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Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economics. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
(Almost) Everything You Should Know About Karl Marx... and Capitalism
(Click the images for the articles mentioned)
Ps.
Tags:
Capitalism,
Economics,
Economics 101,
Karl Marx,
Marxism,
Socialism,
Teen Vogue
Friday, February 26, 2010
BOY Are They Going To Be Mad When They Find Out They Can't Have All The "Stuff"! Narrowing The Gap Between The Rich and Poor In China
WORLD NEWS: "China's Efforts Narrow Gap Between the Rich and Poor," by Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 3 February 2010.Good chart on income inequality in select countries (Gini index):
(In his commentary about it, Barnett is just plain wrong assuming this is good for the other nations and especially the planet due to rising affluence.)
Just wait till the same per-capita percentage of the Chinese population can afford to buy cars and drive them like Americans do.
According to numbers published in Harpers Magazine a number of years back, if the per-capita hypotheses held true, at that time, the global supply of oil would have lasted FIVE DAYS. It's probably a shorter period of time now that the major oil companies have all dramatically re-calculated their reserves downward and they still can't replace current usage with oil-being-pumped-at-the-wellhead.
Further, according to a BBC interview with the Chinese transportation minister a few years ago, that percentage should be reached by 2040 (using simple math).
Just wait till those billions of Chinese citizens find out they've been sold a 'bill of goods' (all the Western trappings of so-called 'civilization') they will never be able to attain.
BOY! Are They going to be mad!.
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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Breaking: U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt... Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion
"I've spent 25 years in this room yelling 'Buy, buy! Sell, sell!' and for what?" longtime trader Michael Palermo said. "All I've done is move arbitrary designations of wealth from one column to another, wasting my life chasing this unattainable hallucination of wealth."
"What a cruel cosmic joke," he added. "I'm going home to hug my daughter."
Business
U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion
February 16, 2010
WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.
What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world's largest economy.
"Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we…if we…" said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. "You know what? It doesn't matter. None of this—this so-called 'money'—really matters at all."
"It's just an illusion," a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. "Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless."
According to witnesses, Finance Committee members sat in thunderstruck silence for several moments until Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) finally shouted out, "Oh my God, he's right. It's all a mirage. All of it—the money, our whole economy—it's all a lie!"
Screams then filled the Senate Chamber as lawmakers and members of the press ran for the exits, leaving in their wake aisles littered with the remains of torn currency.
U.S. markets closed as traders left their jobs and resolved for once to do or make something, anything of real value.
As news of the nation's collectively held delusion spread, the economy ground a halt, with dumbfounded citizens everywhere walking out on their jobs as they contemplated the little green drawings of buildings and dead white men they once used to measure their adequacy and importance as human beings.
At the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday morning's opening bell echoed across a silent floor as the few traders who arrived for work out of habit looked up blankly at the meaningless scrolling numbers on the flashing screens above... [Yes... there's more!]
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Products and Services for the Permanently Unemployed Consumer - ClubOrlov
Does permanent job loss mean that someone is no longer a consumer? In some cases the answer is yes: (But) some people continue to spend as if they still had a job, and the inevitable result is eventual destitution. Once they run out of unemployment benefits, savings and credit, their purchasing ability decreases to the barest minimum provided by food stamps. I don't mean to sound harsh, but this makes them rather uninteresting from a new product marketing perspective.
Friday, February 12, 2010Also see: Closing The Collapse Gap by Dimitry Orlov (@ Energybulletin.net), a point by point comparison of the collapse of the Russian economy compared to what might happen under similar circumstances in the U.S.
Products and Services for the Permanently Unemployed ConsumerDeveloping and marketing products for a shrinking market poses an interesting set of challenges. Even if a company does an outstanding job and is able to steadily grow its market share, these gains are negated if the market itself continually shrinks by an ever larger amount. For instance, a company might have an outstanding electric vehicle design, but it is destined to fall by the wayside during a time when the number of consumers that qualify for a car loan is trending downward, the used car market is glutted by repossessions, and federal, state and municipal governments are unable to upgrade their car fleets because their budgets are far in the red.
