“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Well this quote makes me wish I finished reading that book…
Hey, it’s never too late! I didn’t appreciate it back in high school, but it’s an incredible read as an adult.
I never read the book, but I am aware of the quote. I need to listen to it on audiobook
This was the reason for the Irish potato famine. They were growing wheat but we’re forced to sell it or they would lose their farms to landlords.
There was plenty of food. It was largely requisitioned by the British military.
The peasants were allowed to grow some food for their own survival: which mostly were potatoes. When the blight swept the island, the plentiful edible food was still taken, and the farmers were left with nothing. The ones that tried to keep any bread, milk or butter lost their farms, if not their lives.
It is why it is called the Great Hunger.
I seem to recall food stores paying armed security to guard their trash. They spent money guarding trash with guns rather than letting someone survive that capitalism has deemed “unworthy”
Weird that we’re letting sociopaths run things and not barring them from positions of power. Why are we letting it be an argument that there should be a higher basic standard of living? Can’t give food cause there’s no profit in it, abundance in homelessness but companies buying up houses is okay, second and third rate medical care cause it’s cheaper for the insurance companies.
To a capitalist, a forest has no value until it’s cut down.
Or counted as offsetting five times the carbon emissions it eventually might, given ideal future circumstances.
In america you have the right to buy a forest and bulldoze it. You have the right to fill in wetlands with concrete to build a wal Mart
But only if you can afford it
To prevent starving, establish UBI.
I believe UBI will never come to pass because the rich have too much to lose. Imagine a workforce not beholden to the capitalists?
“The rich” have names and addresses.
And never walk without a small army.
Their small army is a miniscule fraction of the size of the working class
Work smart, not hard.
You have to understand that the housing crisis, in Aus at least is no longer just affecting the most disadvantaged. It’s also affecting middle-aged folks with with defence intelligence backgrounds, as an example.
Besides, I’m talking about civili disobedience that inconveniences them and reminds them that they share our streets and our infrastructure. And they rely on an army of union workers to keep it all going.
I’m not talking about rolling out guillotines yet.
(A lot of what I say should be taken in context, I am Australian, not American).
Im Australian as well and did a bit of number crunching the other day. I live in suburban sprawl 40 minutes from the middle of Brisbane and 40 minutes from the middle of the gold coast. Much worse if there’s traffic. No particular natural beauty to speak of. It’s an upper blue collar suburb, lots of qualified tradies, wives have a part time gig while the kids are at school.
The median house price is 750k. There is very little variance. All houses are pretty much the same. Right now the cheapest is $650k with 10 houses under 750k (maybe 100 houses on the market right now)
There are 3141 households in the suburb The weekly repayments on 750k is just over $1000/week on a 30 year loan
Of those households, only 2200 households earn enough money to pay the mortgage. That’s not earn enough and live, literally earn enough just to pay it and then you cant eat, no electricity, rates etc.
https://profile.id.com.au/gold-coast/household-income?WebID=410
So that leaves 70% who can even just exist.
Affordable housing is considered as being 30% of your income, (https://www.ahuri.edu.au/analysis/brief/understanding-3040-indicator-housing-affordability-stress) that’s supposed to cover rates and maintenance too, but let’s just see who can afford to pay the mortgage:
270 homes. That’s only 8.5%. 8.5% of homes in my suburb can afford to pay the MEDIAN mortgage and live without housing stress.
In that link above it considers that the bottom 40% of houses should not be paying more than 30% of their income. This suburb is great for that because I would suggest it’s pretty low-average as far as income goes. It’s the definition of what should be affordable housing.
That means we need to see the median house fall to 30% of the $1250-$1499 income bracket. IE repayments at $450/week - or a median house price of $315,000
Basically prices need to halve, or incomes need to double.
It doesn’t make any sense how the economy hasn’t collapsed yet. I would love someone to explain to me how it all adds up, because when I try to discuss it people just shrug and say “They are worth that much and it’s not coming down” like how is anyone affording it?
Yeah thanks for taking the time to post this. So Americans and others can get an idea of just how bad it can get.
I know why it hasn’t collapsed yet, it’s because folks like me are hanging on. My wife and I moved to a rural location that will never be expensive to rent in. And vetted landlords as best we could.
So many folks are trying to adapt and kicking the can. But there’s only so much we can stretch. People are already moving back in with their parents, building granny flats out back and so on.
I was making 90k, but with no generational wealth to back me, I was making just enough to pay rent in a major city, pay my bills and feed myself. Working 13hr days for the priveledge.
Changing careers and joining a union right now.
If enough people want it, they can overpower the relatively few rich. But most of the people have bought I to the lies of the rich; social media is probably a convenient tool for the rich and powerful to control the opinions of others.
It’s changing. At least here in Australia, it feels like there has been a shift.
Please elaborate on what you have witnessed?
The election we had? Conservative seats flipping to Greens. Good ol’ boy Nats voters acknowledging that young people are indeed fucked and something needs to change.
