Month: April 2008

Me Want Sam

by digby

I would like to add to the voices encouraging Air America to hire Sam Seder full time for the network. He has been a good friend to this blog and many others and the Air America website is flourishing with him at the helm (and the contributions of my co-bloggers D-Day and Dennis Hartley, I might add.)

Sam runs the kind of radio show I prefer. It’s not just his own rants and comedy bits and calls from listeners, good as those are. He also hosts many interesting guests and features an informative and fun discussion, which adds to my understanding of issues and politics. The mix on his show is the right mix for this liberal.

If you agree, you can send an email to pcollin@airamerica.com to politely request that Sam’s show be given a full time slot.

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The Secular Conscience

Yesterday, I posted the first question I posed to philosopher Austin Dacey author of The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life. My second question was deliberatlely provocative.

TRISTERO: Your second main theme is that liberals have refused to, or been reluctant to, make public appeals to conscience on many of the great issues of the day – abortion, stem cell research – which you argue are deeply moral issues. In general, I couldn’t agree more. Our blog along with the liberal blogosphere is an attempt to address issues in all their dimensions and we often write principally from a moral point of view.

In an example to which you devote much space, you regard as shameful what you perceive as liberal indifference to, or even acceptance of, what you call the “antithesis” of a liberal, secular society, namely radical Islamism. You state that “the mainstream left wing remains more fixated on embarrassing local conservative parties than on protecting women and religious minorities in the Islamic world.” While I would agree that many liberals, indeed many Americans, need to better understand Islamism and Islam, and – as always – liberals need to denounce any human rights abuses wherever they occur – it simply is not the case that liberals have been indifferent to the dangers of radical Islamism. You will be hard-pressed to find a liberal with a good word to say about Wahabbism, bin Laden, or the political leaders of Iran. A refusal to buy into the overwrought demonization of the Bush administration does not equal support for Ahmadinejad or a lack of support for the secular students in Tehran.

One problem with liberals speaking out more often is that prominent moderate Muslims and dissenters, eg, Hirsi Ali, have allied themselves with the very architects of the Bush/Iraq catastrophe, who we view as morally and intellectually bankrupt and discredited. Given that liberal accommodation with American neoconservatives simply will not happen, what do you propose liberals do to woo Hirsi Ali and others out of the neocon orbit and into ours?

(By the way, lIberals have not embarassed the neocons. They have brought shame to themselves. They advocate and pursue a fundamentally absurd and utterly catastrophic foreign policy. It has already led to dreadful horrors perpetrated on all sides and to a net rise in extreme Islamist influence. That the movement conservatives and neocons denounced liberals who opposed them as traitors, anti-semites, and terrorists – I can give you links if you like – pales in comparison to the slaughter and misery they’ve caused in the Middle East, but has not endeared them to us. )

DACEY: [Tristero], if we liberals feel that our values call on us to do nothing more than _to refrain from endorsing bin Laden_, then we have fallen into a moral gutter. I could, of course, name lots of liberals with nice things to say about sharia law (Rowan Williams and Noah Feldman for example). To say nothing of the liberal cottage industry churning out assertions that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam. As though Mawdudi, al-Banna, and Qutb had been oppressed– preemptively–by Bush policies, where in truth they were revolting against the very idea of the secular, open society.

But the worst and deadliest liberal sins here are sins of omission. Last year it was my privilege to be involved in the Secular Islam Summit, a gathering of Muslim and Muslim-born dissidents and reformers. The event was reported–remarkably fairly–by Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, and other Arabic-language outlets. Who showed from the national U.S. press? The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, U.S. World & News Report, and the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck. Where were the liberal opinion-makers? The Washington Post waited two weeks and then ran a piece parroting the Council on American Islamic Relations, which had been smearing the participants and denouncing the meeting as “anti-Muslim” and “illegitimate” before it had even begun.