Consumer product development caters to individuals who live in houses or condos, have jobs to which they commute by car, and generate a steady stream of disposable income. This is the group to which the business press often refers collectively as 'the consumer': one often reads that the consumer is retrenching, that the consumer's credit is tapped out, that the consumer's disposable income is shrinking and so on. The consumer is not growing.
What is there left to do except design and manufacture fewer and fewer products?
The answer is as simple as it is surprising...
In Full @ ClubOrlov
In full @ Energybulletin.net
Friday, December 25, 2009
Predictions For The United States of America During The Second Decade Of The XXI Century
.H/t to Dimitry Orlov @ ClubOrlov:
Da Buffalo wants to note: These ARE NOT 'apocalyptic' predictions... Just predictions of change in a rather uncomfortable and unwanted direction for the citizens of America, and also, perhaps at some point in the not-too-distant future, for the rest of the industrialized world.
As Sweatshop Union exclaims in this video, it's 'ALL ON US'...
Sweatshop Union @ MySpace. The lyrics. Their Wikipedia entry.
An evolutionary HipHop soundtrack is available @ archive.org
...for blithely going about living in a materialist fantasy land since... the beginning of the industrial revolution? But CERTAINLY commencing in it's greatest haste (for the benefit of "the greatest generation", who disregarded their narcissistic and short-sighted
Wikipedia has the basics on "Market Capitalism" and Consumer-based economies, but I recommend this article at the Boston Globe: "Why capitalism fails (The man who saw the meltdown coming [Hyman Minsky] had another troubling insight: it will happen again)".
Quote: "This wasn’t a Minsky moment. It was a Minsky half-century.”
...and this was the snake oil image we were being 'sold':
That said... Dimitry Orlov:
Around this time of year, some brave souls venture to put their reputations at risk by attempting to predict what the next year will bring. Some do so with uncanny accuracy, others — not so much. Being a serious author who hardly ever makes jokes, I generally sit out this annual bout of frivolity, but, noting that a new decade is about to burst upon us, I thought it reasonably safe to paint a picture of how I see the next decade. (In the unlikely case that my predictions turn out to be completely wrong, I would think that they will have been very thoroughly forgotten by the time 2020 rolls around.) And so, without further ado, here are my predictions for what it will be like in The United States of America during the second decade of the XXI century.The decade will be marked by many instances of autophagy, in business, government, and in the higher echelons of society, as players at all levels find that they are unable to control their appetites or alter their behavior in any meaningful way, even in the face of radically altered circumstances, and are thus compelled to consume themselves into oblivion, as so many disemboweled yet still ravenous sharks endlessly gorging themselves on their own billowing entrails.
Governments will find that they are unable to restrain themselves from printing ever more money in an endless wave of uncontrolled emission. At the same time, rising taxes, commodity prices, and costs of all kinds, coupled with a rising overall level of uncertainty and disruption, will curtail economic activity to a point where little of that money will still circulate. Inflationists and deflationists will endlessly debate whether this should be called inflation or deflation, unconsciously emulating the big-endians and little-endians of Jonathan Swifts Gulliver's Travels, who endlessly debated the proper end from which to eat a soft-boiled egg...
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Sunday, December 20, 2009
Two Words... "Vested Interests" - Economic Theory And The Disdain For Empirical Verification
."The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. A theory as an internally consistent system is valid if the conclusions follow logically from its premises, and the fact that neither the premises nor the conclusions correspond to reality may show that the theory is not very useful, but does not invalidate it. In any pure theory, all propositions are essentially tautological, in the sense that the results are implicit in the assumptions made. {6}
Such disdain for empirical verification is not found in the physical sciences. Its popularity in the social sciences is sponsored by vested interests. There is always self-interest behind methodological madness. That is because success requires heavy subsidies from special interests who benefit from an erroneous, misleading or deceptive economic logic. Why promote unrealistic abstractions, after all, if not to distract attention from reforms aimed at creating rules that oblige people actually to earn their income rather than simply extracting it from the rest of the economy?" --Excerpted from Michael Hudson, "Krugman's attack on my review of Samuelson, Personal correspondence (December 20 2009)". In re: "Elegant Theories That Didn't Work: The Problem with Paul Samuelson" by Michael Hudson, Counterpunch (December 14 2009)
For more on the topic, see: "A Note Of Appreciation From The Rich"
Let's be honest: you'll never win the lottery.
