Bellies of the Rich Swell Further on the Back of Hunger

Guest Post by Colin Todhunter

It’s a zero-sum situation. The rich are robbing the poor to swell their coffers – and their bellies.

In April 2022, Oxfam reported a terrifying prospect of more than a quarter of a billion people falling into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone.

In its January 2021 report ‘The Inequality Virus’, it also stated that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth then stood at $11.95tn, a 50 per cent increase in just 9.5 months.

According to Oxfam’s analysis, 13 out of the 15 IMF loan programmes negotiated during the second year of COVID required new austerity measures such as taxes on food and fuel or spending cuts that could put vital public services at risk.

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FOOD: A LOVE STORY PART 1

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

I’ve been eating food most of my life. I can honestly say that in more than sixty years I have never faced more than a few days without a bite to eat and then as a result of either sickness or injury. As an American it wasn’t something I really gave much thought to. In our home, as a child, the refrigerator and the cabinets were regularly filled, and if we were away from home at meal time we’d find something to eat wherever we were. It was the same for everyone I knew- friends and families, neighbors and classmates.

Sometimes I ate communally, in school and then the military, sometimes alone, but food itself, throughout that span of time was ubiquitous and affordable. I was unaware, except for a few exceptions like fishing and gardening done by my family, where all that food came from beyond the shelves of the grocery store. It wasn’t until we bought the farm when our children were young that we came to understand everything that went into the production and effort required to fill them up. The skills that were needed daily took years for us to learn, and the outputs depended upon far more than our efforts alone.

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On the Cusp of an Economic Singularity

Submitted by Dan From WY

Doomberg

On the Cusp of an Economic Singularity

One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.” – Gustave Flaubert

In 1988, Stephen Hawking published one of the best-selling science books of all time. In A Brief History of Time, Hawking made the impossibly complex topics of astronomy and modern physics accessible to a lay audience, inspiring countless young students (and at least one green chicken) to pursue a career in the sciences. It is estimated that the book has sold an incredible 25 million copies worldwide.

A Brief History of Time | photo credit: BBC

 

In Chapter 3 of the book, Hawking introduces the reader to the Big Bang Theory and the concept of a gravitational singularity, which Wikipedia describes as “a condition in which gravity is so intense that spacetime itself breaks down catastrophically.” Essentially, since the laws of physics are eviscerated at a singularity, what happened before it is both irrelevant and unknowable, and one could consider such an event as having reset the universe’s clock. Here’s how Hawking describes it in his book (emphasis added throughout):

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Improve transparency with “Private Label” brands

Improve transparency with “Private Label” brands

All supermarkets now have their own “private labels.” Shoprite, Wegmans, ALDI, LIDL, Stop & Shop, Walmart, and every single major food retailer has them.

In fact, they have exploded over the past few years alone. (Along with many people’s digestive systems!)

The problem is – that “private labels” do not offer any transparency whatsoever.

[You have no idea who is really making it!]

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ON FOOD

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

Before you read the rest of this piece I encourage you to read the links below.

https://www.bakersfield.com/ap/national/billion-tons-of-food-being-wasted-each-year-can-we/article_30886ffe-de1c-5a0f-9ec6-a9a65484bcb0.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/lab-grown-meat-is-in-your-future-and-it-may-be-healthier-than-the-real-stuff/2016/05/02/aa893f34-e630-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7403891/Whole-Foods-CEO-slams-trendy-meatless-burgers-chicken-wings-unhealthy.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gsz3mrnIBd0

“When you are faced with food that has been sterilized, fumigated, hydrogenated, hydrolyzed, homogenized, colored, bleached, puffed, exploded, defatted, degermed, texturized, or if you don’t know what has been done to it, the safest rule is not to eat it.” Helen Nearing

Every morning after coffee, seven days a week I drive into the neighboring towns to make my run for food wastes. My wife refers to it as the slop run, but more than three quarters of what we pick up comes in the form of unopened or completely untouched food that until the previous evening had been on the supermarket shelf priced for consumers; produce, baked goods, and prepared foods. On a good day in the Summer we fill the back of a pickup truck with anywhere between 600 and 1,000 pounds of cabbages and muffins, fresh tomatoes and cherries, herbs packaged in plastic clam shells and tubs of potato salad.

