?

WILKERSON: I think you're onto a point that we see as part of this ethical, moral dimension of this all-volunteer force. It is clear to us after lots of conversations with military leaders, with civilian leaders and actual security experts and others, that part of the reason that the president of the United States feels no real strain or pressure about going to war and staying at war is the fact that no one has any skin in the game. When you've got people who are not capable, really, because of their intellectual capacity or more often their ability to pay, to be in college or to be in some other more productive employment than being in the military, then they have to be in the military.

And that's how we're creating our military these days. We're taking the 1 percent that can't get it anywhere else, by and large, and we're putting them in the military. And we're putting upon them the burden of defending this nation. Defending the other 320-some odd million people in this country who don't have any skin in the game at all. When you have congressmen with no skin in the game, when you have business leaders, corporate leaders, others, religious leaders, no skin in the game, then you have the ability to go to war without any real restraint on you. And this is in addition to other problems we have, the military-industrial complex, other forces that are constantly agitating agitating for conflict, for war. And it makes it just too simple for the President of the United States to go to war.

PERIES: Larry, if you replace the current volunteer system to address the class nature of our military with a draft system, how would it change the nature of the force?

WILKERSON: We put it this way. You don't find the Ivy Leagues in the Army. You don't find the Ivy Leagues in the Marine Corps. If you do it's the exception that proves the rule, like Seth Moulton from Harvard, for example, now a congressman. But there are not many Ivy Leaguers in the Army or the Marine Corps.

And what's happening in order to recruit those people who are in the services, especially in the infantry, the Marine Corps and the Army, is really unconscionable. Let me just point out a few factors here. First of all, of the 2-2.5 million 18-year-olds that come into the Selective Service system every year, roughly one-third of them are not recruitable because they're too fat. They're too obese. Another third can't pass the ASVAB, which is the basic entrance exam for the armed forces. So that cuts the pool to a third of that 2-2.5 million every year.

u.s. hasn't had a strategic grain reserve since 2008...,

LATimes |  Grain silos sport quaint silhouettes on country roads, but these stores of corn, soybeans and wheat have played an essential role in the history of drought, flood and frost, and they suggest a solution to the specter of inflation. No one questions why the United States maintains a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The very threat of bringing reserves to the market can moderate the spiking price of crude oil. But when it comes to food prices, our country cannot even threaten to bolster the national supply because the United States does not possess a national grain reserve.

Such was not always the case.

The modern concept of a strategic grain reserve was first proposed in the 1930s by Wall Street legend Benjamin Graham. Graham's idea hinged on the clever management of buffer stocks of grain to tame our daily bread's tendencies toward boom and bust. When grain prices rose above a threshold, supplies could be increased by bringing reserves to the market — which, in turn, would dampen prices. And when the price of grain went into free-fall and farmers edged toward bankruptcy, the need to fill the depleted reserve would increase the demand for corn and wheat, which would prop up the price of grain.

Following Graham's theory, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a grain reserve that helped rally the price of wheat and saved American farms during the Depression. In the inflationary 1970s, the USDA revamped FDR's program into the Farmer-Owned Grain Reserve, which encouraged farmers to store grain in government facilities by offering low-cost and even no-interest loans and reimbursement to cover the storage costs. But over the next quarter of a century the dogma of deregulated global markets came to dominate American politics, and the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act abolished our national system of holding grain in reserve.

As for all that wheat held in storage, it became part of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, a food bank and global charity under the authority of the secretary of Agriculture. The stores were gradually depleted until 2008, when the USDA decided to convert all of what was left into its dollar equivalent. And so the grain that once stabilized prices for farmers, bakers and American consumers ended up as a number on a spreadsheet in the Department of Agriculture.

Now, as the United States must confront climate change, commodity markets riddled by speculation, increased import costs, hosts of regional conflicts and the return of international grain tariffs and export bans, we have put our faith entirely in transnational agribusiness and the global grain market.

the global land-ownership network

kimnicholas |  Nearly two out of three countries in the world today participate in a new kind of “virtual land trade,” where not only the goods produced but land ownership itself is traded internationally. This was the finding of our new study, published 7 November 2014.

