Hilllary Clinton and others are outraged about the suppression of protests, yet when Saudi troops arrived in Bahrain what happened? Nothing. Could it be that the USA believes change is less necessary in Saudi Arabia than Libya?

Prince Saud Al-Faisal promised to ‘cut off the fingers of those who try to interfere in our internal matters’ and explained protests in the kingdom are unnecessary; there is conjecture that the reason there aren’t mass protests yet – in Saudi Arabia – is because the monarchy enforces its position with the help of torture, mutilation and execution. Why are the USA and the UK so emamoured of the Saudis? Could it be oil access or export licences granted by the UK government for arms sales to the kingdom (4 times as much as in 2003)?

The Brown government was so determined to preserve its special relationship with the Saudis, it derailed British justice, by forcing the Serious Fraud Office to drop its inquiry into corruption in the Al Yamamah deals.

But is it just weapons or is there more at stake? Is the distinct likelihood of unrest in Saudi Arabia pushing oil to $200 a barrel when the world went into meltdown at just under $150 a barrel? The reality is that most governments in power regardless of left or right are likely to survive the economic dislocation that a sustained price of $200 would deliver. But even if the regime remains, it’s not clear that it can keep delivering, as Wikileaks cables showed American diplomats questioning the kingdom’s ability to keep raising production.

The big problem with all oil producing countries is overstated reserves and with the Saudies its said to be 40%; production quotas assigned to OPEC states are a function of the size of their stated reserves, so all members of the cartel have an incentive to exaggerate them. Saudi Arabia posts the same figure as it did in 1988.
Western governments rely on production forecasts from the International Energy Agency, which has been proven to have no real idea; recently backing away from forecasts of future supply and on its aggorant dismissal of those who have warned that global oil output might one day peak. In 2006 the IEA predicted that world oil supply would rise from 82 million barrels a day to 116 million in 2030, only to reduce the forecast to 106m in 2009; a 105m in 2010 and 96m by 2035.

Given that the IEA’s new prediction relies on an assumption that Saudi output will rise from 9m barrels to 14.6m in 2035, every country dependant on oil has reason to be concerned. Dr Sadad al-Husseini (former head of Exploration and Production at Saudi Aramco) said ‘sustaining 12 million barrels/day output will only be possible for a limited period of time, and even then, only with a massive investment program; and then a slow but steady output decline will ensue and no amount of effort will be able to stop it’. When this information was released, he claimed not to have said it, dspite the figures in the report being detailed and precise.

Now, as Japan needs more energy than ever before to rebuild and access non-nuclear fuel for energy, things are going to get a lot tougher …. Peak Oil has passed and we all will suffer; those that plan the least, will suffer the most.

In the graph below, you can see how world markets ‘fared’; however, as Dave Kimble has pointed out below, all currencies have gone down in value, based on the current buy cost of gold. While gold holdings was the standard on which all countries currencies are guaranteed, with the USA leading the charge (not guaranteeing their $ and printing it like it’s going out of fashion), fiat currencies are now the norm.

So what is the correct and relative strength of currencies with the obvious standard of gold?

Over the last 12 months the major hard currencies have all devalued against gold:

US -21.3%
EU -28.0%
UK -23.4%
JP -13.6%
CA -19.2%
CH -14.7%
AU -12.3%

If China was in the above and wasn’t – by choice – pegging its currency to the US$, it would surely have gone up against gold; so the share markets are just reflecting the loss of purchasing power of fiat currency.

Therefore, there is no ‘share market recovery’.

Well, now the IEA has stated that Peak Oil is behind us (probably topped out in 2006) and they have set projections of the world’s liquid energy sources to 2035.

The International Energy Agency is a Paris-based organization that provides energy analysis to 28 industrialized nations and according to a projection in the agency’s latest annual report, production of conventional crude oil peaked in 2006 at about 70 million barrels per day.

You don’t have to be too much of mathematician to see a looming crisis when we have been using about 85 million barrels of oil a day, so when the report suggests a ‘perfect storm’ as producing oil fields will drop sharply in coming decades.

In a typical head-in-the-sand position, the agency does not see energy doom on the horizon, even when – by its own estimates – there will be a dip in crude production with an ‘undulating plateau’ of about 68 million barrels per day between 2020 and 2035. Again doing the maths, if we – at 6 + billion people – use 85 million barrels as day, then having to do with 20% less with a population of 8 billion people when we will need 20% more oil is going to present a problem.

To meet additional demand places pressure on much dirtier oil (translates into higher production / refining costs such as Canada’s tar sands; and we see high demand for  increased production of natural gas liquids.   So as we see the likes of Queensland’s Anna Bligh ripping into farm land to exploit coal and gas (as we Queenslanders have no real oil reserves to speak of), the question is ‘how long before our energy dependant society collapses’ ?

The IEA suggestion that oil productions will climb for several more decades based on  estimates that enough new oil will be found to keep the oil supply roughly steady for the next 25 years is as dependable as their suggestion we were nowhere near Peak Oil several years ago. Furthermore, their suggestion that oil will cost $135 per barrel by 2035, is both laughable as well as of concern seeing how the global economic collapse of 2008 (and still with us) was brought about because oil went past that.

The following chart by John Rudolf provides an insight to our very real predicament.

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

Would you argue climate science with this fellow?

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him. The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.

It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question — tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

The database began as a simple collection of responses written by Leck himself, but these days quite a few of the rejoinders are culled from a university source whom Leck says he isn’t at liberty to divulge. Like other chatbots, lots of people on the receiving end of its tweets have no idea they’re not conversing with a real human being. Some of them have arguments with the chatbot spanning dozens of tweets and many days, says Leck. That’s in part because AI_AGW is smart enough to run through a list of different canned responses when an interlocutor continues to throw the same arguments at it. Leck has even programmed it to debate such esoteric topics as religion – which is where the debates humans have with the bot often wind up.

