the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Feb 17, 2020
Hedge fund firms, which specialize in complicated financial scheming, are “going green,” dumping coal assets and planting avocado trees! For example, a 12.5-billion-dollar hedge fund, Algebris, is planting 25,000 eucalyptus, mango, orange, avocado and papaya trees across villages in Tanzania. But thinking or arguing that these financial schemers are going green, like Bloomberg does, is rather dumb, to say the least.
These financial schemers are, in reality, making large profits off these investments. Avocados, for example, can bring huge sums of money to investors on Wall Street.
Between 2001 and 2018, average annual U.S. consumption of avocados increased from 2 pounds per person to nearly 7.5 pounds. Considering that the U.S. population is currently around 330 million people, the U.S. is consuming close to 2 ½ billion pounds of avocados each year!
This increase in demand in turn caused a jump in the sales prices of avocados. For example, the average price of one Haas avocado increased to $2.10 in July 2019 from $1.17 a year earlier, according to the Department of Agriculture—a price jump of almost 80%.
So, these Wall Street businesses are not “going green” but “seeing green,” the green of the dollars.
Such easy profits have attracted other schemers, like drug cartels, as well. When exports of avocados from Michoacan, Mexico boomed upwards to 2.4 billion dollars last year, Mexican drug cartels got into the avocado business, finding it potentially more profitable than even planting marijuana! These criminal organizations started stealing avocado shipments, demanding extortion fees from the avocado farmers, forcing workers to pick avocados from trees for free, and even seizing farms and clearing protected woodlands to plant their own avocado groves of what locals call “green gold,” according to the Los Angeles Times. These criminal organizations, like the schemers on Wall Street, have been getting “diversified” by going avocados!
Legal or illegal, schemers on Wall Street and drug cartels are united together in their goal of extracting more money and getting themselves filthy rich, this time from the avocado business.