hungry yet?

You may be soon. The food crisis worldwide is growing daily, creating desperate conditions for millions of people who rely on commodities of wheat and corn and rice. Almost everything I read mentions ethanol as a prime reason, but few sources note that the US has vast acreages of tillable land which could be turned to corn production if farmers weren't being paid to let it lie fallow.

Mr. Bush suggests that India is eating better, thus throwing the world into panic. India's justifiable response is "fuck you fat American pigs" and rightfully so. Nouveau riche China is increasing its consumption of meat and this, too, is blamed for the worldwide, spreading crisis in food.

But there's little discussion of how countries like Haiti lost their small farmers, because that is a tragedy that relates to mindnumbingly complex intervention by the never-benevolent IMF and World Bank, subsidized exports from this and other first world countries. It is mind numbing and important, because the destruction wrought upon Haiti and other 3d world nations by globalization and free market economics has been devastating. Another post, another day.


But almost none of the articles I read about the food crisis mention hedge funds and the speculation that is part and parcel of those secretive enterprises. They operate with billions and billions of capital with virtually no oversight or regulation. None of our presidential candidates, Democrat or Republican, have any interest in exploring the possibility of regulating these incredibly powerful financial institutions.

One hedge fund manager took home $3.8 billion last year. That's about $1.9 million an hour, assuming a standard work week of 40 hours and a standard (ha!) vacation of two weeks and that math takes me back to Teddy Kennedy's rant on the minimum wage, his desperate fight to get it raised to a little over $7 an hour for the lowest wage workers in this nation.

$3.8 billion in a year. That is, honestly, obscene. Obscene. And riches accumulated through hedge fund "work" are generally taxed at 15% ~ about what your average low- to mid-range wage worker pays in taxes.

I don't like hedge funds. I don't like the secretive nature of them, their ability to do on an incredibly damaging and very large scale what one-man-and-a-keyboard day traders were accused of doing to the stock market in the late '90s. That is manipulation on an unimaginable scale; having the ability to wreak havoc in the world's economy with no accountability at all. They can make money from things going well, but they can make as much, or more, when the economy goes to hell and the world is in crisis and it's a tiny little step to creating that very crisis in the interest of more profit.

Which brings me back to food. Britain's New Statesman says it far better than I.

This latest food emergency has developed in an incredibly short space of time - essentially over the past 18 months. The reason for food "shortages" is speculation in commodity futures following the collapse of the financial derivatives markets. Desperate for quick returns, dealers are taking trillions of dollars out of equities and mortgage bonds and ploughing them into food and raw materials. It's called the "commodities super-cycle" on Wall Street, and it is likely to cause starvation on an epic scale.

The rocketing price of wheat, soybeans, sugar, coffee - you name it - is a direct result of debt defaults that have caused financial panic in the west and encouraged investors to seek "stores of value". These range from gold and oil at one end to corn, cocoa and cattle at the other; speculators are even placing bets on water prices.

Just like the boom in house prices, commodity price inflation feeds on itself. The more prices rise, and big profits are made, the more others invest, hoping for big returns. Look at the financial websites: everyone and their mother is piling into commodities. It is the great bull market of the Noughties. The trouble is that if you are one of the 2.8 billion people, almost half the world's population, who live on less than $2 a day, you may pay for these profits with your life.

So we now have a food crisis, fast on the heels of a housing crisis, essentially created by the same conscienceless investment organizations whose sole aim is to turn a profit no matter the cost. I recognize that's the purpose of business; that's why the pure free market as proposed by Milton Friedman and other neoliberal economic asshats will never work. Unbridled greed is dangerous to living things.

At this point, there is little or no political interest in providing oversight of the hedge funds and their activities. No one is seriously proposing limiting them in any way; not in this country, never here, where we worship the myth of the free market, the very one subsidized by taxpayers in the form of corporate welfare.

In this country, most of us can suck it up and pay higher prices at the grocery store and cut back a little elsewhere. But we are fortunate, far more so than the world as a whole. What we can suck up and deal with, too many in the rest of the world cannot.

Just for one day ~ one single day ~ I would like to see Wall Street awash in the blood of innocents destroyed by greed. How much is enough for us? How much is enough for the man who takes home $3.8 billion dollars? How much is enough when that profit is taken at the cost of thousands of lives, of millions? And when will America wake up?