“If [the chatbot] actually argues them into a corner, it tends to be two crowds out there,” says Leck. “There’s the guns and God crowd, and their parting shot will be ‘God created it that way’ or something like that. I don’t know how you answer that.” The second crowd, Leck says, are skeptics so unyielding they won’t be swayed by any amount of argumentation.

Occasionally, the chatbot turns up a false positive – for example, it has a complete inability to detect sarcasm. This proved to be a problem when a record heat wave hit L.A. last summer, causing innumerable tweets of the form “It’s 113 degrees outside – good thing global warming’s a myth!”

Leck always apologizes when AI_AGW answers someone who isn’t actually arguing about the science of climate change and then subsequently whitelists his or her account. The bot also has a kind of learning algorithm in it in that can be trained not to respond to phrases that cause false positives.

In the future, Leck would like to expand AI_AGW by giving it the ability to learn new arguments from the twitter feeds of others who debate climate skeptics – allowing it to argue into the ground an ever expanding array of anti-science tweeters who are unwilling or unable to look up the proper scientific literature themselves. In a way, what Leck has created is a pro-active search engine: it answers twitter users who aren’t even aware of their own ignorance.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25964/

Man-made global warming theory [AGW] says that climate change is caused by the CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels. As the human population increases the inexorable need for energy from fossil fuels increases and therefore the level of AGW increases.

AGW is similar to the theory of Thomas Malthus, the 18th century clergyman who thought that human population would outstrip natural resources and that natural calamity would be visited on humankind through disease, starvation and pestilence. Malthus’s theory could never have understood what a person like Norman Borlaug achieved in applying agricultural technology to farming to greatly increase food production or how modern medical technology has saved billions of people.

But Malthus has modern advocates like Paul Ehrlich and science advisor to president Obama, John Holdren. Both Ehrlich and Holdren think there are too many people on Earth; they both think too many people will exacerbate AGW and that natural retribution will be as bad as Malthus predicted.

In their 1977 book, Ecoscience, Holdren and Ehrlich advocated forced abortions and community sterilisation. They also supported a world superagency for control of population and the environment. This idea has underpinned the United Nations approach to AGW and was central to the recent Copenhagen process with the Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC] solution to AGW based on the UN having governmental status and powers.

Population control and reduction is a view shared by other leading AGW supporters. In Australia Clive Hamilton and Glenn Albrecht advocate drastic reductions in population. Albrecht, a former Newcastle academic now based in Western Australia, thinks that the true sustainable population of Australia should be no more than the Indigenous population which existed before European settlement occurred. Other leading green commentators like Keith Farnish and Finnish philosopher Pentti Linkola also see humanity as a threat to nature, and again their solution is for the population to be severely reduced to a few million living in a non-technological primitive state.

This message, that humanity is bad and destructive, is one that is increasingly informing AGW philosophy and promotion. The `evil’ has been extrapolated from the fossil fuels and CO2 to humanity itself. Instead of James Hansen’s coal trains of death and the demonization of CO2 it is now humanity which is the problem.

It is a message which is focused on and directed at children. Al Gore gives special induction seminars to young people where he tells them they know more than their parents; and the EPA’s head, Lisa Jackson, has developed the Environmental Justice Movement based on cadres of children fighting AGW.

The promotion of the Copenhagen conference on AGW was based on advertisements showing children threatened by AGW. Other videos also feature children as victims. Lately, however, the tone of victim has been changed to instead show children as conscious activists and potential eco-warriors.

The threat is palpable; AGW is the cause and the battle to beat it will be ruthless. The most recent video defines the problem and the solution.

The group behind this video are known as 10:10. Their homepage describes their mission as being to cut CO2 emissions by 10 per cent. The homepage is colourfully presented with lots of young smiling faces. The incongruity of the juxtaposition of young, potentially fertile people and the message in their video of culling those people who do not believe in AGW [the "final solution"] has obviously been overlooked by the 10:10 organisation. Irony is not a strong point amongst AGW advocates.

The irony is that AGW as a concept has been driven because it is ostensibly a threat to humanity. But what appears to be really driving AGW is not concern for humanity but a hatred of humanity; misanthropy. Paul Taylor in his book, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics states: “The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty `Good riddance!’.”

Biologist David Graber, in a Los Angeles Times book review of Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower says:

“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line we … became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” Perhaps Graber can get together with Prince Philip who wishes “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

The insidious aspect of this misanthropy is that it is being inculcated to children. What a desolate form of self-loathing we are bequeathing our future generations. The comparison with the 1969 moon landing is stark. On that occasion when Armstrong said “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, a generation were empowered and inspired.

By comparison what has the great moral issue of our time, AGW, given us; only fear and loathing and an obscene amount of wasted expenditure. It is time for the vilification to stop; it is time for humanity to reclaim its self-confidence and for our children to be no longer used as vicious propaganda tools.

Anthony Cox is a lawyer and secretary of The Climate Sceptics. Joanne Nova is a freelance science presenter, a professional speaker, TV host, radio presenter, author and blogger.

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues; for more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

No matter how bad coal might be for the planet, the conventional wisdom is that there is so much of it underground that the world’s leading fuel for electricity will continue to dominate the energy scene unless global action is taken on climate change, but what if conventional wisdom is wrong?

A new study seeks to shake up the assumption that use of coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, is bound to continue its inexorable rise; in fact, the authors predict that world coal production may reach its peak as early as next year and then begin a permanent decline.

The study, led by Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and published in the August issue of Energy, predicts that by mid-century, the world’s coal mining will supply only half as much energy as today.  The idea that the world will face “peak coal” as soon as 2011 flies in the face of most earlier estimates and analysis. (Related: “The High Cost of Cheap Coal”)

The London-based World Coal Institute, an industry group including the largest international coal producers, says “the use of coal will rise 60 percent over the next 20 years,” and that “coal will last us for at least 119 years.” And the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in its most recent international outlook, projects that coal consumption for electricity will grow more than 50 percent by 2035 unless policies are put in place to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.  However, the Patzek study paints a far different picture—and not because people will use up the last of the coal in the ground. Rather, the world will finish off the coal that is easy to reach and high-quality—the coal that produces a large amount of energy per ton, the new study says. What remains will often be of lower quality, and progressively harder to dig up and bring to where it is used.  (Related: “Mine Tragedy Amid Push to Produce More”)

The study’s prediction for the time of the peak—actually a peak in the energy produced by global coal production—may not turn out to be exactly right, Patzek said. “I’m not saying that on July 1, 2011, there will be a peak.”  But the main thrust of the study is stark: “We are near or at the peak right now,” he said.

