Speculators and Our Food: E-I-E-I-O!
Oh, this is just dandy! Hedge-fund schemers and Wall Street manipulators – the very characters who brought us the Great American Housing Collapse – have a new target for their fast-buck profiteering: farming. E-I-E-I-O!
Speculators have long messed with farmers by artificially manipulating prices on everything from corn to soybeans. But now they’re pooling up billions of dollars from global investors to go after the farms themselves, as well as fertilizer plants, grain elevators, ships and barges, and other basic tools for producing, transporting, and storing our food supply. As one hedge-fund operator says: “It’s going on big time. There is considerable interest in what we call ‘owning structure.'”
By “owning structure,” they mean centralizing control of food in the hands of financial manipulators who have only one crop in mind: fat profits. These multibillion-dollar funds are buying thousands of farms in the U.S., Brazil, Africa, Britain, and elsewhere, turning farmers into corporate laborers and viewing farmland and water as disposable inputs for the huge short-term profits investors demand. Rural communities? Move to the city. Quality of food? Advertising will cover that.
Price? Aha! That’s what consolidation of farms and storage facilities is all about. If you can lock down production and stockpile the supply, you can control price. If corn prices are lower than what investors want them to be, simply store the corn and force prices up. Or if corn prices are down in the U.S., ship it to Japan or wherever else might be more profitable. And if these distortments cause a food crash? Hey, the speculators will already have sucked out billions in profits, and they will just move to the next hot investment.
Hedge funds bring nothing but greed and grief to the farm economy and our food supply, and they should be banned from “owning structure.”
Airlines Outsourcing Our Safety and Jobs
Airlines have been cutting everything from pillows to staff – but what about cutting corners on the structural safety of their planes?
Well, fasten your seat belt. Beneath the radar of the flying public, airline execs have engaged in a widespread and worrisome cost-cutting move: outsourcing maintenance of their planes to low-wage countries. Some airlines send landing gear, engines, and other parts out of country for repair, while others send entire planes. This trend sets off safety alarms for us passengers. Not that other countries don’t have competent workers, but – get this – the airlines increasingly are using “noncertificated” maintenance shops around the world. Maybe such places are A-1 repair sites, but we don’t know, because our industry-cozy Federal Aviation Administration has not even inspected and certified them.
Bad enough that our government is letting such a basic safety function slip away, but maintenance is also a key industry for middle-class jobs. As a Machinist Union leader points out, “This is a technological base, an important industry base, for our country, and we’re just giving it up.” We know that CEOs are dramatically raising ticket prices, but they’re then quietly using our consumer dollars to undermine America’s middle-class future, sending our skilled jobs, technology, and maybe our safety to such eager countries as Mexico.
We can’t blame Mexicans for that, because their officials are simply on the ball, trying to lift the economic fortunes of their people. Mexico’s government, for example, will soon break ground for the National Aerospace University, which will train a sophisticated work force for building and maintaining aircraft.
Where are our leaders? Why aren’t they doing that? Why aren’t our corporate and governmental officials investing in the American people, rather than aggressively downsizing America’s future?
This article appears in January 9 • 2009.