STWR - Share The World's Resources

Karl Von Clausewitz, the renowned military theorist, famously said that war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means. Meaning: war is there to serve policy and is useless when it does not. What policies did the wars in the last hundred years serve?

US consumerism -- citizens driven excessively to buy goods and services and accumulate consumable wealth -- is cursed almost everywhere. 

The food crisis is now affecting many countries across the world. Millions of people in dozens of countries are unable to afford the food they need, and malnutrition is on the rise. From Egypt to Indonesia, Haiti to Thailand, and across many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, increasingly vociferous public protests over food prices or shortages have exploded; some governments even fear for their survival (see Marc Lacey, "Across globe, hunger brings rising anger", International Herald Tribune, 18 April 2008).

Food riots have broken out across the globe destabilizing  large parts of the developing world. China is experiencing double-digit inflation. Indonesia, Vietnam and India have imposed controls over rice exports. Wheat, corn and soy beans are at record highs and threatening to go higher still. Commodities are up across the board. The World Food Program is warning of widespread famine if the West doesn't provide emergency humanitarian relief. The situation is dire. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez summed it up like this, "It is a massacre of the world's poor. The problem is not the production of food. It is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis."

From the middle of the 19th century but especially after the Second World War, two models of empire building competed on a world scale. 

Google "second Gilded Age" and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. 

Global confidence in the US economy has reached zero, as was proved by last month’s stock market meltdown. But there is an enormous anomaly in the US economy above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing bubble and the prospect of recession: 60 years of misallocation of resources, and borrowings, to the establishment and maintenance of a military-industrial complex as the basis of the nation’s economic life.

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world's dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent - Latin America. 

'The imf is back," declared the International Monetary Fund's managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at its annual spring meeting earlier this month in Washington. And not a moment too soon either. 

The crisis of rising food prices are leading people to question the fundamental rationale of pushing for more free trade.  What we need now is food sovereignty – the kind that is defined and driven by small farmers and fisherfolk themselves.