Pine Belt Progressive

Just not up for very much blogging today, but here’s a roundup of items related to food, economics, and politics. This is a sort of follow-up to a post I wrote for Left in Alabama yesterday on the threat to food banks posed by food shortages (and see my two long comments to that post, as well). I don’t think we should wait to see how bad things really are before we begin to make preparations for the possible food shortages we could face this year. If we prepare and it turns out that there aren’t significant shortages in the U.S., we haven’t lost very much. I, personally, think we’re about to see a period of rapid transition in our society.

This is just an opinion, and I could be wrong. But soon, I think, the gap between wages on the one hand, and the price of food and fuel on the other, is going to be so great that a lot of people are going to have to find some way of feeding themselves other than going to work. Maybe not this year, but sooner than most people realize.

Here’s a very comprehensive article about the problems we’re seeing with the way captialism organizes food production. It also has some interesting information on the underground food movement. via Sideshow.

The Big Picture says Fed policies may be to blame for the food shortages we’re seeing around the world. I think this is what Spengler was referring to when he wrote that the U.S. is trying to inflate it’s way out of the economic crisis.

Joseph Stiglitz says the recession we’re in is going to end up being our worst since the 1930s.

And here’s an article on the collapse of capitalism I picked up from comments on the Feral Scholar post. I think the article runs the risk of making the collapse seem more certain and more imminent than it actually is. But I find it interesting that it echoes many of the themes from several posts I’ve linked to over the last couple of months:

Natasha at Pacific Views: Global Suicide Pact

Ian Welsh at FDL: The Age of Light

Monkeyfister:

Peak Oil Crisis: Load Shedding . . . (peak oil, climate change, and instability); and

Food Shortages Everywhere . . .(food shortages, mass migrations, famine, and war)

Update: Fuel shortage in Great Britain threatens to become a crisis. This is at the top of Monkeyfister’s blog right now, but I’m adding the permalink for future reference.