Economic Costs

If true, this could have a vast impact on the world economy. Coal-fired power plants supply 40 percent of the world’s electricity, and energy for two-thirds of the world’s steel production. “If we are right,” Patzek’s study said, “major restructuring and shrinking of the global economy will follow.”  Many countries are counting on coal to continue powering their economies for decades to come.

“The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal,” said President Barack Obama earlier this year, referring to estimates that the United States has the largest coal reserves of any country. Citing the huge stores and the need for clean energy, Obama made the remark at the launch of a task force to study how to deploy technology to “clean up” coal, through carbon capture and storage technology, in the next 10 years.

(Related: “Lighting a Fire Under Clean Coal”)

However, Patzek argues that the reserves estimates of the United States and other countries overstate how much coal is actually practical to mine and use.  “In my study, I disregard completely these [reserve] estimates,” Patzek said. “They’re not credible.”

“The only estimate that’s credible,” he argued, “is what actually comes out of the mines, and how you project that into the future.”

For instance, the study notes that estimates of Illinois’ proven reserves are still high—second only to Montana in the United States—even though coal production has declined to a little more than half of what was produced there 20 years ago.

But there are numerous reasons for that drop, including the fact that Illinois coal is high in sulfur. Electric utilities have shifted to buying lower-sulfur coal from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana, despite its lower heat content, as a way to meet federal regulations for control of acid rain.

Other analyses that have taken the shift to lower-quality coal into account have concluded that reserves are robust, including a 2007 assessment of U.S. coal research and development needs, organized by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Despite what the panel admitted were “significant” uncertainties in reserve estimates, the NAS concluded there was sufficient coal to meet the nation’s needs at current rates of consumption for more than 100 years. That study said the United States had about 270 billion tons of coal reserves, plus more than 1,500 billion tons of “resources”—known deposits that are not currently economical to produce, but that may be possible to develop later.

“It is safe to conclude that the U.S. is not running out of reserves,” said Raja Ramani, a mining engineer at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the NAS paper. “I do not see 2011 as the peak year of coal production.”  However, the NAS admitted that its 2007 estimates of coal reserves were based upon methods and data that had not been reviewed or revised since the early 1970s. The NAS called for a coordinated government and industry initiative to determine the magnitude and characteristics of the nation’s recoverable coal reserves.

Will Coal Follow Oil Curve?

Patzek’s study uses a version of a method developed by the legendary father of “peak oil” theory, Marion King Hubbert, to analyze coal reserves. Hubbert, at the time a Shell Oil petroleum geologist, used prior production history to correctly predict 15 years in advance that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s.  Hubbert’s method, a controversial one, assumes that production follows a bell-shaped curve over time.  When there are many different oil wells or coal mines operating independently, the sum of all their production tends to follow such a bell curve over time—starting off small, rising to a peak, and then dropping again as the resources are depleted. Oil in the United States has followed this pattern, as has coal in the United Kingdom.

Patzek’s study, “A global coal production forecast with multi-Hubbert cycle analysis,” modifies Hubbert’s method to allow for several bell curves, to reflect the development of coal mines in different parts of the world and the use of different technologies.

Patzek’s study is not the only one to conclude that the reserve estimates are often too high. In recent years, chemical engineers at Newcastle University in Australia, the electrical engineer David Rutledge at the California Institute of Technology, and a German nonprofit called Energy Watch Group all have estimated that coal production would most likely peak in the next couple of decades.

One of the most important questions involving the peak coal studies is what they mean for climate change policy. Patzek’s study notes that its projections would mean that carbon emissions from global coal production would decline by 50 percent by 2050. That’s significantly below most of the carbon emissions scenarios produced by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Patzek’s paper opens with a swipe at the IPCC scenarios, saying they are “based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics.”

But the paper concludes with an appeal that climate action advocates could only applaud—a plea for using less energy and more efficient electricity generation. “The global community should be devoting its attention to conservation and increasing efficiency of electrical power generation from coal,” the paper said. “Immediate upgrades of the existing electrical coal-fired power stations to new, ultra supercritical steam turbines that deliver [greater efficiency than current power plants] are urgently needed.”  The paper underscores the different drivers behind the push for a new path forward on energy—the call is much the same, whether the worry is too much coal or too little.

Last week at the Security B-Sides and DEFCON conferences in Las Vegas, HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 (and founder and chief architect of Metasploit), disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in VxWorks, which is used to power Apple Airport Extreme access points, Mars rovers and C-130 Hercules aircrafts, in addition to microwaves, switches, sensors, telecom equipment and industrial control monitors.

VxWorks has a service enabled by default that provides read or write access to a device’s memory and allows functions to be called, Moore told SCMagazineUS.com. The vulnerable service, called WDB agent, is a “debugger” for the VxWorks operating system that is used to diagnose problems and ensure code is working properly when a product is being developed.

The debugging service, a selectable component in the VxWorks configuration enabled by default, is not secured and represents a security hole in a deployed system, according to an advisory issued by US-CERT.

The exposed WDB agent “allows anyone with network access to the device to take complete control of the device,” Moore told SCMagazineUS.com. “With a little bit of work, you could hijack just about any device.”  To determine how widespread the problem was, Moore wrote a scanner module for the Metasploit open-source penetration testing framework to run a network survey that encompassed more than 3.1 billion IP addresses (sic) and more than 250,000 products representing 100 vendors were found with the WDB agent exposed, he said.

