By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world, just so they could make a fatter profit.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis like they were hit by a tsunami. "It was very painful," a woman my age called Abeba Getaneh, told me. "My children stopped growing. I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either. We were told the swelling Chinese and Indian middle classes were pushing it up, but as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand from those countries for them actually fell by 3 percent over this period.

There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It's true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land - but that was a gradual process that wouldn't explain a violent spike. It's true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food - but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn't the biggest factor.

To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache - but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.

For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer and the global price is high, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked well.

Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into 'derivatives' that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.

So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to financial speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutschebank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merryl Lynch - and on, and on, provided they think the price can be jacked up, until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles' crop at all.

If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, 'Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay', explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English."

Poetry found its break broke with straightforward representation of reality when T.S. Eliot wrote 'The Wasteland.' Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand. As Lanchester puts it: "With derivatives... there is a profound break between the language of finance and that of common sense."

So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? How could this parallel universe of speculation affect her? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was itself deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in contracts that were speculating on theoretical food that would be grown in the future - and the speculators drove the price through the roof.

Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldman's pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market, and they were looking for somewhere else to make their stash of cash swell. They started to buy massive amounts of derivatives based on food: they reckoned that food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded onto this ground and decided to buy, buy, buy.

So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for contracts based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price for food on people's plates massively rose. The starvation began.

The food price was now being set by speculation, rather than by real food. The hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that even on the regulated exchanges in the US - which take up a small part of the business - 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely to inflate the price and sell it on. Even George Soros said this was "just like secretly hoarding food during a hunger crisis in order to make profits from increasing prices." The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.

When I asked them to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, Merrill Lynch's spokesman said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were a little more detailed in their response: they said "serious analyses... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a single statement by the OECD.

How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period - but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows this speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.

So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. This is what happens when you follow the claim that unregulated markets know best to the end of the line. The finance sector's Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict such misery, and barely even notice?

If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How long would it last then? How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears the Senate - drenched in speculator-donations - may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.

Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble from swelling, probably soon. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. In the UK, the World Development Movement is launching a week of action this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 for your marching orders. In the US, click here to find out what you can do. The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please - do anything you can to make sure they never, never do that to us again."

A great idea to expose the actions that some tyrants around the globe are getting away with. Not sure about such a strong use of Facebook interface, tough.

Not very keen about Sting but have to admit he almost sound angelical in here...

Pixels are taking over...

I never imagined that most of the Facebook users age between 45-54... i would have bet on the 25-34 group!

We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure.

While the web itself has been a massive success (influencing virtually every aspect of our lives) advertising on the web is mostly a bad joke.

Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of powerful consumer-facing brands.

The only truly powerful brands I can think of that the web has created are native web brands like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook. It's as if the only brands television was good at creating were CBS, NBC and ABC.

After 15 years, can anyone name even ten serious non-native consumer-facing brands that have been created by web advertising? Is there a brand of coffee, butter, beer, bread, chicken, gasoline, soda, peanut butter, dog food, milk, tires, potato chips, life insurance, lawn mowers...don't make me go on, you get the point...that has been built by web advertising?

Display advertising is a joke. Remember just a few years ago when they were selling us banner ads on the promise that "interactivity" would make these ads so much more efficient than traditional ads? Then they started measuring them and found that fewer than 2 people in a thousand were clicking. Oops.

Now they're making the same lame "branding" argument for online display ads they made against traditional print ads.

Online video advertising is another joke. 99% of all video is currently watched on a tv, not a computer.

Social media is a rumor. Everybody is hyperventilating about it, but nobody has any idea of how you even measure success. Here are three links (one,  two, and three) to self-congratulatory videos of social media "experts" that run a total of almost 30 minutes.

In that 30 minutes I can't recall the word "sales" being mentioned even once. They're all about false goals: getting followers; creating "engagement"; creating "communities"; "re-organizing around the customer" and, of course, the ever-popular "blowing up silos." If you can get through this festival of smugness without contemplating suicide, you're a better man/woman/child/pet than I am.

These people are living in a different world.

I don't know about you, but if I walked into a meeting with one of my clients and told them that the purpose of the millions they're spending on advertising is to create "communities," they'd laugh me out of the room. They want sales and they want them now.

It is true that there's data to support the effectiveness of two types of online advertising: search and email. But is that it? Is that all the web is going to be? A medium of tactics? A Yellow Pages replacement and cheaper DM? How many powerful brands have been built by search and email? The answer: Zero.

Believe me, I'd love to see online advertising succeed. I'd love to have another forceful tool to help my clients succeed. But, like I've said before, online advertising is like communism. It's always going to be great some day, it's just never very good right now.