Just look back at the reception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the so-called liberal press. Instead of being welcomed as a natural ally in the defense of women’s rights and freedom of expression, she was called an “Enlightenment fundamentalist.” The question liberals should be asking themselves is, why was it the American Enterprise Institute, and not the Soros Foundation or the National Organization for Women, who first extended a hand to Ayaan when she fled Europe?

How can liberals woo Ayaan and other dissidents and apostates? How about refusing to see the world through the ideological prism of Bush-versus-us politics? How in the world does it help the neoconservatives if people feel free to tell jokes about Islam? How does it further the Bush agenda if the 19-year-old Iranian Mehdi Kazemi is saved from deportation from Europe to Iran, where he will surely face execution for being gay? If liberals won’t join in the battle of ideas, others will.

As the prologue to my question implies, I don’t agree with Dacey’s answer. Rather than post my own long response, I’d rather read yours. But I will say this.

To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, an effective confrontation and alternative to bin Ladenism can never be Bushism or neo-conservatism. Nor do I think any liberal finds it morally, intellectually, or tactically acceptable to forge political relationships with the men and women who dreamed up and advocated the disaster of the Bush/Iraq war.

Austin Dacey is right that sometimes superordinate goals should trump more parochial concerns. But there are limits, no matter how critical the goal. In this case , the differences between liberals and neocons are not parochial but fundamental. They cannot be bridged. Rather neoconservatism can, should, and eventually will be returned to the margins of American political discourse. It is then, and only then, that the very serious problems posed by radical Islamism will be addressed by the United States in a serious fashion.

White Hair And War Wounds

by digby

Margaret Carlson tells us all what Real Americans want. Of course, the Real Americans Carlson speaks for are the political media:

As he’d done so many times before, McCain said we can win if we just pull up our socks and banish our defeatism. “We can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success,” he said, ensuring “that the terrible price we have paid in the war, a price that has made all of us sick at heart, has not been paid in vain.”

Don’t I wish? Don’t we all? I don’t buy his take on the war but, like half of America, I want to. Deep down, we can’t accept limitations on our good intentions. We hate to hear that a military surge didn’t produce a political surge that created a Jeffersonian democracy or some reasonable facsimile thereof.
Another six months you say? OK. I’ll buy the prospect that the next six months will be THE six months that makes all the months before worth it.

[…]

Compare this with the downer Democrats whining that we’ve blown it, that it all might be in vain; indeed, we’re worse off than before we lost more than 4,000 lives, spent trillions of dollars, and left 35,000 soldiers maimed and brain-damaged for life. Just suck it up.

Listen to Senator Hillary Clinton’s statement that it is “irresponsible to continue the policy that has not produced the results that have been promised time and time again, at such tremendous cost to our national security.”

Senator Barack Obama is almost as dour, concluding that we may have to settle for “a messy, sloppy status quo.”

McCain’s optimism is seductive no matter the facts because Americans aren’t good losers. It’s not that we’re sore losers. We’re just not losers generally and have no practice at it.

The reigning national philosophy is we can do anything if we just stick with it. Anyone who can shield us from the reality of losing is tapping into an abiding need that exists in poker, illness and war: As long as you don’t fold your cards, turn off the respirator, withdraw your troops, you’re still in the game. You haven’t lost.

[…]

Forget that the sending of more U.S. troops to Iraq hasn’t accomplished its goal of creating a functioning government and an independent army. McCain has bragging rights to having said the surge would work and has statistics to show it has. That buys him time for the other stuff.

McCain is winning the propaganda battle over the war. When a generic Republican is put up against Clinton or Obama, the generic Republican loses. When the Republican is McCain, many polls show that he’s winning.

That McCain’s approach isn’t hurting him was clear at the much-anticipated hearings. Obama and Clinton were still in favor of withdrawing troops, but not nearly so outspoken as they’d been earlier.