On the other hand, the chances are pretty good that you'll slave away at some miserable job the rest of your life. That's because you were in all likelihood born into the wrong social class. Let's face it -- you're a member of the working caste. Sorry!
As a result, you don't have the education, upbringing, connections, manners, appearance, and good taste to ever become one of us. In fact, you'd probably need a book the size of the yellow pages to list all the unfair advantages we have over you. That's why we're so relieved to know that you still continue to believe all those silly fairy tales about "justice" and "equal opportunity" in America.
Of course, in a hierarchical social system like ours, there's never been much room at the top to begin with. Besides, it's already occupied by us -- and we like it up here so much that we intend to keep it that way.
But at least there's usually someone lower in the social hierarchy you can feel superior to and kick in the teeth once in a while. Even a lowly dishwasher can easily find some poor slob further down in the pecking order to sneer and spit at.
So be thankful for migrant workers, prostitutes, and homeless street people...
.
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Saturday, December 19, 2009
You Are Being Lied To - That Describes Everything You Need To Know About The State Of The "Federal Reserve Bank"
It SHOULD make your hair stand on end...
There ARE NO RESERVES.
NOW... go to the fed's link with the updated chart (Gleaned December 2009):
You will immediately note it has been updated, and 'weighted' to 'flatten' it by a simple illusion... The scale has been dramatically increased. But STILL, despite their best efforts, the fact that they are requiring that scaling AT ALL... publishing it in such a manner instead of the chart-typical "_ ~" "broken scale" charting method illustrates a frantic scramble (or appearance thereof) to restore those looted reserves.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Tis' The Season To Ask Ourselves... "What Would Jesus Buy?"
"Join the joyous gritty anti-consumerists Reverend Billy, Savitri D and the 40-voice Life After Shopping Gospel Choir, as they tour the country trying to stop the shopping frenzy.
From Buy Nothing Day in Times Square... to Christmas Day in Disneyland in 30 days.
Produced Morgan Spurlock (Where In The World Is Osama bin-Laden) and directed by Rob Van Alkamade. Created in 2005, before the Great Recession, the film conjures much of the tragedy that has happened since. Amen!"
Friday, September 25, 2009
Market Capitalism 101: Constantly Expanding Markets Are A Must, Despite The Cost To Your Society
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Economic crises are not natural disasters. They are brought about by the actions of bankers, officials, and developers, not to mention ordinary folks struggling to get by in a world we didn’t choose. They appear beyond our control, but they are not inescapable facts of life.
For all the talk of collapse, capitalism itself is as healthy as ever. The fundamental relationships remain unchanged: employers and employees, politicians and voters, police and policed. Our masters may loan us cars or houses to pacify us, but we still lack control over our own lives.
Crises like this are part of the protection racket that keeps them in business.
They profit on the industries that heat up the earth’s atmosphere, and when hurricanes destroy our neighborhoods they replace them with condominiums and sell us energy-saving light bulbs.
They profit on the invasions that secure more resources for the economy, and also on the occupations in which our friends and relatives die.
They profited from the subprime mortgages that contributed to the latest disaster, and now they’re profiting from the bailout.
Imagine another kind of crisis, one that could really pose a threat to their precious market: neighbors defending each other from eviction, workers seizing the goods they need, people building communities based on cooperation and self-determination.
Imagine a world in which we’d never be vulnerable to the whims of the market again.
As far as we’re concerned, it can’t come soon enough.