Moreover, say Moore ‘unknown hackers spent most of 2006 scanning for the service; there is a pretty good chance that someone already found this vulnerability and exploited it en masse all throughout 2006; it was more than likely someone doing something malicious, but we have no clue what that was; there’s just a huge variety of what you can do with this vulnerability – if you know how to apply it; meanwhile, a separate vulnerability involving the hashing algorithm that is used in the standard authentication API for VxWorks could allow an attacker to brute force a password; the hashing algorithm is susceptible to collisions, meaning an attacker would be able to brute force a password in a relatively short period of time by guessing a string that produces the same hash as a legitimate password, according to a separate advisory posted by US-CERT’, said Moore.

Moore contacted the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and provided researchers with a list of affected devices, with the goal of notifying as many vendors as possible. VxWorks customers include Northrop Grumman, Motorola, Dell, Apple, HP and Cisco. VxWorks is produced by Wind River, acquired by Intel in 2009.  Wind River plans to fix the weak password hashing vulnerability in VxWorks 6.9, which has not yet been released, according to Moore. However, the vendor has not made any promises to fix older affected versions of the embedded operating system.

“I expect to see this bug live on almost indefinitely,” Moore said; however, a Wind River spokesman told SCMagazineUS.com (in an email) that when contacted by Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Coordination Center, Wind River immediately assessed the alert, issued patches on August 2 and was instructed by CERT to provide a “synchronous public response.” But Moore wrote in his blog that these two bugs are “just the tip of the iceberg; the VxWorks platform largely has been ignored for the past 10 years and needs to be more thoroughly tested’.

By Angela Moscaritolo (Aug 4, 2010 12:55 PM); see original article on scmagazineus.com

Reply by Gary Woodman (Aug 9th):

‘Or maybe not.

It’s a problem that won’t go away because those networked devices with embedded VxWorks probably weren’t designed to be easily updated in the field without physically accessing them, and often the point of these devices is to have them in the field where they are hard to physically access; fixing will cost many times more than replacing, most likely.

It’s also a problem generically with networked devices, i.e. it isn’t limited to VxWorks and the like. Many new electronic devices are coming with networking capabilities these days, including mobile phones, TVs, e-book readers, and the vast majority will never receive software updates (being consumer equipment run by naïve consumers). Most run some version of Linux if not using a commercial RTOS, often with some software services that make them vulnerable to attack if someone chose to. But they aren’t Windows desktops so nobody much is looking at them that way. Yet.

This story may be a bit of a beat up, but it does foreshadow the spread of computer worms and viruses from Windows to the wider computing arena’.

White collar crime is the dirtiest as it works on the people labouring to build assets and then uses constrictive measure to remove those assets for a fraction of the cost, where the greater unwashed then fights in frustration not against the instigators – the bankers – but the marginalised, be they black, immigrants or even bikie gangs.

It is easy for them as they hire armies, mercenaries and police to take the brunt of the rage and turn the populace against each other.

Professor Carroll Quigley, an insider groomed by the international bankers, revealed this plan in 1966, writing in Tragedy and Hope: ‘The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences’.

This article titled ‘Deficit terrorists’ is from http://www.opednews.com/articles/DEFICIT-TERRORISTS-STRIKE-by-Ellen-Brown-100618-289.html.

Last week, England’s new government said it would abandon the previous government’s stimulus program and introduce the austerity measures required to pay down its estimated $1 trillion in debts. That means cutting public spending, laying off workers, reducing consumption, and increasing unemployment and bankruptcies. It also means shrinking the money supply, since virtually all “money” today originates as loans or debt. Reducing the outstanding debt will reduce the amount of money available to pay workers and buy goods, precipitating depression and further economic pain.

The financial sector has sometimes been accused of shrinking the money supply intentionally, in order to increase the demand for its own products. Bankers are in the debt business, and if governments are allowed to create enough money to keep themselves and their constituents out of debt, lenders will be out of business. The central banks charged with maintaining the banking business therefore insist on a “stable currency” at all costs, even if it means slashing services, laying off workers, and soaring debt and interest burdens. For the financial business to continue to boom, governments must not be allowed to create money themselves, either by printing it outright or by borrowing it into existence from their own government-owned banks.

Today this financial goal has largely been achieved. In most countries, 95% or more of the money supply is created by banks as loans (or “credit”). The small portion issued by the government is usually created just to replace lost or worn out bills or coins, not to fund new government programs. Early in the twentieth century, about 30% of the British currency was issued by the government as pounds sterling or coins, versus only about 3% today. In the U.S., only coins are now issued by the government. Dollar bills (Federal Reserve Notes) are issued by the Federal Reserve, which is privately owned by a consortium of banks.

Banks advance the principal but not the interest necessary to pay off their loans; and since bank loans are now virtually the only source of new money in the economy, the interest can only come from additional debt. For the banks, that means business continues to boom; while for the rest of the economy, it means cutbacks, belt-tightening and austerity. Since more must always be paid back than was advanced as credit, however, the system is inherently unstable. When the debt bubble becomes too large to be sustained, a recession or depression is precipitated, wiping out a major portion of the debt and allowing the whole process to begin again. This is called the “business cycle,” and it causes markets to vacillate wildly, allowing the monied interests that triggered the cycle to pick up real estate and other assets very cheaply on the down-swing.

The financial sector, which controls the money supply and can easily capture the media, cajoles the populace into compliance by selling its agenda as a “balanced budget,” “fiscal responsibility,” and saving future generations from a massive debt burden by suffering austerity measures now. Bill Mitchell, Professor of Economics at the University of New Castle in Australia, calls this “deficit terrorism.” Bank-created debt becomes more important than schools, medical care or infrastructure. Rather than “providing for the general welfare,” the purpose of government becomes to maintain the value of the investments of the government’s creditors.

England Dons the Hair Shirt

England’s new coalition government has just bought into this agenda, imposing on itself the sort of fiscal austerity that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has long imposed on Third World countries, and has more recently imposed on European countries, including Latvia, Iceland, Ireland and Greece.

