Abandoned farms, Third World living conditions, pervasive public assistance -- welcome to the once-thriving Central Valley.
December 15, 2010
The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.
During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.
Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.
On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.
Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.
It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?
Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former small farms — the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from the loss of thousands of small farming families. I don’t think I can remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone out of production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded. Apparently it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly — with suddenly soaring farm prices, still we have thousands of acres in the world’s richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all terrified by the national debt and uncertain future?
California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.
In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.
We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.
At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.
In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.
By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this?
Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.
Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.
Fresno’s California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the student body president’s announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won’t comment on the legislation per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.
I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being deported to Mexico. I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their own long residency in the United States. But here is what still confuses me: If one were to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and moral place than the United States.
So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, “Please do not send me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture that I ignore or deprecate.” I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been far more successful in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might have to leave at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this country rather than return to the place of his birth?
I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed “indifferent.” California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.
Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and out of California — and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.
Now incoming governor Jerry Brown has realized how screwed the state is and he's announcing his own budget emergency, according to the LAT.
He said last night: "I'm going to try to get the budget agreements done within about 60 days. I don't think we have a lot of time to waste... It will be a very tough budget, but it will be transparent... We've been living in fantasy land. It is much worse than I thought. I'm shocked."
Brown implied he would apply major cuts to the education system and other programs. He also refused to rule out new taxes. And it's got to add up to at least $29 billion in cuts.
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
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We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
Re: America will face Riots, Marches, and Revolution
The Left sees a financial crisis as a way to milk money out of taxpayers.
The Right sees a financial crisis as a way to cut spending of taxpayers' monies.
I am actually appalled at these Leftists idiots in Congress screaming about "Fairness" when it comes to "tax cuts".
They don't think it is "Fair" that people get to KEEP some of their own money. They THINK it is OK to take more away from "rich people" (defined by various and sundry standards) than to possibly allow them to KEEP it.
They LIE through their teeth about the "Death Tax" saying "That money has never been taxed before!"
So the HELL WHAT?
I think the LEFT needs to shut their traps about everyone else's money.
It's time people stood up to these fools and shout them down.
I don't have a lot of money, but you can damned sure bet your ass they would LOVE to retax what I DO have and what I've put away. They want to take my IRAs away from me and dole it out to me when I'm old at their pay rates rather than what I SHOULD get.
I'm sick to death of hearing these people trying to get more out of turnips.
Libertatem Prius!
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Shuttered homes and businesses in downtown Detroit, Michigan. American cities and states have debts that could be as high as $2tn. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.
Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe – Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble
Meredith Whitney, the US research analyst who correctly predicted the global credit crunch, described local and state debt as the biggest problem facing the US economy, and one that could derail its recovery.
"Next to housing this is the single most important issue in the US and certainly the biggest threat to the US economy," Whitney told the CBS 60 Minutes programme on Sunday night.
"There's not a doubt on my mind that you will see a spate of municipal bond defaults. You can see fifty to a hundred sizeable defaults – more.
This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults."
New Jersey governor Chris Christie summarised the problem succinctly: "We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn't have.
We borrowed money just crazily.
The credit card's maxed out, and it's over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We've been digging it for a decade or more. We've got to climb now, and a climb is harder."
American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly €1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.
Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. Last week, Moody's ratings agency warned about a possible downgrade for the cities of Florence and Barcelona and cut the rating of the Basque country in northern Spain. Lisbon was downgraded by rival agency Standard & Poor's earlier this year, while the borrowings of Naples and Budapest are on the brink of junk status. Istanbul's debt has already been downgraded to junk.
Whitney's intervention is likely to raise the profile of the issue of municipal debt. While she was an analyst at Oppenheimer, the New York investment bank, in October 2007 she wrote a damning report on Citigroup, then the world's largest bank, predicting it would cut its dividend. She was criticised for being too pessimistic but was vindicated when the bank was forced to seek government support a year later.
She has since set up her own advisory firm and is rated one of the most influential women in American business.
US states have spent nearly half a trillion dollars more than they have collected in taxes, and face a $1tn hole in their pension funds, said the CBS programme, apocalyptically titled The Day of Reckoning.
Detroit is cutting police, lighting, road repairs and cleaning services affecting as much as 20% of the population. The city, which has been on the skids for almost two decades with the decline of the US auto industry, does not generate enough wealth to maintain services for its 900,000 inhabitants.
The nearby state of Illinois has spent twice as much money as it has collected and is about six months behind on creditor payments. The University of Illinois alone is owed $400m, the CBS programme said. The state has a 21% chances of default, more than any other, according to CMA Datavision, a derivatives information provider.
California has raised state university tuition fees by 32%. Arizona has sold its state capitol and supreme court buildings to investors, and leases them back.
Potential defaults could also hit Florida, whose booming real estate industry burst two years ago, said Guy J. Benstead, a partner at Cedar Ridge Partners in San Francisco. "We are not out of the woods by any stretch yet," he said.
"It's all part of the same parcel: public sector indebtedness needs to be cut, it needs a lot of austerity, and it hit the central governments first, and now is hitting local bodies," said Philip Brown, managing director at Citigroup in London.
In Europe, where cities have traditionally relied more on bank loans and state transfers than bonds, financing habits are changing. The Spanish regions of Catalonia and Valencia have issued debt to their own citizens after financial markets shut their doors because of the regions' high deficits. Moody's cut to the rating of the Basque country on Friday left it still within investment grade but noted "the rapid deterioration in the region's budgetary performance in recent years". It said it expected it to continue over the medium term.
In Italy, Moody's and S&P have threatened to downgrade Florence, while Venice has been forced over the past few months to put some of the palazzi on its canals up for sale to fund the deficit.