Impressionable advertisers are continuing to be sold more and more web advertising. But unless something changes pretty soon, marketers with brains and the ability to see beyond the hype and the baloney are going to start to catch on.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with this article! The miracle of web advertisement is a promise in the queue and is only feeding itself...

Believe me, it's the best website you will ever see, in spite of not knowing yet what the hell is it about!

Some of the most creative and hilarious 404 Pages, where the internet breaks!

This video really shows how communication design (packaging, in this scenario) can determinate how we relate to a product, how we feel about it and, in the end, it shows why Microsoft is so damn hard to relate with...

This series is supported by Wix.com, an online design tool that enables you to create your own Flash websites, social network layouts, and more, for free. Learn more about Wix here.

Good design is a critical part of any web or social media presence. Like the clothes you wear to a job interview or a business meeting, a sharp looking social profile or website is the first step toward being taken seriously online.

Whether you’re a professional designer or an armchair artiste, tools abound that you can use to snazz up your web presence, and give it that polish that professionals, potential customers, and online friends have come to expect from a social media maven. We’ve talked to the experts about what they use for inspiration, collaboration, and getting down to the business of design in a social media world. Here are some of the suggestions they offered up.

1. Core Application Alternatives

In days of old, the software powerful enough to create and edit high quality graphics was expensive — and it still is, if you must have the name-brand products.

But if you’re open to experimentation and perhaps a bit of digital quirkiness, there are free, open source alternatives to some of the staples of the digital design tool set.

“I use Photoshop for any image editing I need to do, but it comes at a price,” says Alex Mathers, a freelance designer and illustrator who writes about design and social media promotion at Red Lemon Club. “I would recommend Gimp (

) for those requiring similar functions, and Inkscape (

) as an alternative for creating vector illustrations over Adobe Illustrator (

) … All of these programs are excellent.”

We’ve mentioned Gimp before as a powerful free alternative to Photoshop, and Inkscape has a similar mission in the realm of scalable vector graphic (SVG) creation. Unlike bitmapped images (JPEGs, PNGs, which are the final products viewed on a website), vector graphics are mathematical representations of images, and can be scaled up indefinitely to meet any size requirement. This means that one file can be used in any medium (web, print, etc.) at any size. They are indispensable to the illustrating designer.

2. Design Communities

If you’re a creative person, there’s no better way to improve your craft than by getting social. You can start by following designers and design blogs on the major social networks, but if you’re looking to really explore others’ work and share your own, design communities are key.

“Society6 is an online community that allows artists to showcase their work, sell prints and find others to collaborate with,” says Mathers. “Behance, This is Central Station, Creattica and Design Taxi are some other great creative communities that I have used that help designers connect and promote their work.”

Like any social network, the value is in sharing. “I upload any recent work I have to Society6 and Behance and use both platforms to interact with other creatives, find people to collaborate with, send and receive feedback, and generally communicate with others in similar industries,” says Mathers. “Both sites, particularly Behance, received a healthy amount of traffic … [they] are an excellent way to gain exposure in front of the right people.”

3. Design Element Resources

If you’re not an illustrator or digital artist by trade, but you love “putting it all together” for blogs, social media profiles, and websites, you’ll need a good resource base to draw from. There are many great blogs and sites that compile textures, fonts, vector illustrations, and other graphic elements that you can incorporate right into your projects for free.

“Dezignus is a good resource for free vector illustrations and textures, and they have a large selection of downloads that is constantly expanding,” says Mathers. “Colourlovers.com is a fascinating resource for designers looking for color scheme inspiration and help.”

Mathers added that for his typographical requirements, he regularly visits Dafont.com “for a huge selection of free fonts that are easily accessible and downloadable.”

Jacob Gube, founder and chief editor of the design blog Six Revisions, adds that deviantART (

) is also “a great resource for sharing and getting design assets (Photoshop brushes, textures, icons, and more).”

It can also be a source of design inspiration. “One of the first things I do to get a quick burst of creativity is to click around deviantArt. Seeing what your colleagues are doing can serve as a good motivational factor for getting your own work done,” says Gube.

4. IconFinder

Linking out to social networks is a core element of social web design. Having a Twitter (

) or Facebook (

) icon front and center gives visitors a recognizable channel through which they can connect.

Wonderfully creative social media icon sets abound on the web, and many of them are free for commercial use. But finding the one that perfectly compliments your design (or perhaps inspires a theme in its own right) can be a tiresome process of searching and browsing resource blogs.

IconFinder makes the process a bit easier. It’s a search engine for icons submitted by users, with detailed information on their graphic formats and licenses — nearly all of which are free and available for commercial use. The interface provides a convenient way to download icons right from the search results.

“I’m constantly going back to this site every time I need icons for a site that I’m working on,” says Jad Limcaco, professional designer and editor of Design Informer. “Instead of bookmarking every site that offers free icons, Icon Finder does the work for you … It makes life a lot easier.”

