4th Quarter 2012: Occupy Earth: Happy B’earthday Party

Almost a century ago, John Steinbeck’s classic Grapes of Wrath describes the pitiful plight of American environmental refugees displaced from Oklahoma by the 1930s’ Dust Bowl to California, where if lucky they might get jobs paying a couple of dollars a day as migrant farm workers.  As economic refugees the crux is exploitation by big industrialized agriculture:  “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”  To insure profitable prices for agricultural products per supply and demand market manipulation, vast amounts of food produced was plowed under or left to rot in mountains of surplus…and not provided to feed the starving poor during the Great Depression.