Lectured By Pop Stars

[limerickman]

Agree. I heard the same argument on "The Prime Minister's Question Time" the other day. They are at a disadcantage because of our subsidies & superior technology of our farming industry. If we want to give them an equal chance, we need to level the playing field.

You hit on a very valid point.

When the Treaty of Rome was enacted in 1957, the idea was to tty to bring commonality to Europe and to ensure that peace was maintained.
It also spawned the EEC (known now as the EU).
The EEC was premised upon the idea that common trade and a free market might operate throughout Europe - which would help to underpin the peace concept.
All fine and dandy.

Except that the only real policy of commonality was the Common Agricultural
Policy : this is the only real trans-European policy that has been enacted since the Treaty of Rome.
One by-product of CAP, is that farmers throughout Europe prospered to the detriment of farmers in countries outside of Europe.

The CAP policy is one of the most unethical, wasteful - and in world of hunger - the most inhumane policy ever.
Farmers were guaranteed income for produce that was never consumed.
Subsidies were paid to farmers for produce that went straight to large warehouse.
You had butter mountains in storage, wine lakes, spud mountains, sugar hills.
In a world with people starving, there were (are) bonded warehouses all over Europe stuffed with agricultural produce that would never be consumed.
And not only that, farmers outside of Europe could not compete with produce prices here in Europe : so sugar from Malawi had no chance of being imported to Europe.

So Dave you are correct - vested interests in this part of the world played their part in the depriving struggling economies of Africa.

 

[Carrera]

Ah, hold on a minute Zapper. Wasn't it Fred who originally claimed I was a car-park attendant? Can't you come up with something original? O.K., I grant you the crappera thing was your own coinage, but that's more an insult to my bike.

Yeah it is almost as bad as being lectured by a nightshift parking lot attendant huh crappy????

 

[lyotard]

in the us this is called free speech. it is exemplified by the posting you are engaging in here. some would say celebrity equals exemption from free speech due to amount of publicity or reason xyz...

yet the great staements made by celebrtities do not go unacknowleged.
i think of George C. Scott bringing attention to the native american at the oscars. sometimes a whisper goes unnoticed. a shout is harder to ignore.

"hold on a minute" i hear some say, "what do you think this is, cnn news?"
no, but that is were the majority get their kind of sanitized commercially acceptable news.

these celebs offer an unheard of alternative by voicing their comments via the media. it must be asked which is more important, one's lack of tolerance to the way the message is delivered or the gravity of the message in it's own right.

should we propose to shoot the messenger?

"the popping sound we sometimes hear are our heads coming out of,
er, up for air"

I'm glad I'm not the only one who forms a small minority of skeptical people who, with regard to Live Aid, dare to say:
"Hold on a minute!"
There's something about all of this I find just a touch irritating.

 

[davidmc]

You hit on a very valid point.

When the Treaty of Rome was enacted in 1957, the idea was to tty to bring commonality to Europe and to ensure that peace was maintained.
It also spawned the EEC (known now as the EU).
The EEC was premised upon the idea that common trade and a free market might operate throughout Europe - which would help to underpin the peace concept.
All fine and dandy.

Except that the only real policy of commonality was the Common Agricultural
Policy : this is the only real trans-European policy that has been enacted since the Treaty of Rome.
One by-product of CAP, is that farmers throughout Europe prospered to the detriment of farmers in countries outside of Europe.

The CAP policy is one of the most unethical, wasteful - and in world of hunger - the most inhumane policy ever.
Farmers were guaranteed income for produce that was never consumed.
Subsidies were paid to farmers for produce that went straight to large warehouse.
You had butter mountains in storage, wine lakes, spud mountains, sugar hills.
In a world with people starving, there were (are) bonded warehouses all over Europe stuffed with agricultural produce that would never be consumed.
And not only that, farmers outside of Europe could not compete with produce prices here in Europe : so sugar from Malawi had no chance of being imported to Europe.

So Dave you are correct - vested interests in this part of the world played their part in the depriving struggling economies of Africa.

We have our cuban exiles-The Fanjul Brother's Sugar Co. Getting rich over here at the expense of poor farmer's in our hemisphere not being able to compete what w/ our tarriff's, price control's, ect...It's sad.