"Cities are on their own. Governments won't come to their rescue as they have problems of their own," said Andres Rodriguez-Pose, professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics. "Cities will have to pay for their debts, and in some cases they will have to carry out dramatic cuts, such as Detroit's."
California crunch
Vallejo, a former US navy town near San Francisco, is still trying to emerge from the Chapter Nine bankruptcy protection it entered in 2008.The city, now a symbol of distressed local finances, is still negotiating with the unions, which refused to accept a salary cut plan two years ago. Paul Dyson, an analyst with the Standard & Poor's credit agency, said Vallejo, which is mostly a dormitory town for Oakland or San Francisco employees, did not have enough local industry to sustain its finances and property tax – a major source of local income – plunged with the collapse of the real estate market. The S&P credit-rating agency has a C rating on the town – the lowest level.
With a population of about 120,000, Vallejo has $195m (£125m) of unfunded pension obligations and has to present a bankruptcy-exit plan to a Sacramento court by 18 January. Since 1937, 619 local US government bodies, mostly small utilities or districts, have filed for bankruptcy, Bloomberg News recently reported. US cities tend to default more than European municipalities as they usually rely on bonds issued to investors, which enter into a default if the creditor misses payments.
European towns, by contrast, traditionally depend on bank loans and government bailouts.
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
2011 will be the year of the municipal default. At least that's what analysts like Meredith Whitney predict, as do bond investors that have been fleeing the muni market.
There are many reasons to be worried. First, the expiration of Build America Bonds will make it harder for cities to raise funds.
Second, city revenues are crashing and keep getting worse. Property taxes haven't reflected the total damage from the housing crash. High joblessness is cutting into city revenues, while increasing costs for services.
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
Economists are the real "party of No." They keep saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch – and politicians keep on getting elected by promising free lunches.
Such promises may seem to be kept, for a while. There are ways the government can juggle money around to make everything look OK, but it is only a matter of time before that money runs out and the ultimate reality hits, that there is no free lunch.
We are currently seeing what happens, in fierce riots raging in various countries in Europe, when the money runs out and the brutal truth is finally revealed, that there is no free lunch.
You cannot have generous welfare state laws that allow people to retire on government pensions while they are in their 50s, in an era when most people live decades longer.
In the United States, that kind of generosity exists mostly for members of state government employees' unions – which is why some states are running out of money, and why the Obama administration is bailing them out, in the name of "stimulus."
Once you buy the idea that the government should be a sort of year-around Santa Claus, you have bought the kinds of consequences that follow.
The results are not pretty, as we can see on TV, in pictures of rioters in the streets, smashing and burning the property of innocent people, who had nothing to do with giving them unrealistic hopes of living off somebody else, or with the inevitable disappointing of those hopes with cutbacks on the giveaways.
Nothing is easier for politicians than to play Santa Claus by promising benefits, without mentioning the costs – or lying about the costs and leaving it to future governments to figure out what to do when the money runs out.
In the United States, the biggest and longest-running scam of this sort is Social Security. Fulfilling all the promises that were made, as commitments in the law, would cost more money than Social Security has ever had.
This particular scam has kept going for generations by the fact that the first generation – a small generation – that paid into Social Security had its pensions paid by the money that the second and much bigger "baby boom" generation paid in.
What the first generation got back in benefits was far greater than what they themselves had paid in. It was something for nothing – apparently.
This is the way a Ponzi scheme works, with the first wave of "investors" getting paid with the money paid in by the second wave. But, like Social Security, a Ponzi scheme creates no wealth but only an illusion that cannot last. That is why Mr. Ponzi was sent to prison. But politicians get re-elected for doing the same thing.
As the baby boomers begin to retire, and there are now fewer working people per retired person to pay for Social Security pensions, this scam is likewise headed for a rude revelation of reality – and perhaps riots like those in Europe.
All the incentives are for politicians to do what they have done, namely to promise benefits without raising enough taxes to pay for them. That way, it looks like you are getting something for nothing.
When crunch time comes and politicians are either going to have to tell people the truth or raise taxes, the almost inevitable choice is to raise taxes. If the people think they are already taxed too much, then the taxes can be raised only for people designated as "the rich."
If "the rich" object, then demagogues can denounce them for their selfishness and "greed" for objecting to turning over ever-growing amounts of what they have earned to politicians.
Economists often make stronger objections than the high-income people themselves. That is because history has shown repeatedly that very high rates of taxation lead to all sorts of ways by which those very high rates of taxation do not have to be paid.
No matter how high the tax rates are, they do not bring in more revenue when many of the people subject to those tax rates do not in fact pay them. The scams inherent in welfare states are not only economically counterproductive, they turn group against group, straining the ties that hold a society together.
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
For Europe, it was a year when the cash ran out in some countries.
But one thing that wasn't in short supply was the number of angry protestors. As governments severely cut back on budgets, hundreds of thousands of people lashed out in response.
RT's Laura Emmett wraps up what's been a troubled year for Europe - and why people should brace themselves for 2011.
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
By Chaz Valenza, OpEdNews.com
Posted on December 27, 2010, Printed on January 3, 2011
The good news is there's no reason anyone should ever starve to death in America. The bad news is more and more working Americans, many earning what were once middle class incomes, are spending their time and scarce money to find their next meal.
Emergency Food: More and More It's What's for Dinner
Val Traore, the radiant and gregarious CEO of the Food Bank of South Jersey (FBSJ), wanted to make one thing perfectly clear in our discussion of hunger in America today. "We do not have starvation here in the United States. In Mali," she says, referring to the West African country where about half the population lives below the internationalpoverty lineof $1.25 a day, "if you live in poverty you risk starvation and death. That doesn't happen here in America." It's an important point worth dwelling on.
So what is happening here?