Deficit hawks point ominously to Greece, which has been virtually squeezed out of the private bond market because nobody wants its bonds. Greece has been forced to borrow from the IMF and the European Monetary Union (EMU), which have imposed draconian austerity measures as conditions for the loans. Like a Third World country owing money in a foreign currency, Greece cannot print Euros or borrow them from its own central bank, since those alternatives are forbidden under EMU rules.

Greece is stuck in the debt trap, but the UK is not a member of the EMU. Although it belongs to the European Union, it still trades in its own national currency, which it has the power to issue directly or to borrow from its own central bank. Like all central banks, the Bank of England is a “lender of last resort,” which means it can create money on its books without borrowing first.

The “deficit terrorists,” however, will have none of this obvious solution, ostensibly because of the fear of “hyperinflation.” A June 9 guest post by “Cameroni” on Rick Ackerman’s financial website takes this position. Titled “Britain Becomes the First to Choose Deflation.”

Hyperinflation or Deflation?

The dreaded threat of hyperinflation is invariably trotted out to defeat proposals to solve the budget crises of governments by simply issuing the necessary funds, whether as debt (bonds) or as currency. What the deficit terrorists generally fail to mention is that before an economy can be threatened with hyperinflation, it has to pass through simple inflation; and governments everywhere have failed to get to that stage today, although trying mightily. Cameroni observes:

“[G]overnments all over the globe have already tried stimulating their way out of the recent credit crisis and recession to little avail. They have attempted fruitlessly to generate even mild inflation despite huge stimulus efforts and pointless spending.”

In fact, the money supply has been shrinking at an alarming rate. In a May 26 article in The Financial Times titled “US Money Supply Plunges at 1930s Pace as Obama Eyes Fresh Stimulus,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:

“The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6pc. The assets of institutional money market funds fell at a 37pc rate, the sharpest drop ever.

“‘It’s frightening,’ said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. “The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly,’ he said.”

Too much money can hardly have been pumped into an economy in which the money supply is shrinking. But Cameroni concludes that since the stimulus efforts have failed to put needed money back into the money supply, the stimulus program should be abandoned in favor of its diametrical opposite — belt-tightening austerity. He admits that the result will be devastating:

“[I]t will mean a long, slow and deliberate winding down until solvency is within reach. It will mean cities, states and counties will go bankrupt and not be rescued. And it will be painful. Public spending will be cut. Consumption could decline precipitously. Unemployment numbers may skyrocket and bankruptcies will stun readers of daily blogs like this one. It will put the brakes on growth around the world. . . . The Dow will crash and there will be ripple effects across the European union and eventually the globe. . . . Aid programs to the Third world will be gutted, and I cannot yet imagine the consequences that will bring to the poorest people on earth.”

Hyperinflation, however, is a bogus threat, and before we reject the stimulus idea, we might ask why these programs have failed. Perhaps because they have been stimulating the wrong sector of the economy, the non-producing financial middlemen who precipitated the crisis in the first place. Governments have tried to “reflate” their flagging economies by throwing budget-crippling sums at the banks, but the banks have not deigned to pass those funds on to businesses and consumers as loans. Instead, they have used the cheap funds to speculate, buy up smaller banks, or buy safe government bonds, collecting a tidy interest from the very taxpayers who provided them with this cheap bailout money.

Seeking Solutions

The alternative to throwing massive amounts of money at the banks is not to further starve and punish businesses and individuals but to feed some stimulus to them directly, with public projects that provide needed services while creating jobs. There are many successful precedents for this approach, including the public works programs of England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which were funded with government-issued money either borrowed from their central banks or printed directly.

The Chinese have done better, expanding their economy at over 9% throughout the crisis by creating extra money that was mainly invested in public infrastructure.
The EMU countries are trapped in a deadly pyramid scheme, because they have abandoned their sovereign currencies for a Euro controlled by the ECB. Their deficits can only be funded with more debt, which is interest-bearing, so more must always be paid back than was borrowed.

The EMU model is mathematically unsustainable and doomed to fail unless it is modified in some way, either by returning economic sovereignty to its member countries, or by consolidating them into one country with one government.

A fourth possibility would be for member countries to set up publicly-owned “development banks” on the Chinese model. These banks could issue credit in Euros for public projects, creating jobs and expanding the money supply in the same way that private banks do every day when they make loans. Private banks today are limited in their loan-generating potential by the capital requirement, toxic assets cluttering their books, a lack of creditworthy borrowers, and a business model that puts shareholder profit over the public interest.

Unlike the EMU countries, the governments of England, the United States, and other sovereign nations can still borrow from their own central banks, funding much-needed programs essentially interest-free. They can but they probably won’t, because they have been deceived into relinquishing that sovereign power to an overreaching financial sector bent on controlling the money systems of the world privately and autocratically.

One thing is for sure, eventually all will have gone off; and so too does the world’s countries, as each is systematically set up, money is pumped in to promote an air of new era of financial well-being and then the money runs out and debt-markers are called in to be paid

It happens on a micro as well as macro basis, which brings to mind Wide Bay Bricks, a successful brick manufacturer that was offered additional funds by the bank to grow the business.

New kilns were built extra land bought and a massive build up of stock; however, little did Wide Bay Bricks know that the bank would eventually ‘decide’ that they wanted the debt to asset ratio improved, and called on Wide Bay Bricks to reduce the debt.

Coincidentally, at that time a national brick manufacturer – that had been suffering a loss of market share over the preceding years – decided to have a sale of bricks; sales rep’s for the national brick manufacturer signed up builders of future contracts (for an unknown period) at massively reduced prices. Obviously other plants of this national brick manufacturer around the country would take the slack, otherwise they would have gone out of business real quick.

Wide Bay Bricks had largely dealt built up its market share by competitively pricing its bricks, it had acres and acres of bricks, but nobody to sell the number they needed to sell, to sell to. They couldn’t enter the next nearest markets because they didn’t have a name presence there and the bank sent the receivers in. Now you probably know how this ends, the bank who had shut their client down then facilitated the funds for their other client – the national brick manufacturer – to buy the newly refurbished brick plant and any losses suffered in selling the bricks at a loss were soon made up when the controlled the market.

