Originally published on DailyKos, and republished here by permission of the author.

Back in 2008 I wrote two little noticed diaries about speculative buying that helped to drive food prices higher (here and here), and surprise, surprise, our friends from Goldman Sachs are well represented in this mix of global finance companies.

Two years later, the world food market is still seriously exposed to speculators artificially driving up prices and worsening the risks of malnutrition, and according to one of the world’s leading agricultural researchers, Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute (von Brown was one of the first to write about flawed regulatory regimes in banking and finance driving up food prices) an even bigger food crisis is looming, exacerbated as well by climate change. A visit to his site is well worth your time as he speaks eloquently about food and water.

The food crisis of 2007/2008 is now well documented. According to Paul Jay, from 2007 to 2008 the price of maize in Ethiopia went up 141 percent, retail wheat flour in Peshawar, Pakistan, went up 82 percent, rice in Thailand up 73 percent and this had little to do with supply and demand and much more to do with speculation by the usual suspects.

In March of 2008 the price of food commodities hit an all-time high, sending 100 million people into the ranks of the hungry, worldwide.

The idea of piracy has made a sensational comeback in popular culture and world politics in the last several years. Hollywood has cashed in millions of dollars popularizing the old mischief. I have attended enough pirate themed children birthday parties to start to consider pirates lovable rascals.

That’s until the Somali pirates enter the picture and ruin the facade for all of us. The news of teenage Somali pirates has infiltrated the airwaves around the world, coming to its climax a few weeks ago with the murderous act of the U.S military. With what is called a ‘failed state’, we have come to expect anything from Somalia. Piracy is not the worst of them. After all, it has been drummed into our psyche that we humans are self destructing beings if not watched over by the more prudent amongst us, such as governments, despite how tyrannical. Lo and behold, Somalis don’t have one.

Such is the picture that is being painted for us of the Somali pirates. A bunch of unruly teenagers causing trouble on high sea. Given our modern education/conditioning that the state is our guardian, the image of Somali pirates quickly conjures thoughts of undisciplined and out of control children.

On May 12, 2009, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released a report showing that same air cargo companies transporting humanitarian aids to Africa also funneled arms into the same volatile parts of the continent.  The research is performed by two British nationals with former ties to governmental and non-governmental organizations.  The report focuses primarily on the messengers of the destabilizing efforts as supposed to the sources.  What could be the logic given by the researchers to go after the air cargo companies, as supposed to the sources who are paying them to transport their cargo?  The former are easier to track. It is from that perspective a recommendation is also offered to boycott the air cargo companies.  The logic behind such recommendation is that, if reputable governmental and humanitarian organizations cease to utilize the services of these messengers, the problem may be obviated.  This approach clearly assumes that reputable organizations (such as governments and NGOs) are not involved with the ‘bad’ cargo (some weapons and illicit drugs) that the aircraft are carrying.  It is also implicitly assumed that if reputable organizations cut off income to these airliners by denying them business, the problem can be curtailed.  Furthermore, it is assumed that the weapons that go to destabilize a region are those that originate from non-reputable organizations, as the report mentions the ones coming from western government are for logistic defense support only.

"They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor’s scalpel. I was totally naked … They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. Then they cut my left chest. One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming … They must have done this 20 to 30 times in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. This was repeated many times over the next 15 months … "

These are the words of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-Briton who was just released from Guantanamo, detailing his extraordinary rendition to Morocco. Morocco was chosen for two reasons. CIA wanted a confession related to the "dirty bomb plot," and thought if anyone could extract it, the Moroccans could.

Today was not the first day that my alarm clock failed to go off. But today was the first day that I almost missed my own meeting because my alarm clock failed to wake me up. Better late than never I supposed. So I caught a taxi cab – a ten fold increase in fare as compared to the bus – and opened the laptop to prepare. I noticed that the cabbie was a Hornist and avoided eye contact so as to escape the inevitable back and forth on establishing identity, politics and a long discussion on the miseries of the migrant life. I don’t know if this is just me, but saying where you are from has become a task that requires great mental agility these days. And I think this is particularly true for those of us from the Horn. I am always careful not to offend in case my cabbie runs us both off a bridge. Over the past 10 years I have determined that my identity is really dependent on my counterpart’s identity. If he is from Addis then I am from Addis. If he is from Oromia or Ogaden, then I am most certainly Eritrean.

A politically conservative co-worker recently assured me that immigrants caused the current economic mess by taking out mortgages that they could not afford. Thankfully a liberal one retorted that there was no way for immigrants to have known that their jobs would be gone, and many of them deported. It was time to breathe a sign of relief. Immigrants may be stupid but they are certainly not schemers and criminals. But the nagging feeling remained. Both the conservative and liberal essentially agreed that immigrants, along with a few other poor natives, were responsible for this mess – albeit for different reasons. So off I went to gather economic ammunition to argue my point of view and defend immigrants. In the process I not only discovered the actual culprits but reassured myself that immigrants were actually the reason why the economy is not in total shambles. It should surprise no proper American wannabe that the actual culprits are Islamists. Yes they are the cause of the present economic mess. In fact they have been the cause of almost all modern economic debacles. No let’s take that a little further back. Islamists have been the reason why the western tip of Eurasia has done all that it has over the past 600 years.

Western policy in the horn

In the last days of his government, Mengistu Hailemariam sat in front of the Ethiopian parliament and explained why the capture by rebels of a hill four hours drive north of the capital city did not signal defeat for his regime. He reasoned that the reality of military engagement meant that hills are captured and lost all the time with little implication. Never mind that the rebels had one tenth the number of soldiers as the government, and that they were essentially equipped with captured government weapons. He continued to state that even the defeat at Afabet in Eritrea, which astute commentators of the time predicted would be Ethiopia’s Dien Bien Phu, really meant little since Afabet was a small town of 700 inhabitants. Never mind that it contained the largest Ethiopian garrison in Eritrea outside Asmara with the most elite of the Ethiopian fighting force, Nadew ez, within it.

Such egregious miscalculations by policy makers and leaders happen all too often. Typically they lead to the unnecessary extension of violence and suffering without having much altering impact on the final results.