"We're seeing a large number of families that have never needed food assistance before," reports Traore. How many? So far, for 2010 FBSJ has witnessed a 10% increase in their client base of approximately 100,000 people. Here's the surprise: a large portion of the people needing food assistance today are working, and especially among FBSJ's new clients, many are earning incomes nearly twice the poverty line of $22,055 per year for a family of four (up to 185% of poverty).
Who are the hungry and why can't they afford to feed themselves and their families? Increasingly, the shocking answer is this: If you are not financially independent, the odds are good that someday you could be waiting in line to feed yourself and your family.
Food Lines: The Growing Reality Based Social Network
December 18, 2010 - Burlington County, NJ: Especially since the airing of television shows like "The Sopranos" and "Jersey Shore" most of the nation probably sees New Jersey as some cultural aberration. Perhaps it is. But, this is south Jersey and the landscape looks a lot like other semi-rural areas of the country.
On the drive from Philadelphia through Burlington County, a main highway cuts through farmland that includes several agricultural supply and farm equipment dealers. There are also strip malls, fast food franchises and diners offering breakfast for $2.99 and prime rib dinner specials as low as $10.99. If you were somehow transported here and I told you that you were in Ohio, you would have no reason not to believe me.
In Browns Mills, population 11,257, a tractor trailer painted as the "Hope Mobile" carrying about 28,000 pounds of food is being unloaded at the local United Methodist Church. People are lined up outside, but most of the line has been moved inside on this frigid morning. The church pastor has allowed the use of the facility's assembly room and adjacent corridor to bring members of some 600 pre-qualified, pre-registered families in from the cold.
Depression soup lines have nothing on this sucker. The first in line sit along the hundred foot length of the assembly room where a beautifully lighted Christmas tree glows. The line extends out the door and down one side of a hundred foot corridor and then loops back on itself down the opposite wall.
At the end of the line, another 30 feet or so, people will brave the weather for an hour or two until things get moving. Over 20,000 pounds of food will be provided to the crowd here, the remaining 7,000 pounds will go to a second event later in the day in Camden, NJ.
Food Bank Volunteers Unload Bags of Rice by Chaz Valenza
The Browns Mills' Hope Mobile drop has been occurring monthly since August in an effort to relieve demand on overwhelmed local pantries. Some 450,000 people live here in Burlington County where the median household income here is just under $77,000 per year. The county is 77% white, 17% black and 6% Hispanic.
Many of the people here (according to national averages about 70%) are
just plain poor. Some are on Social Security Disability. Others are senior citizens living on small fixed incomes. Some of them care for grandchildren that their own children, for whatever reason, can not care for.
A few are homeless, or the formerly homeless who have recently found a place live. They are white, they are black and they are Hispanic. All represented in good numbers. They are a typical gathering of Americans in winter wear, with kids in tow and babies in strollers. If I put them all in a local shopping mall - even the ones that told me they were homeless - you would have no reason to believe they weren't holiday shopping.
Deborah (all the names of those interviewed for this article have been changed) is twenty-something, smart, articulate, bi-lingual single mother of four. After losing a well paying job eight months ago, she took a warehouse position at minimum wage, $7.25 an hour in New Jersey, and moved her family into a shelter.
She's hoping her education and language skills will mean a quick promotion and higher wages. Though she pays little in rent, she tells me that after her car expense, diapers and clothes, there's no much left for food. A quick calculation reveals her car expenses alone will eat up nearly a third of her $14,790 annual income.
If you can't quite relate to a single mother of four, who recently lost a significant amount of income, then consider Joan.
Joan tells me over and over that hers is a good story that people need to hear. Unfortunately, for her and her family she is right.
Before moving to Shamong, NJ, Joan, her husband and four children, lived a well above average middle class life in a suburban Toledo, OH. They owned a single family home. She ran a home day care to supplement her husband's $80,000 plus income. He worked as a pipeline technician, a career he built over 26 years, lost 14 months ago and has not been able to reclaim. Two years ago he found work in New Jersey through relatives and the family moved.
Food Line for the Holidays - Browns Mills, NJ by Chaz Valenza
Moving meant Joan's day care income was gone. It also meant a cut in her husband's salary to $40,000, and an increase in rent from $875 monthly mortgage payment, which included principle, interest, taxes and insurance, to a trailer park rent of $1,125.
Doing some quick math for Joan's situation reveals how the Great Recession has decimated middle class America: after taxes $40,000 is about $30,000 take home in New Jersey. Less $5,000 for carfare to get to work. Less $13,500 for rent. Utilities and phone, let's say $2,400; way too low, right?
That leaves $14,100 for food, insurance, diapers, laundry, clothes and every other vagary life throws at a family of six. Since a decent family health care insurance is at least $9,000 per year, I'll bet they aren't making what's left of the COBRA payments.
Think you can feed yourself for $5 a day? What would you buy? What would you forego? Fast food will eat up that whole amount in a single meal.
If Joan spends every cent of her family's $14,100 of "discretionary" money on food she would have a $6.53 per person per day food budget.
Joan wasn't embarrassed to talk about her situation with me. For whatever reason, she wanted people to know her story. But she was the exception.
There were many others seeking a week's worth of food who didn't want to be noticed. They were still well shod. One middle aged gentleman, escorting his wife, was twitching. He didn't care to share his story.
Why You Will Choose to Be Hungry
Setting priorities when your budget gets squeezed is exactly why food is going to come last and why you're going to be left with little or nothing to feed your face and the hungry faces of those you love.
In a strange subversion of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, when things get tough in our modern world, you will put food last. "There are a couple of reasons," explains Traore. "First impulse is we don't want other folks to know we're struggling. So, Americans have a tendency to decide to pay for the visible expenses first."
If you think about it, it's pride, practicality and the unwillingness to give up hope too soon. Mix it all together and before you know it, you're hungry.
You may put off buying new clothes, or if interviewing for a job is a must, you won't.
