Editorial Glance
Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."
You remember the paralyzing ray, the sound effect, the beam of light flashing across the screen toward its target and -- bingo! Zapped! All consciousness we had was momentarily checked out, no longer in the building, not on the planet, but caught up in Star Trek, caught and stunned, captured by the light of the ray.
Every time I look up from what I'm doing, another Republican is charging off into some self-made fray, seated backwards, on a mechanical pony -- the kind bolted to the floor, requiring a quarter to rock back and forth -- shouting incoherently, trying to make the metal animal charge faster, trying to make it back up, all the way.
I don’t care that the retail Christmas season starts earlier and earlier every year. I’m almost continually freaked out that Halloween hasn’t stopped since December 12th 2000. It’s like we’re all living in a demented version of the film, Groundhog day. The alarm goes off, we get up, and something horrible happens. All day long we wish we could change something but the next morning … the alarm goes off, we get up, and something horrible happens.
The stock markets in the US dropped 1.5% today from the renewed sturm und drang over the potential Greek bond default. The Euro zone is trying to force a 50% haircut on the holders of Greek bonds in order to avoid their default, but the catch is that it has to be “voluntary”. If it’s not, it becomes an “actual” default and those CDOs (credit default swaps) start kicking in.
It's been one wimpering bellow and simpering cacophony after another with these guys, all this empty and voidful claptrap called the GOP candidacy, or coronation, or whatever half-baked appellation you'd care to make of this clammy, hammy, clambake.
