Shenanigans on Hennepin Ave. Minneapolis

Shenanigans on Hennepin   The Minneapolis Grain Exchange

An obscure syndicate known as the Minneapolis Grain Exchange remains the supreme price-setter for the continent's most widely exported wheat, a high-protein variety called hard red spring. Upper Left: Minneapolis Grain Exchange today; Upper Right: The Exchange itself; Lower Left: The Old Exchange trading pits; Lower Right: Hard Red Spring wheat.

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CAPITALISTS OF CHAOS:
SPECULATING ON FOOD WHILE
THE WORLD STARVES

[THE ROOT OF THE ARAB REVOLT AGAINST THE AMERICAN NEW
WORLD ORDER SYSTEM IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA]

By: S.R. Shearer
April 24, 2011

FOOD BECOMES A FINANCIAL ABSTRACTION
TO BE MANIPULATED BY THE ELITES

Frederick Kaufman - in an article that appeared last year (July, 2010) in Harper's Magazine entitled "The Food Bubble:  How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away with It" - explains what's been happening:

"The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment.

"Agriculture, rooted as it is in the rhythms of reaping and sowing, had not traditionally engaged the attention of Wall Street bankers, whose riches did not come from the sale of real things like wheat or bread but from the manipulation of ethereal concepts like risk and collateralized debt.

"But in 1991 nearly everything else that could be recast as a financial abstraction had already been considered. Food was pretty much all that was left. And so with accustomed care and precision, Goldman's analysts went about transforming food into a concept.

"They selected eighteen commodifiable ingredients and contrived a financial elixir that included cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs, and a variety or two of wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. Then they began to offer shares.

NOTE: The creation of the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index is — as stated above — based on complicated mathematical formulations; the product created is called a "derivative." Derivatives are "investment instruments" whose value is linked to or "derived" from some other security. Derivatives are an extremely high-risk form of market speculation; nonetheless, they have become in recent years one of the largest markets in the world. The size of the derivatives market is estimated to be $600 trillion today. And just how complicated these mathematical formulations are can be demonstrated by examining the so-called PEARL derivative, a currency derivative that was marketed by Morgan Stanley in the early 1990s. The Pearl derivative (a simple derivative by today's standards) was linked to its principal multiplied by the change in the U.S. dollar over a particular period of time, plus twice the change in the value of the British pound, minus twice the change in the value of the Swiss Franc.

"As was usually the case, Goldman's product flourished. The prices of cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, and wheat began to rise, slowly at first, and then rapidly. And as more people sank money into Goldman's food index, other bankers took note and created their own food indexes for their own clients. Investors were delighted to see the value of their venture increase, but the rising price of breakfast, lunch, and dinner did not align with the interests of those of us who eat. And so the commodity index funds began to cause problems.

 "Wheat was a case in point. North America, the Saudi Arabia of cereal, sends nearly half its wheat production overseas, and an obscure syndicate known as the Minneapolis Grain Exchange remains the supreme price-setter for the continent's most widely exported wheat, a high-protein variety called hard red spring. Other varieties of wheat make cake and cookies, but only hard red spring makes bread. Its price informs the cost of virtually every loaf on

earth."

GOLDMAN SACHS CREATES A
SOPHISTICATED PONZI SCHEME

According to Steven Rothbart, a commodities trader for Cargil, when Goldman Sachs entered the commodities market —

"Commodities had died. We sat there every day and the market wouldn't move. People left. They couldn't make a living anymore."

It was in the midst of this dead market that Goldman Sachs created its index fund: the strategy behind the index consisted essentially of creating a "BUBBLE" in the price of a certain commodity and persuading investors to participate in the creation of that bubble by bidding the price of the commodity up through a mechanism known as "REPLICATION." [Please see Appendix 1 for a description of this mechanism.]

While they would never admit it, what  Goldman Sachs created was a very, very sophisticated PONZI scheme. [Please see our article, "Ponzi Schemes, The Investment Craze and the End of Days" for a description of a Ponzi scheme.]

