Why pushing millions of people into poverty is a good thing (snark)
Fri Jul 04, 2008 at 07:09:44 AM PDT
Summary: Kossack "Fishoutofwater" has a diary up on the World Bank's report about the real reason food prices have been going up across this planet, leading to food riots and increased poverty.
I would like to expand on this diary by pointing out one thing which screamed out to me, the explanation for why it was "necessary" to hide this report, the silver lining in this cloud of starvation.
Here's the bad news:
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated.
Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as 'the first real economic crisis of globalisation'.
It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.
Go to Fishoutofwater's diary is you want a more detailed look at what's going on (it's way more informative than what you're going to get here). For me, however, here was the line from the Guardian article linked to above that was the most interesting:
Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.
That's right. We've got food riots and increasing poverty because the efforts to stop these things might embarrass Mr. Bush. And in the end, isn't that really what matters?
Imagine the attention to priorities it must take to know that people are rioting over food, and keep a cool enough head to know that this is merely the price that must be paid to protect Mr. Bush's image (to those loyal admirers who still feel it's worthy of protection). Sort of like how all those American troops need to keep dying in Iraq in order to protect Mr. Bush from suffering the "humiliation" that would come from withdrawal without victory. Or like how we have to keep pretending that Mr. Bush's "War on Terror" is winnable in order to save him the embarrassment of admitting that he got the US into a war against a tactic ("Oops. My bad.") I mean, it's only costing us billions of dollars, thousands of lives, one right to privacy, and a good chunk of our Constitution.
But in the end, isn't it all worth it? Isn't being willing to sacrifice your life (or at the least, your livelihood) for another supposed to be one of our highest virtues? Don't we praise firefighters and cops and soldiers when they do this stuff? Isn't our entire calendar based around a man whose most famous act was self-sacrifice? True, he was one man sacrificing for the good of the many, instead of the many being asked to sacrifice for the good of the one (Mr. Bush). But reverse-martyrdom is still martyrdom, with all of the glories that come from such a noble act.
In the end, I have only one question: how many virgins are we going to get in the next life if we sacrifice our current ones in order to save the pride of George W. Bush?
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