Just enough to reduce the consolidation of our vital industries so that a handful of “investors” can’t cause farmers to plow their produce under while hundreds of thousands of Americans, newly out of work, are stuck in food-pantry lines all over the country?
That’s not a new thing. In the 1930s, FDR — yes, that guy, the saint of the New Deal — had farmers destroy and bury livestock and plow under crops in an effort to raise prices. That’s NOT what’s happening today. What’s happening today is that the distribution system — the one corporations have bragged on as “just in time,” efficient, productive, waste-reducing — is actually causing a scarcity in some parts of the country because the markets it’s meant to serve are shut, thanks to the pandemic caused by the corona virus.
“So, is the government now conspiring with farmers to create scarcity? According to Bob Branham, Second Harvest Heartland’s director of produce strategy, this may not be the case. On Branham’s LinkedIn page he wrote, “There is enough food to feed every man, woman, and child in America. Hunger in America is not about supply, it is about redirecting the excess food that is lost each year to those that need it.”
snip
Unfortunately, livestock has been destroyed and used for composting as a result of the pandemic lock-downs that have closed or limited restaurant access to customers. The closures have slowed the processing, preparation and distribution of livestock products. The U.S. simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to handle proper distribution in the best of times, and the pandemic has shed a bright light on this weakness.”
www.waste360.com/...
www.industryweek.com/...
www.securityinfowatch.com/...
www.forbes.com/…
news.stanford.edu/… COVID-19, combined with the effects of ongoing civil conflicts, hotter and drier weather in many areas, and an unfolding locust invasion in Africa and the Middle East, could cut off access to food for tens of millions of people. The world is “on the brink of a hunger pandemic,” according to World Food Program (WFP) Executive Director David Beasley, who warned the United Nations Security Council recently of the urgent need for action to avert “multiple famines of biblical proportions.”
Just enough to turn “value” from the stock-share price back into a product, made here in the USA?
That’ll be harder, because for more than 40 years now the nation has defined all types of value as “the bottom line” on Wall Street’s big ticker boards.
PPE is just one example: www.ibisworld.com/…
Another, per WAPO, is testing swabs: www.washingtonpost.com.
The BBC has notes on why it’s so hard to make working COVID tests: www.bbc.com/…
We’ve had almost three generations, since Reagan, of “workers bad, profits good. Minimize labor’s value, maximize capital’s gains.” Round after round after round of business consolidations, starting with hostile takeovers and offshoring jobs …
It might just be time that we went back to what we used to do when this economy actually worked.
Unionized labor built the US middle class, after World War II. The importance of destroying the power of people whose sweat, tears, blood and muscle and bone built things in the USA cannot be overstated — starting with Reagan firing the PATCO air traffic controllers en masse, despite the absolute necessity of having well-trained, well-rested, well-paid air-traffic controllers across the nation. The cascading effects of Reagan’s anti-union avalanche are still resounding.
The corporations, from Exxon/Mobil (those used to be competitors, not divisions of the same corporate behemoth) to Cargill, have had their way for far too long. As a result jobs went overseas or simply vanished; wages stagnated to the point the actual value of a paycheck, in a blue-collar job, has declined since 1980 on a steady curve. College, the “way out of poverty,” became another way to lock shackles around young people as they had to borrow obscene amounts of money against their future earnings — and then Congress determined that not even bankruptcy would release them from such debts.
Health care became “health insurance,” rather than hands-on, face-to-face evaluations by professionals, and actuaries, cost-managers and ‘coverage specialists’ can now practice a kind of medicine without a license by negating need on behalf of their company’s profit margin.
We the people have put up with enough, and the current administration’s apparent hellbent intention to destroy the remnants of our nation as completely as possible must be where we draw the line. Donald Trump is famously fond of asking, “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Everything. We’re losing more of it by the minute.