Get the poster (PDF)
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
The Word On The Street: "Defy Your Empire" - The G-20 Comes To America (and all we got was this lousy depression)
Protests will begin several days before the summit. Many of the activities are being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. There will be a march Sept. 25 for anyone who, as Jessica Benner of the center’s Antiwar Committee stated, “has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food. … ”
There will be at least three tent cities, in addition to a Music Camp beginning Sept. 18 that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street. Unemployed workers will set up one tent city at the Monumental Baptist Church on Sept. 20 and five days later will march on the Convention Center. The encampment and the march are being organized by the Bail Out the People Movement.
The Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation magazine, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Pittsburgh United and other organizations will host events including a panel on corporate globalization featuring former World Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, along with a “People’s Tribunal.”
There will be a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert organized by Students for a Democratic Society [PDF, The Port Huron Statement, SDS founding document].
Go to Pittsburgh, Young Man, and Defy Your Empire
Posted on Aug 31, 2009
Shock troops and “free speech zones” have become the norm at mass gatherings in modern America.
By Chris Hedges
Globalization and unfettered capitalism have been swept into the history books along with the open-market theory of the 1920s, the experiments of fascism, communism and the New Deal. It is time for a new economic and political paradigm. It is time for a new language to address our reality. The voices of change, those who speak in powerful and yet unfamiliar words, will cry out Sept. 25 and 26 in Pittsburgh when protesters from around the country gather to defy the heads of state, bankers and finance ministers from the world’s 22 largest economies who are convening for a meeting of the G-20.
If we heed these dissident voices we have a future.
If we do not we will commit collective suicide.
[In Full @ TruthDig]
For more on how these organizations of the Power Elite destroy economies around the world, see:"Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The WTO, World Bank, and IMF - Destroying African (or insert your third world country's name here) Agriculture - Walden Bello, FPIF"
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Thought for the day: "Who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending?"
{Click the thumbnails for full size images):
The American victory over manifest evil in World War Two was so total that there was no one else left on earth to compete with in making and selling useful articles...
...at least for a while. And it produced a middle class so well-paid that it could express itself in a vast spewage of plastic and leisure across the land.The human race will look back on this society with wonder and nausea for whatever remains of its time on Earth. For at least twenty years, though, this way of life has been running on fumes, inertia, and promissory notes.
The amazing thing is that these life-extension strategies worked, especially the past ten years when there was really nothing left besides a Ponzi structure of interlocked swindles and rackets.
When the time comes when we do look back to understand what went wrong, I think we'll see that the Woodstock generation went off the rails in 1980, with the election of the actor, Ronald Reagan, who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending...
[In Full at Clusterfuck Nation]
Friday, June 12, 2009
Local News For 95060 - Santa Cruz County California (Specifically Watsonville) Is #1 For Highest Unemployment In Northern California
Santa Cruz county is numero uno now all you Fresno losers...
Don't forget it!
Watsonville WAS the home to Seagate Technology(and Connor Disc Drives) in the 90s, who eventually moved their operations overseas, leaving a few janitors and security guards working their empty Scotts Valley world HQ, and Watsonville's machine shops which were re-instituted as Watsonville's new (earthquake resistant) hospital, but what really finished it was NAFTA, which allowed all the packing and canning companies like Green Giant a chance to increase their corporate profits by moving South to Mexico:
(Note from the USDA: This chart is for processed foods. U.S. authorities do not report similar statistics for production agriculture, mainly to protect the confidentiality of individual companies, but the stock of U.S. direct investment in Mexican crop and livestock production may run in the hundreds of millions of dollars).
The Photo Slideshow with the complete list of Top 20 highest unemployment areas in Northern California at the Sacramento Bee
Thursday, June 11, 2009
A Not-So-Nostalgic Farewell To The Days Of Happy Motoring
Showing it's age... 1960's Esso sign, behind a former Esso station in Victoria Rd, Thornbury. (A suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Au.)
