Maybe it was too early to start joking about eating squirrel and deer:
Farmers and food executives appealed fruitlessly to federal officials yesterday for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher. Meanwhile, some Americans are stocking up on staples such as rice, flour and oil in anticipation of high prices and shortages spreading from overseas.
***Costco and other grocery stores in California reported a run on rice, which has forced them to set limits on how many sacks of rice each customer can buy. Filipinos in Canada are scooping up all the rice they can find and shipping it to relatives in the Philippines, which is suffering a severe shortage that is leaving many people hungry.
And then you have this:
Noel Bosse and Ken Davis watch as the numbers keep spinning at the gas pump — 70 bucks, 80 bucks. Gulp, guzzle, then it stops: $101 for about 25 gallons.
The $100 fill-up has arrived in the United States.
“I think it’s absolutely ridiculous,” Bosse says with disgust.
For all the Canadian readers who are upset they don’t get to contribute to the Obama campaign, here is how you can help. We have six more months of Bush, and at this rate, what we need most from our allies are a stable currency and the willingness to send in the RCMP to help stop the food riots. Thanks in advance.
AmIDreaming
…or, in the alternative, send a dollar! A Canadian dollar can feed a US family for *five days*!
Zifnab
Why do farmers and food buyers hate capitalism?!
Seriously, wtf people. I can understand how Wall Street wants to make its buck. I can understand how the commodities markets are hot right now. I can even almost sympathize with the oil traders who are driving up futures prices to cash in on the energy crisis – at the very least, they’re kicking us in the pocket book and getting us in gear over global warming.
But rice speculation? Surely we can’t have any qualms about stepping in and squelching rice speculation. The mortgage market game was fun enough. I really don’t want to hear about CDOs floating around at the expense of starving people and giant warehouses full of rice growing mold as an investment vehicle that no one can afford to buy. That’s fucking insane.
Punchy
And the article continues, “Bosse then later drove off in his “Bush-Cheney” bumpersticker-adorned SUV to get to the local NRA convention, where he had paid over $1000 to hear Rove give the centerpiece speech”.
$100 fillups, and yet McCane is poised to win the preznitsee. We’re surrounded by friggin retards.
Billy K
Beware, Mounties. We will eat your horsies.
‘Muricans be HONGRY!
Chris
But…but The Free Market! Ayn Rand and Ron Paul told me it would fix* everything naturally*.
Karmakin
Chris:It will, for a given definition of fix.
In this case, that definition states that you have a small rich overclass and a majority underclass to serve them.
Yup. It’ll fix it well.
b. hussein canuckistani
It will, by starving to death the surplus population.
How about if we offer asylum to the 10,000 smartest of you, and enough extra to build a big fence?
Phoenix Woman
Meanwhile, remember how Bush and McCain are telling us that al-Sadr’s best buds with the Iranians? Um, not so much:
Dave
I guess with the mortgage market in ruins, the brain trust on Wall Street has moved on to the commodities market.
Oliver's Neck
But it does fix it. There’s no need to stop gross speculative profit-making legislatively. See – people will die of starvation, leaving less demand for food, meaning a return to equilibrium in the market. Yay!
Personally, I think we should just start eating the capitalists – and I’m a vegitarian.
BFR
In the interest of full disclosure, you should point out that there is fact, no shortage of rice.
That being said, that the average citizen is as dumb as a sack of hammers (and panicky ones to boot!) makes Bush no less of an idiot.
BFR
Morons. “I’m dependent on gas, therefore gas should be cheap.” There’s your sense of entitlement in an effing nutshell.
Tim F.
Common miconception. Have no doubt that the population will drop fast as soon as non-ubiquitous oil kills off modern mega-agriculture and the global food distribution system, but I strongly doubt that most will sit at home and wait patiently to die. People are generally more feisty than that.
Krista
I like it!
Michael D.
Maybe I’m missing something, John…
How is the increasing price of rice – or for that matter, the price of any food – Bush’s fault?
chopper
/rimshot
Dork
Brilliant pun.
Wilfred
Just out of curiosity, how much is a kilo of rice or flour in the US?
cbear
While many other Americans may soon be stocking up on staples such as dented cans of Chinese cat food.
But, not to worry, I’m sure the Bush Administration is working hard to solve that whole “poison in the pet food” problem.
chopper
in other news, japanese whalers lanuched a superficial campaign…
count dracula painstakingly tried…
JWeidner
How about artistic-types? I’m an animator. Surely you’ll want entertaining movies and cartoons and not just brainiacs…
BFR
Speaking only for myself, I think this is all probably for the best in the long run. Bush & company have effectively embraced a weak-dollar policy unlike prior adminstrations. This is leading to short-term pain in terms of high fuel costs, but it will result in a couple of long-term benefits:
1) reduced fuel consumption through petro conservation (and the attendant benefits it will bring)
2) revitalized industrial base due to an increase in exports
Again, short-term it sucks but this might be about the one area where I agree with Bush on policy*
(*assumes this is intentional)
Dreggas
Michael D.
