GLOBAL OLIGARCHS AND THE FOOD & ENERGY PRICE HIKES

Erle Frayne Argonza

Good afternoon, Fellows on Earth!

 

As already presented by this writer/analyst in my previous notes and articles, the current state of affairs of the global economy—which featured the inflationary upswings in the food and energy sectors—have a great deal to do with the machinations of the global financiers or oligarchy.

 

Across the ideological and paradigm streams, there has been the preponderance for speculations by the same financiers and subalterns that have been the main upward driver of prices in oil and food. The very same operators were also responsible for the temporary upswing in the price of the US dollar which remains as the chief legal tender for exchanging oil.

 

Below is an article from the Executive Intelligence Review that authenticates to a large degree the positions I took so far regarding oil and food.

 

[Writ 01 July 2008, Quezon City, Manila]

LaRouche: British Are Behind Food and Energy Hyperinflation

June 22, 2008–This release was issued on June 22 by the Lyndon Larouche Political Action Committee (LPAC).

Lyndon LaRouche today forcefully denounced Prince Philip and his fellow genocidalists in the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy, for willfully promoting the food and energy hyperinflation, which threatens to kill billions of people around the globe. “You cannot understand the current hyperinflationary crisis,” LaRouche charged, “without first considering Prince Philip and the late Prince Bernhard’s stated committment to wipe out 80% of the human population, through a combination of wars, diseases and famine. If Prince Philip, and his slavish followers like Al Gore were to succeed, the population of the planet would be reduced, in the next several generations, to well-under two billion people.”

LaRouche was responding to news reports, in the past 24 hours, that the combined food and energy hyperinflation, has created a global national security crisis, threatening the survival of such leading nations as China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Morocco, and Egypt. “I warned, months ago, that the food crisis would soon emerge as the number one issue facing every government in the world,” LaRouche commented. “The combined shock of $140 a barrel oil and food hyperinflation and shortages, willfully promoted by Anglo-Dutch speculators and their oligarchical backers, has thrown the world into an immediate crisis.”

On Sunday, June 22, representatives of the world’s leading oil producing and oil consuming countries will meet in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to consider actions to deal with the crisis. Over 40 nations around the globe have been rocked by food riots and other protests over the hyperinflationary crisis, and the worst shocks, LaRouche warned, are coming during the immediate summer months ahead. “By the time we reach October,” LaRouche warned, “the situation will be catastrophic.”

“There are remedies, even at this late date, to deal with the energy and food hyperinflation,” LaRouche continued, “but nothing is going to work unless and until we crush the power of the British oligarchy.” LaRouche asked: “Do you really think that Saudi Arabia is going to cooperate, so long as their BAE ties to London remain intact—even if the very survival of the Saudi Royal Family is at stake?”

 

SPECULATION PESTERS FOOD: U.S. CASE

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago

Greedy financiers across the globe made humungous killing in the commodities futures recently, which largely explains the sudden hyper-inflationary price increases in grains. The panic that resulted from the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ that food stocks are running out further exacerbated the already volatile situation of the food markets.

The flawed reasoning—that the problem has a great deal to do with the supply side—has been bandied by the paid Pied Pipers of the greedy financiers. This is an old hat lie, and facts about the capital and financial markets belie such cranky rationale for a sector (food) that has been subordinated to predatory finance worldwide.

Below is a case study regarding the subject matter of sky-rocketing food prices on account of speculation, culled from the Executive Intelligence Review. Make your own assessment about the matter.

[Writ 30 June 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]

Speculators Making Killer Profits Off Midwest Flooding While Farmers Can’t Sell Grain

June 16, 2008 (EIRNS)—This morning’s frantic speculation on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) opened with corn (December futures) up 19 cents, for a record $8.06 a bushel (contrast to $4 a year ago); and new crop soybeans hit a record $15.53 a bushel (contrast to $8 a year ago). This is the 12th consecutive day for record-setting corn prices on the exchange, occasioned by binge-speculation off the likely destruction of at least 5 million acres (2 million hectares) of crops in the Midwest flood zone, including at least 3 million acres of corn (out of 86 million nationally).

The volume of grain and soy trading contracts is soaring on the CBOT, part of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). All futures trading has risen 26 percent over the first part of 2008 on the CME, compared to same time 2007 (including non-commodity futures of all kinds). The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Federal agency which could stop the deadly game, but will not, released a report June 13, showing huge flows of funds going into the corn market. The CFTC report gives specifics on the record volumes of outstanding corn commitments—amounting to paper bushels, the way paper barrels exist in oil speculation. The CFTC says that speculative funds have added 34,732 contracts to their long positions and cut 4,588 contracts from their short positions, putting them net long on 219,041 corn futures contracts. Index funds are now net long on 427,352 contracts.

