In his book, The Impact Of Science On Society, written in 1952, Bertrand Russell wrote, “At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars … War … has hitherto been disappointing in this respect … but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full … The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it?”

Russell is expressing a view, long held by many who might be considered “oligarchs”, and who, for many generations, have held themselves to be superior to the vast majority of the population of this planet.

The simple fact is that the world is not “too full.” It might feel like it is, sometimes, as our basic economic infrastructure crumbles round our ears, and as poverty forces the people of large parts of the planet into having large families.

Today’s hikes in oil and food prices are not the result of population fuelled demand, unavailability, or as a lack of capability to produce. They are purely artificial, as the result of Policy.

And what is that Policy?

In a word: GENOCIDE.

The population of this planet is staring a dark age in the face. Culturally, we are already there. But in terms of human suffering, the period we are entering now will put all historical genocides in the shade. The policy has been stated many times: reduce the population of the planet from its present levels.

At April’s G7 meeting of finance ministers in Washington, the World Bank issued statements warning of the impoverishment of entire regions of the world as the result of the food crisis, a situation they believe will not change in the coming year.

Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, issued a statement at the same meeting, stating that the rise in food prices would be likely to nullify the fight against poverty.

As the saying goes, “no shit, Sherlock!”

These guys can make their statements with confidence, because they know of the activities of speculative kingpin, George Soros, and people like him. For those unaware, Soros was behind the near collapse of the British Pound in 1992.

Georgie has moved on from currency speculation. That form of profiteering only caused economic hardship. Today, he is aiming fairly and squarely at human death. On the 18th June, Goergie told a Budapest newspaper: “Rather than expecting energy prices to go down somehow, we should accept that it must go further up first, for us to be able to solve the [long-term] problem. Prices must go up first so as to encourage people to consume less.”

So Georgie wants us to consume less, which might be fine for you or I, who probably don’t struggle too much for our three meals a day. What happens if you are one of the several billions who only eat once per day? Do they need encouragement to consume less?

Georgie’s mechanism for pushing prices up is typified by his recent aquisition of all the commodities trading and merchandising business of the giant multi-national ConAgra Foods. This aquisition was made by a private investment fund managed by Soros Fund Management LLC, acting as part of a consortium with New York hedge fund Ospraie Management and New York asset manager General Atlantic. The $2.8 billion deal is estimated as the largest acquisition ever by a hedge fund.

The agreement includes 144 ConAgra facilities, located primarily in North America. Renamed Gavilon, the new company provides physical distribution and merchandising of grains, feed ingredients, fertilizer, and energy products; as well as agriculture, energy, and other commodity trading activities, and “risk management services” — i.e., commodity futures derivatives speculation.

It doesn’t stop there. It goes without saying that Georgie is right in there pushing biofuels. Another string to the bow, the biofuels insanity is a strategy that even the greenies don’t want. The ConAgra operations provide “procurement and marketing services” for ethanol and bio-diesel producers, supply chain infrastructure, as well as financial hedging.

Georgie’s not alone of course. Politicians and scientists have all been pushing the insanity that biofuels are the answer to the non-existent Global Warming problem.

And if Biofoolery is not enough, GM is being pushed harder than ever. GM crops are designed to reduce diversity of plant species through cross-pollenation, and more importantly, guarantee control of the food supply chain. The decades long destruction globally of small farming, to be replaced with huge factory farms planting seeds only ever purchased from Monsanto adds to that effect. We even have these two insanities of GM and biofoolery getting it together, with scientists at Michigan State University messing with the genetic makeup of corn to develop a strain that can break down its own cellulose, thus making fermentation easier, and biofuel production more efficient.

The problem for the corporations, at least in the short term, is that the risk of cross-pollenation makes GM unpopular. So until the use of GM is universally accpepted, they need to do something about that. Just another of the “conincidences” in the world, is Colony Collapse Syndrome. Bees, the little stinging insects that we depend upon to pollenate our food supply, are dying out in unprecedented numbers. Is it really a coincidence that this happens within a few years of the development of GM crops, or that certain GM crop manufacturers also happen to belong to a cartel of pharmasutical/chemical/insecticide manufacturers and have had their products banned because they are harmful to bees?

Unfortunately, they’re never too far away from releasing another product.

It can’t get much better for them, can it? Kill the bees which cause cross-pollenation, but that are also needed for the pollenation of the regular food supply. Result: global food supply crisis, and calls for GM crops which don’t need pesticides.

Increasingly now, politicians are coming out and openly pushing the Policy. For example, the heads of the World Bank and IMF met with the finance ministers of the Americas (or, at least, those that turned up) on the 23rd and 24th June. Finance ministers listened to lectures from the IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the World Bank’s Robert Zoellick, on the dangers of giving in to the “temptation” of subsidising food and fuel and restoring protectionism, because such policies might fuel “expections of inflation.”

Delegates at the meeting were greeted with a World Bank report on the impact of rising food prices on the Americas. The report asserted that:

• food prices are “relatively low,” by historical standards
• “high food prices are here to stay”
• the cause of the high price of food is rising consumption in developing countries.

Recommended measures included “food for work” programs, and targetted cash hand-outs for extremely poor families who meet specified conditions. Any general national subsidy program, however, would be dangerous, because “it could spur inefficient consumption of these foods by non-poor households.”

The IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn endorsed the World Bank report, and added a warning that governments must stop policies which are encouraging “domestic demand growth … Social protection should not be used to justify a retreat into protectionism, or a delay in measures to cool domestic demand.”

In the film “The Third Man,” by Greame Greene, there’s a classic piece of dialogue spoken by Orson Wells which Greene claimed he didn’t write, but that Wells had added. It fairly well sums up the attitude of global leaders these days. Wells’ character, Harry Lime, was a black marketeer selling corrupted stolen drugs, resulting in many deaths. The scene has Lime and his friend, Holly Martens, at the top of a Vienese ferris wheel, as he attempts to justify his activities.