This phenomenon of large-scale global land acquisitions, sometimes called “land grabbing,” is receiving increasing international attention because of its potential to contribute to development and raise yields in developing countries, but amidst concerns about local land rights and livelihoods. 

We found that the land trading network is dominated by a few key players with many trading partners- led by China, which imports land ownership from 33 countries, closely followed by the UK and the US (Figure 1).

One-third of countries both import and export land ownership. Of the 80 countries that export land ownership, most export to only a handful of trading partners, with a third having just one import partner. On the other hand, Ethiopia exports land to 21 different countries, and the Philippines and Madagascar both export land to 18 countries. 

Geographically, countries in the global North primarily act as land importers, while the global South acts primarily as land exporters (Figure 2). There are four main areas that import land: North America, Western Europe, the Middle East, and developing economies in Asia. Southeast Asia is also an exporter of land, along with South America, Eastern Europe, and especially Africa. Many of the areas exporting land currently have low agricultural productivity, so have potential to boost yields with technological improvements.  Fist tap Arnach.

the term - "white collar"

delanceyplace |  By the mid-1800s, that strange creature, the office worker, was starting to be more and more prevalent in American cities. The 1855 census recorded clerks as the New York City's third largest occupation, behind servants and laborers. The office worker didn't seem to do or make anything, in fact, he seemed to do little but copy things. But the emerging class of office workers wanted to differentiate themselves from mere laborers, and the best way to do that was through their attire:

"[In America in the 1800s, there was] the sense that office work was unnatural. In a world in which shipping and farming, building and assembling, were the order of work, the early clerical worker didn't seem to fit. The office clerk in America at the high noon of the nineteenth century was a curious creature, an unfamiliar figure, an inexplicable phenomenon. Even by 1880, less than 5 percent of the total workforce, or 186,000 people, was in the clerical profession, but in cities, where the nation's commentariat was concentrated (who themselves tended to work in office-like places), clerks had become the fastest-growing population. In some heavily mercantile cities, such as New York, they had already become ubiquitous: the 1855 census recorded clerks as the city's third largest occupational group, just behind servants and laborers.

"For many, this was a terrible development. Nothing about clerical labor was congenial to the way most Americans thought of work. Clerks didn't work the land, lay railroad tracks, make ammunitions in factories, let alone hide away in a cabin by a small pond to raise beans and live deep. Unlike farming or factory work, office work didn't produce anything. At best, it seemed to reproduce things. Clerks copied endlessly, bookkeepers added up numbers to create more numbers, and insurance men literally made more paper. For the tobacco farmer or miner, it barely constituted work at all. He (and at that point it was invariably a he) was a parasite on the work of others, who literally did the heavy lifting. Thus the bodies of real workers were sinewy, tanned by the relentless sun or blackened by smokestack soot; the bodies of clerks were slim, almost feminine in their untested delicacy.

"The lively (and unscrupulous) American press occasionally took time to level invectives against the clerk. 'We venture the assertion that there is not a more dependent or subservient set of men in this country than are the genteel, dry goods clerks in this and other large cities,' the editors of the American Whig Review held. Meanwhile, the American Phrenological Journal had stronger advice for young men facing the prospect of a clerical career. 'Be men, therefore, and with true courage and manliness dash into the wilderness with your axe and make an opening for the sunlight and for an independent home.' Vanity Fair had the strongest language of all: clerks were 'vain, mean, selfish, greedy, sensual and sly, talkative and cowardly' and spent all their minimal strength attempting to dress better than 'real men who did real work.' ...

"Clerks' attire was a glaring target for the barbs of the press, since the very concept of business attire (not to speak of business casual) came into being with the mass appearance of clerks in American cities. 'In the counting-room and the office,' wrote Samuel Wells, the author of a 'manual of republican etiquette' from 1856, 'gentlemen wear frock coats or sack coats. They need not be of very fine material, and should not be of any garish pattern.' Other fashion advisers pointed to a whole host of 'business coats,' 'business surtouts,' and 'business paletots,' which you could find at new stores like Brooks Brothers. Working-class Americans would be seen in straw hats or green blouses; what distinguished the clerk was his collar: usually bleached an immaculate white and starched into an imposing stiffness. But collared business shirts were expensive, so stores catering to the business customer began to sell collars by themselves, half a dozen collars running to under half of what a cheap shirt would cost. The white collar, detachable and yet an essential status marker, was the perfect symbol of the pseudo-genteel, dual nature of office work."