The rice issue is a global one but there have been severe price increases in other commodities due to increased growing of crops for ethanol. Rather than crops of wheat, rye, etc. more farmers are growing corn here in the U.S. to make ethanol since there’s a lot of money in it, forget it does nothing for the environment.
Add into the mix severe weather and flooding ruining crops in the midwest, or preventing crops from being planted and it gets worse. Further add to the mix the rising fuel costs to run tractors and trucks and trains and the transportation necessary to get the crops to market and the prices will continue to rise. The U.S. was, in many ways the globes bread basket, we exported tons of food-stuffs but that is declining.
There was another article not long ago about the stocks of rye flour, the reserve stocks that is, dwindling as well. To further aggrivate matters it won’t be long before there is a water shortage in the midwest as one of the largest aquifers in the U.S. is running out of water faster than it is replenishing it.
Failure to address global warming issues, continued subsidies to agri-business (there is no family farm anymore, really), policies that encourage farmers and agri-business to plant non-food crops to be made into ethanol and the surge in fuel prices can be laid, to an extent, at the feet of this administration. Not that they could have fixed global warming but we would have had an 8 year head start.
This is just the beginning, soon it will spread. Now there’s even research that shows that, due to pollution, flowers may be losing their scent, one of the primary things that attract bees and the bees themselves are dying off. Watch orange prices start to rise not just due to crop damage but because of a lack of crops due to a lack of pollination. Some might laugh but the farmer’s best friend is a honey bee which does all the pollination work.
It’s a butterfly effect.
Billy K
I’m buying as much rice as I can, filling my pockets with it, and galavanting about town. Everyone is sooooo jealous.
I had a conversation with a friend last night. Interesting guy. About as hardcore of a Republican as one can be. He was horrified by “food rationing” in America
1) He absolutely despises Bush now – about as much as Hillary.
2) He’s convinced there will be “blood in the streets” (of America) within 5 years.
3) He hates Obama, but he actually listened and considered when I made my case that he was the only guy who can get this country back on track. That really stunned me.
Dennis - SGMM
All of that speculation money had to go somewhere, didn’t it? Now it’s being applied, with the same results, to petroleum and commodities. And the Fed is propping these people up because…?
A.Political
For all the Canadian readers who are upset they don’t get to contribute to the Obama campaign….
—
We’re dealing with our own homegrown neo-con problem up here, which is being run by Republican consultants behind the scenes for gawds sake..
http://news.google.ca/news?hl=en&ned=ca&ie=UTF-8&ncl=1151383295
p.a.
above from 12/2004. (em mine)
Comment 1: of course, this just means we didn’t cut Paris Hilton’s taxes enough!
Comment 2: this is so obviously Bill Clinton’s penis’ fault!!!
cbear
Look at the upside from a gooper perspective: this may stem the tide of illegal immigration from Bangladesh and Somalia.
jake
Eat. The. Rich.
Dreggas
p.a.
spot on, on that as well. With how weak the dollar is and the fact that we now import more food than we grow we’re going to get screwed even more.
Billy K
I told my Republican, illegal-immigration ragin’ buddy this last night in total seriousness. I says to him, I says, “look on the bright side. Pretty soon, the Mexicans won’t WANT to come here any more.”
chopper
that would be great if we didn’t sell off our manufacturing base overseas years ago.
Dreggas
I hear they taste like chicken.
chopper
don’t forget a once-in-a-century drought in australia, one of the world’s largest growers of wheat. and their rice crop is down 98%. in times of drought rice is always the first to go because growing it is so water intensive. lots of australian farmers are switching to wine grapes.
Dreggas
Australia factors into the global warming part. Their wine is quite good from what I have heard.
Evinfuilt
Maybe we shouldn’t be growing rice in the deserts of northern California? Not exactly the best approach to water conservation.
John Cole
Directly, none of it is. In fact, as was noted upstream, there isn’t even a real shortage. He is, however, President, and this is all happening on his watch, so if Red State can refer to the Pelosi recession, I can make snarky titles.
