In a recent review of Rob Wallace’ latest work,
Dead Epidemiologists, we are reminded that “If the virus has a source it is not Yunnan but the boardrooms of giant corporations.” The review takes the time to name the culprits:
“the
retail corporations whose main aim is to drive profits up by getting cheap food on the shelf, paying less and less to producers;
the “cafos” (
concentrated animal feeding operations) who now dominate livestock rearing in the USA and South America, and which have virtually wiped out the mixed farming family farm in the American mid-west;
the
investment houses and sovereign wealth funds who poured money into a global land grab…the result of (which) has been to drive millions of peasant farmers off their land and turn it over to large scale monoculture farming of crops for export;
Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Big Flu and Dead Epidemiologists, has become an international pundit in the conversation about the rise and spread of global…
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. R. Jamil Jonna is associate editor for communications and production at
Monthly Review. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah.
The authors thank John Mage, Craig Medlen, and Fred Magdoff for their assistance.
The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline. The result is two national economies as perceived, respectively, by the top and the bottom of society: one of prosperity, the other of precariousness. At the level of production, economic stagnation is diminishing the life expectations of the vast majority. At the same time, financializatio