At the same time, prices are falling for the farmer trying to forward-sell his corn or soybeans to his local buyer. There has been a 12 cent drop in the prices offered to farmers for their corn over the past 24 hours! This comes on top of an average 4 cent a bushel drop in prices to the farmer last week in the Cornbelt, according to a spot check of local grain buyers, by Dow Jones. This farmer price disparity with the exchange prices, reflects not only the physical destruction of shipping and processing infrastructure, but also the fact that whenever prices spike on the Chicago Board of Trade, the local grain elevator or buyer is hit with a margin call, that he now cannot meet. So he is not offering farmers forward-contracts. Many local terminals, strapped for cash, have gone bankrupt, or sold out to the wave of hedge and index funds now on a buying spree for hard infrastructure, with which to further hold and hoard grain. E.g. WhiteBox, based in Minneapolis. The cartel terminals, dominated by Cargill and ADM, started denying forward contacts to purchase farmers’ grain months ago, under the principle: protect yourself, screw the farmer. The cartel firms offer the farmer take-it-or-leave-it prices, and terms of delivery.

On top of this, key grain and meat processing facilities are shut down by the flood all over the Midwest, for example, a huge ADM corn-processing plant in Cedar Rapids.

WHAT RICE SHORTAGE? SACKLOADS CAN FILL MOUNTAINS!

Bro. Erle Frayne D. Argonza

[Writ 03 May 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]

Good day, Fellows!

You see, if you’re going to beg (panic buy) from any rice trader in Cagayan Valley (northern Philippines) for some rice, accompanied by your melancholic look like as if all rice will disappear from Earth very soon, the stunned trader would most likely say, “you’re asking only for a few rice? By golly we got mountain loads of them here!” “What? You say there’s a shortage of rice? Tell that to the Marines! What a Big Lie, this shortage!”

 

Development partners, peace builders, this is the latest news update I got on the ground. A structural  engineer up north, who contracts projects for the Department of Agriculture, laughed with guffaws about the ‘shortage lie’ as he narrated to me his fresh reportage passed on to him by traders. There’s plenty of rice to last for months, for Christ’s sake!

 

Look at what the organized chaos had done so far here in Manila and other regions. It had made the poorer more pathetic as they have to line up for supposedly cheap rice, made to believe as they are by public relations Pied Pipers that rice is going to run out soon. We’re almost near to stampedes here already, thanks heavens there’s still some dignity left among our poor folks they won’t stampede for rice alone. They would do that for a Wowowie TV program that promises to turn them into millionaires overnight, but to stampede for 5 kilograms of rice? Hello! Our folks are too civilized to buy that bullet.

 

To continue, listen to what some traders said: “Kabayan, how tragic this shortage lie had done not only to our poor but to us traders. We got so huge stocks in the warehouses, but now we cannot just bring them to Manila for unloading, afraid that no retailer might buy them because suddenly their wholesale prices are sky high. So now even our pockets have to wait for the more stable days. Sad!”

 

That’s the real picture at ground-level, Partners in development & peace. THERE IS NO RICE SHORTAGE. The shortage was stage-managed. Whether the theatrics was designed overseas and spilled over here, or that it’s only a domestic script is something worth investigating. Our intelligence community should get busy getting to this business of pinning down who staged managed what.

 

Meantime, the Thailand & Company (states) that cartelized rice recently has done an act that now seems reactive. It is pure and plain panic, disguised as anything worth the ‘rationalization’ of the rice sector. True, for a time this measure can stabilize rice price and bring it down a bit. But now, this company has to prove itself worthy to the global community that its cartelization effort—state-sponsored, using the nation-state as mediating instrument—will make rice available to rice-consumers at relatively reasonable (note: cheap is out of the question) and sustained supply.

 

If the Thailand & Co will fail to meet global expectations, its member-states will be stoned with fiery embers of public wrath. And that is because, by placing themselves in the line of fire between the global consumers (who were the ‘victims’ in the shortage game script) and the global financiers-speculators (the real culprits in the criminal rise of price rice and stage-managed shortage), the national cartels will be the vent object for public ire. And there it goes, the real culprits go unnoticed and unpunished.

 

The real story of the price fluctuations in grains and foods in general is that many hedge funds and related financiers decided to park their money a bit in food for their commodity futures operations, eventually driving prices higher up. The reason being that it’s safer to park and earn money in food, period. Look at how the hedge funds were burnt out by their over-exposures to the subprime housing in the USA, that’s enough a precedent for the same financiers to go to safer investment havens. Or else the various global stakeholders will focus their eyes on these gung-ho derivatives investors and ‘burn them at stake’ (criminalize in world courts, regulated via new global treaties and instruments).

 

And that’s where price stabilization would start later: regulate speculative finance, take down the ‘virtual economy’ based on predatory speculation, dismantle global monopolies, return to fixed currencies backed up by the gold standard, tax cross-border financial transactions, and so on. Quite a wish list for now, true. Crisis after crisis will bring us to their galvanization…and, returning to the ‘real economy’, there’ll be enough grains, cereals, staples for all the earth’s peoples.