Ben
In fairness, it should be pointed out that, to a significant extent, increased demand for meat in China and India is driving up prices. It takes a lot of grain to raise cattle and other tasty animals. Also, subsidies for ethanol as fuel are indefensible.
bartkid
>Maybe it was too early to start joking about eating squirrel and deer…
>For all the Canadian readers… we need most from our allies are a stable currency and the willingness to send in the RCMP to help stop the food riots. Thanks in advance.
Maybe we can mail you lots and lots of gophers.
We expect to be overrun by them varmits this summer, and they grill up just like squirrel.
If we send the Mounties, it won’t be to stop the food riots.
PeterJ
He might have turned his own daughter away from the republicans…
Heckuva Job, Bush… indeed… ;)
Zifnab
I’m more worried about the speculation. I’ve seen estimates that the inflated price of oil can be attributed by 20-30% to the futures markets and other forms of speculation. When about 50 cents on every gallon of gas is going to some tycoon hedge fund manager, its not the gas tax that is raping Americans at the pump.
I can see the same thing happening to food commodities in response to the mortgage crash. People want to put their money somewhere safe, and – with the Australia drought and food riots around the world – rice/wheat/corn seems a good bet.
Likewise, the oil crisis brought on by our Middle East Adventure has us creating and using more ethanol. It takes about 250 ears of corn to fill your tank up with a gallon of gas. Since the price of oil is rising, you can get more money for your 250 ears of corn in a liquefied, flammable form than you can in the boiled-in-a-pot-for-eating variety.
All these little shortages and redistributive measures can be traced back to Bush policy choices. He’s not the only player in the game, but he does control the biggest pile of chips. And, as the head of the most powerful country in the world, its his job to unfuck us when meandering market forces or natural disasters leave us fucked. If he wasn’t actively screwing America over, he’d still be at fault for repeatedly knee-capping and choking off every legislative or cabinet-level attempt at trying to help.
I know this may sound crazy, Michael, but the US Government has a very heavy hand in world affairs. Through a combination of foolish mistakes and willful neglect, Bush has put America – and the rest of the world – in a very shitty position. Yeah, he actually did fuck us on this one too.
chopper
its a bunch of stuff. unfortunately, its all happening at once.
honeybee colonies collapsing? check.
flooding and drought in major production areas? check.
wheat rust in other areas? check.
high oil prices raising the cost of growing, fertilizing and shipping, and also pushing american farmers into growing corn for ethanol? check.
the thing that made the great depression as brutal as it was was that drought and shitty farming practices turned america’s breadbasket into a dusty mess at the same time. it was a one-two punch.
Wilfred
A friend of mine met her at a Unesco function in New York recently. He said he was quite impressed with her sharpness and open-mindedness – my friend being quite to the left.
BFR
Oh, please.
Here
Grumpy Code Monkey
Can you say “food riot”? Good, I knew you could!
Martin
In a college anthro course we read a book that researched cannibalism and interviewed different tribes (what few remained). They commented on how different nationalities tasted different because of their diet.
I seem to recall that they liked Japanese the best.
Martin
And about a gallon of oil to process that 250 ears of corn.
It’s the circle, the circle of graft…
4thelulz
>>“food riot”
At ADM HQ.
j/k NSA4tehlulz
Damn. I spelled “the” correctly….
Zifnab
I think that’s actually worked into the equation. Like, you don’t have to hang ring 250 ears of corn for a gallon of gas. But the gas you get minus the gas you put in leaves you with one gallon per 250 ears.
I could be mistaken, though. Either way – shitty deal.
mikesdak
At least we can count on the oil companies to react sympathetically.
notable exerpts:
Oil companies are holding refinery rates at levels not seen since the 2005 hurricanes.
A U.S. Gulf Coast refinery could make about $9.50 a barrel by turning light, sweet crude into gasoline and other products. That’s triple the margin levels from October 2007 but still not enough incentive to encourage wide-scale gasoline-making efforts.
So triple the profits of 6 months ago isn’t enough when others can be squeezed even more.
I know it’s good old-fashioned capitalism, just like heroin dealers practice with addicts,except there’s more competition among heroin dealers.
Dracula
Fuck off.
Dreggas
see my bit on the major midwest aquifer that is drying up. That goes, hello dust bowl II.
Damned at Random
I had four deer in my backyard this AM and a squirrel that visits the bird feeder daily- the Damned family will outlive you all
Dave_Violence
Whoa! You’re telling us that the basis of this news story to which you’ve linked is false? You’re saying that the reports of Americans eating their children – uncooked, even – are not true? You mean to tell me that the USA isn’t a fourth-world country? Are you saying that, even though the folks at Costco indicated they weren’t aware of a shortage, even though it’s common practice for stores to limit customers to a set number of items, be they widgets or veeblefetzers, even though for some odd reason the supermarkets in my area aren’t experiencing food riots, that the white I see is actually black?