You've been out of work for a couple of months, but obviously now is no time to sell the house. So you'll continue to make the payments as long as you can, especially in this market.
The car is leased or not yet paid off and you have to get to interviews and in today's environment public transportation to a job may not be an option.
Anyway, you don't want to start taking the bus or train when a better situation is probably just around the corner, and the neighbors will notice the Camry is gone.
In today's world, how can you live without a cell phone? A haircut? An
internet connection? A clean pressed suit? A couple beers with the crew after a hard day on the job site? Paper towels for the kitchen, heck toilet paper for the bathroom? A small gift for the kid's birthday? A coffee at break time? Money for the school field trip? License, registration and auto insurance?
So, you're going to pay the rent, you're going to keep the car, you're going to pay the cell phone bill. Do you think you want the neighbors seeing the electric is off? I don't think so. And, as things don't improve for months and months, you're going to max out the credit cards and home equity line of credit.
In retrospect, you're going to see that it was time to stop the hemorrhaging of money long ago, but you didn't do that. You couldn't do that. Where would you move? How much would that save? Are you underwater on the mortgage, ditto the car loan?
Whether it's looking for a job equal to, or nearly equal to the one that's long gone, or running in the right circles to get that job, appearances are important. The fear is if you're seen as a loser now there's no going back.
Sadly, employers appear to be embracing this thinking as evidence continues to show that older workers and long time unemployed workers are being discriminated against.
Nice Spread: The Odds on You vs. Food
Sustained under or unemployment, yours or that of your life partner, or any other significant decrease in income is certainly the most obvious way to find your tight budgethas you looking for your next meal. But it is not the only way.
Case in point: Paul, a postal worker, and his wife Amy, a part-time housecleaner and full-time mother of six.
On paper, Paul doesn't look like he belongs on a breadline. He has a solid employment history, 23 years with the United States Postal Service. His wife not only raised their children, but supplemented the family income. He has always had a government medical insurance plan for the entire family.
With $52,000 of earnings in 2010, you would think he would be at least lower-middle class.
Paul's family, formerly of Queens, NY, moved to south Jersey two years ago to get out from under an oppressive and ever escalating rent that ate up nearly half of their family income of $62,000 per year, $2,500 per month when they left, utilities not included.
There were other reasons to move as well. Two of Paul's children have learning disabilities. So it made sense to also look for a good school district that could meet their educational needs. The move to a two-plus bedroom garden apartment in Mount Holly, NJ at a rent of $1,300 per month looked like a smart thing to do.
With a little luck, Paul could make a swap transfer to a post office in New Jersey without losing his seniority. But the recession and luck was not with them. Housecleaning work in New Jersey has not been plentiful for his wife.
The hoped for transfer has yet to materialize. And, Paul is spending $400 a month for a 2 hour commute to Brooklyn, NY on a commuter bus, then the NYC subway and then a second bus to main post office.
Peanut Butter, No Jelly - Hope Mobile by Chaz Valenza
In New Jersey they also have a car expense. Paul tells me he is not a regular food pantry client, but the children are getting older and eating more in their teen years. At just over 130% of the poverty line, Paul's family is not poor enough to get food stamps. They are well within the 185% of poverty qualifier for food assistance.
What happened? Did Paul and his wife have too many children? They were all born by the year 2000. If their income was as little as $40,000 per year 11 years ago, they were no where near living in poverty. Just ten years later, with only a slight decrease in income and their efforts to decrease their housing expense, they are no longer getting by.
Paul's was probably one of the few families here with decent healthcare insurance. But ten years of higher living costs without enough increase in income has thrown them off balance and into a financial net loss.
Together, decreases in income and increases in living costs are the combined factors that will put more and more of us in the food lines. In a way, Paul and his family are solidly in the middle class, a middle class newly defined as not quite able to afford the necessities of life.
The imbalance is continuing even if, by academic measures, the recession is over. The engine of this financial imbalance for the middle class is another imbalance: wealth and income inequity. By all indications, the financial assault on working people will continue.
Oil is now hovering at $90 a barrel and the average national gasoline price is set to break $3.00 a gallon any moment. Not only is this more money out of the pockets of Americans, most of whom must drive to work, it threatens another round of layoffs should demand for goods and services fall as a result.
In a new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, global food prices are forecast to spike over the coming decade. The report concludes that demand for food from developing countries will outstrip even an increased production supply.
But inflation over the past ten years has been tame, right? Wrong, whenever you hear a report of "core inflation," just remember that number does not include two categories that affect working people the most: food and energy. Shelter costs, that spiked with the bank fashioned housing bubble, have also thrown many middle class families into financial turmoil.
The only good news on the horizon is in the area of housing where costs are predicted to fall. But moving is expensive and foreclosures will soon return to historic high levels as soon as the banks sort out their questionable procedures for putting people out on the street.
So, what does it take to be middle class today? That depends, and it's not necessarily an income number, though many analysts throw around income from $70,000 to $100,000. Tell that to Joan. You'll need to be able to sustain those dollars year after year without much in the way of cash flow interruption.
To be middle class, paying for all the vital and frivolous "necessities" of American adult life, you do need an income, usually from a job.
If it took education to get the training or degree needed for that job, subtract the cost of student loan repayment. Then you need housing at a cost that fits that income, and transportation that provides a reliable way for you to do what you need to do to earn that income.
As you would like to have more in your life, like a spouse and/or children
your income needs may change, i.e. increase substantially. But because life is generally unpredictable you also need to be able to afford at least some insurance, auto, home and medical, to smooth those costs.
To be middle class, you will also need the one thing the current economic and socio-political situation refuses to oblige: stability.
You need to know that at least most of the important things that you've
build your life on will not disappear tomorrow. For example, the job that expensive education bought will not be down-sized, right-sized, off-shored, out-sourced or become obsolete and eliminated altogether.