Real Americans are winners, not losers like those boring old Democrats. The fact that it’s the Republicans, most especially head cheerleader McCain who have “lost” their lovely little war seems to be irrelevant. In this game, you blame the referees for failing to allow the game to go on forever.

This is because “deep down we don’t want to accept limitations on our good intentions.” The war in Iraq may have been an illegal invasion of a foreign country that didn’t pose an imminent threat and which was sold to the people based on the thinnest of evidence and propaganda, but heaven forbid anyone would seek to limit such good intentions. And anyway, the good news for all of us is that he gets “bragging rights” for extending the killing giving him time to do “other stuff.” (!)

It helps that McCain has separated himself from President George W. Bush’s war and hasn’t been caught in any recent photos being hugged by him. McCain claims ownership of a new, improved war. He’s long been a critic of Bush’s management of the military, called early for Donald Rumsfeld’s head, and was an early adherent of putting an expert on insurgency like Petraeus in charge.

He’s done more than just about anyone to convince Americans that they’re fighting a war against al-Qaeda, conflating our real enemy — al-Qaeda — with “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” a terrorist group that didn’t exist until we invaded. It’s been repeated so often that more than 80 percent of Americans believe the two groups are the same.

…It’s McCain’s war now, and he’s not afraid to own it.

And we love him all the more for it, the optimistic old rascal!

He may be as delusional as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, but with his military bearing, his seriousness, his white hair, his war wounds, his straight talk, he doesn’t seem so.

Just as independents and Democrats project onto McCain a liberalism that isn’t there, they may believe he will be like Richard Nixon going to China — the hawk who can safely bring the troops home without having to say we’re sorry we ever went there.

It’s possible that Carlson actually has some insight into the way Real Americans view John McCain and the war in Iraq, although unlikely. I simply can’t believe that John McCain is seen as some kind of happy warrior and that the country has even the slightest notion of what “winning” in Iraq means other than that we are no longer bankrupting the country to keeps troops over there for no good reason. (What would VI Day look like?) People get that this is not a war which will have a glorious surrender date, and they know that this notion of

Margaret Carlson does, however, have insight into the way the kewl kidz view John McCain. Even though he might be just like Bush he just doesn’t seem like it. He’s got white hair and war wounds and he doesn’t act like a five year old (a trait which Margaret and her cohorts previously loved.) And, of course, there’s the straight talk. When he isn’t delusional, that is.

And by the way, liberals and independents wouldn’t impute to McCain a liberalness that isn’t there is the press stopped partying with the man long enough to report on him honestly. It’s not the people’s fault that they have the wrong impression of the man, it’s the fault of Margaret Carlson and columns like this. She takes the most shallow conventional wisdom (we like winners!) and writes another chapter in the myth of St John McCain the heroic, straight talking optimist who will lead us to victory and bring American back its national pride.

I’ve seen that movie and it sucked. McCain can’t count on “Iraq Syndrome” and economic malaise to get him out of this. Unlike the halcyon days of St Ronnie, this time they can’t get away with blaming the dirty hippies for all the country’s problems — after the last 14 years of “branding” of their identity all over everything they touched, there’s no escaping the fact that he’s a Republican. And people are very, very, very disappointed with their product.

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Making Sissies

by digby

Dick Morris is one of those wingnut gasbags who doesn’t sugercoat the propaganda and just tells the world outright what the Republican conventional wisdom is at any given moment. This column discussing the recent USA Today/Gallup Poll (via Media Matters) is a perfect example:

So Obama won the traditional Democratic (and female) virtues of understanding problems and caring about people. McCain won the usual Republican (and male) virtues of strong leadership and efficient management.

In an age of terrorism, weakness is a capital crime. McCain needs to base his campaign on establishing Obama’s weakness and his own strong leadership by comparison.

It is in this context that we must analyze Obama’s problems with the Rev. Wright and his emerging problems with former terrorist Bill Ayers. The American people are not about to judge Obama guilty by association, even with a lowlife type like Ayers and an anti-American like Wright. But they will see, in Obama’s tentativeness in handling these controversies and his “decency” in refusing to cut off his relationships and condemn these men, a sign of weakness that will hurt his campaign.

