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Dr. Herb Ruhs & grandson
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Manufacturing scarcity and famine
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by Herb Ruhs, MD, Unknown News June 20, 2008
The endgame of unrestrained capital gain is always starvation in the
midst of plenty, since food is the ultimate speculative commodity. It
will bring any price that manipulation can achieve.
If people spend
half their money on food, they can be forced to spend all their money
on food, by means of market manipulation. Those already spending
nearly all their income on food are condemned to starve as a result
of this manipulation of the all powerful "market." That many should
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horrible deaths from starvation and diseases of malnutrition is seen as necessary to provide the motivation to drive up prices and
profits. This is the face of depravity.
The propagandists on the right not withstanding, there are no current
world shortages of either fuel or food, yet prices are spiraling out
of control worldwide, while stockpiles of essential
commodities grow
in antici-
pation even more fantastic profits. The nitty-gritty of how artificial
scarcity and price gouging become an irresistible ploy of
plutocrats is very nicely laid out in an article by Dante Pastrana
called "Philippines: Spiraling rice prices bring hunger to
millions".
This dynamic is classic. Whenever private power grows to exceed
govern-
ment power, starvation is guaranteed to ensue. The intellectual
whores of the right always press the intuitive idea that famine is an
accident, a result of an actual scarcity of food. While droughts and
weather changes have initiated famines, "food distribution is more to
blame for famines than food scarcity".
What recent world history shows is that famine is virtually
always a matter of deliberate maldistribution brought about by
hoarding by rich merchants and the politically powerful, specu-
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The people of the world have forever
sought to impose the rule of law to establish justice for the many,
and the privileged few have always sought to evade the rule of law in
the pursuit of greater concentrations of wealth.
Now we call it by
fancy names like global capitalism, the Chicago school,
privatization, "rationalizing the world economy" and structural
readjustment, but all this verbiage is just massively financed
propaganda to put a confusing face on the resurgence of criminally
depraved greed.
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lating
on the price of food commodities in an atmosphere of oppressive
rule. The current growing worldwide famine that we are experiencing
follows this pattern.
The diversion of food commodities, corn in particular, to the
production of biofuels is a new, nasty twist to this multimillennial
concerted campaign of the depraved rich to starve the poor to extract
every last drop of wealth and enslave the survivors. Biofuel
diversion is essentially a new twist of the process of deliberately-induced famine that characterizes the history of what we
euphemistically call "civilization."
Of course, at a higher level of analysis, our destructive industrial
agriculture process that are destroying soils and depleting usable
water are also destined to impose Malthusian conditions on an
overpopulated world. Reasonable, informed people are of the opinion
that, were we to come to our senses and stop investing in war and
start investing in localized, non-commodified food production and
sustainable agricultural methods, we could avert the impending
catastrophe by increasing agricultural productivity while
we arrange for an orderly reduction of world population to a level at
or below the carrying capacity of the earth.
Who knows? Maybe
finally enough people will listen to reason and chart an abrupt
course change toward survival. We might as well hope for this,
because without a radical redirection of energy
What recent world history shows is that famine is virtually
always a matter of deliberate maldistribution brought about by
hoarding by rich merchants and the politically powerful, speculating
on the price of food commodities in an atmosphere of oppressive
rule.
The current growing worldwide famine that we are experiencing
follows this pattern.
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wealth accumulation by means of unrestrained markets, the species is
toast.
Scarcity is the mother of profit, and therefore manufacturing scarcity is
the chief means of concentrating wealth and is the chief
preoccupation of capitalism.
The people of the world have forever
sought to impose the rule of law to establish justice for the many,
and the privileged few have always sought to evade the rule of law in the pursuit of greater
concentrations of wealth. Now we call it by
fancy names like global capitalism, the Chicago school,
privatization, "rationalizing the world economy" and structural readjustment,
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but all this verbiage is just massively financed
propaganda to put a confusing face on the resurgence of criminally
depraved greed.
In previous iterations of this process nations were brought to ruin,
one after another, with little wisdom left behind in the carcass of a
destroyed society that found itself left to be picked over by the
carrion beasts of war and genocide. This time it is different for
we are all -- everyone in the world -- in the same boat drifting
toward the same fatal fall. Maybe out of the wreckage of this
catastrophe will arise the universal recognition that unrestrained
greed and speculation is just a close relative of cannibalism and
deserves the same attitude of visceral disgust as we now reserve for
those who seek to dine on the flesh of his neighbor. If we, as a
species, fail to finally learn this lesson, extinction will be too
good for us.
© by the author.
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