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GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out

Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer

“Not everybody has the time or means to cook healthy meals from scratch, so let’s not pretend it’s that simple.”

When your first sentence is demonstrably false, can anything that follows be trusted? There is no debate that preparing your own meals, from scratch, is less expensive than buying a meal that has already been prepared. And if you do find a prepared meal that costs less, what does that tell you about the value of the ingredients and preparations?

Food propaganda is really starting to take off and we all know what the end game is; divorce people completely from access to foods except where it can be provided by the Government or a corporation and make them 100% dependent for their next meal.

Why ‘Just Cook More’ Isn’t the Universal Solution to Healthy Eating

image of an empty skillet on a blur background

Healthy eating is an endlessly complex topic that often gets distilled into sound bites—some short directive that assigns a simple solution to a myriad of problems. For example: Just cook more. These days, home cooking is presented as the holy grail of healthy eating, and the way to meet every dietary ideal we’re supposed to be working toward—whether it’s what we should be eating less of (salt, sugar, calories, processed foods) or what we should be eating more of (vegetables, fiber, whole foods, vitamins and minerals).

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Herbicide Is What’s for Dinner

Via Nautilus

Driving down a grid road in central Saskatchewan, a machine that looks like a giant insect approaches me in a cloud of dust. The cab, hanging 8 feet above the road, is suspended by tires at least 6 feet tall, with wing-like appendages folded along each side. Should I drive around it or under it?

It is harvest season, and the high-clearance sprayer is on its way to desiccate a field. Desiccation may be the most widespread farming practice you’ve never heard of. Farmers desiccate by applying herbicide to their crops; this kills all the plants at the same time, making them uniformly dry and easier to cut. In essence, desiccation speeds up plant aging. Before desiccation, crops would have to dry out naturally at the end of the season. Today, there are examples of desiccation being applied to every type of conventional crop in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.1 Chances are that most of what you ate today was harvested using a desiccant, but you’d never know.

Hart_BREAKER-1
The future: A fleet of combines harvests a field of desiccated peas on the Shewchuk farm near Saskatoon. The uniform senescence of the crop has made it dry, causing the combines to kick up chaff and dust as they work.

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EVERYTHING CAN COLLAPSE REALLY FAST

Guest Post by Ol’ Remus

art-remus-ident-04.jpg Food. Finding good water isn’t a problem in the hills of Appalachia. Survivalists who fixate on water probably have other regions in mind, the arid southwest or the western high plains. If I lived, say, on the lee side of the Rockies I’d worry more about water than I do. Which is not much.

Here there are springs and weeps everywhere, creeks big and small, lakes, ponds, rivers and reservoirs, even the occasional swamp. If this isn’t enough to keep you hydrated, it rains regularly and generously in summer, and snows in the winter. Water would often be an obstacle to the travelin’ man keepin’ low and movin’ fast in interesting times.

Where survival doesn’t turn on a scarcity of water and adequate shelter has been managed, food quickly reveals itself for the priority it is. This is not as obvious as you’d imagine. You’d have to get up early and work hard to avoid food in America. In the last hundred years, only in the “dust bowl” times of the ‘thirties did America see anything like a food shortage. Notice there was always bread for the bread lines in the Depression. The lines were from lack of means, not lack of product.

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“Shrinkflation” – How Food Companies Implement Massive Price Hikes Without You Ever Noticing

Tyler Durden's picture

Do you ever get the sense that your favorite steak at that Quick Service Restaurant of your choice keeps getting thinner and thinner all while your check size at the end of the night continues getting larger and larger.  Well, it is.  How else are publicly traded chains going to continue to deliver margin growth to wall street in the midst of rising labor costs, rising commodity costs and shrinking customer traffic?

As a new study in the U.K. just revealed, shrinking portion sizes among food manufacturers is actually way more common than you might think and you probably never even noticed it.  In fact, according to data from the Office for National Statistics, over 2,500 consumer products in the U.K. shrunk in size over the past five years despite being sold for the same price.