Unfortunately, that modicum of stability no longer exists. Too many things that put your stability at risk are out of your control.
It may not seem possible, but in today's global corporate market, your job could be history tomorrow.
The probability that you will need to retrain for another job, no matter how old you are, is high and today education is very expensive and may mean becoming a debtor in a big way.
The odds energy costs will increase to unaffordable levels, for at least periods of time, is nearly a sure bet. These spikes will increase what you pay for transportation, heating, electric and also affect a broad market basket of prices on everything from food to paper.
That housing shortages and increased rents may occur is still in the cards. If housing costs do decease you will need money to move and reestablish your living situation.
That labor prices may continue to be depressed is nearly certain. Most American workers have already tightened their belts. You only need to look a Paul's story to see the fine line between making it and otherwise.
That large corporations will enter more and more business categories where small business once thrived is a foregone conclusion. Today, there are only a handful of small business opportunities that have not been taken over by corporate category killer big box and national chain operations.
Odds that some day you and your family will need food assistance because you haven't yet made the rent or paid the phone or gas bill and your next paycheck is nine days hence: better, much better, in my opinion, than ten to one.
The Hunger Game: What You Will Do to Get Food
As stated earlier, unless for some odd reason you are unable to make contact with the outside world, you will not starve to death in America.
You will, however, play a game with certain rules and you will also spend time, money and effort to play the hunger game.
As with many lifelines in American society, help is available but you will need to jump through a few hoops to get it. We just can't bring ourselves to make basic needs easy to get. It's a puritanical punishment our society seems to need mete out to those in need.
Money is short. The fridge has a bottle of ketchup and bread bag with a heel in it. What do you do? That night you'll scour the house for loose change and buy some macaroni and a jar of tomato sauce. While you're eating you'll vow to do something about the situation.
That night on the internet tubes, you will look into Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps. SNAP is not only an acronym, it's also a contradiction; nothing about the program is quick or easy.
You will probably find you don't qualify as your income can be no more than 130% of the federal poverty threshold. If you're single that's $14,079 pre year; for a childless couple $18,941. Then, for each additional person or child in the family add $4,862. Really!?! It just doesn't add up, expenses for children can be much greater than those for adults, but that's the formula.
Let's say you think you may qualify, SNAP won't get food on the table tomorrow or the next week or even necessarily the next month. Remember Joan, the woman who moved with her family from Toledo? She applied for SNAP in September of this year. To date, her application has neither been accepted nor rejected.
Eventually, depending on how dire your need is, you will find a food pantry. If the one you find isn't open the next day, you may get referred to one that is. Maybe you'll remember those little $1, $3 and $5 coupons you occasionally purchased at the supermarket that make a donation to a food bank. In that case, you might call the food bank and they will somehow get you somewhere you can get your first supply of emergency food.
Congratulations! You've just join the ranks of 37 million Americans served by Feeding America and all the related agencies that are part of their food assistance programs and the ranks of approximately 49.1 million people who are food insecure in the U.S. today. Don't be embarrassed. If you or you spouse or significant other has a job you are among 36% of those millions that do, the working class Americans that are not able to afford food.
That's just the beginning. Now the major part of the game begins. Pantries are not open every day and lately they've also been running out of food.
More importantly, you may not be able to get there when they are open.
So, like any good game, you'll need a strategy and a plan.
Still got a car? Great! You can drive to the food pantry and depending on their inventory you may get enough food for a day or two. No, car? It's public transportation or spring for a car service. Call before you leave to check if food is available. Also ask when they open and get there early to be sure you get your share.
Big events, like FBSJ's Hope Mobile are a godsend as you'll pick up 5 days of food in one stop. But chances like this don't come every day, or every week, just once a month. Deborah, Joan and Paul all drove 20 miles, about 30 minutes, each way to get to the Browns Mills Hope Mobile. They were early birds and waited just three hours to receive about $50 worth of food.
So, to win the Hunger Game, you will gather information on where the pantries are and when they are open. You will talk to a counselor at your child's school and enroll your children in whatever programs may be available. You will get pre-qualified with the local food bank. If you're an older citizen or physically disabled you may be able to get your food delivered, if possible, or a senior center or other nearby agency to relieve you of the need to stand in line.
The Hunger Game comes with an excellent support feature. You are not alone. Organizations like the FBSJ and other Feeding America organizations are playing the game and they're on your side. Besides procuring surplus food and donations to buy food for you, they are also working every day to figure out who is hungry, where they are and how to get food to them as easily as possible.
For example, demand for food and the need to get more food to more people spawned the Hope Mobile.
Preston Beckley the Hope Mobile Program Manager at FBSJ is obviously proud of the good work and success of the Browns Mills event. Not only have 600 pre-qualified families received food, another 28 families were qualified at this event. That's well over 1,300 people getting food they need in one quick shot.
Next year, FBSJ's Beckley plans to expand the program from 9 sites to 16 sites. "There's a real need and it's increasing. With this program we are able to supplement pantries that can't keep up with the increased need. We can also bring the truck to places that have no pantry."
That's the point of many of the FBSJ's programs: find ways to get the food to the needy. For seniors it's home delivery. For school children it was a weekend supply of food for the child, but that soon turned into a program of school based pantries were parents could obtain a weekend supply of food for the entire family. FBSJ supplies food to over 200 agencies, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, special services, church and faith based organizations in their four New Jersey county service area.
Nobody wants to see an important donated resource, like food or food stamps, turned into a nefarious business enterprise. But why do people have to prove they are in need, a reasonable requirement, but also spend excessive amounts of time and money to get help?
The Hunger Game shouldn't just be about getting food. It's getting food, keeping a job, working toward a self-sustaining future, getting the necessary education and to the point where you can afford all the necessities of life on your own.