As a result of Goldman Sachs' Ponzi scheme, the price of wheat rose from a little less than $4.00 a bushel in 2003 to over $15.00 by 2008 — a rise of 400 percent, and it did so when the world was producing more wheat than ever before.

Indeed, the wheat harvest of 2008 turned out to be the most bountiful the world had ever seen. U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics eventually revealed that 657 million bushels of 2008 wheat remained in U.S. silos after the buying season, a record-breaking "carryover." So plentiful was the supply of wheat that even as hundreds of millions slowly starved around the world, 200 million bushels were sold for animal feed. Livestock owners could afford the wheat; poor people could not.

The worldwide price of food as a whole rose by 80 percent between 2005 and 2008, and unlike other food catastrophes of the past half century or so, the United States was not insulated from this one, as 49 million Americans found themselves unable to put a full meal on the table. Across the country demand for food stamps reached an all-time high, and one in five kids came to depend on food kitchens. In Los Angeles nearly a million people went hungry. In Detroit armed guards stood watch over grocery stores.

Naturally enough, as with all Ponzi schemes, the Ponzi pyramid had to eventually collapse, and it did for wheat shortly after reaching the astronomical price of over $15.00 a bushel in 2008. But Goldman Sachs had found a way to profit from the pyramid scheme regardless of whether it was inflating or deflating. Kaufman writes:

"If the price of wheat went up, Goldman made money. And if the price of wheat fell, Goldman still made money ... The bankers had figured out how to extract profit from the commodities market without taking on any of the risks they themselves had introduced ..."  [Again, please see Appendix 1 for a description of this mechanism.]

And what happened in 2008 may only be the beginning of man-made scarcities in the world's food supply. Kaufman warns:

"It may be hard to imagine commodity prices advancing another 460 percent above their mid-2008 price peaks. But the fundamentals argue strongly that these sectors have significant upside potential. I made a quick calculation: 460 percent above 2008 peaks would mean hamburger meat priced at $20 a pound."

NOTE: Paul B. Farrell writes that if one believes that average investors in the commodity markets will eventually "catch on" to how they are being duped, Goldman Sachs is already "... adjusting its strategies to keep a steady supply of naïve, clueless investors buying their toxic commodity ETFs, "dumb money" investments that "make lousy buy-and-hold investments" for Main Street investors while making Wall Street traders filthy rich." Farrell continues: "Wall Street banks are transferring wealth from their clients to their trading desks."

THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS

Liam Fox and Gilbert Mercier describe the idea behind what Goldman Sachs and other Wall Streeters are up to:

"The idea is quite simple. It's a regular process of boom and bust with an elite few consistently making as much money off the bust as they do the boom. The boom period attracts people to invest their money into the inflating financial system. The bust allows for the money to be consolidated into the few hands that control and manipulate the system. At first you create the right conditions for an economic bubble to occur to get as much money as possible injected into the financial markets. During such a period of boom, the people running the financial game can reward themselves handsomely without even attracting attention from shareholders, because investors, especially the small ones, are under the illusion that they are greatly profiting from the upward trend. When the bust happens, suddenly the pseudo-science of Wall Street is replaced by the odds of chance in Vegas. Sorry for your luck, the house always wins in the end."

HORDING THE WORLD'S FARMLAND TO "CORNER THE
MARKET" ON AGRICULTURAL GOODS AND DRIVE UP PRICES

Rolling Stone's McKenzie Funk adds another brutal critique regarding what Wall Street is up to in "Will Global Warming, Overpopulation, Floods, Droughts and Food Riots Make This Man Rich?"

Funk focuses on Phil Heilberg, a former AIG commodity trader who is one of the new "Capitalists of Chaos." Heilberg is a self-proclaimed pure Ayn Rand capitalist hustling Africa, making "land grab" deals to control millions of acres and commodity rights in unstable nations in order to drive the price of food up all the more.