The following article replicates what is happening on a sequential order known of volatility of any given country dependant on political sell-out, manipulation and resource potential, either in material or labour resource.

“And taxes on labor now are about to be jacked up to pay off the public debts resulting from the asset-price inflation and financial wreckage that property tax cuts have helped cause. This is the cause of national debts. Governments have run into debt as a result of un-taxing the wealthy in general, not just real estate.”

Excellent article about how the banksters are coming home to pillage entire nations in Europe now…

http://michael-hudson.com/2010/05/euro-bankers-to-greecethe-wealthy-won%E2%80%99t-pay-their-taxes-so-labor-must-do-so/

The wealthy won’t pay their taxes, so labor must do so.

Riddle: How are the Greek rioters like America’s Tea Party movement?
Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.

The difference is that the Tea Partiers have lost faith in government. This is just what the financial oligarchy wants, of course. Giving up hope of gaining electoral control to pursue a fair fiscal agenda, the Tea Partiers have abandoned the centuries-long fight for reform to make governments better by giving them the power to check predatory finance and wealth. Sliding to the right wing of the political spectrum and acting mainly out of frustration, they have succumbed to a utopian desire simply to shrink a government that they see acting adversely to their interests.

Financial lobbyists are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.

Bank lobbyists know that the financial game is over. They are playing for the short run. The financial sector’s aim is to take as much bailout money as it can and run, with large enough annual bonuses to lord it over the rest of society after the Clean Slate finally arrives. Less public spending on social programs will leave more bailout money to pay the banks for their exponentially rising bad debts that cannot possibly be paid in the end. It is inevitable that loans and bonds will default in the usual convulsion of bankruptcy.

Greek labor is not yet so pessimistic as to give up the fight. What it recognizes that its American counterparts do not is that somebody will control the government. If labor – the demos – loses its spirit, power will be relinquished to foreign creditors to dictate public policy by default. And the more the bankers’ interest is served, the worse and more debt-burdened the economy will become. Their gain is bought at the price of domestic austerity. Scheduled payouts by Greek pension funds and government social spending programs must be to replenish German and other European bank capital.

This worldview already has been delivered to Europe’s northernmost periphery, where it has elicited a fiscal masochism that banks hope to see in Greece. Having fallen on their swords, Baltic governments would be jealous and even resentful to see Greece rescue its economy where they themselves failed to repudiate arrogant creditor demands. “Seen from the eastern rim of the European Union, the looming austerity drive in crisis-afflicted Greece reads like old news,” writes Nina Kolyako.

“For almost two years, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have brought in repeated draconian measures, slashing public spending and hiking taxes to try to dig themselves out of a hole. ‘We learned the lessons very painfully, heavily and effectively, that you need to look after the fiscal situation very carefully,’ Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius told AFP in a recent interview.

‘We understood very clearly that fiscal consolidation was the only way for us to survive.’”

Capitulating in a classic Stockholm syndrome (literally to Swedish banks in this case), Lithuania’s government dutifully tightened the screws so much that GDP plunged by over 17 percent. A similar plunge occurred in Latvia. The Baltics have slashed public-sector employment and wages, imposing poverty rather than the Western European levels of prosperity (and progressive taxation to foster a middle class) that was promised after the Baltics achieved their independence from Russia in 1991.

After Latvia’s parliament imposed austerity in December 2008, popular protest in January brought down the government (as a similar protest did in Iceland). But the result was merely another neoliberal “occupation regime” run on behalf of foreign banking interests. So what is unfolding is a Social War on a global scale – not the class war envisioned in the 19th century, but a war of finance against entire economies, against industry, real estate and governments as well as against labor. It is happening in the usual slow motion in which great historical transitions occur. But as in military conflicts, each battle seems frenetic and spurs wild zigzagging on the world’s stock and bond exchanges and currency markets.

All this is great news for computer program traders. The average commitment of funds lasts only a few seconds these days as financial markets are buffeted up and down by vast credit waves blown by the storms sweeping today’s financially overheating planet.

The coming economic dystopia

The Greek crisis shows how far the “European idea” has shifted from 1957 when the six-member European Economic Community (EEC) was formed. At U.S. prodding, Britain and Scandinavia created the rival seven-member European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Even so, the promise of Euroland – at least before Maastricht and Lisbon – was to elevate labor to middle-class prosperity, not to impose IMF-type austerity programs of the sort that devastated Third World countries.

The message to indebted economies is stark: “Drop dead.” And they are obediently committing economic suicide (emulating Japan in the 1985 Plaza Accords) to endorse the Washington Consensus – the class war of finance against labor and industry.

Political, social, fiscal and economic power is being transferred to the EU bureaucracy, its financial controllers in the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF, whose austerity plans and related anti-labor programs direct governments to sell off the public domain, land and subsoil wealth, public enterprises, and to commit future tax revenues to pay creditor nations. This policy already has been imposed on “New Europe” (the post-Soviet economies and Iceland) since autumn 2008. It is now to be imposed on the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).

No wonder there are riots!

For observers who missed Iceland and Latvia last year, Greece is the newest and so far the largest battlefield. At least Iceland and the Baltics have the option of re-denominating loans in their own currency, writing down their foreign debts at will and taxing property to recapture for the government the revenue that has been pledged to foreign bankers.

But Greece is locked into a European currency union, run by unelected financial officials who have inverted the historical meaning of democracy. Instead of the economy’s most important sector – finance – being subject to electoral politics, central banks (the designated lobbyists for commercial and investment bankers) have been made independent of political checks and balances.

In truly Orwellian fashion, right-wingers in Europe and the United States (such as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke) call this the “hallmark of democracy.” It actually is the stamp of oligarchy, stripping away control over the economy’s credit allocation – and hence, forward planning – while giving high finance a stranglehold over public spending programs.