Are Aermicans THAT stupid? Are we THAT helpless that we’ll believe not our own eyes but some strange untruth? Perhaps, perhaps. Yet we still are blogging on… We’re still looking forward to the weekend, we’re caring about sports scores… Strange, that.
Clearly, since all Americans are now homeless, due to their stupidly buying homes with subprime mortgages, and now we’re starving because there’s no more rice to be bought at any price, there needs to be Someone to save us all from this. But who? And at what cost? After all, we Americans have NOTHING left to pay with, right?
Svensker
Bush IS partly responsible. Turmoil in the Middle East raises the price of oil, dropping dollar raises the price of oil and food/commodities, financing the Iraq War by borrowing further weakens the dollar, encouraging corn growing rather than wheat to make ethanol which drives up the price of grain — all can be laid at Bush’s door.
I also think the lack of confidence in Bush as the President of the United States adds to a general feeling of “nobody’s in charge”, which only adds to the sense of uncertainty.
And yet 28% still support this guy. Guess they’re the ones who LIKE the idea of Armageddon.
daryljhusseinfontaine
Chickenhawk, actually, but it’s a common misconception.
D
chopper
yeah, with the water shortages we already are seeing in the US i’m keeping a close eye on agricultural news this year.
dust bowl II: the revenge
jnfr
Geez louise, will some kindly moderator fix the frakking link that’s making this thread unreadable?
Dreggas
what’s funny is that people will point to all the rain and flooding going on and say “what water shortage” of course they don’t realize that the water that’s being used up is from the ground,not the sky and that due to the ground not being able to absorb that amount of water, that quickly it just floods everything then ends up in rivers.
With lower than avg. snow melts and other issues we’re facing a real problem. Here in So Cal they predict L.A. will be out of water in less than 15 years.
Cain
OK, so to wit:
We have War, and now we have Famine.. what’s left?
cain
Dreggas
pestilence and death. Death is kinda over arching. However I have seen some really big fucking grasshoppers here in so cal of late. Some as big as 4 inches long.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
You know I’ve always liked David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series, but I prefered it as fiction, not prediction. Thanks, David!
binzinerator
What’s ridiculously disgusting is that most of America gave the middle finger to conservation. The writing was on the wall in 1973, but people didn’t want to read what it said. Carter told them; they held him in contempt for it. The first thing Ronnie did when he moved into the White House was to remove the solar collector. Stupid Jimmy Carter. He didn’t know real Americans don’t conserve. Cheney said as much. The whole so-called conservative attitude toward conservation was summed up by our war criminal Dick himself: “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”
One can’t help but wonder how ‘conserve’ became a bad word among conservatives.
And so we built our cities especially our suburbs without a care or thought for a future of high energy prices, even though it didn’t take a clairvoyant to see it was just a matter of time. We poured a huge portion of our national wealth into creating an infrastructure, even the fabric of our very society, that utterly relies on cheap energy.
How many hours do people spend driving to work? How many hours are spent taking the kids to school, to soccer, to their friends’ houses? Why is a minivan an emblem of the soccer mom? Why are so many women (and men) forced into the role of chauffeur for their kids?
Got public transportation? Even got a sidewalk to walk on? Is the grocery store (or your kid’s school or the drug store or the hardware store or any business other than a gas station) within a reasonable walking distance?
Doubt it. Most of America wasn’t built that way. Conservatives have been trying to destroy public transport for decades. They want sprawl. It’s been good for their core constituents’ businesses: real estate, finance, the oil industry.
No what is absolutely ridiculous is that most of America demanded to be lied to, starting with Reagan they got what they wanted. They suspended their disbelief when thinking about the future, where oil was always going to be cheap for the rest of their lives.
What is fucking disgusting is the leaders who understood the nation’s dependent energy source was controlled largely by countries with regimes and cultures at the worst overtly hostile or at the least antithetical to our own institutions and culture — and did nothing to ensure our security by leading an effort to end our dependency on oil. Worse still are those so-called leaders like Bush and Cheney whose solution is to invade oil producing countries, thereby disrupting the oil supply, driving up oil prices, and mock those who conserve as un-American — all without having any sort of plan for other energy sources.
But we know all about the Bushies’ disdain for planning for when reality refuses to conform to their wishes.
nightjar
Maybe these folks are involved?
binzinerator
There are some good reasons given in this Harper’s article by Eric Janszen for why ‘green’ energy (of which ethanol is a part) will be the next bubble to replace the housing bubble. Actually, the whole dang thing is very interesting regarding our economy.
