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
Jun 16, 2008
Since the huge increase in food and energy prices have driven hundreds of millions more people all over the world to the edge of starvation, Bush has made a big deal about increasing funding for U.S. international food assistance programs.
It’s a fraud and a scam. Even the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) found that two-thirds of U.S. food aid money goes to supposed “administrative” costs, that is, to the big U.S. agricultural distributors and shippers. The system is so corrupt, CARE, the Atlanta-based international charity, recently announced that it is cutting its ties to the U.S. program.
In many ways, the U.S. government food assistance program causes even more hunger and starvation. For when U.S. flour and grain are dumped on markets in poor countries, it helps to drive many of the local farmers out of business–thus contributing to a catastrophic drop in the local production of food–and making the population even more dependent on the increasingly expensive food exports from the U.S.
Under the guise of “international food assistance,” the U.S. government takes U.S. tax dollars and hands it over to Big Business. At the same time, this “assistance” is used as a weapon in the U.S. government’s economic war in which the biggest U.S. companies increasingly starve the poor in the rest of the world for their own profit.