Iceland, Latvia and now Greece are the opening shots in the resulting global campaign to roll back the great democratic reform program of the 19th century and the Progressive Era: taxation of land and the “unearned increment” of price gains for real estate, stocks and bonds, and subordination of the financial sector to the needs of economic growth under democratic direction.

This doctrine was still being followed by the post-1945 era of progressive taxation that saw the 20th century’s greatest rise in living standards and economic growth. But most countries have reversed the fiscal trend since 1980. Tax collectors have “freed” income from public obligation only to see it pledged to banks for higher loans to bid up property prices.

Houses, office buildings and entire companies are worth whatever banks will lend. So populations (and corporate raiders) have responded to the pro-financial tax shift by borrowing to buy houses (and companies) before prices recede even further out of reach.

And taxes on labor now are about to be jacked up to pay off the public debts resulting from the asset-price inflation and financial wreckage that property tax cuts have helped cause. This is the cause of national debts. Governments have run into debt as a result of un-taxing the wealthy in general, not just real estate.

Following Western governments in shifting the fiscal burden off property and finance onto labor over the past few decades, Greece’s government is politically unable or unwilling to tax the wealthy, or even well-to-do professionals.

But neoliberals blame it and other debtor governments for not selling off enough public land and enterprises to make up the gap. Tax-deductible interest charges make privatizations on credit tax-exempt, so governments will lose the user fees they formerly received – while populations pay higher “tollbooth” charges for hitherto public services.

Just as the U.S. Government has done, it has issued bonds to finance the deficit resulting from these tax cuts. The buyers of these bonds (mainly German banks) are demanding that Greek labor (and now German taxpayers as well) should bear the burden of tax shortfalls. German and other European banks and bondholders are to be repaid at the social cost of drastic cutbacks in pensions and social spending – and if possible, by more privatization sell-offs at distress prices.

The riots in Greece have erupted because labor understands what most journalistic reporting shies away from confronting. Growth in real wages has slowed (and has stopped cold in the United States since about 1979). Home ownership has been achieved at the cost of new buyers taking on a lifetime of mortgage debt. And the post-Soviet economies won their political freedom from Russia, only to find themselves insolvent today, dependent on IMF and EU direction of their economies to obtain the loans to pay their foreign bankers that loaded down their housing, public enterprises, industry and families with debt.

Bondholders and financial speculators have ganged up to demand EU, IMF and US support for them to take their gains before the financial game crashes.

The grab can be done most quickly by shrinking economies under IMF-style austerity plans.

Unemployment is to rise while driving economies even further into debt – not only public debt as shrinking markets lead to falling tax revenue, but also foreign debt as import dependency increases.

Creditors are to be paid by letting them appropriate the economic surplus, in the form of debt service at the expense of new capital investment, infrastructure spending, public social spending and rising living standards. Economically, the Greek uprising is a revolt against the policy of sacrificing prosperity to pay foreign creditors in this way.

At the political level, the fight is to save Greece from being turned into an anti-state. The classical definition of a “state” or government is the ability to levy taxes and issue money.

But Greece has relinquished its fiscal authority to the EU and IMF, which are telling it to violate what political theorists list as the Prime Directive of any government: to act in the long-term national interest. The Greek government is being directed to act on behalf of bank capital, and indeed, that of foreign countries to engage in asset stripping, not to promote long-term growth.

At issue is whether nations will be run by creditors or by popular aims to reap the benefits of economic growth. An oligarchic push for IMF-EU loans to bail out foreign banks and bond speculators at the expense of Greek labor (the intended taxpayers of the future) aims at making labor rather than finance capital take the loss of government arrears resulting from un-taxing wealth. The aim is to enable foreign banks to avoid having to pay the price for acting as enablers in draining the domestic market. Government policy is to be taken out of the hands of voters and subordinated to the IMF and EU acting as instruments of international finance.

This creates a state of affairs in which neither Greece nor the EC are “states” or “governments” in the traditional political sense. The EU and IMF bureaucracy is not elected. And at the point where their foreign-dictated financial plan succeeds, the economy’s capital will be stripped and social democracy will collapse.

Bailout costs Merkel
On Sunday, May 9, German voters expressed their anger at the government’s role in bailing out German bankers (euphemized as bailing out “Greece”) at the expense of German taxpayers. The European Central Bank [ECB] is not creating free euro-money but is billing national governments.

The Social Democrats overtook Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Winning only just over a third of the vote – a bit less than the Social Democrats (and down over 10 percentage points from the last election, of which 4 points were lost just in the last week when the bailout package was promoted by Ms. Merkel) – the CDU lost its majority in Germany’s upper house.

Many German voters may have wondered whether taxing the poor to pay the rich to engage in usury was really as “Christian” as the party claimed to represent. Or maybe they were concerned that Germany’s tax collector is to pay nearly $30 billion as its share in the bailout of bankers – not all of whom are beloved in Germany, even when they are German. And some no doubt saw the game as a financial deception by the banking sector’s compliant politicians.

The deception
Europe’s financial lobbyists used the crisis as an opportunity to promote a broad series of bailouts. For Swedish and Austrian banks, the EU approved a €60bn extension of the balance-of-payments facility already put in place to help Hungary, Romania and Latvia keep current on their debts to Austrian and Swedish banks respectively. To circumvent the Eurozone’s no-bailout principle, this special bailout law is based on Article 122.2 of the EU treaty permitting loans to governments in “exceptional circumstances.”

If we give Ms. Merkel credit for understanding the economics at work, then we must accuse her of lying through her teeth. The Baltic debt problem is chronic and structural, not “exceptional.” Ms. Merkel also must know that she is being deceptive in pretending to help Latvia by extending loans that the EU limits explicitly to support the lat’s exchange rate, not for domestic development. The foreign exchange is to cover the cost of Latvians paying mortgages in euros to Swedish banks, and of Latvian consumers buying food and manufactures that EU governments subsidize while leaving the Baltics in a state of economic and financial dependency.