The whole idea of ethanol struck me as dumb from the get-go. Lessee here: we’re paving over tens of thousands of acres of arable land every day to build sprawl loaded with McMansions and roads while we are planning to fuel the SUVs driven back and forth on those roads by the occupants of those McMansions with corn grown from the farmland we’re rapidly paving over to build more McMansions and roads. Oh dear. And we’re going to have to feed a growing population too.
Riiiight.
Oh, and of course this is going to be some how sustainable for 100 years from now, a future with at least double the people to feed, even more cars to fuel, and even less arable land to do it with.
No effin’ way.
People snicker when I told them how stupid we are as a nation to be destroying our valuable and irreplaceable farmland. Because we only value arable land for the sale price right now we somehow can’t imagine its value 100 years from now when we will absolutely need our arable land to feed ourselves. Mother nature’s done making more farmland, at least not on production schedule that will matter to us, but we haven’t stopped making more people.
Ah yes. But I must be a loony unrealistic treehugging elitist.
We are as careless and clueless with the arable land we do have as we were with the energy we didn’t have. And with ethanol we see an intersection of food and energy and unwise land use, where one affects the others.
Perhaps one upside to this ethanol bubble in the making: it may make corn pay better than the developer, and as such help to keep it farmland.
NonyNony
BFR –
It’s NOT intentional. It’s bungling by Bush pure and simple.
How can I tell? Extrapolate from your points 1 and 2:
1 – A drop in oil usage in the US would mean that either we’re doing less overall OR we make some energy breakthroughs that allow us to continue to produce/consume as much as we do now while using less oil. Either of these options are bad for oil companies, and the first option is bad for the US Chamber of Commerce as a whole. Bush would not intentionally do anything that would cause direct harm to either of these groups – especially NOT the oil companies.
2 – A boost in our manufacturing means more power to the folks doing manufacturing jobs – which means the unions benefit. Since the Republicans have been doing their damnedest since the 70s to kill the power of unions in this country (which is one of the big drives of shipping jobs overseas) anything that provides more power to the unions is not something they would intentionally do.
Hence, it’s pretty easy to see that this “weak dollar policy” is yet another example of Bush’s “Sidam” touch – where everything he touches turns to shit. I have no doubt that Bush never intended for the dollar to weaken as it has – and that in fact the invasion of Iraq was partly to stop other actors in the region from shifting their pricing to the Euro and away from the dollar (another magnificent failure on the man’s part, I might add).
binzinerator
Yup. Some even can’t spell their own nationality.
If you ever voted for him, you have your proof.
binzinerator
him = Bush
jnfr
Thank you, thank you, kindly moderators.
grandpajohn
Actually where I live it is no joke, people have been doing it for years as the deer population has become so plentiful they have become a problem.
I live in a small town. My wife looked out the window one day and there was a deer running up the street. At certain times of the year it is almost unsafe to drive after dark. MY son-in-law lives in the country and hunts off of his back porch.the influx of Deer amd wild turkey hunters during their respective seasons has created hunting as one of our major industries
BFR
I’d thought of that as well, but on the other hand since no politician can come right out and say they support a weak dollar, there’s always going to be some doubt.
A weak dollar is good for the industrial base, lousy for consumers. I can see how the GOP wouldn’t exactly mind that outcome.
Soliton
I’m surprised that no one here has heard the term “long pig”..
Humans don’t taste like chicken, they taste like pork..
Hence the scene in _Fried Green Tomatoes_ where the sheriff is commenting about the best ribs he’s ever tasted.
Person of Choler
Why not look on the bright side? America suffers from an unprecedented plague of obesity. If you need proof, take a look at the folks at the mall next time you go there.
We know that higher fuel prices will have the salubrious effect of cutting down fuel consumption, lowering carbon emissions and thereby extending the time that Life Itself exists on earth.
Similarly, higher food prices will decrease the overconsumption of calories, thus making our people healthier and more attractive so we can better enjoy our last days as a species.
rapier
It’s excess money that is causing this inflation. When the inflation was in financial paper, real estate and other assets all was well. Then the last sucker was found and roped into a mortgage and several trillion dollars in paper assets have lost half or more of their value so the money is seeking love in the stuff going up. That would be commodities.
Sure, there is a good fundamental story about tight supplies but a crucial psychological threshold has been reached and now everyone wants to buy and hold and ‘invest’ in stuff, not paper.
It could end tomorrow of 5 years from now. It’s difficult to say. Bubble usually run 5 years. Arguably the commodity bubble is about2 years old.
Kynn
Demmons wrote:
LOL.
And his next front page post is about gas prices…