Regarding what Heilberg is up to in Africa, Funk writes that Heilberg -

"... makes no apologies for dealing with warlords: 'This is Africa ... The whole place is like one big Mafia, and I'm like a Mafia head.'"

Funk says, however, that people like Heilberg know -

"... that the 'Food Bubble' they're collectively blowing will also explode, triggering wars across the planet, wars fought over ever-scarcer non-renewable commodities. That's why the new Capitalists of Chaos -- not just Heilberg and Goldman, but Monsanto, Exxon, etc. -- and their competitors are in the short race to buy up and hoard rights to hard assets, positioning themselves for global catastrophes dead ahead."

In other words, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, etc. are not only creating a "Food Bubble" on paper (i.e., creating "scarcity" on the world's commodity exchanges), but they are doing everything in their power to make it real by buying up the hard assets themselves and taking them "out of the market," thus creating REAL scarcity - even if it means starving people around the world.

Britain's Guardian reports that the trend for large land acquisitions by First World corporations is a wide-spread phenomenon affecting ever growing parts of south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America.

For instance, in Cambodia, 15% of land has been signed over to private companies since 2005. The Guardian goes on to report that -

"Many of the deals are shrouded in secrecy, so the scale of what is happening is obscured ... It's not hard to see why the subject generates so much attention. It's partly the secrecy element, partly the fear ... Large-scale land acquisition prompts all too vividly visions of a dystopian future in which millions of the hungry are excluded from the land of their forefathers by barbed wire fences and security guards as food is exported to feed the rich world.

NOTE: Dystopia is an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it possibly can get.

"This is no longer just a fear for the future. US environmentalist Lester Brown points out in his new book, World on the Edge, that in 2009 Saudi Arabia received its first shipment of rice from giant corporate agri-businesses that had acquired land in Ethiopia while at the same time the World Food Programme was feeding 5 million Ethiopians. Similarly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 7 million hectares for palm oil production were exported by agri-businesses while millions of people in the DRC are dependent were international aid for food ... [Please see our article, "The Congo and American Greed."]

"Much of the attention so far has focused on Africa. Most of the biggest deals have been in countries such as Ethiopia, Mali and Sudan. The imminently independent south Sudan has seen investors queuing up to exploit one of the areas of greatest potential for as yet under developed agricultural land. In comparison with many other areas of the world, land in Africa is very cheap; in Ethiopia, land can be leased for as little as $1 an acre."

Concerning what's happening in Ethiopia, Fekade Shewakena writes:

"If you are wondering why the government of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia is doing the secretive land deals with ... agribusiness corporations without any public discussion and scrutiny, and why the officials are handling it in much the same way like thieves who sell their stolen stuff on street corners and dark alleys, you have asked a serious question and probably have almost gotten some of your answers. This is pure theft and burglary sugarcoated as investment — only in this case that the burglar has someone to open the door from inside. It is a dangerous venture that has little to do with solving Ethiopia's economic problems but bound to negatively impact the country's most strategic resources, land and water, and its posterity. It appears that we have reached a point where we are selling out our last belongings just like the desperate peasants I once saw in 1984 sell their last belongings for scrape as they fled their villages to escape an impending famine.

"This land deal, now popularly known as "land grab" among other names, and becoming epidemic in desperately poor ... countries, is a neocolonial venture where land is being sold to foreigners at bargain prices.

Foreign land grabs by First World "investors." State and private investors, from Citadel Capital to Goldman Sachs, are leasing or buying up tens of millions of hectares of farmlands in Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production. Land grabbing has intensified over the past 10-15 years with the adoption of deregulation policies, trade and investment agreements, and market oriented governance reforms. [From "Food Crisis and the Global Land Grab."]

"The "investors" are salivating over the cheap access to agricultural land, water and cheap labor which would definitely make them even richer in the lucrative food markets ... The Meles Zenawis of Africa are salivating over the quick cash that will go to temporarily solve their hard currency crunch and the opportunity of swelling their individual bank accounts. Those who likened these secret deals to the colonial scramble for African land, where some local chiefs signed and sold off tract after tract of land to colonialists under the influence of alcohol supplied by the colonialist and some glittering gifts, are not very far from an accurate description of these transactions."

