The Tipping Point: When Do Americans Hit the Streets?

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Tipping-Point-When-Do-by-Dr-Stuart-Jeanne-B-110812-851.html

Former Wall Street analyst (and fellow expatriate) Max Keiser predicts that American workers are unlikely to manifest the same revolutionary fervor as their comrades in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain until they experience comparable difficulties paying for food. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-B2V2l_6QE (link kindly provided by a reader). Egyptians pay 40% of their income for food, Americans only 12%. Nevertheless with the impending double dip recession, continuing public service, wage and benefit cuts, and financial markets massively speculating in food derivatives (see Speculating with Our Food), Keiser believes, as I do, that this day isn't far off.

As a doctor and healthy food advocate, I was well aware that the federal government massively subsidizes cheap fast food and junk food (Ending the Obesity Epidemic). America's agricultural subsidies kill literally millions of Americans every year, by creating an epidemic of obesity and related medical conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke. Yet until Keiser raised the issue, I never recognized the importance of these subsidies in suppressing popular unrest. It seems the main purpose of US agricultural subsidies isn't to help farmers or even the massive food conglomerates that run factory farms. They are intended is to control the single most important factor driving third world resistance movements -- namely the cost of food.

I was also interested in Keiser's view that no subsidy program has the ability to control rising food costs, so long Obama refuses to regulate the investment banks that are driving up food prices by speculating in the food commodities market.

:snip:

World Bank President Robert Zoellick describes the link between the cost of food and regime change in an oped he wrote for the Financial Times in February 2011 (only paid subscribers can read the FT article, but it's summarized at click here). The oped points to the widespread food riots that occurred in 2008 due to a sudden spike in food prices -- as well as triggering regime change in Haiti. However according to Zoellick, the 2011 food crisis is even worse -- with rising food costs forcing 44 million people into poverty between June 2010 and January 2011.

More at the link --

[Davis_X_Machina]

1. I've heard of peasants..

...with a pitchfork in one hand and a torch in the other storming the castle, just not a pitchfork in one hand and a remote, or a controller, in the other.

[Bluenorthwest]

2. Yes, becasue in the UK, they do not have remotes or TVs

or reality TV....oh,wait, the do.

[Davis_X_Machina]

4. That's a boot sale...

...where the price of everything is £0. It's not a revolution.

Anything burning in Westminster? How't the West End doing?

[MineralMan]

3. The street is just outside your door, Donna...

Truly.

[Scurrilous]

9. ...

:thumbsup:

[starroute]

5. Things are getting tight out there

I saw an ad on TV the other day encouraging people to take out loans against their cars. That's really weird.

I guess if you're underwater in your mortgage and up to the limit on your credit cards, your car is the only thing you have left of any value -- but it strikes me as a real sign of desperation that anybody would ever consider it.

And this ad couldn't have been aimed at the poor, who drive around in old beaters, but at people with enough money that their cars actually have some value. In other words, it's a sign of the middle class hanging on by their fingernails.

Even if the government is keeping the price of food artificially low, as the article suggests, that's not the only factor. The cost of housing and utilities, for example, is really squeezing people -- especially since rents are going up in many areas as more people default and lose their houses.

Food costs may be particularly effective as an inciter of revolution because they hit everyone in the same way at the same time, which makes for coordinated effort. But I think Americans are being hit by a more generalized "can't make it here any more" effect which is going to be as powerful in the long run.

What it may really take is some good old-fashioned consciousness-raising. One of the first tasks of feminism back in the 60s was to tell women that their problems weren't their own personal failures but a result of the system -- and to get them together to compare notes and realize this was so. And in the same way, Americans who have been consumed by a sense of guilt and inadequacy because they can't pay the bills or provide for their families may need consciousness-raising groups to identify the real source of their problems.

[Mr Deltoid]

6. If deflation hits that is when people get really, really desperate

In a deflationary cycle, wages drop, prices drop, but your house payment stays the same. Eventually wages drop below what is necessary to keep up payments, and people start selling everything so they can pay their house payments. This is what happened in Argentina during the 90s. You could drive around Buenos Aires back then and see peoples furniture in their front yards with for sale signs on them.

[area51]

8. Car title loan businesses

are all over the place in Houston. So much for Rick Perry's booming economy.

[alterfurz]

7. Marx maintained...

...that the revolution will only take place once the middle classes finally realize they will never, ever join the upper classes. Most of our current political leadership certainly seems bent on doing everything possible to hasten that realization.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. -- Frederick Douglass

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached. -- Kafka

Almost there now, America.