Eliminating the Hunger Game
If hunger is the problem, food is the answer and the Food bank of South Jersey is just one of over 200 such non-profit organizations that serve all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, distributing more than 2.5 billion pounds of food and grocery products annually under the national organization Feeding America.
Traore's organization is the hub of an intricate, charitable food distribution system designed to provide sustenance to anyone hungry in four south Jersey counties when money for food is scarce.
Hers is part of a shadow system to the gigantic profit driven arrangement that has made relatively inexpensive food easily available everywhere. They do a great job at minimal administrative cost and deserve your support.
Shouldn't there be a better way? After all, there are already large caches of food nearly everywhere in places called supermarkets, wholesale clubs and big box department stores? I put that question to Traore and she agreed.
"I'm sure our services are not accessible to everyone who needs emergency food in our area and that's a function of logistics," confessed Traore. So, what can be done?
"My wild idea is that certain food, what I call ground provisions," explains Traore, "should be free and available at all major food outlets." She defines "ground food" as basic, no frills food stuffs. A protein, maybe chicken, maybe just dark meat chicken, though I believe people deserve a whole chicken, a meal and soup after. Flour or basic bread. A green vegetable and a fruit, canned if not otherwise. Milk.
Under Traore's proposal, everyone would have a ground food provision that could be electronically tracked. You would "purchase" up to your provision limit monthly, or not use it at all. That's it. Have a food emergency? Tap your ground food provision. Need to supplement your food supply? Tap your ground food provision. Feel entitled to food Just because you are human, even if you're a millionaire? Tap you ground food provision. Nobody goes hunger. Nobody is put out. Nobody is wasting other valuable resources, like time and fuel, in the pursuit of a self-sustainable life here in America.
You know it's so crazy Traore's scheme just might work and be a boon to the economy.
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“You Americans are so gullible.
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By GRACE GAGLIANO and CURTIS MORGAN - Bradenton Herald/Miami Herald
JANUARY 9, 2010
MANATEE -- David O’Brien is getting used to seeing damaged vegetables. The salesman for C&D Fruit and Vegetable in Manatee sees hundreds of acres of strawberries, cucumbers, beans and squash at the farm destroyed by the recent cold weather.
The result of all the produce destruction is being felt across the state as grocery shoppers are finding fresh vegetables in short supply along with soaring prices.
Arching her eyebrows at prices along the produce aisle, Ilene Ellman decided to alter her shopping routine.
TIFFANY TOMPKINS-CONDIE/ttompkins@bradenton.com The impact of the freezing weather has shoppers paying higher prices for some fruits and vegetables, and some varieties are unavailable.
Instead of buying fresh corn -- four ears for $4.99 -- she picked up a $1.79 bag of frozen kernels. She also tore open a nearly 2-pound bag of green beans, marked at $5.65, and scooped out half.
“I love fresh vegetables but I draw the line at five bucks,” said Ellman, outside a Publix grocery store this week in Hollywood.
The Florida Department of Agriculture estimates that farmers statewide lost $273 million during the string of December freezes. Now the cold spell is costing consumers.
O’Brien estimates about 60 percent of Manatee’s vegetable crop was damaged in the freezes.
“There are still peppers available, beans have been hit and miss, but the quality is off and the prices are up,” he said. “The strawberry yields are down but they are coming back.”
Market prices for sweet corn -- among the hardest-hit crops -- have doubled since before the freeze. Green beans, also hammered, have tripled from cut-rate pre-holiday prices.
Though prices vary from store to store, yellow squash, zucchini, cucumbers, bell peppers, eggplants and some lettuces also have jumped 25 percent or more.
Publix and Sweetbay officials report supplies remain limited for corn and tomatoes through March when the new crops are expected to create more volume and lower cost. Several chains have run out of beans, squash and peppers.
“Volume is expected to pick up for squash as new blooms begin producing,” said Shannon Patten, spokeswoman for Publix Super Markets. “Much of the bean crop had to be replanted and is expected to start producing in early February. The same is true for the peppers. Supplies will continue to improve as we move forward.”
Farmers and grocers expect them to continue to rise, though not as steeply, over coming weeks until replanted crops or imports come in.
George Caldwell, director of purchasing at Global Organics Specialty Source, a Manatee County-based organic supply company, saw prices for tomatoes and green and yellow squash increase 25-40 percent. For Florida tomatoes, which were hit hardest, prices began to creep up before the cold snap even hit.
“As soon as they knew they were going to lose those crops, tomato prices shot up,” Caldwell said. “And yellow and green squash (prices) rose to levels that are rarely seen. People want to make sure it’s on the shelves at various grocery stores, so the stores have to be willing to pay more to make sure that spot is not empty.”
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“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
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Re: America will face Riots, Marches, and Revolution
There is no shortage of wild four-legged sources of food in my backyard!
Of course, if things get bad enough there could be. I have heard a shortage of game animals was a problem during The Great Depression. Then again, there are a lot more stupid people out there today that have no clue about hunting than there were then.
As world food prices continue to approach crisis levels, and global demand continues to increase, one international organization, The World Economic Forum, warns of possible “social and political instability.” In particular, the cost of corn and soybeans has skyrocketed to the highest they’ve been since July 2008, and experts predict the costs will continue to edge upward.
What’s worse is that price gains are expected to impact food costs for consumers and raw material costs for businesses, including ethanol producers and livestock producers.
The Blaze reports:
The Agriculture Department predicted this year’s corn production will fall about 4.9 percent to 12:45 billion bushels. That would leave inventories at the end of the season at about 745 million bushels, compared with 1.7 billion bushels in the previous year. On a global scale, the agency forecast inventories to decline 3 million tons, with more than two-thirds of fall coming in the United States.