There is in Obama something of the Democratic candidate for president in the 1950s, Adlai Stevenson. Both from Illinois, they share an eloquence that lifts them above normal political figures and a profundity of thought that lies behind it. But each was seen as weak, and Stevenson as indecisive. Obama’s over-intellectualization of issues and of the problems that crop up in his campaign will increasingly harden into a perception of a lack of sufficient strength to deal with America’s problems.

The right wing tried to attack John Kerry in 2004 for a lack of patriotism and commitment to American values, just as it is now doing to Obama. It likely fell short of its goal. But the pressure it brought to bear on Kerry, through the Swift Boat ad and other attacks, led people to conclude that Kerry flip-flopped on issues and led them to discount what he said during his campaign.

Similarly, Americans will not buy that Obama is un-American. But the pressure the right brings to bear on him will cause him to appear weak in the face of attacks.

McCain needs to hammer away at the issue of strength and leadership and deal decisively with the problems that crop up in the campaign, while Obama dithers, thinks things through and tries to parse hairs in his responses.

Here the Iraq issue opens a real opportunity for McCain, where otherwise his support for the war would be a real negative. Iraq is a lot like Social Security. Everyone knows there is a problem, but any solution is immediately shot down. The issue earned the label “the third rail” in our politics, a status that was underscored when Bush’s momentum from his 2004 reelection was smashed against the rocks of Democratic and elderly opposition to his Social Security reform plan.

So it is with Iraq: He who proposes an alternative is doomed. McCain’s position, that we have to stay until we win, is far from popular, but it’s a lot better than unilateral and immediate withdrawal.

And Obama’s opposition to the war begs a host of questions: Shall we retain any presence? What about al Qaeda? What happens if the government falls? Can we let Iran take over? Obama will dither and seem far from decisive as he answers each of these questions. They will make him look terrible, just as Kerry — in opposing the war after voting for it — looked like a flip-flopper.

McCain can use the predisposition of voters to see Obama as weak, coupled with the Iraq issue, to make the strength issue his key advantage.

We’ve all been saying this for years and there it is all wrapped up in a pretty bow. The question is whether or not people believe that “strength” is really defined in such simple terms after observing the idiot Bush up close for eight years. It’s theoretically possible that they will see McCain as a “strong adult” while Junior was an overgrown teen-ager, but I don’t know if they trust their instincts on any of this as much as they used to. They thought Bush’s swagger and stubbornness were traits of masculinity and strength after all, and they were proven to be adolescent preening.

Then there are the other big issues of age and race, which also play into masculine stereotypes. This one isn’t quite an uncomplicated as Morris thinks, although I’m quite sure he’s right about Republican intentions. They are very good at tapping into the masculine leadership archetypes and base all their campaigns on them. The fact that they were able to turn a draft dodging party boy into a hero and a hero into a flip-flopping sissy is testament to how good they are at it.

In my opinion, the GOP’s hyper-macho, strutting, codpiece wearing flyboy ran the country firmly into the ditch in virtually every way possible has likely made people yearn for a thoughtful, intelligent president who understands their problems. I’d bet at least 51% do anyway.

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The Horror

by dday

We all knew this, but the level of specificity is striking.

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

Having finally seen The Road To Guantanamo the other night, about three British nationals of Pakistani descent who were picked up in Afghanistan and sent to Gitmo for years despite being innocent of any crimes, this is particularly acute. The idea that these monsters were up in the White House deciding how many times a CIA agent could slap somebody is grotesque. These men and women – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Ashcroft, Rice, and yes even that nice Mr. Colin Powell – should never be able to leave the United States again without the threat of indictment.

And by the way, that whole Rice for VP clamor?

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Yes, please Mr. McCain, make Condi your running mate so I can follow her around in an orange jumpsuit on the campaign trail.