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The Fed has fueled inflation — and it’s helping the rich

Higher stock and real estate prices don’t benefit average Americans

It may come as no surprise that in the aftermath of an epic single-family housing boom and subsequent bust, millions of more people have been renting — without much new multifamily housing supply until recently.

This situation has let to strong gains for apartment REITs and an astonishing ability for property owners to raise rents.

Now a research paper by Rob Arnott and Lillian Wu of Research Affiliates in Newport Beach, Calif. asks why the CPI doesn’t reflect the inflation that is apparent in places where people spend their money.

Arnott and Wu argue that the four biggest expenditures for most people — rent, food, energy, and health care — have been rising. Since 1995, rents have been rising at 2.7% clip, energy at a 3.9%, food at 2.6%, and health care at 3.6%. Notably, these four expenses account for 60% of the aggregate of people’s budgets, 80% of middle-class budgets, and 90% of the budgets of the working poor.

Research Affiliates

Indeed, these Four Horsemen are galloping along, outstripping headline CPI, but it has taken six years of massive government spending, borrowing, and central bank stimulus for real per-capita GDP to regain its pre-recession peak.

Continue reading “The Fed has fueled inflation — and it’s helping the rich”

ABOUT THOSE “STRONG” RETAIL SALES

I get tired discrediting the MSM narrative of economic recovery, but I feel it’s my duty to set people straight. There were blaring headlines about the much better than expected retail sales in April. I find it humorous watching the government report this drivel and the MSM unquestioningly regurgitating it to the ignorant masses as retailer after retailer reports absolutely atrocious results.

Let’s dissect the bullshit report from the Census Bureau. They said retail sales went up 1.3% in April over March. Unless you delve into the actual report, you don’t know this is a seasonally adjusted number. On an unadjusted basis retail sales fell by 2%. But, for the sake of consistency I’ll use their adjusted numbers.

Total retail sales rose from $447.8 billion in March to $453.4 billion in April, an increase of $5.6 billion. That’s a 1.26% increase. Let’s breakdown our increase.

It seems $2.9 billion of that increase came from auto “sales”. That’s 52% of the total retail sales increase. So, desperate auto manufacturers with inventory piling sky high on their lots are doling out more subprime 7 year loans, 0% down leases, and offering massive rebate incentives to rid themselves of inventory. This is supposed to be some sort of positive development proving the consumer is back?

Remember those low gas prices? It seems the 30% increase in prices has boosted retail spending at gas stations by $700 million in one month and $1.7 billion over the last two months. Gas station sales increases account for another 13% of the monthly increase. So, 65% of the jump in retail sales is accounted for.

Another $550 million was produced at grocery stores, as food prices have jumped 20% since the beginning of the year. Paying more for less food is surely a sign of economic progress. Food is another 10% of the increase.

Lastly, the death of bricks and mortar retailers is further confirmed by the $900 million increase in on-line sales, as department store sales fell again.

In conclusion, the “awesome” increase in retail sales was essentially due to inflation in energy and food, with debt financed “renting” out of overpriced vehicles as the kicker. Sales at discretionary retailers like restaurants, sporting goods, electronics, and furniture stores were either flat or down. The MSM bullshit is a lie.


Nine Meals from Anarchy

Guest Post by Jeff Thomas

In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Since then, his observation has been echoed by people as disparate as Robert Heinlein and Leon Trotsky.

The key here is that, unlike all other commodities, food is the one essential that cannot be postponed. If there were a shortage of, say, shoes, we could make do for months or even years. A shortage of gasoline would be worse, but we could survive it, through mass transport, or even walking, if necessary.

But food is different. If there were an interruption in the supply of food, fear would set in immediately. And, if the resumption of the food supply were uncertain, the fear would become pronounced. After only nine missed meals, it’s not unlikely that we’d panic and be prepared to commit a crime to acquire food. If we were to see our neighbour with a loaf of bread, and we owned a gun, we might well say, “I’m sorry, you’re a good neighbour and we’ve been friends for years, but my children haven’t eaten today – I have to have that bread – even if I have to shoot you.”

