Prediction Comes True: Rising Food Costs Correlate with Rise in Protests, Revolutions

Predictions made a few years ago that rising food prices would cause a rise in protests and revolutions against governments worldwide are now coming true.

Ukraine, whose grain crops withered in a heat wave in 2010 and reduced the harvest, faced a political crisis on Nov. 21, 2013, when then President Viktor F. Yanukovych had a choice: lean toward the European Union in the west, which would support workers' rights and protect against corruption or lean closer toward to the former leader of the Soviet KGB, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Corruption in Russia is so well known it's considered to be "a way of life." It's no accident that not all of the money that was spent on the Olympic village in Sochi went into the amenities that would have made visitors' stays more comfortable. Much of it was siphoned off into contractors' pockets and the pockets of organized crime.

When Russia put pressure on the Ukrainian president to side with Russia and added a bribe of $15 billion to keep the Ukraine within its sphere of influence, Yanukovych blinked. When he blinked and yielded to Putin, hundreds of thousands of protesters saw their chances for a better economy and less corruption vanish, so they took to the streets in Kiev's Independence Square.

When the fighting turned ugly and some Ukrainian police snipers shot live ammunition into the crowd, dozens died and some Ukrainian police officers joined the protesters. Soon, protesters occupied the palace and Yanukovych fled to his eastern Ukrainian base and may have fled the country. His current whereabouts aren't clear at this time. He was last seen in the Crimea in a car with two other cars as escorts. Most of his bodyguards and supporters have abandoned him.

The Ukrainian parliament has issued an order for his arrest for mass murder in his use of snipers to kill protesters.

By cutting $9 billion worth of food stamps to needy people in the U.S., many of them the elderly and the working poor, and by opposing a rise in the minimum wage, many in Congress are doing their best to create a similar situation in this country. However, it's hard to know what, if anything, would tip our country to a similar state of unrest.

Many elderly, middle-aged, and young people facing a dismal economy seem numb to the hardships they endure and hopeless about their chances to change the status quo.

Obviously, the desertification of the West, especially California, will cause the prices of fruits and vegetables to rise if the drought doesn't end there. Some cattle died in the harsh winter of 2013-2014, which isn't quite over yet, though there's a thaw in the weather.

We might just take a look at what's happening in other corrupt countries, as corrupt as our own or more so, and ask ourselves if we are headed in the right direction. The U.S. has the most inequality of wealth of any so-called First World country. 

Protesters occupied former President Yanukovych's $500 million mansion, played golf on his golf course, surveyed his many luxury cars, and observed the kind of wealth enjoyed by the top 1% of the top 1% of the wealthy in this country. Think of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and his Cadillac elevators, Sen. John McCain's numerous homes, too numerous (seven at last count) for him to remember, Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme, Sheldon Adelson's casino fortune poured into Republican Newt Gingrich's campaign for public office, the Koch Brothers' oil money poured into Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's campaign, and so on and so forth.

Charles Koch, a billionaire like his brother, opposes having any federal minimum wage and opposes health care for the poor.

Is the United States really so different from the Ukraine, now that Republicans have cut food stamps to the tune of $9 billion, and many in Congress oppose a long-delayed rise in the minimum wage, which is now $7.25 an hour (not a living wage), and have already rejected unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed? 

The only thing the elderly have to be thankful for is that Pres. Obama's federal budget denied Republican requests to cut Social Security cost-of-living raises because Republicans refused to keep their part of the bargain. Republicans were supposed to deny tax credits to corporations that move jobs overseas but let their base of rich oligarchs keep their tax breaks.

The only thing the young have to be thankful for is that they have a chance to get medical health insurance if they can negotiate the Obamacare website or get assistance from someone who can.

That's not much, but in a lousy economy for most of us (it's a great economy for the very rich as the transfer of wealth from the working poor and the struggling middle class to the very rich continues as productivity gains do not trickle down to the workers who increase their productivity but do go to CEOs), it's something.