The Lords of Capital Decree Mass Death by Starvation
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
Broadcasters and others desiring an MP3 copy of this commentary should visit the Black Agenda Radio Archive page here.
"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.
"The Lords of Capital
have imposed a triage of death by starvation on the planet."
The so-called "market" - which is actually a club of
super-rich men who distort and destroy everything of value to humanity that
they touch - will be the death of us all, and much quicker than through the
effects of global warming, which is also greatly accelerated by the ghoulish,
greedy rush to grow food for cars rather than people. In such a murderous
environment -manipulated purely for the profits of the Lords of Capital -
neither trees nor peasants stand a chance. The United Nations says it needs about half a billion dollars
for the most critical cases of starvation, but no amount of emergency aid is
sufficient to make up for the wild price rises that have already occurred - and
which will put trillions in the pockets of the Lords of Capital.
Agribusiness wiped out small farmers in the U.S., and
impoverished and pushed off the land untold millions of peasants, worldwide.
Now the Lords of Capital have imposed a triage of death by starvation on the
planet. The people who live on two dollars or less per day will have to die,
and then, as prices rise, the three dollar people will follow.
The men who profit from such mass murder use terms like
"structural adjustment" and "economic fundamentals" to attach a veneer of
rationality to a chaotic system they have created on the fly for the sole
purpose of mega-theft. In the end, the Lords of Capital have mastered only one
art: the production of overlapping calamities, each more lethal than the last.
Soon, if not already, the Haitian poor will have no cooking oil to mix with
clay for their diet of dirt
pies. The Lords of Capital will have turned them into dirt for another
Haitian's consumption and demise.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Shani Robinson taught in the Atlanta, Georgia public school system.
Dr. Nicole Price is the Forbes Books author of Spark The Heart: Engineering Empathy In Your Organization.
Nick Encalada-Malinowski is Director of the Civil Rights Union campaign at Vocal-NY.
The climate emergency won't end because of heartfelt pleas to the people and the interests who created the crisis. Ecocide will stop when capitalism ends.
To mark the last days of Black August, we reprint below Freedomways’ 1975 editorial about Joanne Little, a Black woman indicted for killing her white prison guard and would-be rapist.
