In the weeks ahead, it would be wise for all of us to keep our hemispheres straight & also our understanding of what the basic commodity in the Iran-Contra transactions really was.
The scene epitomises the scramble for basic commodities in a country rich in oil, but home to an increasingly impoverished population that struggles to cope with a mismanaged economy.
Bread and cornmeal disappeared from most shelves Saturday as stores complied with the order issued by President Robert G. Mugabe last week to halve the prices of basic commodities in an attempt to get a grip on rampant inflation, which reached an official rate of 4,500 percent in May, though real inflation is estimated at closer to 9,000 percent.
Web sites bring together "neighbors in solidarity," who help one another with chores or repairs and buy basic commodities in common; on swap sites, people can work out exchanges for things from clothes to household equipment.
Price spikes for basic commodities in 2008 and 2010 have helped to focus attention on a series of interrelated and escalating problems - climate change, population growth, resource depletion and environmental degradation - that the government's Chief Scientist Sir John Beddington warns are brewing into "a perfect storm that presents a serious challenge to global food security".
Household-waste treatment service corresponds to a non-basic commodity in the Sraffa's sense, so that the technical condition of the service (which may be called a non-basic service), i.e. the waste treatment cost, does not affect the wage-profit frontier.
The Syrian government has dropped some basic commodities into the city in recent weeks, and Russia said on Friday that it had dropped 22 tons of aid to the besieged part of the city.
Time is known to be a basic commodity in health care.
But the same legislation also radically changed the way basic commodities changed hands in the global economy.
The persistently rising rents and bills and the exponential rise in the prices of basic commodities force the Hijras to sell sex as a means of living.