author:	Nikil Saval
title:	Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace
publisher:	Doubleday a division of Random House
date:	Copyright 2014 by Nikil Saval
pages:	12-15

human pheromones and food odors: epigenetic influences on the socioaffective nature of evolved behaviors

The microbiota–gut–brain axis: neurobehavioral correlates, health and sociality

socioaffectiveneuroscienceandpsychology |  Background: Olfactory cues directly link the environment to gene expression. Two types of olfactory cues, food odors and social odors, alter genetically predisposed hormone-mediated activity in the mammalian brain.

Methods: The honeybee is a model organism for understanding the epigenetic link from food odors and social odors to neural networks of the mammalian brain, which ultimately determine human behavior.

Results: Pertinent aspects that extend the honeybee model to human behavior include bottom-up followed by top-down gene, cell, tissue, organ, organ-system, and organism reciprocity; neurophysiological effects of food odors and of sexually dimorphic, species-specific social odors; a model of motor function required for social selection that precedes sexual selection; and hormonal effects that link current neuroscience to social science affects on the development of animal behavior.

Conclusion: As the psychological influence of food odors and social orders is examined in detail, the socioaffective nature of olfactory cues on the biologically based development of sexual preferences across all species that sexually reproduce becomes clearer.

biota, diet, brains, power...,

bbc |  I have some startling news: you are not human. At least, by some counts. While you are indeed made up of billions of human cells working in remarkable concert, these are easily outnumbered by the bacterial cells that live on and in you – your microbiome. There are ten of them for every one of your own cells, and they add an extra two kilograms (4.4lbs) to your body. 

Far from being freeloading passengers, many of these microbes actively help digest food and prevent infection. And now evidence is emerging that these tiny organisms may also have a profound impact on the brain too. They are a living augmentation of your body – and like any enhancement, this means they could, in principle, be upgraded. So, could you hack your microbiome to make yourself healthier, happier, and smarter too?

According to John Cryan, this isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. As a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at University College Cork, he specialises in the relationship between the brain and the gut. One of his early experiments showed the diversity of bacteria living in the gut was greatly diminished in mice suffering from early life stress. This finding inspired him to investigate the connection between the microbiome and the brain.

The bacterial microbiota in the gut helps normal brain development, says Cryan. “If you don’t have microbiota you have major changes in brain structure and function, and then also in behaviour.” In a pioneering study, a Japanese research team showed that mice raised without any gut bacteria had an exaggerated physical response to stress, releasing more hormone than mice that had a full complement of bacteria. However, this effect could be reduced in bacteria-free mice by repopulating their gut with Bifidobacterium infantis, one of the major symbiotic bacteria found in the gut. Cryan’s team built on this finding, showing that this effect could be reproduced even in healthy mice. “We took healthy mice and fed them Lactobacillus [another common gut bacteria), and we showed that these animals had a reduced stress response and reduced anxiety-related behaviours.” Fist tap Dale.

iron, dopamine, activity, creativity...?

frontiersin |  The present significant associations between iron levels and behavioral and psychological variables extended previous relevant findings reported in infants to adults using a large sample. As described in the Introduction, previous studies of infants with anemia, correlation studies of body iron levels, and intervention studies of iron supplementation have shown that lower body iron or hemoglobin levels are associated with higher levels of negative effects, lower levels of attention to people and objects, and activity levels (Lozoff et al., 1996, 1998, 2003; Wachs et al., 2005). The present findings of the positive associations between novelty seeking, extraversion, and physical activity levels were congruent with these previous results, considering the similarity of extraversion and novelty seeking with the measures reported in the previous study. Thus, it can be said that the present findings extended the previous findings to young adult samples using a larger sample size and suggested that these associations of temperament, personality, body activity levels, and body iron levels are not limited to infants without life experiences.