These people are scum and their willing subordinates Jay Bybee and John Yoo simply fed them what they needed to have retroactively – justification for their crimes, a “Golden Shield,” as they called it. That doesn’t make Bybee or Yoo blameless, but it puts it into perspective. The lot of them should be up at Nuremberg standing trial. And guess what, they knew it.

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

The present isn’t judging you kindly. Historians are already calling this President the worst ever. But it’s really worse than that. This is a high-level crime syndicate being run out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. History won’t just not judge this kindly. History will weep, and scream, and recoil.

The predictable response is to call for impeachment. It’s clearly warranted, but at this point impeachment is way too good for this crew. Indictment is more like it. Less martyrs, more felons.

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The Secular Conscience

by tristero

I urge you to pick up a copy of The Secular Conscience by philosopher Austin Dacey (he serves as UN representative for the Center for Skeptical Inquiry, is an editor at Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer and a personal friend). It is a fascinating and provocative book that, among other things, fills in an important gap in the reasoning behind the resurgence of progressivism: a philosophical justification for a non-deist morality. We liberals act as if this is self-evident but it is not. Dacey argues from first principles for the primacy of a “secular conscience” – ie, that a secular moral sense underlies all moral systems, including religious ones. Furthermore, Dacey calls upon liberals to exercise this secular conscience by speaking out, in an unambiguously moral voice, on important issues of the day. Along the way, Dacey discusses notions of objectivity, relativism, and other philosophical conundrums (conundra?) in an original and elegant way. His book is quite readable and, as all books on important topics should be, both illuminating and provocative.

In order to introduce his book to readers of this blog, I asked Austin four questions about the ideas and opinions in his book and he kindly responded. As you will see, we often agree but in several important ways we also strongly disagree. Since both the questions, and Dacey’s answers, are long, I’ll spread them out over a few posts. I will add some comments and invite Austin to have the “last word.” Except for your comments, of course. I think you will find much food for thought in what Dacey has to say…

My first question was intended provide an introduction to one main overarching idea in the book:

TRISTERO: Your book has, as I read it, two main themes. The first is an argument, from basic principles, of the centrality of a secular conscience in all moral discourse. Please summarize the logic by which a religious conscience presupposes a secular conscience and what you mean by terms like “open,” “private,” and, in particular, “objective” when used in this context.

DACEY: By conscience I mean our reflective judgment about what we have most reason to think or do, all things considered. As such, conscience cannot be based in a duty to God, for it is conscience that must tell us where our duty lies. This is the lesson of the great Platonic dialogue, the Euthyphro, which stands to Western ethical thought as the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac stands to the Abrahamic faiths.Interrogating Euthyphro’s definition of the righteous or holy as “that which is loved by the gods,” Socrates asks: Is it holy because it is loved by the gods, or do the gods love it because it is holy? No matter which horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma one takes, the ox of religion-based morality gets gored: If holiness is just whatever the gods love, then the gods’ evaluation appears arbitrary or subjective. If, on the other hand, holiness is loved because it is holy, then the gods’ evaluation appears superfluous–any reasons for recognizing what’s righteous must be god-independent.

Christopher Hitchens has challenged religious believers to name a single moral action performed by a believer that could not have been performed by a nonbeliever. I want to go further and say that if the religious have any good reasons for acting morally, then those reasons are equally open to the nonreligious. Unless there is such a thing as secular moral
conscience, there can be no such thing as religious moral conscience.

In The Secular Conscience I argue that questions of conscience are open and not private–contrary to the slogan of contemporary secular liberalism. By this I mean that the workings of my conscience necessarily are susceptible to examination by others in light of objective standards, where something is objective when it is settled by the way the world is, and not merely by our attitudes. In religion and ethics, conscience is also open to revision, thank goodness.