PLEASE SEE THE FOLLOWING VIDEO
ON THE RAPE OF ETHOPIA

(View Video)

NOTE: One would be very wrong to assume that these kinds of land grabs are only occurring in Third World countries; they are happening in First World countries such as Canada. For example, NFU (the National Farmers Union) reports that — "In Canada, corporations, investors, and foreign interests are buying up farmland. The National Farmers Union (NFU) today released the first report of its kind documenting Canadian developments in a global land grab. "The NFU report gives ten specific examples of agribusiness and investment companies buying Canadian land. It gives details of these companies and their practices and thus illuminates the rapidly accelerating transfer of foodland ownership from family farmers and local citizens to foreign interests, investors, and corporations. "The report also details the role of Canadian federal and provincial governments in facilitating the farmland buy-up. Governments are failing to monitor or report corporate and investor purchases. Moreover, these same governments are acting to facilitate and promote purchases of farmland by non-farmers. "'Crown agency, Farm Credit Canada, is acting as the main financier of one of the country's biggest farmland investment companies—providing multi-million dollar loans to a company that has already bought up 100,000 acres of farmland. The federal government's 'Invest in Canada' website is promoting 'affordable' farmland, 'low political risk,' and 'fertile fields' to international investors', said NFU President Terry Boehm. "He continued: 'There have been two primary models of land ownership and food production over the centuries. In one, land is held broadly, owned by farmers and other local citizens. In another, a relatively small number of elites owned the land and those who worked it and grew the food were sharecroppers and serfs. Canada has, until recently, embraced the first model. But a corporate and investor farmland buy-up means that we may be in the opening stages of a rapid move to the latter model'." Farmland in western Canada being bought up by giant agri-businesses that make serfs out of ordinary Canadian farmers.

COMMODITY TRADING IS MUTATING INTO A
TOXIC PANDEMIC FUELED BY INSATIABLE GREED

McKenzie Funk continues with his assessment of what commodity traders such as Phil Heilberg — people that Funk calls "CAPITALISTS OF CHAOS" — are creating, and in doing so he echoes what Ellen Brown had to say earlier about the chaos this is creating in North Africa and the Middle East:

"The toxic trail of ... [what Goldman Sachs, etc. are up to] is already proving to be deadly, starving thousands worldwide, while the new Capitalists of Chaos only see incredible profit opportunities, as they make huge bets that they'll get even richer in the next round of catastrophes, disasters, poverty, starvation and wars.

"Bottom line: Commodity ... [trading] is mutating into a toxic pandemic fueled (and protected by) the insatiable greed of banks, traders and politicians whose brains are incapable of giving up their profit machine, won't until it implodes and self-destructs. The Wall Street Banksters have no sense of morals, no ethics, no soul, no goal in life other than getting very rich, very fast. They care nothing of democracy, civilization or the planet. [Please see our article, "The Elite, Money and the End of Days."]

"They are in a race to become the richest man in the world, to control more assets, more commodities, more rights, more land, more money ... It's a contest and the other 6.3 billion humans on the planet are just profit opportunities (and collateral damage) in the dangerous high-stakes games played by the new Capitalists of Chaos ruling the world."

COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE
REAL CHARACTER OF THE ELITES

It is sometimes difficult for ordinary people to believe that there exist such people - people who are so past all feeling toward others, and so lacking in any kind of compassion that they would purposefully starve their fellow man in order to enrich themselves.

But, of course, they do exist. Indeed, to the elites, people THEMSELVES are "commodities" to be used up and discarded; "throw-aways" to be worked to death and then cast off as human trash the way the German chemical firm I.G. Farben did to the Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau; the way the British elites did to indigenous workers in India, Kenya, Malaysia, etc.