“Look down there,” he said, “Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand for every dot that stopped - would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man? free of income tax. it’s the only way to save money nowadays.”

Coming on top of many years of underinvestment in food production, Al Gore’s push for ethanol based fuels is having a devastating effect on world crop reserves.

It is projected that US wheat stocks will fall to a 60 year low of 7.64 million metric tons, for the wheat marketing year of 2007-2008.

U.S. soybean production will be 5.06 million metric tons, a 68% decline in a single year. This reflects the drastic shift of U.S. soy production to corn for biofuels.

An Illinois Agriculture Extension Service economist, David Good, wrote an article entitled, “Can U.S. Farmers Plant More Corn, Soybeans and Wheat?” on the 18th of December in agricultureonline.com, concluding that “Early projections for 2008 suggest that U.S. harvested acreage of corn, soybeans, and wheat all need to be larger than in 2007, by a total of about 7.4 million acres. With rising prices of other commodities [fuel, fertiliser, electricity, chemicals] and limited amounts of uncultivated acreage available, it is difficult to see how such an increase can occur.”

In Canada, the Vice President of the Agriculture producers Association of Saskatchewan, Don Connick, warned in DiscoverMooseJaw.com yesterday, “We have struggled with low grain prices for years while our costs of production have continued to rise. Many grain growers have gone out of business, taking off farm jobs, or seriously eroding their equity just to stay in business.”

As as result of these drops in production, as well as insane hedge fund speculation, inflation is spiraling upwards. I’ve discussed rising food prices in Europe recently. In many Central Asian and Caucasus states, the inflation rate has hit double digits. In Kyrgyzstan it reached 20.1% during the January-October period in 2007. Although Uzbekistan denies it, the International Monetary Fund claims that Uzbekistan’s inflation rate is now 12.2%. In Kazakstan, inflation was 13.4% for the first ten months of 2007.

In Georgia, inflation is at 11.2%. It’s about the same in Azerbaijan. Both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan rely on wheat imports from Kazakstan, which has decided it’s more lucrative to export surpluses to China and India instead. Reports from Tajikistan, where inflation is running at 14.9%, say the price of a 50 kilogram bag of flour has risen by 20% over the last year. In Uzbekistan, which is scheduled to hold a Presidential election tomorrow, regional media outlets have reported that the price of flour has risen between 10% and 37% depending on quality.

To add insult to injury, a wind borne fungal disease - a new wheat stem rust strain - has appeared in Yemen, having managed to cross the Red Sea, from East Africa. This disease is now in a perfect place to attack the Indian subcontinent where 25% of the world’s wheat is grown. This disease is highly virulent, a strain having destroyed 40% of the spring wheat crop in North America during the 1950s.

In Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, 300-400 million people survive on wheat based diets.

George Bush’s “insane decision” to replace 20% of petrol with biofuel over 10 years is behind the recent price rise in food products, says Italy’s number-one pasta producer Guido Barilla — only failing to give equal mention to Nobelist Al Gore in the promotion of this genocidal policy.

In an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica on the 20th Oct, Barilla charged that Bush’s decision “has unleashed a chain-reaction that has increased prices of all agricultural commodities.”

The Italian antitrust authority has started an investigation on bread and pasta prices, which have increased by as much as 20% recently. “It is a monumental mistake,” Barilla charged. “When I see ads of farmers saying they are proud to be growing energy, I shudder. You cannot use sacred commodities to feed 4×4s.”

A commentary in the Catholic daily Avvenire, added that financial speculators are worsening the food price situation. The process “would not have exploded in such a virulent way, had it not been `doped’ by speculators at the Chicago Board of Trade,” wrote Paolo Viana, the head of the Christian Workers Movement.

On the 12th October, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors agreed to extend Federal Reserve contingency lines of credit to two British banks–$10 billion to the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and $20 billion to Barclays, two of Britain’s Big 4 banks. The Federal Reserve would open these $30 billion facilities to the two banks, should the banks, in turn, need them to extend credit to their clients “in need of short-term liquidity to finance their holdings of securities and certain other assets,” the Federal Reserve said in a letter to the banks.

With respect to the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Fed said that the coverable assets could include “residential and commercial mortgage loans and mortgage-backed securities, asset-backed securities, commercial paper and structured products.” At the same time, the Fed lifted the limit on how much credit the RBS and Barclays could extend to their “affiliated broker-dealers,” to $10 billion for RBS, and $20 billion for Barclays, matching the size of the contingency lines of credit that the Fed would extend to them. RBS’ and Barclays’ affiliated broker-dealers would be the vehicles, which would then extend the funds to the two banks’ collapsing clients.

Thus, the U.S. Federal Reserve is preparing to extend a hyper-inflationary $30 billion to bail out the British banking system, and the Cayman Island and London headquartered hedge funds.

With the Fed promising to backstop its actions, the Royal Bank of Scotland went into action: It announced on the 21st Oct, that it was deep in talks to take over the failed Cheyne Finance, a $6-7 billion Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV), which was set up and is controlled by the London-headquartered Cheyne Capital. This SIV was on the verge of a fire-sale of illiquid assets. Deloitte
Touche, Cheyne Finance’s accounting firm, received an extraordinary ruling by Britain’s High Court last week, which allowed Deloitte Touche to declare the Cheyne Finance SIV to be “insolvent.” Deloitte Touche, appointed as receiver, is now offering to sell Cheyne Finance to Royal Bank of Scotland.

Simultaneously, Barclays Bank is heavily involved with three deeply troubled SIVs, one of which, Solent, is headquartered in
the Cayman Islands.