Austin and I agree about most of this, including the importance of defining a secular conscience, the basic logic by which a religious conscience presupposes a secular one, and the importance of addressing morally serious issues (say, abortion, the Bush/Iraq war, stem cell research, and censorship) in moral terms.

Where we disagree is whether privacy of conscience is “a slogan of contemporary secular liberalism.” It is true that liberals often argue for privacy – the gender of a person’s bedpartner is no employer’s business when it comes to benefits, for example. It is also true that we often frame arguments operationally – it’s common to hear not that the death penalty is intrinsically immoral, but rather that it fails to deter.

However, it is also true that liberals make many moral arguments. Among the objections voiced to the Bush/Iraq war was the moral one: the US simply has no right to invade a country that has never threatened us. But Dacey has a point. While Bush’s violation of the international order was one of the most compelling arguments not to invade (if not the single most imposrtant), it was rarely articulated in a forceful manner, let alone defended when criticized. Liberals too often cede the ethical high ground by default, implicitly acknowledging that the moral position may be easily trumped by bogus utilitarian concerns. The argument “well, an invasion of Iraq doesn’t have a chance in hell of succeeding” implicitly acknowledges that the
moral argument may not matter too much if the US did, in fact, have a chance to succeed. From there, it’s an easy step to Kanan Makiya’s infamous formulation that if there is a 10% chance of success, the US should put “hope before experience.”

So yes, liberals can – and must – be much more aggressive in defining the ethical dimensions of (some) civil and governmental issues. And we need to be very aggressive in defending those moral principles when attacked, refusing to retreat to often less convincing arguments from utility. Neither Austin nor I are saying that Bush/Iraq could have been prevented had liberals better articulated the moral objections.* Rather the issue is to make the principles of the liberal conscience (what Dacey calls “secular”) more a part of the mainstream culture – as they often were prior to the ascension of the neocons and the christianists. By doing so, truly deranged notions like “preventive war” will no longer seem as thinkable to mainstream leaders. By contrast, not doing so provides crackpot moral ideas a free reign to create havoc.

*[UPDATE: Anyone familiar with my blogging knows that I fault not only the Bush administration and its cronies for the Bush/Iraq catastrophe, but also their enablers among the mainstream media and the liberal hawks. ]

Big Ole Whiff ‘O Freedom

by digby

Right wing bloggers’ heads are exploding all over the country:

An Iraqi judicial committee has dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and ordered him released nearly two years after he was detained by the U.S. military.

Hussein, 36, remained in custody at Camp Cropper, a U.S. detention facility near Baghdad’s airport.

A decision by a four-judge panel said Hussein’s case falls under a new amnesty law. It ordered Iraqi courts to “cease legal proceedings” and ruled that Hussein should be “immediately” released unless other accusations are pending.

The ruling is dated Monday but AP’s lawyers were not able to thoroughly review it until Wednesday. It was unclear, however, whether Hussein would still face further obstacles to release.

The bad news is that the US is probably going to invoke a Yoo Hoo: where the rule of law only applies when the government, at its discretion, believes it won’t cause a security risk:

U.S. military authorities have said a U.N. Security Council mandate allows them to retain custody of a detainee they believe is a security risk even if an Iraqi judicial body has ordered that prisoner freed. The U.N. mandate is due to expire at the end of this year.

Oh well. The wingnuts can work their little hearts out for McCain to win in November to ensure the continuation of the glorious GWOT which justifies the torture and imprisonment of innocent people both here and around the world. That’s how we keep the country safe.

Here’s good backround on the Michele Malkin led witch hunt, if you’re unfamiliar with it. More here.

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World Food Crisis Update

by dday

Last week I tried to call some attention to the looming world food crisis that is resulting from soaring prices on staples like rice and wheat. This week we’ve seen a continuation of that alarm as the crisis has spread.

Rice climbed to a record for a fourth day as the Philippines, the biggest importer, announced plans to buy 1 million tons and some of the world’s largest exporters cut sales to ensure they can feed their own people.

