A recent article in the New York Times highlights the critical role that agriculture will play in rebuilding Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 2010.
Food security is not a new problem in Haiti, and development organizations such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme, as well as nongovernmental organizations like Heifer International and Oxfam, have been forced to halt food programs in the country as these groups themselves attempt to recover from the disaster.
Before the quake, FAO alone was implementing 23 food and agriculture projects in Haiti, hoping to improve access to food in the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Prior to the disaster, an estimated 46 percent of Haiti's population was undernourished, and chronic malnutrition affected 24 percent of children under five.
Right now the most urgent need is to get food and water to millions of people in the capital city of Port au Prince and elsewhere in Haiti. But as the country looks to the future, the need for sustainable sources of food, such as those we are learning about in sub-Saharan Africa, is more important than ever.
The lead story in today's Missoulian warns that the city and some business associations may have been a bit too optimistic with plans for retail growth in the urban core. I have no real idea whether that is true or not, but this quote really stood out for me:
Missoula Area Chamber of Commerce President and Chief Executive Officer Kim Latrielle said she doesn't want to see the city scale back plans for retail businesses. Rather, she said she wants Missoula to bring a new main attraction to town so the local economy can support all the retail it has planned.
"I believe with my whole heart that we need to figure out a way to get more people to Missoula, to bring new money to Missoula," Latrielle said.
The Chamber represents businesses all over Missoula. Latrielle said retailers report that when football season ends, so does their season to earn good income. An exposition center could fill the gap and is on the table as part of the strategic planning efforts at the fairgrounds.
The idea of building something that will boost business in the same way that the Griz do is, I think, a little absurd. Washington Grizzly stadium is huge, the team wildly popular, and the season built for a relatively lengthy period of time.
Beyond that, for the Chamber of Commerce's initial response to concerns that a surplus of retail space may be getting developed being to say it is just fine strikes me as irresponsible. Unnecessary development is the underlying phenomenon behind bubbles. Empty retail storefronts won't be very attractive.
Anyways -- I always wanted to mention some interesting phenomena happening in the media world.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer may be on its way out. There is similar news out of Denver, where Rocky Mountain News is likely to shutter its doors. But the big story on the media front I've seen lately is Michael Hirschorn's "End Times" anticipating the potential fall, this year, of The New York Times.
It is no groundbreaking statement to say that the Internet has impacted journalism in ways that the businesses have yet to figure out (they're facing much the same situation as record labels without as many advantages from intellectual property law).
One of my roommates anticipates subscribing to the Missoulian soon. Like many of us, he enjoys reading the paper in the morning, especially on Sundays. But after he mentioned his plans to subscribe, we ended up in a conversation about the utterly unnecessary (for us) portions of the newspaper. We don't pick up a Montana newspaper for national or international coverage that we read the day before on the Internet.
I'm not sure where news coverage is going. I know that as Hirschorn says, 1) if the current business models fail we will find new ones because the need for news is too great and 2) citizen journalists simply will not (and can not) replace some kind of professional journalism.
Big scandal news today out of the New York Times: John McCain had an uncomfortably close, relationship - according to McCain staffers - with lobbyist Vicki Iseman at the same time he was working on her clients' behalf in the Senate commerce committee, of which he was chair:
A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Ms. Iseman's clients. He introduced a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms. Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.
In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain's staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain's staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.
Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman....
Senator McCain's relationship Iseman was questionable enough so that staffers tried to intervene, limiting her time with McCain and even warning both the Senator and his lobbyist of the impropriety of their relationship.
So...what to think of this report? It's awfully thin, isn't it? Apparently, one of the motivating factors for printing the story was that other publications were chasing it.
Most of the initial reaction to the story in the blogs - as you might imagine - was strictly partisan. From the right, Townhall's Mary Katherine Ham poses a rhetorical question: "What's the Quickest Way to Rally Conservatives 'Round McCain?" (I'll leave you to mull over the irony that McCain is an anathema to "conservatives" when he strives towards ethics reform; and a hero when he's suspected of ethical impropriety.) On the left, Kossak Scout Finch: "Speculation about an affair is one thing, but an intimate relationship with a telecommunications lobbyist? Not smart. Not smart at all."
The best analysis of the night, however, belongs to Josh Marshall:
You already know my thoughts about the New York Times' decision to hire William Kristol as a regular op-ed columnist for the newspaper. It's a bad idea. Kristol isn't an editorialist, he's a propagandist, a doctrinaire. He's been wrong on just about every issue - Iraq , the economy - but that doesn't matter in conservative circles, because he's dutifully adheres to rigid conservative doctrine.
