Just another look at the racket....

Prices don't rise by magic or because a handful of goat herders have taken over the oil fields or when rice jockeys buy up everything with all that American money. But it does take a lot of money to influence it and when you have a global market as we do nowyou have to have the money to move materials in it. This market can and is manipulated by the big buck guys and there's nothing much governments can do about it. Hence, buying and selling causing these guys chasing a profit and bidding against each other and to Hell with you and your puny pay check or voting the bastards out!

Of course, you can always, as all politicians do, call them names as Oba mama has amply demonstrated when he railed against the oil speculators. Hey, it's good for laughs and look how well it worked out for president Nixon! 

Did Goldman Sachs Help to Create the Current Food Crisis? | Oil Price.com

In a shocking report by Frederick Kaufman that has been featured on the Foreign Policy website, the role of Goldman Sachs and its Wall Street cohort in creating the food crisis has been revealed.

Frederick uncovers the 1991 scheme where Goldman bankers lead by Gary Cohn created a derivative that tracked 24 raw minerals; including coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy and wheat and how that scheme was then manipulated to raise food commodity prices.

Each element was given a calculated investment value and is now known as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI). The GSCI has been a static commodity vehicle for the past decade while bankers focused their attention on collateralized debt (hello economic crisis) until 1999 when futures markets were deregulated. That’s when bankers started taking large positions in grains.

Following the money trail Frederick reports:

Food inflation has remained steady since July 2008 when there was $318 billion in the commodity markets - up from the $55 billion speculators dumped in the first 55 days of 2008. In 2003 commodities futures markets were only worth $13 billion. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture stated.

Between 2005 to 2008 worldwide prices of food rose 80 percent, and they’ve kept on rising. Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, concluded that in 2008 "a significant portion of the price spike was due to the emergence of a speculative bubble."