CRAZY WONDERFUL WORLD
June 28th, 2007 by Barry Eaton
What have we learned in 2,066 years?
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled,
public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be
tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should
be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to
work, instead of living on public assistance.”
So, evidently nothing!!!
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US Congress Declares Pizza is a Vegetable
18 Nov 2011
(Reuters) - The House of Representatives dealt a blow to childhood obesity warriors on Thursday by passing a bill that abandons proposals that threatened to end the reign of pizza and French fries on federally funded school lunch menus.
The scuttled changes, which would have stripped pizza’s status as a vegetable and limited how often French fries could be served, stemmed from a 2010 child nutrition law calling on schools to improve the nutritional quality of lunches served to almost 32 million U.S. school children.
The action is a win for the makers of frozen French fries and pizza and comes just weeks after the deep-pocketed food, beverage and restaurant industries successfully weakened government proposals for voluntary food marketing guidelines to children.
“It’s an important victory,” said Corey Henry, spokesman for the American Frozen Food Institute (AFFI). That trade association lobbied Congress on behalf of frozen pizza sellers like ConAgra Foods Inc and Schwan Food Co and French
fry makers McCain Foods Ltd and J.R. Simplot Co, the latter best known as a supplier to fast-food company McDonald’s Corp.
“Our concern is that the standards would force companies in many respects to change their products in a way that would make them unpalatable to students,” Henry said.
Other AFFI members include H.J. Heinz Co, General Mills Inc and Kraft Foods Inc.
The school lunch provisions were a small part of a mammoth bill that provides money for all parts of the federal government. The House sent the bill to the Senate for final Congressional approval.
“They started out with French fries and now they have moved on to pizza,” said Jared Polis, Colorado Democrat, who lamented the government’s subsidy of unhealthy diets through school meals. “Pizza alone (without side dishes) … common sense, it’s not a vegetable.”
Steven Pearlstein: You bet it’s another Bubble
By Steven Pearlstein, November 5, 2011
Washington Post
Silly you. You actually thought companies existed to make products and profits.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
You thought houses were meant to provide a place for people to live and office buildings a place for people to work.
You thought food was meant to be eaten, oil and gas to be turned into energy, and metals to be turned into cars, bridges and downspouts.
You weren’t sophisticated enough to realize that these really are just different “asset classes” meant to give investors around the world something to speculate in and to diversify their portfolios.
Even worse, you actually believed all that stuff about prices being set based on market fundamentals. Little did you know that it’s no longer the supply and demand for companies, houses, office buildings, natural gas or wheat that sets prices. More likely it’s the supply and demand for the futures, swaps and other derivative instruments linked to those things.
Maybe they thought we wouldn’t notice that the financialisation of the economy brought with it higher prices and a more volatile economy, along with higher profits for the financial services industry.
The latest example is the market for commodities: corn, wheat, cotton, silver, copper, oil, natural gas. In the past decade, hundreds of billions of dollars have flooded into the market, largely through swaps contracts and commodities index funds, ETFs and mutual funds.
These markets have long since outgrown their original function of providing producers and consumers of these commodities with a way to hedge their risks by guaranteeing supply and locking in prices. All futures markets require a certain number of “speculators” to take the other side of the contracts from commercial users and producers. Typically, these speculators would represent 30 percent of the participants in a healthy futures market.
The financial wizards on Wall Street
But today, because of a sudden desire to earn higher returns and diversify investment portfolios, there are more people wanting to invest in corn and copper and oil than there is corn and copper and natural gas produced and consumed. But no problem. The financial wizards on Wall Street have magically conjured up synthetic corn and copper and West Texas oil so that speculators can provide hedging opportunities for other speculators. Instead of 30 percent of the market, these “passive investors” typically account for 70 percent or more.
Who are these new passive investors, as they are politely called? They are pension funds and university endowments whose overpaid consultants tell them that if they want to earn big returns like Harvard and Yale, they have to put money into “alternative” investments such as private-equity funds, hedge funds, real estate investment trusts and commodity pools. More recently, however, they have been joined by individual investors turned off by the stock market and looking for higher returns than they can get from money market funds. While in the past, small, unsophisticated investors have been unable to invest in risky and volatile commodities, the financial services industry has rushed in to satisfy the new demand with exciting products.
Bands left the stage and the microphones were turned off twice in the late afternoon to allow the call to prayer to sound out uninterrupted from nearby mosques.
“Where I live, there’s nothing like this. I heard about it so I had to come,” said Ahmad Shah, dressed in a traditional white shalwar kameez and waistcoat, who travelled from Kandahar, a southern city plagued by insurgent violence.
“I came to escape the cancer of the Taliban and this makes a refreshing change.”
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