Links To Go #5
While I continue to monitor surveillance creep worldwide, that I think the food production, distribution and consumption issue is intensely serious.
1. Big Brother In Sweden
‘Orwellian law must be stopped’, in thelocal.se
Despite mass protest from the citizenry and a consequent postponement to address civil liberties concerns, FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt - Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment) will be able to conduct mass surveillance of law-abiding citizens’ communications without need for a court order. It will be able to read people’s emails and text messages, listen to their conversations, see which websites they are visiting, create “sociograms” that map out the friends people have.
2. Big Brother In America
‘ Agreement Could Pave Way For Surveillance Overhaul‘, by Tim Starks, via Global Research
No warrants will be required in the US when the administration and their outsourced private “partners” order surveillance on “targets” under “exigent,” or urgent circumstances. (Such “exigent” circumstances are determined by executive branch “intelligence officials,” of whom fully 70% are private mercenaries.)
According to Congressional Quarterly, telecommunication corporations and their “customers,” the NSA, FBI and other members of the “intelligence community” will get the retroactive immunity they’ve sought over the access to citizens’ private communications, as well as and billions of dollars in continued taxpayer subsidies for intelligence “outsourcing.”
Courts will be forced to issue virtual get-out-of-jail-free cards to corporate executives and their shareholders, thus freeing them from any and all liability, should companies claim they had “received assurances” from the state that its spying program was “legal.”
There is a piece by the same writer detailing the corporate lobbies for increased surveillance here.
3. Worst Floods In 15 Years Hit Midwest Corn Belt
Midwest floods may add to gasoline misery, via Cryptogon.
U.S. gasoline prices, which have already jumped to a nationwide average over $4 per gallon, may get an extra nudge from soaring costs for gasoline-additive ethanol as the worst floods in 15 years hit the Midwest Corn Belt.
As the Financial Times reported, this will also produce sharp increases on global food prices, pushing up corn and soyabeans in an enviromnent already protesting massive price hikes. Corn futures and soybean barrels are at record highs. The price of live cattle is at the highest for 22 years.
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Agriculture traders described the problem graphically, saying that corn plants in Iowa or Illinois should now be reaching almost waist height, but due to the impact of the heavy rains and low temperatures were below knee-height.
They added that expensive nitrogen fertiliser – critical for the plants’ development – has now been washed out from the fields by the rains. For that reason, some farmers are likely to leave their land fallow and, instead, cash in their crop insurance policies, further reducing supply.”
This is particularly scary if you consider the next article, below.
4. Without Record Crops This Year,Famines May Occur
from Bloomberg, via Cryptogon.
See also in this connection, How Far is the US From Food Shortages and Food Riots?
As Americans complain over high gasoline and food prices, many third world countries are experiencing food riots over price and scarcity of food. In some parts of the word rice is so expensive that it is transported in heavily guarded convoys and farmers guard their fields from thieves.
Food riots are becoming more common, as more land and crops are being diverted from the food chain by the world biofuels industry. According to an investment magazine, the crisis shows no signs of weakening. Food, the bread of life, is fast becoming the “gold” of the Twenty-first century.
Fatal food riots in Haiti. Violent food-price protests in Egypt and Ivory Coast. Rice so valuable it is transported in armoured convoys. Soldiers guarding fields and warehouses. Export bans to keep local populations from starving. (Globalinvestor.com)
The face of food security is rapidly changing around the world and there are no quick fixes experts say. What worries many is that food stockpiles are at historic lows. In the United States alone,
stockpiles of wheat hit a 60-year low in the United States as prices soared. Almost all other commodities, from rice and soybeans to sugar and corn, have posted triple-digit price increases in the past year or two.
Grain farmers will need to harvest record crops every year to meet increasing global food demand and avoid famine, Potash Corp. ( the world’s largest maker of crop nutrients) Chief Executive Officer William Doyle said. People and livestock are consuming more grain than ever, draining world inventories and increasing the likelihood of shortages.
“If you had any major upset where you didn’t have a crop in a major growing agricultural region this year, I believe you’d see famine,” Doyle, 57, said in New York.
Of course we’re already seeing famine. What he means is famine in the global North.
5. Arctic sea ice melt ‘even faster‘
I know certain circles in which publishing an article like this would have you denounced as a Malthusian Nazi. Whether manmade or not, change is happening and I doubt that we have the capacity to prevent it now. What I do agree on is that certain policies now being mooted (e.g., personal carbon allowances in the UK) show how the global warming issue will be used to increase corporate-state power. Assuming everyone hasn’t starved to death by then.
“A few years ago, scientists were predicting ice-free Arctic summers by about 2080. Then computer models started projecting earlier dates, around 2030 to 2050. Then came the 2007 summer that saw Arctic sea ice shrink to the smallest extent ever recorded, down to 4.2 million sq km from 7.8 million sq km in 1980. By the end of last year, one research group was forecasting ice-free summers by 2013.”
Bizarrely, the response of States according to the piece is to look at how they can exploit the melt for financial gain, suggest they don’t take very seriously negative externalities like the above, flooding, crop failure and famine. Not to mention underwater London, Amsterdam, etc…
The Club of Rome’s 1991 publication, The First Global Revolution, written by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider states:
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Presumably this means a protocol other than writing blank cheques on citizens’ bank accounts to bail out bankers — a grimly paradoxical situation if ever I heard it. No one wants a protocol because no one wants to admit it might be necessary, which is again rather appropriately like something out of Catch 22.
7. Hedge Fund Chief Warns Of Worse To Come
(Ben White and Francesco Guerrera in The Financial Times)
There is a ‘growing debate about whether financial institutions have taken big enough markdowns on mortgage-related holdings or could still face billions more in losses.’ A hedge fund manager who made some of the biggest profits from the global credit crisis says there is worse to come. Evidence mounta that banks are ’struggling’ to regain their earnings power and properly value their assets.
John Paulson, president of Paulson & Co, who made billions for himself and his investors by anticipating the subprime meltdown, now says mortgage-related losses for troubled financials could be $1,300bn, compared with writedowns so far of $380bn.
Blackwater is a Private Military Corporation (PMI) or Private Mercenary Army, and it was involved in — in some circles seen as responsible for — the worst massacre of Iraqi civilians to date in the Iraq war involving a private company. Their contract gets renewed in April 2008 and the Democrats continue to fund their operations — and with the exception of [congressman] Henry Waxman [D-Calif.], almost no one in the Congress has done anything to effectively take on these individuals or this company.
The GAO estimated approximately 70,000 people working for private security firms in Iraq. In 2006, the estimate was about 48,000. But it’s incalculable because of the labyrinth contracting system. It took Congressman Waxman three years just to find out who the Blackwater contractors were working for when they were attacked in Falluja.
Blackwater has a private intelligence company called Total Intelligence Solutions that offers what they describe as “CIA-type services” to Fortune 1000 corporations when they go into hostile areas. The U.N. Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries said recently about Latin America that, and I quote, “an emerging trend in Latin America and also in other regions of the world indicates situations of private security companies protecting transnational extractive corporations whose employees are often involved in suppressing legitimate social protest of communities and human rights and environmental organizations of the areas where these corporations operate.”
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