If you’re not hunting for something specific, the site also offers a browsable catalog of icon sets.

5. MockFlow

Building a socially-minded website from scratch requires quite a bit of planning.

“One step in the design process I rarely skip is wireframing,” says Grace Smith, owner of Postscript5, a micro-design studio based in Northern Ireland. “It’s perhaps one of the most important stages as it helps give an overview of usability, information architecture, layout, and site content.”

For larger projects and applications, Smith uses Mockflow for this stage. She says the process is “an intermediary phase between initial sketches and the actual design phase.”

MockFlow is a versatile tool that enables you to quickly render functional website prototypes without a big time investment. There are also real-time collaboration and note taking features built into the platform.

“[It] may sound like a waste of time when you can just move on to a full color comp, but it allows you to spot potential problems early, make adjustments quickly, and cuts down dramatically on revisions later in the design treatment stage.”

A similar tool recommended by other designers is Mockingbird.

6. Notable

If you find yourself collaborating on a design project, whether with a colleague or client, the feedback process can get cumbersome via e-mail. It helps to be able to take visual notes on a visual product.

“I use Notable for feedback on projects,” says Smith. “Notable is superb and is ultimately built to allow quick and easy collaboration. It’s helped me streamline my feedback process and keeps all parts of a project organized using sets and workspaces.”

Notable works on the web, so you can capture and notate web pages from any computer, as well as your iPhone. Image captures and their respective notes stay organized on your notable account dashboard, and can easily be shared out to your collaborators or team.

7. Campaign Monitor

Believe it or not, e-mail marketing is still very much a part of successful social media campaigns. Whether you’re looking to up the design ante for your business’s newsletter, or reach out creatively in search of new freelance projects, a design-focused e-mail marketing tool is worth investigating.

“Campaign Monitor is an intuitive e-mail marketing application created for designers. It has excellent tools for designing professional HTML e-mails, creating and managing e-mail campaigns, useful e-mail analytics, and more,” says Jacob Gube.

In addition to the valuable features Gube notes above, Campaign Monitor can also be a viable source of income in itself. “For designers looking to expand their service offerings, you can re-brand, customize, and resell Campaign Monitor to your clients,” says Gube.

8. Proposable

As part of a small team or as a lone freelancer, a designer must wear many hats. Because of the competitive market right now, Gube stresses the importance of salesmanship. “Designers can [have] great success by using online proposals to win over a project bid.”

He recommends Proposable, an online tool that allows you to build highly customized, branded presentations. A Proposable account incorporates an asset library (which can include rich media like video), a variety of templates, and a comment management system for real-time feedback.

“Proposable makes generating professional-level proposals a cinch,” says Gube, “and it has reporting features to analyze the performance of your proposals. It was created for salespeople, but as a designer, being a salesperson is a huge part of the gig, whether you’re freelancing or pitching a design idea to your managers.”

9. Freshbooks

Staying on the business side for a moment, getting paid can often be a struggle for freelancers. For the social web-minded designer, the idea of a cloud-based invoice management system is likely appealing. Enter Freshbooks, “an all-in-one web app for invoicing, tracking expenses, time-tracking, and more,” according to Gube.

“I use it to keep track of my expenses, manage payments, and to generate professional invoices quickly and effortlessly,” he adds. “There are many billing tools out there, but this one stands out because it caters to freelancers, is aimed towards creatives (designers, developers, writers, artists), and is one of the few web app start-ups that still values customer support.” And the fact that it’s all on the web allows you to “send someone a bill from your favorite WiFi-enabled coffee house.”

10. 960 Grid System

Creatively, the sky’s the limit when it comes to web design. But the interfaces of the social web generally follow certain patterns that users are accustomed to. If you’re building blog templates or other interactive websites, the 960 Grid System is a good way to map out your page elements so they can achieve alignment harmony.

Many of the designers we spoke to stressed the importance of good old fashioned pen-and-paper sketching in their creative process. “Sketching enables me to break down ideas and fully explore UI options. I find putting it down on paper tends to raise questions and ideas and leads to changes,” says Smith. “I use the Sketch Sheets supplied with the 960 Grid System which display a browser frame and grid lines.”

960 Grid provides examples of how the system works with a number of sites, and also offers a wealth of other code-related resources for web designers.

What other tools and resources do you use to make your social web designs really pop? Share them in the comments below.

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Upload image files, videos and mp3’s. Add Twitter, Facebook, and blog links with ease. Use a Wix domain or connect to your own. The options are practically limitless. With added e-commerce features, search engine visibility and other professional tools, Wix is the ultimate solution for creating and publishing spectacular web content for free. Start Creating!

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), DNY59