People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

John Maxwell from the Jamaica Observer on where the world financial system has now focused their “expertise”:

The food supplies of the world is their new target.

According to the Toronto Globe & Mail Thursday: “Food producers lined up against investment fund managers during an extraordinary meeting in Washington yesterday, saying they are partly to blame for driving up food prices and playing havoc with commodity markets.

“Sixty per cent of the current [wheat] market is owned by an index fund,” said Tom Coyle, of the National Grain and Feed Association. “Clearly that’s having an impact on the market.”

What is an index fund doing owning 60% of the world’s wheat trade? According to Tom Buis, National Farmers Union “…[W]e’ve got a train wreck coming that’s going to be greater than anything we’ve ever seen in agriculture.”

Rice has almost doubled in price in two months, wheat has gone up 120% in a year and both will go higher if speculators play true to form.

In the International Herald Tribune, economist William Pfaff, says “Speculative purchases have no other purpose than to make money for the speculators, who hold their contracts to drive up current prices with the intention … of unloading their holdings onto an artificially inflated market, at the expense of the ultimate consumer. Even the general public can now play the speculative game; most banks offer investment funds specializing in metals, oil and, more recently, food products.”

Pfaff - like millions of less well educated people, cannot understand why this wickedness is allowed to continue: “It is astonishing in the present situation that the international financial institutions and government regulators have done little to control or banish this parasitical and antisocial practice. The myth of the benevolent and ultimately impartial market prevails against all contrary evidence.”

“Speculative purchases have no other purpose than to make money for the speculators.”

Meanwhile, here in Paradise, we will stay cool, as we import new problems with mammoth people-processing factory-hotels fencing us off from our Caribbean Sea, happy to service the unscrupulous and law-defying local subagents of the international casino called globalization.

And, as we degrade our land for shrimp farms and slave to produce and process pond shrimp, it should give us no end of joy to know that the American Purina Corporation is a huge market for farmed shrimp. They use it for dog food.

Are we having fun yet, Daddy?