James H. Kunstler:
"Americans will never again buy as many new cars as they were able to do before 2008 on the terms that were normal until then: installment loans. Our credit system is completely broken. It choked to death on securitized debt engineered by computer magic and business school hubris. That complex of frauds and swindles coincided with the background force of peak oil, which meant, among other things, that economic growth based on ever-increasing energy resources was over, and along with it ever-increasing credit. What it boils down to now is that we can't service our debt at any level, personal, corporate, or government - and that translates into comprehensive societal bankruptcy.
The efforts of our federal government to work around this now, to cover up the "non-performing" debt and to generate the new lending necessary to keep the old system going, is a tragic exercise in futility.I'm not saying this to be a "pessimistic" grandstanding doomer pain-in-the-ass, but because I would like to see my country make more intelligent choices that would permit us to continue being civilized, to move into the next phase of our history without a horrible self-destructive convulsion.
Another consequence of the debt problem is that we won't be able to maintain the network of gold-plated highways and lesser roads that was as necessary as the cars themselves to make the motoring system work.The trouble is you have to keep gold-plating it, year after year. Traffic engineers refer to this as "level-of-service". They've learned that if the level-of-service is less than immaculate, the highways quickly enter a spiral of disintegration. In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers reported several years ago that the condition of many highway bridges and tunnels was at the "D-minus" level, so we had already fallen far behind on a highway system that had simply grown too large to fix even when we thought we were wealthy enough to keep up. Right now, we're pretending that the "stimulus" program will carry us over long enough to resume the old method of state-and-federal spending based largely on bonding (that is, debt).
The political dimension of the collapse of motoring is the least discussed part of problem: as fewer and fewer citizens find themselves able to buy and run cars, they will feel increasingly aggrieved at the system set up to make motoring virtually mandatory for all the chores of everyday life, and their resentments will rise against the elite that can still manage to enjoy it.
Because our car-dependency is so extreme, the reaction of the dis-entitled classes is liable to be extreme and probably delusional to an extreme, too."
In Full, Lagging Recognition, James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation, (June 08 2009)
Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005)
Thursday, April 16, 2009
NOT 'Somali Pirates'... It's The "Somali Coast Guard" And They're 'Taking Out' The 'Trash' (along with Illegal Offshore Nuclear Waste Dumpers)
"Piracy", as applied to Somali fishermen put out of work by foreign flagged factory-ship ocean rape and the pollution caused by the dumping of toxic waste (up to and including low-level nuclear waste washing ashore in barrels from Mafia controlled waste management companies in Europe) is a misnomer, and undoubtedly an intentional one on the part of the major shipper of the world and their cronies on the international committees that oversee maritime law.
But in essence these so-called "pirates" ARE the Somali Coast Guard.
Addenda...
Razer just wants to point out that he's blogged information about the OTHER players in this nation-breaking equation... A writeup on the eerie mayhem-induced quiet that's settled over the capital Mogadishu, and a family photo the CIA's Somali warlord mercenary army leadership with a link to information about their "extraction" by US SEALS on a US Navy submarine the first time they were run out of the country. That posting is HERE
African Nuclear Destruction Update: Saturday August 22 2009...
The rationalization and implicit denial, Malawi Edition, from Inter Press Service:
KAYELEKERA, Malawi, Aug 22 (IPS) - "We are serious about the integrity of the environment," says Neville Huxham, the country director for Paladin Energy Africa.
"We're taking the uranium out of the ground, we're exporting it to be used for productive purposes, so we should be getting a medal for cleaning up the environment." [In Full]
Now, to the issue at hand... and my sentiment as seen in the topquote has been validated by the #3 most under-reported news story in this year's Project Censored Top Censored Stories of 2009/2010 linked below, and more from other sources and viewpoints farther down this post
...and you MIGHT want to perus the #4 under-reported (putting it kindly) news story too... It's in YOUR back yard:
See all 25 of the Top Censored Stories here4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
...The threat exists, however, without the speculation of terrorist attack. Should the cooling system malfunction, the resulting fire would be virtually unquenchable and could trigger a nuclear meltdown, putting more than two hundred million residents of this rapidly growing section of North Carolina in extreme peril. A recent study by Brookhaven Labs estimates that a pool fire could cause 140,000 cancers, contaminate thousands of square miles of land, and cause over $500 billion in off-site property damage.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has estimated that there is a 1:100 chance of pool fire happening under the best of scenarios.