Latvia thus is being victimized, not helped. The aim is to give Swedish banks a little more time to keep collecting payments on loans that are going to go bad in due course. Foreign exchange spent in facilitating private debt service to foreign banks becomes a national debt, to be paid by Latvian taxpayers.

This EU loan thus is an exercise in naked neo-colonialism.

Will the belated shift of German voters to back the Social Democrat red-green coalition with the Green and Left parties do much to stem matters? Probably not. Greek President Papandreou acquiesced in the cave-in despite being head of the Socialist International. So the question is whether Greece really is checkmated, destined to see its public spending, pensions, health care, schooling and living standards rolled back in the way that the Baltics have experienced. They have been an experiment in neoliberal central planning. If they are an example of what the future is to bring, the world will soon see a wave of Greek emigration, Baltic-style.

That evidently is what stock markets around the world anticipated when they soared on Monday morning at the news of Europe’s trillion-dollar bailout.

What really was bailed out is the principle that economies should be stripped so that finance capital may rule.

But the fight surely is not yet over. It will escalate for the remainder of the 2010s, because it is nothing less than an attempt to roll back the history of the 19th and 20th century’s struggle to replace the power of vested property and financial interests with principles of progressive taxation and public enterprise.

Is this where Western civilization really is supposed to be leading? Confronted by parliaments controlled by aristocracies, the 19th-century reformers sought to take them over on behalf of democracy. Classical political economy was a reform program to tax away the “free lunch” of land rents, monopoly rents and financial interest extraction. John Maynard Keynes celebrated this program in his gentle term, “euthanasia of the rentiers.”

But the vested interests have fought back. Calling social democracy and public regulation “the road to serfdom,” they are trying to set Europe’s economies on the road to debt peonage. Making an end-run around national elected governments to impose the Washington Consensus, IMF and EU institutions have gained fiscal and economic control over governments and their tax policies to cut taxes on wealth – and borrow from it to finance the resulting fiscal deficits.

America’s Tea Partiers and anti-tax rebels have given up the fight to reform governments. Squeezed by debt from which they see no escape, they demand lower taxes – and are willing to see the highest brackets become the major beneficiaries in an even more regressive tax shift. Faced with the corruption of Congress by lobbyists acting on behalf of the vested interests, they reject government itself and seek safety in local gated communities.

They see Congress and parliaments throughout the world losing autonomy to the IMF, the EU and other Washington Consensus organizations seeking to impose austerity and shift the tax burden onto labor and industry, off property and off predatory finance.

The only way to prevent a regressive tax shift and debt squeeze is to gain control of governments on behalf of the spirit of classical economic and Progressive Era reforms. At least, that is what Greek labor is rioting for. Someone must control government, and if democratic forces withdraw from the fight, the financial sector will tighten its trip.

Last week is still only the beginning of how this drama will play out. The response by the post-Soviet economies, which have retained their own currencies, is to come this summer and autumn.

During those years, irrigation practices improved as did variants of staple foods and GM forced itself uninvited and unwanted, onto the world market backed by heavy money and lighweight political will in naming food products tainted by – now proven – side effects and serious health issues.

But with this growing abundance, so too did the population explode, from around 3.5 billion people to nearly 7 billion, eating up surpluses and expected to rise to 9 billion by 2050.

Problems included no down-time for land, for it to have a rest and be nutrients re-enriched and we’re running out of potable water throughout the world, from the Americans and India, throughout Australia, Africa and China. Rising temperatures are affecting germination and pollination, killing bees and shriveling yields and potable water supplies are so polluted (with toxic pesticide residues) that rural cancer rates in Farmers is soaring; if the chemicals don’t get them, it will be crop failures and goughing banks.

Food reserves are now at 20 year lows and yet emerging market standards of living are consuming more and better food; vegetarian numbers are out-numbered by meat eaters which compete along with cars for food crops. The Chinese population is the largest in the world, and statistics indicate that pork demand has risen by 45% from 1993 to 2005; meat is an inefficient calorie transmission mechanism, creating demand for five times more grain than just eating the grain alone.

To produce one kilo of beef, you need 32 kilos of grain and over 4,000 litres of water and in Australia, they are going from the sheep’s back (wool) to sheep meat and the subsidy governments pay for ethanol and biofuel programs is an added burden of the system. However, any proposal of genetic engineering taking up the slack will be as volatile as theuse of DDT in the 50′s. While sustainable farming and smart irrigation may assist in a second green revolution, the reality is that any slack generated will be eaten away by a plague of the human population.

The amount of arable land per person has fallen since 1960 from 1.1 acres to 0.6 acres per person and that could halve again by 2050. Water will become even more scarce than land and productivity gains from new seed types are already hitting a wall. China is in a bind, with 20% of the world’s population and only 7% of the arable land; China has committed $5 billion to agricultural land in Africa and the Chinese government has sent well over a million Chinese agricultural workers outside it’s borders, even to Africa.

South Korea has leased half the arable land in Madagascar to insure their own food supplies and as the realisation of a global famine presents itself, many countries and their corporations are securing tracts of land around the world, including Argentina and Brazil or building portfolios of farms in their own regions. The question must be asked, will locals allow food to be harvested and shipped away if the populace is hungry … how long will local governments remain in power (let alone keeping their lives) if and when the poor see how the rich are doing ?

2009 was one of the greatest crop yields in history brought on by perfect summer weather and delivered one of the largest grain crops in history; however, rain-falls and an early frost meant that much of crops ended up rotting in the field, providing a backdrop for price rises of 30% across the board. In the USA, the US Department of Agricultural January crop report predicted a replay of record production in 2010, but the weather pattern / change in cycles may do as it did last year.

Food production has dropped off in Australia, resulting in more imported foods and prices going up; also, our oil dependence is growing rapidly as well and as the population grows out of control – as far as politicians seem concerned – we can expect to see higher food prices across the board; and thats not even mentioning rising water and electricity charges. So get in the habit of buying what you need and will use, reduce wastage and become more environmentally aware, if you don’t it will cost you, dearly.