Sunday, April 20, 2008

Our friends in ETA exploded a bomb at 3:25 this morning at Socialist party headquarters in Elgoibar, Guipúzcoa. They called in a warning, and the cops were able to evacuate the area, so fortunately no one was injured, but serious property damage was done. Three kilos of explosives were used. This was the second bombing of a Socialist headquarters in three days.

Nasty incident in Málaga: a drunk driver passing illegally ran a bus full of Finnish tourists off the road, where it rolled over. Nine were killed and fifteen seriously injured. The drunk survived, thereby pointing out a flaw in the Darwinian model.

Drivers from other European countries might want to be extra-careful in Spain, which has pretty near the most dangerous highways in Western Europe. All the drinking doesn't help, and the dreadful road signs don't help much either, nor does all the speeding that goes on. There really is more machismo among the Latins than the Nordics, and it comes out in the way some of them drive.

Check out this nonsense by Bru Rovira in La Vanguardia today:

Hunger is a structural problem of the globalized world today. A tragedy that demands collective solutions to the shared responsibility of the chief actors on the new scene of politics, and transnational markets, especially the rich countries, which have dictated the rules and exercise political and economic control of globalization.

Looks like the Jew-American conspiracy against the world is poisoning the wells again. We wouldn't want to imply that many poor countries are poor because of their own social structure or corruption or thieving dictatorial governments, would we?

(According to the UN) technical progress applied to agriculture "has produced very unjust profits." In order to correct it, the Unesco recommends fostering sustainable agriculture that respects the fragility of natural resources and protects the local production of food, bringing the producer closer to the consumer.


Sounds like protectionism to me. By the way, the corrupt thieving dictatorial governments that impoverish their own people are well represented at the UN. I'm not surprised that they're trying to blame the situation they created on the Jew-American conspiracy and its "unjust profits." I also note that our author has no concept of competitive advantage: the countries that are best at producing food should do so. Other countries should concentrate on producing other goods that they can produce more efficiently and trade those goods for food. In that way everybody takes the fullest advantage of its economic potential.

As can be seen now, although production has increased, distribution is unequal, and the poorest countries have not only gotten poorer because of the difficulties of reaching the markets and unfair competition against their products exercised by rich countries slashing prices with subsidized products (dumping), but they now see that having lost their food sovereignty, self-sufficiency within the poverty in which they lived has directly become hunger, because they now depend only on the markets and the prices that the large producers set, with whom they cannot compete
.

Our author is absolutely right that agricultural subsidies in First World countries need to be stopped now; these subsidies are genuine unfair competition to Third World farmers. However, I was not aware that "slashed" food prices caused hunger; I figured the lower the price the consumer pays, the better. Guess I was wrong. Our author also believes that prices are set by the producers rather than the market, by the way. Finally, he does not understand that the way to make Third World countries wealthier is by improving farming technology to increase production there, along with hanging their corrupt dictators.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Some of the people that write in La Vanguardia are clearly against the usual stuff: the US and free trade. I stopped reading it long ago. Them champions of moral superiority are really boring and predictable.