T: Is for Trouble in Paradise or is it home?

Gases prices have reached $5.20 and, compared to the $3.21 price of last year, everything is on the rise. Tonight's news stated that Con Ed was raising its prices by 5%, giving them a profit of $425 million. This is the biggest one-time increase in bills for electric service. The average customer will pay about $5.60 a month more.

I have known for awhile that a company called Monsanto had derived a process in which all grains would be seedless much like the watermelon. When I mentioned it to my friends, I was called a conspiracist. Think what you want of me but, sadly to say, I was right about my concern. For in owning all the grains and deciding how much they produce, you rule a world.

For a 50-pound bag of flour, it was $16 a bag last week; for Gold Medal brand flour, now it is $37 a bag. Cremosa Food of Melville, New York, confirms there are plans for a price hike to $40 a bag in the next week. With the increased price of cheese, pizza went from $2.00 to $2.50. With the new rise in flour what will pizza cost now? The cost of cereals and bakery products climbed more than 9% last month, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics during the past 12 months. A bushel of wheat now trades for more than $1100, more than two-and-1/2 times what it was just a year ago.

Huge demands for ethanol have farmers planting more corn to produce fuel when they could be growing wheat, and corn is about to become extinct to those of us who love to eat it. To make matters worse "Fifty-nine-percent of everything we raised in 2007 is leaving the U.S." That's 9-10% over what is normal. U.S. wheat supplies are at their lowest level since the end of World War II. In Manilla, one of the world's largest rice importers, they are gearing up to increase imports to beat escalating Asian rice prices and secure thinning domestic stocks. The price of soy has risen by just 3.1%. The rising grain prices are one of the first global economic indicators to tell us that we are on an economic and demographic path that is environmentally unsustainable. Monsanto's development and marketing of genetically engineered have made the company $7.344 billion. Not bad for making us slaves to their pricing.

Now Monsanto is attempting to acquire water rights in countries with water shortages in a move to control the people's basic means of survival. Seeking to privatize the world's water and putting it on the open market for sale to the highest bidder is their goal. Millions of the world's citizens are being deprived of this fundamental human right, and vast ecological damage is being wrought as massive industry claim water once used to sustain communities and replenish nature. You may like these F.A.C.T.S. but they are here and staring us in the face!