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THE FED CAN’T FIND INFLATION ANYWHERE

The lying pricks at the Federal Reserve give speech after speech about no inflation, keeping rates low, and even blathering about negative interest rates. I guess these idiots don’t need to drive cars, eat food, pay rent, buy houses, or essentially live in the real world. Gas prices are up 22% since mid-February. Food prices are up 6% since early January. Rent has been ratcheting higher at a 4% annual rate for awhile. Home prices have been going up 5% to 10%. Various government taxes, fees and tolls have been accelerating at a 5% to 10% pace. And Yellen can’t find any inflation????

Via Anthony Sanders

CRB Foodstuff Index UP 6% Since Jan 4th (24% Annualized) – It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Inflation

It’s beginning to look a lot like inflation.

The Commodity Research Board’s Foodstuff index is up 6% since January 4, 2016. That is just in a little over 3 months. That translates to just under 24% growth on an annualized basis.

foodinf

With US Real Average Weekly Earnings 1982-1984 USD YoY at 0.7%, it really does feel like inflation. Although The Federal Reserve thinks inflation is just shy of 2%.

realweeklyee

When The Federal Reserve conducts their closed meeting today (and meets with President Obama), I certainly hope it is to discuss rising food prices and NOT negative interest rates!

santayellena


The Way of the Future

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

metropolis-farms-24

One of the more vital technological advancements has been developed locally in Philadelphia. They can grow all the necessary food without farmland from inside a warehouse that is completely free from genetic tinkering or chemical whatever. The owners of Metropolis Farms actually grow fresh produce all year long. Those interested in survival of the fittest, well here it is.

President Jack Griffin developed this technology and has been doing a bang-up job. It would probably not be a bad idea to set one up in a basement for the years ahead. As he explained, “The innovation here is density, as well as energy and water conservation.” Griffin continued, “We can grow more food in less space using less energy and water. The result is that I can replace 44,000 square feet with 36 square feet. When you hear those numbers, it kind of makes sense.”

This is the way of the future  — fresh food coming from your basement.


Overstock Holds 3 Months Of Food, $10 Million In Gold For Employees In Preparation For The Next Collapse

Tyler Durden's picture

Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne’s crusade against naked short sellers in particular, and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve in general, has long been known and thoroughly documented (most recently with his push to use blockchain technology to revolutionize the multi-trillion repo market).

But little did we know that Overstock’s Chairman Jonathan Johnson is as vocal an opponent of the fiat system, and Wall Street’s tendency to create bubble after bubble, if not more than Byrne himself.  That, and that his company actually puts its money where its gold-backed money is and in preparation for the next upcoming crash, has taken unprecedented steps to prepare for what comes next.

One week ago Johnson, who is also candidate for Utah governor, spoke at the United Precious Metals Association, or UPMA, which we first profiled a month ago, and which takes advantage of Utah’s special status allowing the it to use gold as legal tender, offering gold and silver-backed accounts. As a reminder, the UPMA takes Federal Reserve Notes (or paper dollars) which it then translates into golden dollars (or silver). The golden dollars are based off the $50 one ounce gold coins produced by the Treasury of The United States. They are legal tender under the law and are protected as such.

What did Johnson tell the UPMA? Here are some choice quotes:

Continue reading “Overstock Holds 3 Months Of Food, $10 Million In Gold For Employees In Preparation For The Next Collapse”

How Do People in Different Countries Spend Their Money?

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Have you ever wondered how much money Russians spend on alcohol and tobacco compared to the rest of the world? Or how much households in Saudi Arabia allocate to recreation?

Today’s data visualization from The Economist shows how much people in households around the world allocate to different expenses such as food, housing, recreation, transportation, and education.

The first thing to note is that this looks at private spending only, and does not include any public spending that could be allocated to each household. As a result, in places like Canada or the EU, spending on healthcare is much smaller than in comparison to the United States, where households spend 20.9% of their money.

Here’s a few interesting stats: