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Guest Post: Horsemeat Economics
Submitted by John Aziz of Azizonomics blog,
The British (and now Europe-wide) scandal of corporations selling horse meat as beef is emblematic of many of the problems with big, unwieldy systems.
The similarity between horse meat and subprime have already been noted in a Financial Times editorial:
The food industry has long known that processed meat is susceptible to fraud. While it is relatively easy to verify whole cuts of meat taken from a carcass, this is not the case for the bits left behind. These are gathered up and shipped out to thousands of outlets for processing into lower-value products. In Britain, monitoring this industry is left to local authorities and the retailers themselves.
Yet this surveillance has become virtually impossible in the modern world of food production. Consumers want ever lower prices. But food margins are already wafer thin. The drive to cut costs has sent retailers scouting for cheaper suppliers in far-flung parts of the world. Supply chains have become vast and unwieldy. And internet tenders drive prices down even further.
This has brought big benefits to consumers who until recently enjoyed consistently falling prices. But in a disturbing parallel to the financial sector’s subprime crisis, the growing distance between supermarkets and their suppliers has also opened the door to fraud on a scale that as yet can only be guessed at. The meat used in these products now travels across multiple borders and through myriad companies. Regulators do not have the resources to keep up. Only those who buy the processed products and sell them under their own brands can apply the pressure that will limit chances for fraud.
Just as with subprime, complicated, impersonal systems have bred fraud. Once upon a time, banks were impelled to lend responsibly, because if they did not their balance sheets would become filled with trash, and they would face bankruptcy. Then they discovered that they could pull a ruse — lend irresponsibly, and pass off the risk to someone else. Purchasers of subprime mortgage-backed securities thought they were buying a AAA grade product, as that is what ratings agencies passed them off as being. But it turns out they were just buying unsustainable trash. It is, of course, possible that the subprime crisis could have been avoided had the price of oil and other commodities not risen so steeply and precipitously, squeezing consumers’ budgets.
But sooner or later, the banks’ irresponsibility would have come home to roost, and the ruse would have collapsed. If it hadn’t been ballooning commodities prices, it would have been something else.
Similarly, in an equally sprawling and disconnected system — the global food supply chain — anonymity has bred irresponsibility once again. Retailers claim to have been misled. Meat processors and food manufacturers claim to have been misled too. But somewhere along the line, someone is lying. Someone, at some point decided that horse was a cheaper alternative to beef, someone tested it for taste, to affirm that it would be taken as an acceptable substitute. And someone decided that horse would enter the food chain, and that consumers could be fooled into thinking that it was beef. Would that be possible with a local butcher? Would it be possible for unwanted substances to penetrate the food chain if the supply chain was much shorter?
Maybe, but there are strong disincentives. With a shorter supply chain, it is not so easy to pass off the blame to someone else. If a local British butcher decides to substitute horse for beef, it would be more easily discoverable than if a sprawling multinational — whose abattoirs are located in Romania or Cyprus, but its customers in Britain, Spain, France and Italy — decided to do so. British abattoir workers would know, and might dissent. Butchers would be able to tell the difference, and most would have a serious problem with deceiving customers who they see face to face. A supermarket that sells meals packaged in plastic containers by other companies, has no such problem with deception. Customers don’t ever get to meet the person who butchered or cooked or shipped their ready meal. This provides a barrier of anonymity. There is no immediate embarrassment in deception carried out at distance. Simply, anonymity makes deception easier, and big, complex systems create anonymity.
In 2010, The Telegraph reported on some empirical research supporting this idea:
There is a growing body of research to support the logically obvious idea that humans become increasingly dishonest as cheating becomes easier:
From finding a £50 note on the floor to being accidentally given the answers to test questions, even normally honest people can suddenly become dishonest, it found.
But they will only cheat if it does not involve any work, said the academic study for the journal Psychological and Personality Science.
In an experiment on 84 students, researchers set up a trial involving a maths test on a computer, without telling them the reasons why they were doing it.
Half the students were warned the system was not working properly. If they pressed the space bar on the keyboard the answers would come up.
The other half were told that if they did not press the enter key immediately after seeing the question, then the answer would come up.
Overall, few cheated at all. But those who did not have to press a key to cheat were almost TEN times as likely to do so, said the researchers from the University of Toronto.
They said it was because pressing a key was like ‘intentionally’ trying to cheat while those who didn’t acted as if they were cheating by accident, so they did not feel they were making an immoral choice.
In a second test, the volunteers were tested on their willingness to help a fellow student with a disability complete an exam paper.
Half were told the way to volunteer was to follow an online link, the other half simply had to click ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the screen.
Those who had to follow the link were five times less likely to volunteer to help, because it was easier for them to get out of it than the others who had a clear choice to make.
Study author Rimma Teper said: “People are more likely to cheat and make immoral decisions when their transgressions don’t involve an explicit action.”
I am coming to believe very strongly that as this century continues, and as systemic interconnectivity and complexity increases, we will see many more horse meat and subprime style scandals exploiting the anonymity of big systems.
Meanwhile, those who do not wish to be exposed to such counterparty risk will avoid such complexity like the plague.
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Too big to trust...
The 1/4 pounder has been pipped at the post by the new, giant size, 1/4 horse.
"SOYLENT GREEN IS TRIGGER!"
We're running out of basic foods so horsemeat could one day be a luxury.
The global wild fishcatch has plateaued. Next will be land-based food production.
http://www.planbeconomics.com/2013/01/30/chart-global-fish-catch-has-fla...
Big unwieldy systems are a psychopath's best friend.
Buy local. You'll know what you're getting and you'll be voting for much needed decentralization.
Decentralization. The only "ism" that matters.
Decentralizationism Bitchez!
But people is not know what is good, central State Apparatus is necessity to manage means of production. All must kneel at alter of big government and serve high priests, even if eat contamination beef. All hail to central power and submit!
(Boris is infuse dialog with caustic sarcasm, please is do not down for thumbs!)
I appreciate the necessity for thickly veiled satire when discussing the state, the party and other sacred entities.
For Boris, today is horsemeat luxury. When run out, must eat neighbor cat (after first is shave, but not over-cook).
Roy Rogers bitchez! The double horse burger.
http://www.royrogersrestaurants.com/#/food
And do you want fries, fruit, or saddle with that?
"HO-RSES! WE ARE EAT HO-RSES!" - Charlton Heston, who is raise thoroughbred horse
There are INFINITELY more cattle than horses, horses are more costly to raise and maintain, so why the switch/uproar ??
I paid for a KIA and they gave me a Lexus.....those bastards.
Quarter Horse Burger...i like it
I once asked my dad 'What's a non-performing loan?', and he answered by way of analogy that a horse at the glue factory is a non-performing race horse... except that now instead of glue-base it's become Mcfood.
Indian media reports cow flesh found in horse meat products in Europe.
The people won't care about horsemeat in their burgers as long as they can still get a side order of Extra Big-Ass Fries™.
I can't believe its not udders!
Doctor told me have to watch what I eat, so I bought a ticket to the track.
I got the trots after eating at Burger King once.
Only the freshest chicken lips and asses for Sir'ah.
I think that most have seen this equation from me:
BIG = FAIL
That said, there's going to be more and more ponies given up, and despite all the "give the ponies a home" foundations out there, I suspect that horse meat WILL be on the menu for a while (in the not-to-distant future).
I'm not sure I agree that anonymity is the problem. I tend to think it is influence. If you pay off the cops (regulators), you can sell horse meat and then when someone else catches on, you grease your local law maker and have him rewrite the law to increase the minimum required horse meat content in beef.
That's assuming there's enuf regulators to inspect. Funny they're always under staffed.
It's easier to see down a straight path than one that's got lots of turns. The more links there are, the more crooked the road and the harder for anyone to see. With fewer links you're going to have more people (outside the production/distribution chain) who are willing to poke around the corner of a bend or two; I'm thinking, then, that while there can/will be local abuses, such abuse will be hard to conceal and less-likely to result in the levels of distortion that we're seeing with these BIG systems.
Horsemeat.....Don't knock it til you ride it.
"I've had better food at the ballgame, you know? This steak still has marks from where the jockey was hitting it." Caddyshack.
Caddyshack& Scarface(directors cut) and bag of Doritoes. I'm sitting pretty.
Dan Quayle, is that you?
No 'e' in that factory food nightmare known as Doritos.
.
That's how they've gotten away with selling it as beef: there's nothing riding on it.
Everyone is up in arms about the horse meat yet we are all more or less oblivious to the absolute crap contained in the food chain overall.
I'm calling you out on the bad punnage. Puns can only go so far.
Quit being an Ass! Oh, wait! You've definitely got room for concern here, we've moved into the equine food class :-)
.
Gimme a bray-k. They can't all be whinniers.
Make sure it's well dun.
I've ridden a horse, but I haven't "ridden" a "horse."
stick your Whole Foods "Organic" olive oil in the fridge. If it's still liquid at 40 F, it ain't olive oil. It's probably mixed 50-50 with GMO corn oil.
Pinto or Arabian for lunch? At least step out of the cloud you junkster. You look like an idiot attacking me with no game!
I bridle at junksters dumping and bolting too.
A fine person you are. Thanks for your honesty.
Anonymous junksters need to pony up. They mustang out with the wrong people. Don't let them stirrup your emotions.
Agreed.
Stirrups aren't for emotions - They're for wrists and ankles, my friend.
Last time I had Pinto, there was an explosion of flavor in my mouth.
That's what she said!
This will go on until the central banks vote 'neigh' on the next QE.
You're beating a dead horse by saying that on ZH.
Monsieur, would you like Grey Poupon with your horsemeat?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itHhhYxqSSE
No thank you, Garcon. I'll try the horse d'oeuvres instead.
Distance, whether spatial or via intervening links in the chain, is great for reducing guilt.
That way you don't have to look 'em in the eye after you fuck 'em...
The more complex a system, the more catastrophic the failure.
But we gotta make a buck somehow, we need an inverse horse-shoes ETF.
This guy has an idea. Pimco plans to launch currency ETF - InvestmentNews Personally I think he's making a big mistake.
Upside down is bad luck.
It was a bartender, actually, who asked "why the long face", but whatever.
Remember it's not a lie if you believe it (and your tongue can't tell the difference).
Remember it's not a lie if you beef-lieve it
Ah, subtle misdirection- shift away from equine-speak, you Ass! :-)
I think I'll go back to grinding cuts of known quality, rather than taking what's being offered.
That's leverege.
It is all MERS ...... Fraud everywhere
MERS eat oats......
I up arrowed you that one. Good, very good.
.
I think you mean it's all MARES.
I hear about a fellow who ate horse meat late in the evening and ended up having nightMARES. (I should self delete....that's terrible).
Smoke and MERS.
....And little lambs eat ivy, a kid'll eat ivy too, wouldn't you?
Is she cute? (and tasty?)
so the way I read it if I actually don't physically kick the stool out from under Corzine but allow his legs to finally give out I would feel better about it? Nah, I think I'm pushing the space bar anyway.
+1 booboo, say hello to "Honey" for me.
americans at every level of society are liars....this paves the way for the nazi state....americans are nazis because they love lies and control, seeing themselves as the gestapo agent to enforce law and order....and privy to reams of personal information on their enemies....
they love their cherished lies about lone nut gunmen, naturally born citizens who have indonesian citizenship and foreign births, economic statistics, airplanes crashing in pentagons, and on and on.....they lie and love to be lied to because it is seen as the path to power....
it will all end horribly.
ps. one stupid bitch tried to tell me that a secretary she sold me was the property of john barrymore, sr when the item was made c. 1982.....and he died in the 1940s....people are liars....
Are you saying we're looking like how a population can be handheld into committing and excusing genocide, kinda like WW2 Germany?
Search for "Stanley Milgram"...
'Americans' are duplicitous.
LOL.
Maybe it was Drew Barrymore's Play-Skool desk.
There's this saying called 'caveat emptor'. Learn it.
You're ranting about Americans because one person tricked you into buying a "secretary" that wasn't as old as you thought.
You should have checked the teeth.
coming from you that sounds odd; i'd have said : check her tits!
toys for boys! Horsemeat and teeth are for men from Stalingrad trenches.
The zombie horde has won. I can't even tell if I care about this, nor what I would do about it if I did. I think I'll have some more pink slime, please.
It all tastes like chicken to me at this point.
'
'
'
Soylent Green is Horse!
•J•
V-V
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5j8uUR2nc
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=horse%20meat,%20pink%20slime
"Would that be possible with a local butcher? "
Ever see the movie "Motel Hell"?
That was pretty much the plot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motel_Hell
And this seems applicable :
Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made. --
Otto von Bismarck
It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent's fritters.
Certainly Rory Calhoun's most delicious role.
Who could ever forget the famous chainsaw killer wearing a pig's head scene? There wasn't a dry seat in the house.
"I ......... used ....... preservatives..."
That was the first thing I ever saw back when I first got cable.
It made me think, really, this is what cable is all about?
Things haven't changed much. Watching any news channel, and many of the shows are the equivalent of making sausage.
As long as they don't serve human meat, the fast-food world is still filled with golden arches.
Wait a minute. I thought if we kept the government out of just about all aspects of business that thing would blossom forth and everything would be wonderful. If we gave free enterprise free reign then there would be no problems. You know self regulation and all that. So what's this shit with the horse meat?
I'm becoming disillusioned. First we get Wall Street and the too big to fail banks who don't apparently need any regulation (but they need massive handouts). We have coal mines with explosions, cave-ins and deaths. Oil rig disasters in the Gulf of Mexico. Continuous illness and deaths from various poisoned food. But we're told that corporations have too much regulation and it's stiffing growth. This shit make a libertarian have seconds thoughts
It's funny how horse meat content has risen with CRUSHING TAXES. I wonder if there is a fucking correlation? This isn't capitalism, bro. This is rape and pillage. Enjoy your horse.
Yeah, yeah, always an exterior cause to explain this or that. That perfect system can not fail because of intrinsic properties. It fails because of alien influence.
'Americanism' at work.
So here, it is taxes. Later, it will be too many people on Earth to feed. Later, it will be human nature as deep inside, all people are compulsional cheaters...
Anything goes. Best thing with 'americans': they have failed now to renew their propaganda to explain failures for ages by now.
They still keep partying as if it was 1777.
They went round all their funny explanations but they cling to them.
Future is told: considering that 'americans' run a business of extorting the weak, farming the poor, when the ability of bambozling is lost, only brute force remains to coerce people.
Welcome to an 'american' world. It is a cosy place, you'll see.
AnAnonymous said:
Quite telling. Sounds exactly like the system you utilize on the basis daily to flee self indiction.
Description gives matches to the tee on your comments pattern. Do consider to changing your handle to AnAmericAnonymous. It gives the better congruence.
Laughable. Wok calling the cooking marmit black.
Consider that AnAnonymous, in addition to managing Chinese citizenism fastfood franchise Just Killed Cat, runs a business of distorting the fabled past and farming the myth. Wonders if stir fried scapegoat appears on the menu at JKC.
"It's funny how horse meat content has risen with CRUSHING INFLATION & CORRUPTION."
Here, I corrected it for you.
Product substitution is part of the same process of food inflation as reducing package sizes but keeping the same price is. Wasn't watered down beer in an article in ZH just the other day?
It just so happens that in this specific case it's actually illegal in most countries to sell horse meat as beef. If this had been some different food ingredient that had been replaced by a cheaper one, nobody would've battered an eye (in fact, a very common and yet totally legal scam is to inject water in chicken and sell it as chicken by weight, when in fact a lot of the weight is water).
Blaming it on taxes is symbolic of a favored explanation looking for a problem to attach itself to.
"inject water in chicken and sell it as chicken by weight"
Bingo. And that chicken someday will be raised without a head attached.
http://www.zmescience.com/other/headless-chicken-solution-matrix-farming-420545/
How many millions of FRNs, Euros, etc are gonna be lost by every company associated with this fiasco?
Methinks that suggesting a willingness to steal pennies, drachmas, etc and then getting yer name, honeor, reputation, etc dragged through the mud is not a sound business plan.
Horse meat, in a couple of years they will be begging for it.
That reminded me of something written about the battle of Stalingrad in WWII.
"Finally, with little food and supplies, the Germans were on the verge of starvation. Temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Centigrade. Starving German soldiers were forced to slaughter their horses and later still to dig up their frozen carcasses to eat the bones."
i give everyone a little tidbit i learned long ago...dont buy your meat from a butchershop next to a barbershop. the meat is always a bit stringy.....
When the general public sees the rich people at the top being greedy, and outright lying, cheating on taxes, perpetrating all sorts of illegal and immoral business practices and getting away with it, that makes it easier for the less fortunate to rationalize gaming their circles of influence any way they can. And less fortunate can be relative at any scale.
Here's an interesting case in point :
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2015427070_greenberg26m.html
Do you think there might be many more just like him in the circle of influence he came from? I wouldn't be surprised if there was some pretty seriously corrupt parenting evaluators, supervised visitation people, and DV advocate lawyers that may have known and worked with that man and perverted justice in similar ways in that court system where children's lives were churned.
I even heard about a case in Nevada where an SV type person unfairly churned a 12 yr. old boys life by incentivizing and suborning perjury in a legal matter that practically destroyed the boys life. As a result he tried to commit suicide as he had been unfairly accused of something despicable but untrue. When that case got serious attention as a result, it was discovered that the perjury had been suborned from the babysitter by the SV person and charges were brought against the SV woman. How sick and twisted is that? Do you think there might be some kind of connection in those circles of influence?
"There is a growing body of research to support the logically obvious idea that humans become increasingly dishonest as cheating becomes easier"
One for the ages.
'Americans' run a program of human selection.
'Americanism' includes duplicity as a value. This from the start.
People whose genetic make up inclines them to duplicity find a cultural reinforcement thanks to 'americanism'
Trouble for 'americans': they miscalculated that people with an 'american' potential are to be found in the whole humanity.
More and more 'americans' to come by.
'Americanism', the best thing to have ever happen to humanity.
"Trouble for 'americans': they miscalculated that people with an 'american' potential are to be found in the whole humanity."
I reckon it is the other way around. 'Americans' know they can get away with it because they know that deep down most two-legs are like what you describe as 'american' and just moan about it since they're lower on the foodchain.
So please rename your schtick.
Nah. 'Americans' have pushed other human beings to make room for themselves. Problem: they have been so successful the world is crowded with 'americans'.
The King was not like the 'americans'. Many before the 'american' age were not like the 'americans'.
And if that was so easy for 'americans' to get away with because of communaulity, they would not stack on guns and weapons as they have been doing.
Free people can drop and take up weapons.
Extorters of the weak and farmers of the poor must cling to their guns. They have no other options.
The world is your mirror (you get what you give etc.) and there are always bigger fish. And extorting the weak and farming the poor has been going on since Ancient Egypt. IMHO you get into trouble with or because of 'americans' when you have more or less the same mindset.
In this day and age Europe and America with their dominions are just the very best in this game of what you call 'americanism'.
Relax.
He was raised on melamine instead of milk.
He can't help it.
Conquer or be conquered bitches. It's a jungle. Deal with it you loser.
Story of Civilization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization#I._Our_Oriental_Heritage_.281935.29
Dutch were the Pilgrams. From Holland. I am Scottish and Welsh. English, Arabian, every nationality on earth is in America today. Conquering versus sure death was the dilemma.
Da Camptown ladies sing dis song, doo-dah, doo-dah....
The banks own the market indexes so you don't have to worry about that.
Everything will be ok until one day no one will be able to get to their money--wherever it resides. Access will be militarily blocked. At that point you better be where you are going.
I bet the horses that where eaten were claiming to be misled all the way to slaughter.
That's what humans do.
I miss poor old Boxer.
Horses are being slaughtered because owners can't afford to feed them.
Or in a lot of cases, horses are simply rounded up in the wild and shipped off for parts unknown. Only to then become 'parts unkonwn' in some foreign land.
That is to say, wild horses are being 'adopted' and sent to new homes in foreign lands.
Unbridled greed.
Just say "neigh" to horsemeat.
I'm sure that massive spike from 2000 on has nothing to do with the repeal of Glass Steagall and passing the Commodities Futures Modernization Act.
Nah, can't be. That's a lunatic fringe conspiracy theory.
'American' icon, Adam Smith, asked why work with this or that butcher. 'Americans' once again answered to the question.
C'mon it's not horsemeat .... it's subprime beef!
Funny how 'americans' are so prone to dismiss their own says to maintain their propaganda and fantasy.
Story says that sellers are left to check the cargo by themselves and/or local authorities.
Local government is efficient, private sector will do it as good as public sector.
One thing to ever remember: 'americans' are 'americans', wherever they are, they reproduce 'american' patterns.
One pattern is to blame 'americans' working in a different sector for behaving the 'american' way.
Simply situational: every 'american' on this board if they had worked the meat sector in positions to sell horse meat for beef meat, they would have done it.
For 'americans' do the 'american' thing wherever they are.
What the FUCK are you even talking about?
Keep it a secret, I wrote about that word that starts with an A.
You know, the word 'americans' would prefer not to see exposed as the main driver for the current situation.
'A
M
E
R
I
C
A
N
I
S
M'
Chit is bubbling up out of your zippers.
Pull finger, release energy into your own Dutch O-Van
Someone has slipped you bath salts. Don't leave the house and don't answer the door.
02/02/2009 in Warhammer 40K
Exitus Acta ProbatThe outcome justifies the deed.
I am the hunter. The stalker, the killer, parodies of any sinister contraption your mind may perceive me as. You see that is what I am, a contraption, some sort of device as you may call it, a programmed machination or an unthinking drone. A machine built for killing. Manufactured for the sole purpose to perfect the art of elimination of a sole person, the one target. Adept in the combined skills of stealth and evasion, marksmanship and combat, the Imperium’s best, only serviced into action when control has surpassed the abilities of more, unsubtle factions.
I am the feared, the treacherous. Some may see me as evil, even heretical. But they’d never lived to tell the tale. Some don’t even see me at all. In this petty exchange of wars and brute force, people forget who the true master is. The truthful master is I, the concealed monster within. It is I who hold the puppet strings, and it is I who hath the power to cut them. One shot. Beware if you’re the enemy, the wanted bounty or the condemned false hero, you are the centrepiece for my crosshair.
For I am assassin.
Vindicare, or to avenge, and the avenger is the assassin’s crude title. Released from the fresh training grounds of the Officio Assassinorum, beneath Imperium’s reach, blind fools on false pedestals of glory. Unnoticed and uncared for, the cult breeds its finest warriors of the temples Callidus, Culexus, Eversor and the Vindicare. Born from the finest exemplarities, bred into furnaces of the ultimate killing machine."
http://www.imperial-literature.net/archives/426
Fantasy?
What they are NOT testing for is human DNA. Meat operations are owned pretty much lock, stock and barrel by the Mob. When "problems" need to be disposed of, you can guess where they end up very late at night. Killing, bleeding, gutting, sawing and hacking 100's of animals a day, every day for weeks and months and years invites a certain callousness of attitude about death. And there are those who actually enjoy the process, maybe too much so.
Horses? Sure. People? That too...
