Venezuela: Seizing corn meal an option [price controls and communism]

Business Week/Associated Press ^ | January 17, 2006

[Toddsterpatriot]

Why don't you look it up, lazybones. Its been posted before.

LOL! You made a $10 billion claim based on zero facts. You're the waste.

Hey, I heard that saving Americans $2.5 billion on sugar will really cost the country $1 trillion. LOL!!

[Toddsterpatriot]

Cane and Beet Sugar

The combined retail value of the 1994 sugarbeet and sugarcane crop was about $5.1 billion.

Production of sugarbeets and sugarcane in 1994 was 59,220,000 tons. After refining losses, there are 235 pounds of sugar per ton of sugarbeets and 195 pounds in a ton of sugarcane. It is estimated that sugar production by source was 6,838,500,000 pounds from sugarbeets and 5,873,400,000 pounds from sugarcane.

For this report, it was assumed that the entire sugar crop was processed into refined white sugar.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 1994 retail price for refined sugar was $0.40 per pound. At $0.40 per pound, the 1994 retail value of sugarbeets was $2,735,400,000 and the retail value of sugarcane was $2,349,360,000. The total sugar crop retail value was $5,084,760,000.

Retail Values of U.S. Agricultural Commodities

Awaiting your explanation of how the loss of a sugarbeet crop that sold for less than $2.74 billion can cost the sugar beet states $10 billion.

[OldArmy52]

Hopefully, Liberals will remember...?

Don't hold your breath. Liberals care about doctrine, not reality.

[proud_yank]

Things like this are the result of 'feeling' and not 'thinking'.

I would love to tell all the libs I know to start paying attention to what is happening down there, as it is a perfect example of the poverty and instability socialist economic policies create. But, why waste the breath.

Welcome to FR by the way!

[Nowhere Man]

Nothing Chavez is doing violates any "free trade" agreement. You see, "free traders" embrace communists. They embrace China, although China enslaves their people in laogai to produce goods for "free trade". They welcome Viet Nam into their waiting arms, although they use forms of slavery as well. Now if Chavez wants to starve his people so other consumers can get stuff cheaper, why thats the name of the game to "free traders".

True, although I will be willing to add that they would embrace anybody as long as they can get the lowest price or maximum profit. That said, they would go to bed with anyone be it a Communist, someone like a Hitler/Tojo, perhaps even Satan himself. Sooner or later, you will get kicked in the butt as the Japanese did when they bombed Pearl Harbor.

[1rudeboy]

Textbook strawman argument. Well done.

[endthematrix]

Leave it to my State of Illinois. We have a friendly relationship with Castro and sent him some supplies. That was with a Republican Governor in office! With a Rat Gov and two despicable Senators, it's a done deal...

[Hank Rearden]

You want to see price controls and communism, look no further than right here. As of 2003 the US government has stockpiled 650,000 tons of powdered milk - about $1 billion worth. This is bought from dairy farmers for no reason other than keeping the prices up.

Yet we're called crazy for refusing to support Republicans who continue to prop up this crazy crap while refusing to even get PBS off the taxpayer tit.

[hedgetrimmer]

Out of date info.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Out of date info.

Coming from someone who made up facts with no info, that really hurts.

[hedgetrimmer]

$2 billion in industry-related revenue each year

The sugar industry acts as an economic multiplier, thats why the third world wants so badly to control it. They are using the lack of loyalty that the transnational corporations have to this country and to the American people to do it.

All ag industries act as economic multipliers in terms of the businesses that supply them.

Sugar industry multipliers and linkages include:
*academic institutions that do research and produce experts the by-products manufacturing sector.
*Employment creation
*Co-generation plants for electricity
*Bagasse is also used as raw material for production of paper.
*Bagasse and wood fiber are made into building particleboard
*molasses can be used in the manufacture of ethyl alcohol and as a table syrup and food flavoring.
*molasses is a feed for farm animals
*Molasses is used for some processed tobaccos
*Molasses is used to manufacture Ethanol
*Press mud can be used as fertilizer


Other by-products of the sugar cane industry include synthetic alcohol and spirit (combined with benzene) as a fuel, bakers' and fodder yeast, chemical products such as acetic and citric acids etc.

[hedgetrimmer]

How do price controls and expropriation fit into "free trade"? Ask your "free trader" friends in Mexico.


A Mexican worker directs sugar cane delivery into threshing machines at a refinery in the central state of Morelos

Mexico Backs Expropriation of Sugar Mills

[Toddsterpatriot]

The sugar industry acts as an economic multiplier, thats why the third world wants so badly to control it.

Imagine how the $2.5 billion we waste on higher priced sugar could multiply.

[hedgetrimmer]

Smart "free trader" that you are you would know the price of sugar is going up because the MARKET is dictating it.
***
Sugar Jumps to 24-Year High on Fuel Use: World's Biggest Mover
Jan. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Sugar prices in New York surged to a 24-year high as more supplies are used for fuel because of surging energy costs. Today's 6.4 percent rally was the biggest fluctuation of any commodity.

Sugar has jumped 92 percent in the past year as Brazil, the world's biggest producer and exporter, converted more of its crop into ethanol fuel to cope with record gasoline prices. Oil jumped as much as 2.3 percent today to a four-month high on concern for possible supply disruptions in Nigeria and Iran.

``Sugar is going ballistic because of the oil price,'' Sam Tilley, head of research at London-based commodities brokers Sucden (U.K.) Ltd., said in an interview today. ``As oil prices go higher and higher, the only real alternative at present to gasoline is ethanol.''

**
You sound like the "ministers" at the WTO the way you harp on the sugar industry here. Seems like your loyalties are with other countries.

[Cboldt]

You want to see price controls and communism, look no further than right here.

I wouldn't call it "communism," but food production is a highly regulated commercial activity in the United States. And I'm not referring to the "safety" aspects of the industries.

[1rudeboy]

You're gonna' have to elaborate. Are you suggesting that the expropriation of the mills was a triumph for "free-traders," and the subsequent reversal of the move by the Mexican Supreme Court one for protectionists?

[1rudeboy]

I think we have veered, yet again, into an alternate universe.

[tflabo]

Nothing of lasting good can come from the outcome of having that fat disgusting socialist pig Chavez running Venezuela and influencing S.A. His glory will go down in flames.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Smart "free trader" that you are you would know the price of sugar is going up because the MARKET is dictating it.

Excellent news!! We can eliminate all restrictions on sugar imports because prices are now high enough for our sugar farmers to make a profit without government protection.

World Sugar

U.S. Sugar

Of course if you looked at the above links, you'd see that US sugar averaged 29.54 cents a pound for the calendar year 2005 versus World sugar at 13.19 cents a pound. Imagine the multiplier if your buddies can get Congress to raise the US price to $1 a pound. Or maybe $2. Anything for our sugar farmers. Sounds like loyalty to Americans all right.

[Toddsterpatriot]

I think we have veered, yet again, into an alternate universe.

Where Willie Green and hedgetrimmer can insist that higher sugar and steel prices are actually better for America than lower prices....because.....well, just because!!!