First, a note I was writing to someone who said that their local economy was uneffected: “You say that the economy is good there. Have you checked the food banks and other resources for those having hard times? Here is a link to Bill Moyer’s Journal and a link to the video which is focusing on Denver since the Democratic convention is there”
Here is a big chunk of highlights from the Bill Moyer post:
BILL MOYERS: Working Americans, and that’s most people, are experiencing the “big squeeze.” In fact, they’re trying to survive one of the most profound social and economic changes in our history. The middle class is disappearing, facing a decline in standards of living. So you’d hope that the Democrats in Denver next week and the Republicans in St. Paul the following week would confront this crisis head on and not just serenade struggling families with a chorus of sympathetic but meaningless sound bites.
This week, we go to the city of the hour - Denver, the site of the Democratic National Convention. Nearly 75,000 people will gather in the Mile High City as Barack Obama makes history by becoming the first African American to be nominated by a major party for president.
But outside the convention center doors, history of a different, more prosaic sort is being made. This year oil hit a record high - $147 a barrel when last year, it was less than half that - around $68. A loaf of bread is up 14% from last year, a dozen eggs is up 33%, and pizza makers have seen the cost of their cheese soar from $1.30 to $1.76. Flour used to make the dough has tripled in price. As these prices soar, the value of homes is sinking. One in three home buyers since 2003 now owe more than their property’s estimated worth. Not only has home equity plummeted, so has the value of other holdings, like stocks and bonds and pensions, the investments families count on as a cushion during hard times.
So America’s middle class, our “fearful families” as some people call them, is taking it on the chin. The history-making nominations aside, all the rhetoric from all the speakers at next week’s Democratic Convention will be so much hot air above the Rockies unless the party comes to grip with how people are living and hurting today.
Just imagine what might happen if instead of going to all the shindigs being paid for by all the wealthy donors and corporations next week, the Democratic faithful - and their candidates - spread out across Denver’s neighbors, and listened to people caught in the big squeeze. That’s what our producer Betsy Rate and correspondent Rick Karr did just the other day.
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One goal of this blog is to look at the main stream media and contrast the actions of the government led by the Bush Administration with the growing threat of our degrading environment. Today I wrote an aggregation of the Georgia/Poland situation between the United States vs. Russia. The Bush Administration is tightly aligned with military violence to secure more fossil fuels to grow a wasteful economy instead of advancing policies to protect sustainable resources for a stable society.
From the Online NewsHour:
Huge swaths of the world’s oceans are too starved of oxygen to support shrimp, crabs, fish and other marine life, and these so-called dead zones are growing virtually unchecked, according to a new study.
Coastal waters worldwide contain more than 400 dead zones that, combined, make up an area the size of New Zealand, according to a study published online Thursday in the journal Science. Robert Diaz, a marine biologist at the College of William and Mary Virginia Institute of Marine Science and lead author of the study, said fertilizer runoff from farms is a major source of the problem.
Fertilizer, animal waste and car exhaust leach into storm-water runoff and spill excess nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorous, into coastal seawaters. Algae and phytoplankton on the seafloor feed off the nutrients, which cause them to bloom wildly. As bacteria consume the blooms, they suck oxygen from the water, depleting whole stretches of ocean. Scientists call this oxygen depletion hypoxia.
“All of the systems are reacting in concert to a general over-fertilization of the rivers and bays in the coastal area,” Diaz said. “Most of this in the marine environment is due to excess nitrogen.”
Diaz’s research shows that the number of dead zones have roughly doubled each year since the 1960s. Dead zones alter the habitat for crab, shrimp, fish and lobster, often forcing them to shallow areas.
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“Farmers are driven by their immediate needs to provide food and income…” at a time when we need to be regulating farm practices in order to sustain farm yields for a growing world population.
There are few Free Trade Libertarians around when an economic cycle is at the bottom as we are reminded with the ‘wise’ US backstopping of Freddie and Fannie. Quite frankly, there shouldn’t be any Free Trade Libertarians at the top of the cycle either because now the system has revealed itself as one where ‘profits are privatized and risk is socialized”. In the future, the United States government should pass laws that help contain markets from getting too hot–for instance the Government should have contained the amount of liquidity in markets during the Bush administration.
