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The Lords of Capital Decree Mass Death by Starvation

Glen Ford
Counter Currents
May 1, 2008

“No amount of emergency aid is sufficient to make up for the wild price rises that have already occurred.”

Fidel Castro called biofuels “genocide,” and he was right. And there can be no question as to the identity of the perpetrators of this global genocide: the Lords of Capital that formulate the foreign and domestic policy of the United States. That policy calls for 20 million acres of corn from states like Iowa to be converted from food to fuel. As should have been expected, such a massive diversion almost immediately pushed up the price of all other basic foodstuffs - a global disaster made quick and easy by the fact that, over the past several decades, planetary food production has been taken over by agribusiness - the speculative human parasites that control how food is bought and sold, and to whom, and for what purpose. These Lords of Capital are killers on a mass scale.

“Hot” money has totally distorted the “marketplace” for life-sustaining goods, causing millions of the desperately poor in scores of countries to take to the streets. “In less than a year,” writes the Guardian newspaper, in Britain, “the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent.”

These are nothing less than crimes against humanity, and cannot help but destroy the lives of millions who are already at the very edge of the precipice.