disaster in afghanistan:
However, the most important current issue in Afghanistan is the drought, the crop failure, and the prospect of famine. This story has received no coverage in the North American media. Over the last winter Afghanistan received well-below normal rainfall and mountain snow pack. The spring runoff was light, and crop yields from irrigated agriculture have been significantly reduced. There are conditions of drought throughout the country. In many areas there are no crops and livestock has perished from lack of pasture. Wheat provides the staple food, and production is 60 percent below average. Recent rains have brought flooding, as the land has been hardened by the drought. Floods are more common because over the past few decades 60% of the woodland has been removed by the population seeking fuel for cooking and winter heating. The jump in fuel prices has raised the cost of the delivery of food from neighbouring countries. Food prices are rising. The price of a 50 kg bag of wheat flour is now $35. One half of the population in Afghanistan lives on less than $2 per day. The government of Afghanistan reports that 42% of the population lives in “extreme poverty”, defined as a per capita income of less than $120 per year. The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan reported in August that “at least four million most vulnerable people have already been pushed into the ‘high-risk food-insecurity ‘ category.” Children are the most vulnerable. One in five children die before the age of five, mainly due to malnutrition. In response, the United Nations and other food agencies have called for an emergency fund of $404 million in order to purchase food. To date less than 20% has been forthcoming from donor countries.
(...) Supporters of the U.S. project in Afghanistan always point to how many girls are now going to school. But as Ann Jones points out, the number cited (5 million) is fewer than half the children of school age. In Kabul 85% are in school; in the Pashtun south, less than 20% and “near zero for girls.” Radio Free Afghanistan’s Jan Alekozai recently toured eastern Afghanistan. He noted that there were schools but no teachers, no chairs and tables, no electricity or water, no books, and no labs. “The participation of women is zero in the provinces,” he argued. While some are going to school “they cannot walk, for example, in a park - or with their families.” In February 2008 Womankind Worldwide (UK) released a survey of the status of women in Afghanistan. They found that 87% of Afghan women report domestic violence, 60% of all marriages are still forced, and 57% of all recent marriages involved girls under the age of sixteen, which is contrary to the law. Ann Jones, who spent a number of years in Afghanistan working for women’s rights, is not surprised. President Karzai’ wife is a qualified gynecologist but does not practice her skills. She remains locked up in the presidential fortress, the Arg, and is not seen by the general public. Since the onset of the 20th century, she is the first wife of a state leader who has not publicly championed women’s rights.

What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism -- where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We've retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.

The new conflicts of the twenty-first century – the "infinite wars," the "clashes of civilization," the "new crusades" – are fundamentally different from the "mass wars" and statist military conflicts that characterized capitalism from the nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War. The main difference lies not so much in the military nature of the conflicts, as in the broader role that war plays in capitalism.

"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement. "Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.

This 4000 MW of AC load simply vanished from the system demand after the mercury dropped by 7-8C on late September 5. The system remained so till September 08 where-after it has slowly built up at a rate of 800-900 MW a day. Energy labelling is unheard of and Pakistan remains a dumping ground for gas guzzling and inefficient electrical equipment. The present requirement of cooling is being managed by double the required load viz. only 2000 MW. As such, besides being unduly loaded by a non-productive AC load of 4000 MW, the power system has also to arrange for expensive peaking generation without much returns. Pakistan cannot afford such extravagant usage of ACs and that all such usages have to necessarily result in great increase in utility revenues. We must use ACs most frugally, and these have to be energy labelled with only efficient models allowed to be imported and manufactured locally.

He could have pointed out that after just increasing at the same pace as overall inflation for a century, house prices suddenly jumped by more than 70 percent, after adjusting for inflation, in the decade from 1996 to 2006. He could have shown that this increase was not supported by any changes in the fundamentals of supply and demand in the housing market, nor was it matched by any remotely comparable increase in rents. If Chairman Greenspan had pointedly made the case for the existence of a housing bubble and explicitly warned of the losses likely to be suffered by individual homeowners and the huge risks being taken by financial institutions that were heavily invested in mortgages and mortgage derivatives, it almost certainly would have been sufficient to take the air out of the bubble. As a last recourse, he could have raised rates with the explicit purpose of bringing down house prices.