Here is another thought for Free Trade Liberal Economists. Principles and platitudes won’t bring back the large stock of fish in the ocean that is now depleting dramatically, it won’t grow the forests that have been mowed down by the 10’s of thousands of square acerage, nor will philosophical positions create enough top soil to feed a booming population which global civilization has created. Believe me, I do love a good philosophical position because it helps build systems that we can discuss and aids decision makers make strong judgments, yet the real consequences of the world will bring down concepts based on infinite math and never ending resources. Never ending material growth is not wise policy. This blog is very much dedicated to understanding limits, and where those limits create pressure on the economy and the article below finishes with a declaration of limits that we should be accounting for: “About three feet of topsoil represents the foundation of human civilisation. The pressure of feeding a population of 9bn people is likely to stretch that resource to the limit.”
Remember that fertilizer is destructive to the environment. Dead zones in the sea, particularly near the mouth of the Mississippi river, have developed due to the high concentration of Nitrogen in the water due to fertilizer run off.
Soil under strain: A thinning layer of life evokes concern
The rising cost of food from the Financial Times
By Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent
Published: July 16 2008 19:32 | Last updated: July 16 2008 19:32
Civilisation sprang from dirt. The thin layer of topsoil, formed on parts of the earth’s surface over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, enabled crops to be cultivated and gave early farmers a reliable food source. On average, that layer is only three feet deep.
But now that dirt is in danger. “The world’s cropland is losing topsoil through erosion faster than new soil is forming, thereby reducing the land’s inherent productivity,” warns Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, in his book Plan B. “Where losses are heavy, productive land turns into wasteland.”
Farmland across the world is affected, stretching from the wheat-covered prairies of the US to chemically contaminated tracts of eastern Europe and China. But the problem is most acute in Africa, where farmers tilling some of the world’s oldest soils are among the least able to take action to protect their most important resource.
These problems are not new. Some archaeologists assert that civilisations such as the Mayans, the Easter Islanders and the Norse settlers of Greenland collapsed because of the depletion of their soils, caused by over-use, deforestation or climate change. More recently, the “dust bowl” of 1930s America provided a stark warning of the dangers.
What has changed is population pressure: there are now more than 6.5bn people on the planet, a figure that is forecast to rise to 9bn by mid-century. Though scientists estimate that there is enough suitable uncultivated land to meet increased demand until at least 2020, feeding the world demands that existing fields remain productive.
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Alex Hunter waits to load harvested catfish into a truck for processing.
New York Times
THE FOOD CHAIN
By DAVID STREITFELD
LELAND, Miss. — Catfish farmers across the South, unable to cope with the soaring cost of corn and soybean feed, are draining their ponds.
“It’s a dead business,” said John Dillard, who pioneered the commercial farming of catfish in the late 1960s. Last year Dillard & Company raised 11 million fish. Next year it will raise none. People can eat imported fish, Mr. Dillard said, just as they use imported oil.
As for his 55 employees? “Those jobs are gone.”
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New York Times
June 26, 2008
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday reduced what had once been a $5 billion punitive damages award against Exxon Mobil to about $500 million. The ruling essentially concluded a legal saga that started when the Exxon Valdez, a supertanker, struck a reef and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989.
The decision may have broad implications for limits on punitive damages generally. Punitive damages, which are meant to punish and deter, are imposed on top of compensatory damages, which aim to make plaintiffs whole.
Justice David H. Souter, writing for the majority in the 5-to-3 decision, said a ratio between the two sorts of damages of no more than one-to-one was generally appropriate, at least in maritime cases. Since Exxon has paid about $507 million to compensate more than 32,000 Alaska Natives, landowners and commercial fishermen for the damage caused by the spill, it should have to pay no more than that amount in punitive damages, Justice Souter said.
The plaintiffs have received an average of $15,000 each as compensation, and Wednesday’s decision means they will receive a similar amount in punitive damages.
Justice John Paul Stevens, in a dissent, said he would have upheld the punitive damages award, which the federal appeals court in California had reduced to $2.5 billion.
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Financial Times
By Hal Weitzman in Chicago
Published: June 25 2008 14:22 | Last updated: June 25 2008 14:22
Monsanto, the world’s biggest seed producer, reported record results for its fiscal third quarter on Wednesday, underlining how the boom in crop prices and increasing global demand for food has driven farmers to improve yields.
