Forum for discussing local and world politics and issues. All views are welcomed. Let your opinions be heard on current news and politics.
All standard guidelines apply to this board, No Flaming, No Taunting, No Foul Language,No sexual innuendos,etc..
As politics can be a volatile subject, please consider how you would feel if your comment were directed toward yourself.
Any post deemed to be in violation of guidelines will be deleted or edited without warning or notification. Any continued misbehavior will result in a ban or hidden status, so please play nice!!!
*"Moderators are here for a reason. If a moderator (or Global Moderator or Fencer) requests that a discussion on a certain subject to cease - for whatever reason - please respect these wishes. Failure to do so may result in being hidden, or banned."
> To get people to work, to make them indeed "function", all the families comunities etc you need to bust the wall street > our standards of agriculture are getting better >This industrialisation not only went a little too far, it's waaay out of hand.
You make very good points in your last two posts. Poverty and drugs go together, and so do money and drugs. In reality the drug business is being fuelled by several factors.
On one side we have big demand fro drugs from the wealthier industrialized nations. This demands comes from all segments of society from the rich to the poor. Drugs among the poor are the worst problem because drugs make poverty even worse. Poor people use drugs to escape from a bad life, and that life gets worse as a result. It is a problem that feeds on iself.
The other side of the problem is the supply side. Most of the growing of plants for drugs is done by some of the poorest farmers and peasants in the world. These people grow coca, poppies and other crops because drug crops make more money than food crops. A farmer growing corn will starve to death, but a farmer growing coca can at least make just enough to feed his children.
What does all this have to do with Wall Street (or other financial centres in the world)? Agricultural conglomerates (like Monsanto, DuPont, etc.) make billions of dollars by controlling the supply of seed, fertilizers and pesticides. These companies make money by overpricing essential supplies that farmers need. In wealthier industrialized nations farmers might be able to get by, but in developing nations farmers can barely break even between the cost of production and the income they get from cash crops. At the same time big grain producers in the US, Canada and Europe dump massive amounts of grain at lower prices and that means that small farmers in developing nations can't compete. So poor farmers get a double pronged attack on their livelihoods. Expensive supplies and external competition means that their cash crops are worthless, so they turn to growing drug crops out of desperation.
The end result has been that at no time in history have there been so many human beings suffering from hunger. In 2006 there were 850 million people who did not have enough food to eat. With the massive rise in oil in 2007 and 2008 the cost of grain increased between 80% and 300% in developing nations. As a result now nearly 2 billion human beings do not have enough to eat. That is about 30% of the population of our planet. Ironically, advances in agricultural technology also mean that never in history has humanity produced so much food. We have enough food to feed everyone, but we insist in pursuing agriculture for profit and that is leaving 30% of our planet without enough to eat.
The same can be said for industrialization. We live in the most productive time in history. Never in history has humanity produced so many consumer goods, yet 1/3 of humanity lives in poverty and misery. The reason is simple. Poverty means cheap labour, and cheap labour means mass production at a low cost. Who makes the profit? Wall Street (and other) billionaires.