Friday, April 15, 2011

More valuable than gold!

Greetings good citizen,

For time out of mind (as far as the West is concerned) people didn’t bother to steal food as the punishment far outweighed the short-term benefit.

Although we can only speculate what would happen to a ‘first time’ offender if he were nabbed for, er, ‘hijacking’, that isn’t quite an accurate desciption of what took place here.


In late March, they contacted Allen Lund. The broker carried out a standard series of checks, including verifying the company’s federal registration and its insurance coverage. Then it assigned the company to pick up a load of tomatoes from a shipper in Miami on Monday, March 28.

Over the next four days, working through Lund and three other freight brokers, E&A Transport picked up four more loads of tomatoes, a load of cucumbers and a load of frozen meat from shippers across Florida, including in the Miami area, Palmetto and Punta Gorda.

At each pick-up, a driver working for E&A showed up at the wheel of a tractor with a refrigerated trailer. The shippers loaded the pallets of tomatoes or the other goods into the trucks and the driver drove off. None of the loads got to their destinations.

The load of frozen meat, worth about $48,000, was picked up from a meatpacker north of Miami. It was bound for Salem, Ore. It is missing, too.

“This was definitely a smart organization,” said Mr. Holland, who was the broker on the load of meat. “They were smooth as silk.”

The thieves sought out loads headed for Detroit, Hartford, the Hunts Point market in New York, Los Angeles and Sacramento. Mr. Holland said that gave them time to carry out multiple thefts before the alarm was sounded, since in each case it would be from two to four days before the loads were due at their destinations. Brokers and shippers suspect the thieves had a buyer for the produce.


In this case nobody got a gun stuck in their face. Contracts were drawn up and what appears to be a legitimate trucking company was contracted to pick up the goods and deliver them to their respective destinations.

So, in a case of what looks like fraud, what would a first time offender be facing, punishmentwise?

If he had a real good attorney, he could probably get away with probation and community service.

But that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

The point, the real story here is a combination of ‘who took the food’ and why?

The theory put forth here is the food was stolen for resale…although the dollar figures don’t seem to justify the risk involved.

You can indeed speculate that the loads were ‘insured’ (although for how much will remain unknown.) in the beginning insurance is ‘attractively priced’ something that changes quite quickly as the ‘risk’ (losses) mounts.

Why food and why now?

Should we be on the lookout for a big time pasta fest (with 4 truckloads of tomatos comprising the bulk of the missing cargo?)

Hard to say good citizen, you know the uprisings across the Middle East have more to do with food shortages than ‘freedom’ but the rat-bastard capitalists don’t want you even thinking about what they will soon inflict upon you in the not too distant future.

Yeah, there was a blurb in today’s paper about inflation being ‘up slightly’ due to the relentless increases in food and gasoline.

Using the ‘New (Republican) math’ inflation is only up a few hundredths of a percent. But measured the ‘traditional’ way, (without all of the fudge and bullshit) inflation is running around nine and a half percent.

Make no mistake about it good citizen, food (in times of scarcity, regardless of the cause) is more valuable than gold!

Something to keep in mind after the collapse of civilization, a hoard of food is just as likely to get you killed as quick as a pile of gold will. Maybe even quicker given that the only thing gold will be marginally good for after the collapse is buying food…but that ‘assumes’ a seller (stupid enough to take troublesome ‘yellow metal’ over any number of vastly more useful items.)

But we still drift off topic.

One can assume this story attracted media attention because of the ‘slickness’ of the crime, four or five truckloads of food that have ‘disappeared’ after being legitimately contacted for.

Left to our imaginations is how much more food and toher items are simply ‘never making it to its intended destination’ that doesn’t get reported (to anyone beyond the trucker’s insurance carrier?)

I’d posit this puzzle is much larger than it appears and could account for the absence of food riots that should have broken out among the tens of millions of newly homeless created by globalization.

Not that such an untoward occurance would be considered ‘newsworthy’ by the coporate owned media. Which is to say if there were food riots it is doubtful we’d see it on the six o’clock news, even as a sidebar.

Did I mention the rat-bastard capitalists?

Four truckloads of tomatos makes for a curious mystery…throw in a truck load of mystery meat and it sounds like you have a Roman festival in the works…the only thing missing is the truck load of pasta.

And that may have slipped through the net…probably on purpose.

Just as mercenaries make no sense in a ‘free’ society, neither does stealing food in a land where more than a third of the population is on some form of food assistance.

Again, the numbers are ‘households’ and not individuals.

If prices get much higher it is only going to make the ‘theft’ problem that much worse…a circle without end.

And speaking of ‘ends’, I leave you here to ponder the true nature of this story.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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