Ethanol producers continue to purchase corn after the Obama administration approved the sale of gasoline with 15 percent ethanol, an increased percentage from the current blend. However, trade groups are in the process of challenging that decision by the Obama administration.
The Agriculture Department predicts that soybean production will fall to 3.329 billion bushels, which brings the end of the season inventory down 11 million bushels.
In order to meet the growing need, Telvent DTN analyst John Sanow predicts that farmers would need to plant a large number of acres of spring wheat, corn, soybeans, and cotton to ease situation. In the interim, however, prices will continue to remain high.
The Blaze notes, “In contracts for March delivery, corn added 24 cents to settle at $6.31 a bushel, soybeans gained 58 cents to $14.15 a bushel and wheat rose 11 cents to $7.705.”
Joseph Glauber, chief economist for the United States Department of Agriculture, indicates, “The markets are very, very tight. There is concern, no doubt.”
The impact of the crisis exceeds well past the United States into the rest of the world. The World Economic Forum released this week indicates a rising demand for basic necessities like food, water, and energy.
According to the report, “A growing global population and greater prosperity are putting unsustainable pressures on resources. It also raised the issue of shortages, which could cause social and political instability, geopolitical conflict, and irreparable environmental damage.”
In addition to food, oil prices continue to go up as crude oil supplies decrease.
Growing food prices could have a dangerous social impact on nations, like Tunisia and Algeria, where widespread riots rage over soaring unemployment and soaring sugar, flour, and oil prices. Though the government has since agreed to slash import taxes on those staples, the protests have not dwindled.
Likewise, the United States military has been taking the necessary precautions to prepare for potential economic disaster and social unrest in the United States. In fact, the Pentagon’s Unified Quest 2011 is a training program in which soldiers are prepared for evacuation and detainment as a response to rioting related to economic disaster.
According to a CNBC report:
All different parts of the Pentagon and Defense Intelligence establishment are looking at markets and looking at ways they can present a new kind of threat to the United States.
These are the guys whose job it is to think of the worst possible things that could happen.
Blacklisted News asserts that the Unified Quest 2011 is just one of my indicators that the world is headed towards economic disaster. Other examples include the decentralization of FEMA from a single distribution center in Washington to 15 regional facilities across the nation.
Other global powers are equally preparing for such scenarios, including Russia, which has reportedly been preparing for the development of 5,000 new underground bunkers. Similarly, the European Union has allegedly commissioned the building of a “Doomsday Seed Vault” several hundred feet below sea level.
Gulf News writes, “With food supplies and prices making headlines around the globe for the second time in less than three years, experts are warning of the possibility of social unrest sweeping through poor countries.”
UAE-based economist Mohammad Al Assoomi states, “I can’t say for sure whether [social unrest] will happen. I believe things are moving towards increasing prices, and this could be absorbed by rich countries. But in poor countries, most segments of society won’t be able to handles these increases.”
In Asian countries, for example, food inflation has entered the double digits. Kenya’s government has already had to issue drought and famine alerts.
When asked about the impact of soaring food prices on social stability, Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) remarked, “We are entering danger territory.”
Perhaps offering some comfort, Abbassian contends that world food prices have still not yet reached the level they did when food riots hit almost 30 countries in the West, like Bangladesh and Haiti.
However, the good index jumped to 214.7 points from the peak recorded in June 2008. Additionally, the FAO reports that the prices of sugar and meat are at their highest since the first recorded levels in 1990. As far as wheat, rice, and corn, prices are sitting at the 2008 crisis levels.
Some nations are calling on the Group of 20 leading economies to take steps to aid the poorer countries and ensure that they are receiving adequate food supplies.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick asserts, “By empowering the poor the G20 can take practical steps towards ensuring the availability of nutritious food.”
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
Have you noticed that most Americans seem to know far more about American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Justin Bieber and their favorite sports teams than they do about world affairs?
Most Americans cannot even find Tunisia and Algeria on a map, and if you told them that food riots are happening in those nations right now most of them would not even care anyway. We have become a very self-centered, self-involved and self-absorbed nation. Quite a few people have accused this column of being obsessed with "doom and gloom", but the truth is that the world really is falling apart out there.
What are we supposed to do? Are we all supposed to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that everything is going to be okay? Should we all not try to warn others so that they can prepare for what is coming?
Until people understand that we are facing absolutely massive problems they are not going to be motivated to take significant action, and hopefully those of us that are proclaiming "doom and gloom" are doing a good enough job of describing what is really going on out there that some people are starting to wake up and actually make changes.
Most Americans may not care, but the food riots that are starting to erupt around the globe are actually very serious.
Do you remember what happened back in the summer of 2008?
That summer, the price of oil spiked to an all-time high of $147 a barrel and that caused a substantial increase in the price of food all over the globe. Suddenly millions of poor people couldn't afford to feed themselves anymore and food riots erupted all over the world.
Well, here we are in 2011 and the price of oil hasn't even reached $100 a barrel, and yet the food riots are already beginning.
Violent food riots are being reported in Tunisia, in Algeria, in Chile and in Mozambique.
Yes, that is how serious things are getting already.
Unfortunately, it looks like the global food situation is only going to get even worse.
Australia is a major food producer and right now they are experiencing flooding of Biblical proportions. In fact, it has been reported that at one point the flooding covered an area greater than France and Germany combined.
In Brazil, another major food producer, horrific flooding has killed more than 500 people so far. This flooding is being called the "worst-ever natural disaster" in the history of Brazil.
Meanwhile, record cold temperatures and record snowfalls are playing havoc with winter crops all over the Northern Hemisphere.
But even before all of these weather disasters struck the price of food had been going up significantly. The UN recently announced that the global price of food hit an all-time high during the month of December, and world leaders all over the globe are openly expressing concern about what 2011 is going to bring.