"Killing, bleeding, gutting, sawing and hacking 100's of animals a day, every day for weeks and months and years invites a certain callousness of attitude about death."
Well, there's always another side, another emotional potentiality here. My abattoir is pretty good. They KNOW what their job is. And, they actually have to face those that hand over their livestock to them. RESPECT in partnership. REVERENCE for the animals of which we give and get life from.
Possibly true to a degree. Not saying every butcher is a ... butcher. But the emotional trauma of slaughtering animals is significant for most emotionally health people. If there is a way of doing it which does not dehumanize the person, and as well does not minimize the sacrifice, that would be a good thing IMO.
But on the south side of Chigaco, in the killing shoots, wading in the foot deep blood, in the meat packing isles, they do not have time to say a prayer, or thank the animal.
Like saying a carpenter grieves when he wallows in sawdust...
Meat packers know they don't work at a petting zoo.
this thread about commodity price MANIPULATION under oligarchy capitalism, its similarities with the banking world, or for that matter with the oil oligarchy world or the arms proliferation world, is based on one fundamental POWER principle:
You obtain dominant position NOT to use economies of scale and technology to bring the price down to the consumer; but to increase the oligarchy margin for the power broker, (oil firm, food firm, mega retail chain, bank), so that the end user consumer gets doubly screwed : he pays more and the quality goes down as his welfare is the avowed holy grail of the construct, ONLY IN NAME.
When kings were king, this principle was openly practiced in feudal evidence, they had divine protection.
Now our political kings hide behind the oligarchy curtain, hailed as agents of human progress thru science and innovation, and pretend they serve the general interest, as our institutions have changed and they are our ELECTED; only to serve their own crony entrenched interests as their political leverage on the economic system is huge.
But we will see this oligarchy concentration now occuring even in the Internet world soon; where Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and Apple have become the new Oligarchs of information dissemination world. Information manipulation will bring much power, right now being shared as this is an infant new frontier stage of this social evolution of huge potential.
We are truly in Marx's capitalist horror show and Huxley's Brave new world, if we let the cancer continue to develop.
Aziz does not go far enuff in his demonstration of the Oligarchy construct worldwide, which we see winning the current war in front of our complacent eyes.
The only solution is people's counter revolution to take back power from the Oligarchs. As all oligarchies die under their own corruption. People have to leverage that fact to reimpose their own power. And it has to come from winning back our institutions which are the bedrock of our society. No running away, every nation has to create more critical and active mechanisms of self defense. Armageddon is THEIR way out...
"You obtain dominant position NOT to use economies of scale and technology to bring the price down to the consumer; but to increase the oligarchy margin for the power broker,"
falak, "economies of scale" is a curse. Its aim is always GROWTH. This is Jevons Paradox in action.
I'd argue that because "economies of scale" (note that typical use of this phrase is about INCREASING; I've warned about it's REVERSING) increase transactional volume, and transactional volume means more ability to skim. This is how the "refined" players, the financials, have done it.
Since transactional volume is in decline we're now seeing, as you note, manipulations in order to deliver "profits." This differs very little from the recent (40+ years) economic smoke-and-mirrors manipulations.
"it has to come from winning back our institutions"
Um... those "institutions" were created by THEM.
"Armageddon is THEIR way out..."
No. Armageddon is the consequence of a structural problem, of the perpetual-growth-on-a-finite-planet economic meme. No amount of "honesty" can not rectify this (w/o it being required to completely dissolve the entire meme, which, really, is the same as Armageddon [the definition of, means "a great unveiling" (unmasking)].
not questioning your take on the "economies of scale" meme; just saying since Rockafella n Ford days its been the formula for capitalism's rise AND its justification, as disseminator of the "middle class" welfare horizontal society, as opposed to old vertical european society of monarchies.
It is also the logic of going down the technology unit cost reduction scale, of the "experience curve", so prevalent in Silicon Valley. SO its the basic guiding principle of expansionist consumerist society.
I know you don't believe thats the road of the future. You are a "deconsumerist".