There are a few limitations to this study. One is that similar to majority of studies using hair mineral analysis, the present study was a cross-sectional study. Thus, despite the strength of the hair mineral analysis and the large study sample, any implications regarding causal effects cannot be viewed as definitive. To solve this problem, intervention studies of iron supplementation are warranted for determining whether iron supplementation can increase dopamine-related traits and physical activity levels. Through these studies, it can be determined whether iron intake can facilitate dopamine-related traits and body activity levels, both of which are essential parts of our social and physical everyday life. In addition, despite the importance of iron in the dopaminergic system, evidence is available that suggests iron accumulation in the brain helps the progression of neurological diseases (Zecca et al., 2004), and whether any detrimental effects of higher iron levels in the body of older subjects are observed, may have to be investigated in future studies. Finally, in this study, the study population was unbalanced toward males due to the low availability of hair that fulfilled these conditions of the study in females, and we did not and could not investigate gender-specific relationships between hair iron levels and psychological variables. The measures used in this study, such as creativity, were measured by DT tests that show gender differences. It is therefore possible that the relationship between iron levels and psychological variables may differ between females and males. Future studies are needed to investigate this issue.

Creative cognition and dopamine-related traits, states, and physical activity levels, which are related to creativity, are important aspects of our cultural and everyday life. Our findings showed that hair iron levels did not significantly and directly correlate with creativity but instead positively correlated with novelty seeking, extraversion, and physical activity levels. Our findings may imply the importance of iron intake, even in normal samples, for the facilitation of these traits and activity. Future longitudinal studies are warranted to confirm these notions.

vitamin d, serotonin, autism, sociality...,

sciencedaily |  A new study by Rhonda Patrick, PhD and Bruce Ames, PhD of Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) demonstrates the impact that Vitamin D may have on social behavior associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Dr. Patrick and Dr. Ames show that serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin, three brain hormones that affect social behavior, are all activated by vitamin D hormone. Autism, which is characterized by abnormal social behavior, has previously been linked to low levels of serotonin in the brain and to low vitamin D levels, but no mechanism has linked the two until now.

In this study, Dr. Patrick and Dr. Ames show that vitamin D hormone activates the gene that makes the enzyme tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (TPH2), that converts the essential amino acid tryptophan, to serotonin in the brain. This suggests that adequate levels of vitamin D may be required to produce serotonin in the brain where it shapes the structure and wiring of the brain, acts as a neurotransmitter, and affects social behavior. They also found evidence that the gene that makes the enzyme tryptophan hydroxylase 1 (TPH1) is inhibited by vitamin D hormone, which subsequently halts the production of serotonin in the gut and other tissues, where when found in excess it promotes inflammation.

This mechanism explains many of the known, but previously not understood, facts about autism including: 1) the "serotonin anomaly" low levels of serotonin in the brain and high levels in the blood of autistic children; 2) the preponderance of male over female autistic children: estrogen, a similar steroid hormone, can also boost the brain levels of serotonin in girls; 3) the presence of autoimmune antibodies to the fetal brain in the mothers of autistic children: vitamin D regulates the production of regulatory T-cells via repression of TPH1. The Patrick/Ames mechanism is relevant to the prevention of autism, and likely its treatment.

The current guidelines for adequate vitamin D levels are concentrations above 30 ng/ml. Most Americans' vitamin D is made in the skin from exposure to UVB radiation; however, melanin pigment and sunscreen inhibit this action. This is an important cause of the well-known widespread vitamin D deficiency among dark-pigmented Americans, particularly those living in Northern latitudes. The most recent National Health and Examination survey reports that greater than 70% of U.S. population does not meet this requirement and that adequate vitamin D levels have plummeted over the last couple of decades. This precipitous drop in adequate levels of vitamin D in the US is concurrent with the rise in autism rates.

The study suggests dietary intervention with vitamin D, tryptophan and omega 3 fatty acids would boost brain serotonin concentrations and help prevent and possibly ameliorate some of the symptoms associated with ASD without side effects. There is little vitamin D present in food and fortification is still inadequate as is the amount in most multivitamin and prenatal supplements. Vitamin D supplements are inexpensive and offer a simple solution to raise vitamin D levels to an adequate status. In addition, vitamin D levels should be routinely measured in everyone and should become a standard procedure in prenatal care.  Fist tap Dale.