Sadly, the truth is that there has been a trend of rising food prices for quite some time. According to Forbes, corn is up 94% since June, soybeans are up 51% since June, and wheat is up 80% since last June.
As one of my readers recently pointed out to me, it usually takes about six months for the prices of agricultural futures to filter down into the supermarkets. So the very high prices for agricultural commodities that we are seeing right now should really start to be felt around the globe by the middle of 2011.
In addition to everything else, reports continue to come in of thousands of birds and millions of fish suddenly dying all over the globe, and nobody seems to really know what is causing it.
Do you want some more doom and gloom?
*There are reports of "panic buying" of silver and other precious metals right now.
*S&P and Moody's have both warned once again that the United States is in danger of having its credit rating slashed if it does not get government debt under control.
*U.S. housing prices have now fallen further during this economic downturn than they did during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, America's economic infrastructure continues to be taken apart piece by piece.
The United States is losing more jobs to China. In fact, the United States is losing more high technology "green jobs" to China.
Evergreen Solar, a company that manufactures solar panels, is closing their factory in Devon, Massachusetts and they are moving their production facilities to China. This is going to result in the loss of 800 good American jobs.
"Solar manufacturers in China have received considerable government and financial support and, together with their low manufacturing costs, have become price leaders within the industry."
Is it any wonder that a recent survey found that 47 percent of Americans now believe that China is the world's leading economic power while only 31 percent still believe that the United States is the world's leading economic power?
As America continues to lose good jobs, millions of Americans find themselves simply unable to pay the bills. In fact, at this point one out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one government-run anti-poverty program.
As things have fallen apart in the United States, many private citizens have tried to step forward and do what they can to help people, but now in many areas of the country the government is actually stepping in and shutting down these private avenues of assistance.
For example, in the city of Houston, Texas a couple named Bobby and Amanda Herring has been feeding homeless people for over a year.
They never left behind any trash and no trouble was ever caused.
So will they be able to get a permit? Well, it turns out that city officials are saying that this "Feed a Friend" effort most likely will be denied one.
Apparently the city "officials" believe that the homeless "are the most vulnerable to foodborne illness" and that therefore the warm meals that the Herrings were providing for them were potentially dangerous.
Can you believe this?
This is what happens when political correctness and bureaucracy get wildly out of control.
Now it is illegal to go out and feed homeless people?
What is American turning into?
As the economy continues to fall part, the iron grip of the government is likely only going to get tighter as it desperately tries to keep order.
But do we really need to be giving tickets to 6-year-olds?
Yes, you read that correctly.
The truth is that there is a reason why so many websites are now reporting so much "doom and gloom". Things really are getting bad out there.
Sadly, most Americans have only known tremendous prosperity all of their lives, so they can't even conceive of what it would be like to go through difficult times.
Most Americans have been conditioned to believe that while we may have brief "recessions" once in a while, in the end our economy will always get better and the good times will continue to roll.
But the good news is that an increasing number of Americans are waking up and are trying to warn their family and friends about what is coming.
So do you believe that the food shortages and the food riots are going to get even worse throughout the rest of 2011?
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Nikita Khrushchev:"We will bury you"
"Your grandchildren will live under communism."
“You Americans are so gullible.
No, you won’t accept To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. ."
We’ll so weaken your To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. until you’ll To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 15 or greater. You currently have 0 posts. like overripe fruit into our hands."
A 38-year-old gunman walked into a Detroit police precinct this afternoon and shot a commander and three other officers before he was killed, police sources confirmed.
Cmdr. Brian Davis, in charge of the 6th precinct, was shot in the hand and side and underwent surgery this evening, a police source said. He was in critical condition. Officer David Anderson was shot in the head but is alert and talking and moving his limbs, the source said. Another officer was also shot in the head. Both are conscious and aware, police said.
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A fourth officer, a female sergeant, was shot in the chest, but was wearing a bullet proof vest. She was treated and released.
During a press conference this evening at Sinai Grace Hospital, where the officers were taken, Police Chief Ralph Godbee offered few other details, saying the shooting was an open investigation.
"Incidents like this are very sobering and remind us how vulnerable we all are," Godbee said, adding that security protocol is being reviewed at all of the precincts.
"We have a lot of people that are shaken up," he said.
Police said the man was armed with a small shotgun.
The victims were taken to nearby Sinai Grace Hospital shortly after the 4:30 p.m. shooting. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and Godbee arrived at the hospital early this evening to visit the wounded.
Earlier, Bing and Deputy Mayor Saul Green visited the police precinct to offer support.
Sunday's shootingcapped off a bloody weekend that saw 10 people shoton Sunday — five at the precinct, including the gunman, and five outside a strip club — and three bodies found Friday night ina housein the 14000 block ofFaircrest.
The shooting occurred at the 6th Precinct, just west of the Southfield Freeway and south of Interstate 96. Like most precincts in the city, there are no metal detectors in the entrance and visitors can come in and talk face-to-face with officers.
Anderson worked for the department with the Law Enforcement Information Network, or LEIN, the database of criminal justice activity kept by the state.
Rufus Cain, who works at a car wash across the street from the precinct, said he was shocked by the news. He said he feels safe in part, he said, because he's so close to the police facility.
"We don't experience anything like this over here," he said.
After the shooting, yellow police caution tape surrounded the one-story brick building and traffic was limited as more than a dozen police units from Detroit and the Michigan State Police descended upon the precinct.
Godbee said that the 6th Precinct is being treated as a crime scene and is closed to the public. Residents in the 6th Precinct who need to file police reports or speak to officers on other matters are asked to visit the 10th or 12th Precincts instead or call (313) 596-2200 for more information.
Re: America will face Riots, Marches, and Revolution
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Cobra is one of those great '80s action flicks that is in my collection and I've been known to put it on every now and then on a lazy weekend.
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