However, although earnings per share were strong, the company’s sales figures were below expectations, pushing the stock down in pre-market trading. Shares in the St Louis-based company have more than doubled in the past year as investors bet that spikes in crop prices and rising demand for food in the developing world would sustain strong markets both for seeds and for Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.
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Financial Times
By Sheila McNulty in Houston
Published: June 19 2008 20:24 | Last updated: June 19 2008 20:24
US meat, dairy and poultry producers on Thursday urged regulators to re-examine ethanol mandates, which are tightening limited grain supplies and forcing a run-up in feedstock prices that threatens their livelihoods.
“We are facing tighter and tighter supplies of grain that threaten to devastate meat, dairy and poultry producers and cause food price increases for the American consumer,’’ said Thomas Elam, president of FarmEcon, an agricultural and food industry consulting firm. “The government must not allow this to happen.’’
US laws require that 9bn gallons of renewable fuels be blended into transport fuels in 2008. Most of this will be met using corn-based ethanol. However, the Environmental Protection Agency can waive these requirements, in whole or in part.
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Financial Times
By Carola Hoyos and Javier Blas in London
Published: June 20 2008 22:02 | Last updated: June 20 2008 22:02
Western countries have upgraded the food and fuel crisis into a national security concern as they fear record high energy and agriculture commodity costs are destabilising key developing regions of the world.
The concerns come as the world suffers for the first time since 1973 from the confluence of record oil and food prices. Corn, soyabean and meat prices jumped this week to all-time highs, while oil prices hit a record of almost $140 a barrel.
This shift toward a national security concern will become apparent at Sunday’s oil meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where ministers are expected to warn that developing countries are cracking under the burden of record oil and food costs.
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Financial Times
By Jonathan Birchall in New York and Elizabeth Rigby in Chicago
Published: June 19 2008 22:35 | Last updated: June 19 2008 22:35
Procter & Gamble is planning to give one of the US’s biggest food groups access to its industry-leading packaging and design skills in one of the most ambitious co-operation deals struck by the world’s biggest seller of consumer goods.
ConAgra, which makes Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn and Hebrew National frankfurters, will be allowed to use P&G packaging – from non-splatter valves on plastic bottles to wrappings – to make its products more user-friendly.
It will also be able to use “nutritionally enhancing” food ingredients, such as Calsura calcium, used in PepsiCo’s Tropicana orange juice, across its entire range of products.
Jeff Weedman, vice-president of external business development at P&G, said that under the deal “P&G’s packaging capabilities are going to be applied to ConAgra’s needs”.
It is the first time P&G has allowed another company access to its packaging technologies – used in non-food lines such as Pantene shampoo, Tide detergent and Fairy liquid – and could mean changes to hundreds of food lines across the US.
The deal has the potential to be one of the biggest to be developed under P&G’s “connect and develop” open-innovation strategy.
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New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and CATRIN EINHORN
June 19, 2008
CANTON, Mo. — Looking out from the highest hill in this town, it suddenly seemed that there were two rivers: the Mississippi, of course, and now a new river, a nameless renegade that had appeared out of nowhere on Wednesday when the Mississippi’s waters broke over a levee near the tiny hamlet of Meyer, Ill., and surged over tens of thousands of acres of farm fields.
The runaway river was gruesome news for the farmers and the residents — about 100, the authorities said — near Meyer and in other towns near where more than 20 levees have overflowed so far, creating their own bodies of water during this week’s flooding along the upper Mississippi. Around Meyer, part of a region of endless fields of soybeans, corn and cattle, state conservation police officers rode door to door in boats to ensure that everyone had left, and flew over in a helicopter, scanning for anyone stranded.
So it went all along the Mississippi on Wednesday, through Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, north of St. Louis: People marching along levees and flood walls, scanning for the slightest puddle or hint of pressure in the sand, waiting for what might come. In Quincy, Ill., local officials raced to reinforce a levee they were worried about south of town; at stake were 100,000 acres of farmland and access to the Mark Twain Bridge. And federal authorities said they were closely monitoring more than 20 other levees they view as vulnerable, as the waters continue to rise downstream in the coming days.
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