I live in the birthplace of Australian union organising. So attitudes here may not reflect the country at large.
But the last election was a pretty big step in the right direction. Even if it wasnt as big a shift as I would have liked. It was the renter voting block that delivered the W.
Hey at least Barcaldine has some pretty good water
Actually the capitalists have the most incentive to implement UBI. Better paid workers are more likely to turn around and buy the shit they were just making for themselves, and if the rich are not kept away from the megaphone, an improperly done UBI will be made an excuse to strip welfare benefits.
We can have UBI right now if we pledge 10% of our income and pay it voluntarily.
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I would love to see regulations define “fair profit.”
Material costs + labor costs + fair profit = retail price.
Fair profit cannot be more than X% of retail price.
I’d say that fair profit is a ratio of materials+labor costs. Basically a supply chain merchant’s VAT. Find a rate at which a well run shop is able to turn a profit allowing it to hire more workers and expand if successful enough, and cap the “fair profit” at whatever that is as a ratio to labor and material costs.
Really the worst hit industries will be ones that are particularly prone to brand taxing, and it actually disincentivizes offshoring since cheaping out on labor and regulatory costs correspondingly limits your upper profit margins.
Companies just need to be kept small, if they can afford to expand then it means they are making too much money
I kinda agree but not too much. National scale industrial companies are a necessity for modern complex products. Keeping companies from going international (or at least beyond multinational bloc scale for places like the EU or Mercosur) is more than fair in my mind.
Fast food cartels seem to work ok. Maccas, KFC, Hungry Jacks, Subway, Red Rooster, Chicken Treat, Nandos, Grill’d etc (and I use these examples because the americans will recognize some, but not others which are Australian or Western Australian only) can all coexist while also being statewide, national and/or international franchise chains. None of them can really squash out the others because the customer demands choice, and no one store can reliably deliver all the possible options that consumers seem to want. Sure, they have plenty of other ethical concerns attached, but so far, monopoly seems not to be one of them.
You can have an international product without international stores but Windows for example can be an OS but be banned from expanding into software or a cloud company for example. Google can be search engine but not an ad platform. Etc
I guess that too, I was imagining more for the prevention of shady tax dodging shiz
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In the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, this more or less already exists in countries with socialized medicine. It’s not as explicit as my formula, but the price of medications and devices are regulated. Industry needs to demonstrate the actual benefit of a new product over a prior product for the system to pay for it, and the price of the product is then set on the basis of the health economic value it brings.
Some say it stifles innovation, but honestly, it eliminates the bullshit minor changes that are only made to continue justifying high prices and exclusivity.
Anyway, I think the “Exodus of industry” argument is an empty threat the shareholder class makes when they feel threatened. A market is a market, and if they want to continue to sell in it, they have to follow the rules, even when they change.
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It’s always externalized exploitation because they’re all multinational corporations.
It’s true that many of the big players are based in the US, e.g. Pfizer, J&J, Merck, AbbVie, Abbott, EliLily, etc.
But there are plenty that aren’t:
- Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, BioNTech, and Merck Group (MilliporeSigma in the US, distinct from Merck & Co) are headquartered in Germany.
- AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline are in the UK.
- Roche and Novartis are in Switzerland.
- Novo Nordisk in Denmark.
- Sanofi in France.
- Takeda, Otsuka, and Astellas in Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_biomedical_companies_by_revenue
It’s important to note that much of the R&D pharma relies on is publicly funded via academic grants in research carried out at universities. It’s not to say that pharma doesn’t also carry out clinical research, which of course does carry a cost, but a lot of the development dollars for a given drug are spent well before they make it into pharma’s hands.
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Can’t have corporations when suddenly everyone has freedom to choose what they do for work.
Co-ops already exist.
You need competition. The milk surplus, you want that. Companies should compete and only demand what they need to keep going.
But if you do that, there is no real owning class. So you need other ways to finance innovation.
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Which means only people with other motives own companies. That could be a good thing.
Studies have shown that, at least in the states, inflation is basically independent of wage growth.
Not to mention how being the guy who doesn’t jack up prices will automatically hand you a significant market advantage. In non cartel organized markets every competitor has a prisoner’s dilemma incentivizing them to betray the others if an unspoken price increasing agreement is put into effect.
Lol so they can just raise food and rent prices?
Simp
Same point was made in a reply 13 hours before your comment. If you want an answer you can find it there.
This is some Facebook quality content right here.
What the image says is true. What the title says is dumb. Strange combo, immune to both upvotes and downvotes (from me, at least).
For real, like the literal headlines attached to it were that they had to dump because they’d run out of storage capacity and didn’t have enough transit infrastructure to move their stuff during the lockdowns.
I didn’t spend the latter half of 21 learning more about supply chain management than any man should have to because of the news for some self righteous twit to just outright lie about my trauma even happening!/s
Oh omg. Wow I was misinformed, thank you.