Just saying its the road of the past that made America top dog with a market homogenised the size of a continent!
Armageddon is what happens when Roman legions could not be paid for! YOu went and beat up the neighbour. You are right its a structural problem of an empire construct that has only one logic : grow, grow grow...and thats why it digs its own grave in corruption. But, in that mindset the Caesars ALWAYS waged war to save their own skins.
We are still in THAT mindset today, now run by our corporates who play at Caesar's legions.
I beg to disagree, those institutions were made by the people, post colonial and post monarchial revolutions of 1776-1789. There is no place for oligarchical control in those constitutions. But its evolved in that direction with capital concentration. Remember those revolutions occured in agrarian societies and industrial capitalism was born subsequently.
Anti armageddon philosophy is the very essence of people's meme, if they can avoid falling for the honey trap of becoming populist Caesars like Robespierre and Napoleon. That is the ever recurrent tragedy of society. We always fall for that trap.
So we always head to Armageddon...but we have no choice but to try and avoid it, recurrently. After all, its the people's skin that gets burnt, not of the Oligarchs who never fight front line nor send their sons front line.
Sisyphus is us!
" Simply, anonymity makes deception easier, and big, complex systems create anonymity."
Sums up corporate business practices pretty succinctly. Welcome to the Grand Fraud (again).
"Get your goat." It's got an interesting, and horse-related, origin.
Anyway... when do banksters start to enter This food chain?
I believe 'pink slime' is already a major player in the food chain.
Who knew horses were fungible?
As poor old Boxer learned, at some point, on a long enough timeline...
I heard you really have to Pony up if you want to eat at that new PoloTM steakhouse.
Another horsemeat story?
Man, talk about beating a dead horse! :-D
support DOT... be a Decentralizationismer...
Tyler,
You're behind the curve on this one.
The issue is not "whatshittheyputinmymeat" - because lets face it - only acomplete moron buys microwave food and cheap mince from a supermarket that is offering it at a price 'too good to be true' - because it is.
The issue is the effect this is having on themeat market. With Sterling falling fast and the idiot environment secretary randomly and incorrectly blaming 'Bulgarians' - the chances of a trade war is high.
Worse still - thanks to the recent Cameron speech about an EU referedum - business is already nervous about investing in Britain - hence the falling pound.
This is a perfect storm brewing - butchers have queues which have not been seen since the war and supermarkets are throwing out tonnes of processed food.
The consequences are obvious - only the people in power cannot see it coming.
I will not accept the expected and eventual "we couldn't have seen this coming" as it's perfectly clear what lies ahead. Just remember this.
All good capitalists should admire this situation. Cost cutting through horsemeat substitution. A great benefit to the bottom line.
Chapter 2 is underway questioning the validity of the cost cutting measure. Maybe laws were violated.
No Problem. No one is accountable. Complex Supply Chains make that so.
A small fine will be exacted and back slapping all around for the continuation of the cost cutting measure.
The food supply chains may be long these days but that is a blustering smokescreen. It has never prevented national governments (eg the UK Govt) from ensuring that each vendor of meat products in the country is lawfully responsible for what he sells with no ifs and buts, eg: make the supermarkets responsible for the products they sell, all the way up the supply chain. Such regulations would ensure that each link in the supply chain from the point of importation down to the end-retailer implemented random testing procedures.
It's not rocket science. But as usual, government has failed in its duty leading to where we are today.
Horse stew...yumm!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wo5TznA5as
The Law of Unintended Consequences...
A law which bans horses from Romanian roads might be the reason behind the fraudulent sales of horse meat on the European beef market, as hundreds of thousands of animals were sent to the abbatoir when the country’s road rules changed, reports the Independent.
Read more: Horseburgers scandal: Mystery supermarket meat in the UK suspected to be from Romanian donkeys - TNT Magazine Pay to bury tons of meat when hamburger retails for $5.00 lb.? Duh. I'll bet some poor Romanian farmer who can't afford a truck would rather have his lasagna back pulling a cart.