The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #161326   Message #3833261
Posted By: Steve Shaw
17-Jan-17 - 08:11 PM
Thread Name: BS: Businessmen as Leaders of Nations
Subject: RE: BS: Businessmen as Leaders of Nations
Ah yes, Teribus, your agricultural revolution seemed to turn into a golden-age "agrarian" revolution all of a sudden. Well your 19th century phase drove people in their millions out of the countryside towards those dark satanic mills, where they could be exploited in semi-slavery for almost all their waking hours except for chapel on Sunday, where they'd damn well better be seen praying by the bosses or else. Meanwhile the squires carried on bleeding their tenants not quite dry but just short of making them squeal. You're a bit of an Archers country life man, aren't you? Well look around at all those monocultures that are the end-products of your agrarian dream world. Two-thirds of barley grown here is too poor to be used for malting. Over half the wheat goes for animal feed, too weak for flour production. Thousands of acres of elephant grass which gives farmers a yield for biofuel - not food! - that enables them to do very little work at all. Thousands of acres of maize that denudes soil, robs it of nutrients and and allows it to wash into rivers to silt them up, all for cattle feed. Oilseed rape as far as the eye can see that causes plagues of flea beetles and pollen beetles, a little for cooking oil but mostly for feed, industrial lubricants and biofuel. Neonicotinoid insecticides which are ravaging bee populations. All of this is profit-driven and it's big business, and, if that isn't enough, the "landowner" can get forty thousand a year for each monster wind-turbine that someone else paid for to put on a tiny patch of his land. You can go to the pubs round here and hear those same "landowners" whingeing about immigrants and blaming benefits claimants for all the ills of the country. The "contractors" they can affford to hire instead of doing the work themselves cause chaos all summer on our roads as they trundle along for miles, instead of a few years ago when farmers with their own machinery just had to cross roads to get from one field to another. Ah yes, Teribus, the economy of scale, the benefits of gigantism, never mind the quality feel the width! The fruits of your agrarian paradise! Now why don't you toddle off and find out for yourself just how important bees are to life on earth, then, when your agribusinessmen land-barons have destroyed them all, tell us a bit more about "progress!"