Yeah, even though governments have sometimes stepped in and prevented free market to do its own thing to keep prices somewhat low or in disasters (for instance, here in my country farmers are subsidized to keep food prices low, and various governments during covid didn’t wait for free market to step in to deal with the pandemic and funded the relief effort by themselves), capitalism has been critiqued endlessly, its contradictions pointed out over 200 years and due to what the post refers to and countless other reasons, capitalism should definitely be replaced.
The issue is that the left hasn’t really organized themselves and provided an alternative and by that I mean something akin to a step by step solution. What happens now when the left gets into power in a country is some random small tweaks such as making healthcare and worker lives a bit better, adding taxes on cars - nothing that tackles the core problem which is capitalism.
Those are centrist talking points, not sure if you’re aware. Any step that dismantles capitalism is met with “too extreme” or “unfeasible”. The Overton window is too far to the right.
What happens now when communists take over is a clique of insane people do wild shit, supposedly for the proletariat at the expense of the bourgeoisie. And then they wonder why their insane, clumsy, ignorant and naive new policies didn’t work, they blame their people for not being good enough as they are being uncooperative assholes ergo not true proletariat because the proøetariat would be very cooperative with dear leader, and then they start shooting.
I hate that this image was chosen to attach to this statement.
Dammit Bobby…
*Dang it Bobby
“‘Dammit’ is a strong word. That’s why I used it.”
Dunno why it reminded me this trailer. Got goosebumps always I see it…
Dumping product is losing money, the only way it makes profitability sense in Democratic Capitalism would be if the increase of profit from dumping 1 unit is greater than the marginal cost of producing that unit.
And even if that was the case industry wide, without collective action from government or cartel persuasion (or there being a monopoly which is the result of a LACK of government action), it wouldn’t make sense to do for any individual because you make more being a free rider.
The issue of misaligned incentives does exist, we have enough food to feed everyone and we aren’t doing it, but the pandemic milk dumping was because of the pandemic, not Capitalism. Farmers did donate some food to food banks but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime disruption nobody was prepared for so the food banks couldn’t take all that was available.
Meanwhile most of dumped milk was dumped in US
Yes, I think of this as a messaging problem. Uncontrolled capitalism is essentially anarchy. It creates perverse incentives, which can result in behavior like dumping or limiting product at very high cost when it would be cheaper and more profitable in the short term to sell it (see OPEC, DeBeers). I don’t know of a successful capitalist state with a government that doesn’t regulate capitalism.
In this case, though, yeah, a pandemic disrupted supply chains, changed consumption patterns, created labor shortages. We all understand the toilet paper shortage wasn’t engineered because we could see the cause. When a root cause invisible to us, it’s a common reaction to assume bad intent.
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Op is a fucking retard. It was because they had no storage facilities to take it not to keep demand high.
Hey man, don’t need to go that far. The concept and context of his argument are solid. Look at diamonds, for instance. It’s done, even if his example wasn’t spot on. Maybe. Where I am the dairy farmers are selling their cattle for meat, because the supermarkets have strong armed such low prices, they can’t afford to even operate. While the milk on the shelf isn’t cheap.
Diamonds are a luxury item that no one needs. Can’t say I’m terribly upset about that.
Don’t milk cows, lactation stops. No milk until the next calf is born. Outside the ethics of bovine milk, if the supply chain has ground to a halt, and food safety regulations mean you can’t sell warm, unpasteurised, unfiltered milk at your front gate (Yay, faeces and gravel) then it’s going to be tipped because it needs to be in this instance.
The us government famously has a cheese storage facility intended for just this purpose.
Well, not this purpose. It’s intended to allow the government to buy surplus at near market rates to subsidize the dairy industry.
But there’s literally a place to put it already paid for by your tax dollars.
Not only that, but the gov. subsidizes our farms so we have food to eat. We produce and excess so we don’t all go hungry.
Ever heard of powdered milk?
Have you ever seen a milk dryer?
Cannot turn one of those around in three months, and when it’s full, it’s full.
Not to mention warehouse storage for the bagged/ binned product and conversion to shelf ready
You obviously have no clue how milk production actually works 😂😂😂
Why should I?
Because you evidently feel entitled to an opinion on it.
I learned a long time ago to keep my mouth shut if I don’t know what I am talking about.
Powdered milk, also called milk powder,[1] dried milk, or dry milk, is a manufactured dairy product made by evaporating milk to dryness. One purpose of drying milk is to preserve it; milk powder has a far longer shelf life than liquid milk and does not need to be refrigerated, due to its low moisture content. Another purpose is to reduce its bulk for the economy of transportation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powdered_milk
What else is there to know?
You’re a bit special
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So do you propose communism or will you step in and tell us what to do to fix this?
The icon of this community is quite literally a hammer and sickle, with the sickle replaced as a keyboard. They’re proposing communism lol
I propose communism except I will guide us there with some friends of mine as a sort of Vanguard 😉 and as soon as we’re ready to accomplish communism we will disband the vanguard. Pinky promise.