Did you know the high seas off Somalia's coast are being used as a TOXIC WASTE & NUCLEAR MATERIALS DUMPING GROUND?
No?
(See: 'Somalia & the Mafia the nuclear waste dump zone' at Seeker401.com)
Also see this research report for more internationally sourced linkage on the Mafia and nuclear dumping at this DailyKos Post: "Pirates of Somalia: Curse of the Mafia Nuclear Waste Dumps and Thanks for All the Fish"
As if THAT'S not enough to say "Tsk Tsk! ...and a pox on your industrialized nations"
Excerpted from We're Being Lied to About Pirates
By Johann Hari, Independent UK (via Alternet)
Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas." William Scott would understand.
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won't act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world's oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.
In full @ Alternet
Also See: Putting Today's 'Pirate' Attack in Context
A US ship, owned by a Pentagon contractor with "Top Security" clearance, was seized off the Somali coast. Reports say the US crew has retaken the ship. But the question remains: Why are the pirates attacking?
By Jeremy Scahill
.
.
.
The Somali pirates who took control of the 17,000-ton Maersk Alabama's cargo-ship in the early hours of Wednesday morning probably were unaware that the ship they were boarding belonged to a US Department of Defense contractor with "top security" clearance, which does a half-billion dollars in annual business with the Pentagon, primarily the Navy.
The ship was being operated by an "all-American crew", there were 20 US nationals onboard. "Every indication is that this is the first time a U.S.-flagged ship has been successfully seized by pirates, said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesperson for for the U.S. Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet. The last documented pirate attack of a US vessel by African pirates was reported in 1804, off Libya, according to The Los Angeles Times.
The company, A.P. Moller-Maersk, is a Denmark-based company with a large US subsidiary, Maersk Line, Ltd, that serves US government agencies and contractors. The company, which is based in Norfolk, Virginia, runs the world's largest fleet of US-flag vessels. The Alabama was about 300 miles off the coast of the Puntland region of northern Somalia when it was taken. The US military says the Alabama was not operating on a DoD contract at the time and was said to be delivering food aid.
In Full @ rebelreports.com
Tags:
Economics,
Environment,
Europe,
Globalization,
Mafia,
Maritime Law,
Nuclear Waste,
Pentagon,
Piracy,
Pirates,
Somalia,
Toxic Waste
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
It's Not JUST Oil Companies Making A "Killing" - Multinationals making billions in profit from food crisis
Multinationals making billions in profit from food crisis
World Development Movement director calls earnings ‘immoral’
Giant agri-businesses are enjoying soaring profits as a result of the world food crisis that is driving millions of people towards starvation, British newspaper The Independent reported on Sunday.The report quotes World Bank figures that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger this year, saying that some of the world’s richest food companies are making record profits.
Monsanto reported last month that its net income for the three months up to the end of February 2008 had more than doubled from the same period in 2007 — from $543 million to $1.12 billion.
Cargill’s net earnings soared by 86 percent from $553 million to $1.030 billion over the same three months, and Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 percent in the first three months of this year, from $363 million to $517 million.
Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world’s largest fertiliser companies, saw its income for the three months ending February 29 rise from $42.2 million to $520.8 million, on the back of a shortage of fertiliser. The prices of some kinds of fertiliser have more than tripled over the past year as demand has outstripped supply. The Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that 37 developing countries are in urgent need of food. Food riots have broken out in several nations.
Immoral: The report quotes World Development Movement Director Benedict Southworth as calling the escalating earnings and profits as ‘immoral’. daily times monitor
Source: Daily Times - Pakistan
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