Rice, the staple food for half the world, rose as much as 2.9 percent to $21.60 per 100 pounds in Chicago, before paring gains. The price has doubled in the past year. Philippine President Gloria Arroyo announced two rice tenders today and pledged to crack down on hoarding. Anyone found guilty of “stealing rice from the people” will be jailed, she said.

“We’re in for a tough time,” Roland Jansen, chief executive officer of Pfaffikon, Switzerland-based Mother Earth Investments AG, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television from Zurich today. Unless prices decline, “you will have huge problems of daily nutrition for half the planet.” Mother Earth holds about 4 percent of its $100 million funds in the grain.

This is basically a preview of the resource wars that will result if we continue to ignore the disastrous effects of climate change. Wealthy or resource-rich nations will simply pull their goods from the world market and retrench to benefit their own citizens, and as a result resource-poor nations will have little recourse. When you see wheat harvests becoming a more prized commodity than heroin harvests in Afghanistan, you know that there’s a major problem out there. The impact on global security is great, as nations without access to adequate food supplies will create civil unrest and perhaps even the toppling of many regimes. And it should be of particular concern where in the world these sparks of violence and rioting would occur. Already we’re seeing incidents in places like Egypt, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Cameroon (40 died in riots in February), Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia. But consider that nearly half of the 160 million in Pakistan are “food insecure” and risk malnutrition and starvation from rising prices. We’ve seen that grinding poverty can be a magnet for extremism and fundamentalism. This is a national security crisis as well as a moral one.

Another example of geopolitical concerns of world hunger is in Zimbabwe, a country with 10,000% inflation and almost totally reliant on world food aid. In the midst of a political crisis where longtime dictator Robert Mugabe has apparently lost national elections but won’t give up his position, violence has spread, in particular with respect to seizing farms.

Militant ruling party supporters invaded white-owned farms Monday, a day after President Robert Mugabe urged Zimbabweans to defend seized land, fanning fears he would stage a violent crackdown to retain power […]

Invasions that began Sunday worsened with intruders entering at least 23 farms in southern Masvingo province and northern Centenary, said Trevor Gifford, president of the Commercial Farmers Union.

“In Masvingo where the police have been very cooperative, every time they remove invaders, within five, six hours they’re reinvading,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s very apparent that this is being coordinated from higher up the chain of command.”

Workers were being rounded up on the farms and forced to chant anthems in support of the ruling party, he said, and many of the farm owners had fled out of concern about their safety.

“The farmers are being told that everything on the farm is the property of those invading,” he said.

The farms are the chokepoint to maintain power in Zimbabwe. Before the election there were reports of needing a membership card from the ruling party to receive food aid. Seizing the farms is a continuation of that process. And so the food crisis sustains a brutal dictatorship.

African heads of state are meeting about Zimbabwe right now. But before long, they’re going to have their own problems resulting from hunger. This is perhaps the biggest threat to global security we’ve seen in quite a while.

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And The Killing Continues

by tristero

Clashes in Baghdad’s Sadr City kill 20.

Notes On BagNewsNotes

by digby

People keep saying that I have to remove the jarring picture of Hillary in the BagNewsNotes ad on the left. The answer is no. The ad is for a site that deconstructs media images. That picture appeared in the Village Voice this week accompanying an article about MSNBC’s coverage of the Clinton campaign. BagNews asks all kinds of important questions about what that image means in the context of the article and the gut reaction it evokes in people who see it. Click the link and you’ll see.

Images are more powerful than words in this culture and nobody but Michael Shaw and his photographers and contributors bother to talk about it. I’m proud that he is a sponsor of this blog and I will continue to support the unique mission he has undertaken in the blogosphere.

I find it very interesting that so many people are disturbed by the image. Perhaps you would like to discuss that in the comments to this post. I’d like to hear it and I would imagine Michael would enjoy getting feedback too. That’s what he does.

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