Best investment for the working stiff?.......

Still is a cupboard full of food. Only a dozen or so corporations control the worlds food. They are controlled by various governments like Chavez in Venezuela, the U.S., Russia, China, Australia, Canada and the OPEC gang. And who do you think owns them?

Make you feel more secure?

Most people are unaware of how thin the food supply chain is. Archer Daniel Midland,Walmart , Food lion and a few others control most of the distribution in the U.S. A hand full of trucking companies and two railroads own the rest.

Ever get the idea that you have very little control over our lives? Not that these guys are particularly evil, but that every time they don't get their way, you and I have to pay.

Health care cost for these companies , for instance, is in the billions. Yep, a hand full of companies control that too. And who controls them? The politicians who take their "campaign contributions", of course. Do you really think that a government that has trillions to spend  really gives a rats ass about  me or you and our problems?

How much money did you give these assholes?

Until we can compete with the money we don't have a voice. After all what major difference do you see between Bush's policy and Obamama's ?

Any?

Of course! Abortion! Deficits! National Security!

Bullshit!!!

Check this out and see what you think.

oftwominds: "Peak Food": Agriculture Cartels, Oil, and Seed Patents

Further to your work on the proportion of our spending that goes to the big corporations (cartels):

I just did a quick analysis of the corporate take in my area of expertise: Farming.

Wheat in a 'high rainfall' area of Australia costs on average $323 per hectare to produce. (This makes a benchmark yield of 3.5 ton of grain) Of that cost of production:

$111 goes to fertilizer. We have a choice of 2 companies.

$66 goes to chemicals. We have a choice of 8 companies but only 4 would hold most of the patents for most of the chemicals. (bayer, syngenta, Dow, dupont)

$65 goes to fuels. We have a choice of 4 companies.

$9 goes to insurance. We have a choice of about 4.

$8 goes to machinery. We have a choice of about 4.

$23 goes to seed (which could be bought from one of about 4 companies producing new varieties and holding plant breeder rights, or it could be on-farm seed from a free variety that is still produced using 80% corporate inputs)

Monsanto and syngenta are getting scary in this field. They are the leaders in plant breeder rights and see the infinite profit potential in owning the bulk of the world's food genome. Scarier than Peak Oil in my opinion. If they are able to saturate the market with their crop varieties you can be sure there will be built in 'self destruct sequence' that means you MUST buy their seed or have a crop that reverts to weedy grass.

This is the case with many hybrid vegetable varieties already. The seed they produce will not produce good marketable produce the following year ... it throws back to a highly variable plant of different sizes, grades and maturation times, making it difficult to manage and market.

So $259 to $282 or 80% to 87% of costs of wheat production go to multinational companies! The other 13% to 20% goes to small service providers who could probably break their costs down in the same way.

When you consider that chemicals and fertilizers use huge amounts of fuels to produce you can sense that the share of total money flowing in the agricultural sector that stays within the major corporations is very, very high indeed.

Thank you, Bart, for a very enlightening peek into agricultural cartels.