How Goldman Sachs Caused a 'Silent Mass Murder,' Gambling on Starvation in the Developing World

How Goldman Sachs Caused a 'Silent Mass Murder,' Gambling on Starvation in the Developing World

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. "My children stopped growing," a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. "I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."


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[edit on 3-7-2010 by Jack Jouett]

Star and Flagged. No one probably even noticed it or cared. These companies did it with Natural Gas a few years ago too. It's not like we had a spike demand or a decrease in supply yet both food and Natural Gas Shot up. Price manipulation that only benefited them.

Don't you think it was pretty convenient that one of Goldman Sachs biggest rivals Lehman Bros., was "allowed to fail" by then Treasury Secretary Paulson, who just happened in a previous life to be a CEO of Goldman Sachs. Nothing fishy going on here....move along.....nothing to see here.

yeah this is unfortunately unsurprising. tragically unsurprising.

thats how they play this game, and its all for control. they did it with the depression. with conflict products. they do it anyway and everyway they can. the lady said she got into debt. wonder how many did? people who knew nothing of debt. now theyre owned.

welcome to the club *sad uncomfortable lol*

this could have been really worse if there were no competition of food producing countries: corn, soy beans and meat from brazil, rice from china, wheat from argentina, etc.

seriously, this ordeal didn`t lead to a global catastrophe because some of this players saw an opportunity to increase their market shares of a given commodity in places that they didn`t participate at all, or had little penetration. and obviously, when you`re industrializing food products, no matter what incentives in tax exemptions you have from buying from usa -- or wherever -- when the base prices takes a hike up you`ll start to look from alternative suppliers.

capitalism really saved the day on this one (oO") -- or made it less gruesome.

it is a matter of common sense that some resources must retain a strategic type of status, and never be left to gamble with. food being the prime and best example.

btw, on a side note, i always held the opinion that commodities altogether shouldn`t come under speculatory markets. they have to be regulated.

otherwise you would be trading possible financial gains for sure economic growth. a uncertain quick buck for assured long term revenue.

but greed always has a louder voice, i guess. even in macroeconomics.

It is tragic enough that this happens to billions in the underdeveloped world. But the developed world will only take a limited interest and have a dim understanding of the scale of the tragedy because...well, that's just the way people are. All people. There is so much going on and everyone is locked in their own private struggles. Few have the will or the ability to look beyond what impacts them.

However, this will become a problem for the developed world as well, and then you will hear much more howling from the public in advanced nations. Because along with dismantling the middle class, TBTB are essentially erasing the differences between the developed and developing worlds. They have spent the last 50 years raping the third world and now that its all cashed out, they are going to turn exactly the same techniques on the previously-hallowed-ground of the developed world. We can see this in many ways....refusal to do anything about immigration in the US; the various crises in Europe and the attempts to impose third-world-style "austerity" programs in the EU; etc. etc.

TPTB figure if they just build the walls around their own estates a bit higher they can afford to pilliage their own neighborhoods now. You will see that for most people in the developed world, food will come to account for an ever-growing percentage of their dwindling buying power, and swings like this will start to be seen in the G8 nations as well as the third world.

S & F!

If you thought Goldman Sachs and friends were A**holes before, well...

I think it is time to attempt the disengagement of world wide, daily human activity from Wall Street's machinations. They have proven incapable of being trusted.

I am up for suggestions.

There is still so much that needs to be done to reform global finance and I'm worried that the issue is being forgotten.

Public anger was rivited on the subject for awhile...it seemed to me for a brief moment that there might actually be enough rage to effect real reform...then along came the BP disaster, and suddenly finance has been puswhed to the back burner. People can only keep one catastrophe in mind at time, I guess. It will probably take another major financial ****up for people to return to the topic.