The paper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, penned an editorial shortly after Kristol's hire decrying the decision. Hoyt pointed to anti-Times statements uttered by Kristol on Fox News over the report that the government was sifting through U.S. citizens' bank records (without warrants), and said they "smacked of intimidation and disregard for both the First Amendment and the role of the free press in monitoring a govermnet..." Hoyt also noted that Kristol's very first op-ed in the paper contained a misquote and "wrote off Hillary Clinton with finality the day before she won the New Hampshire primary."
Today, New Republic's Gabriel Sherman took an inside look at the hire, and saw that, once again, the paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, was reacting out of fear of conservative criticism, and hired Kristol to ward off accusations of liberal bias.
Sound familiar? It should. Those were the very same reasons that Sulzberger hired and kept Judith Miller with the paper. Miller, of course, was the reporter who (unknowingly?) participated in the administration's propaganda campaign to start a war in Iraq . (She regurgitated bogus information fed to her by the administration's favorite expatriate, Ahmad Chalabi.) Sulzberger and the paper's editors knew Miller's credibility was shaky and her reports questionable; but they kept her on, despite newsroom muttering, because she provided the paper with a conservative "balance."
Yes, that's right. The New York Times aspired to objectivity by using government-created propaganda to "balance" factual reports. Reality, after all, does have a left-wing bias.
This time, Sulzberger may be operating out of fear of Rupert Murdoch:
Others suggest that Sulzberger's decision was made as a way of confronting Rupert Murdoch, who took ownership of The Wall Street Journal in December. "Arthur is scared to death of The Wall Street Journal," the former veteran Times staffer said. "That's what's behind the Kristol appointment." But critics questioned Sulzberger's hiring Kristol, a high-profile member of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire. Given Murdoch's baldly stated intention to use The Wall Street Journal to go after the Times franchise, staffers groused that Sulzberger had unwittingly extended Murdoch's influence.
It seems to me the best way to combat Murdoch's influence is not to imitate him and publish political propaganda, but to take the high road, and create the paper of record, with an unblemished record of striving towards journalism's highest goals of objectivity and fairness, and to serve as a watchdog over government. Murdoch has already shown himself to the be the master at being the mouthpiece for conservative doctrine. Why not try for something better?
Stuck behind a firewall at the New York Times is a small write-up of my recent criticism of our Democratic Senators. If I wanted a better yellow journalism write-up of my take, I doubt I could have paid for it (I'd link, but I'm guessing that you, like me, do not pay for Times Select access).
Tobin Harshaw writes that I am "beginning to have qualms about the sort of Democrats that (sic) get elected in conservative states." I don't think that's true. On a list of my favorite Senators, a lot of red staters would make the cut -- Jon Tester, Jim Webb, Byron Dorgan.
He goes on to write "[Singer] considers the two Montanans' votes against the Reid-Feingold bill [...] to be partisan treason." That's just flat-out untrue. Read what I actually wrote. "They're in a different place than me. That's fine. I ain't happy about it, but it's understandable."
What I took issue with was the substance of their arguments defending their votes.
Finally, the term "partisan treason" is a stretch. I'm a Democrat, but I'm a progressive first. Partisan treason is not the sort of thing I'd be likely to accuse anyone of.
I'd expect better from the paper of record, even if just as part of their blog section. Still -- looks like I'll be disappointed.
Update -- In case you want the full NYT post, it's here. Alternately, email me and I can probably forward it to you.
Matthew Yglesias does a nice explanation of why government privatization and contracting is a really, really bad idea. Thankfully, he does it in about 30 seconds.
Here you have private enterprises displacing government. Why? For the private sector efficiency, of course! But you don't actually get that efficiency. It's still a government program. Funding is still being determined by political support. The cash doesn't go to companies that can do a really good job, it just goes to companies that have political clout -- i.e. ones that recycle a share of their profits into campaign contributions. It's essentially the worst of both worlds, since you get the inherent problems of the public sector plus the need for owners to be taking a slice off the top in profit margins. It is, however, a very good deal for politicians interested in union-busting and for politicians interested in raking money in from government contractors. Shockingly, the GOP loves it.
Ding! Ding! Ding! I believe Mr. Yglesias just won himself a new car.
The New York Times is reporting on our new Senator. The coverage is actually pretty well done.
For all the talk about the new Democrats swept into office on Tuesday, the senator-elect from Montana truly is your grandfather’s Democrat — a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916.
It is a place with 105-degree summer days and winter chills of 30 below zero, where his grandparents are buried, where his two children learned to grow crops in a dry land entirely dependent on rainfall, and where, he says, he earned barely $20,000 a year farming over the last decade.
Well, durn. I thought he was an elite liberal from the East Coast. My bad.
