In an interview with yesterday's Guardian, Makan discusses his relationship with Neda, her political involvement, and the attempts by the government to suppress the truth following her violent death. Neda's death was one of 80 reported during the protests against the presidential elections, but unlike the others, Neda died live on camera, in a clip that quickly traveled around the world, turning Neda into a symbol of reform-minded Iranians' struggle. According to eyewitness reports, Neda was shot by a member of the religious militia. Her face, and the face of her death, became a central image in the protests, a rallying point for people all over the globe. But as the Guardian notes, "symbols destroy lives." And Neda's was not the last.

In the days following Neda's murder, Makan spoke out to foreign news stations, before suddenly disappearing. It was soon learned that Makan was being held in the Evin Prison in Tehran, where he would stay for more than two months. During his time in prison, Makan was subjected to weeks of solitary confinement, interrogation, beatings, and psychological torture. He recalls being asked to lie about Neda, to say that she was a member of a group opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran. "They insisted on saying that Neda and I were members of a group with plans to cause these events," he said. They also suggested that Neda had gone intentionally to her death in order to undermine the state, but he could see that even they did not believe this;

"They weren't serious. It was pretty clear that they themselves didn't believe the accusations they were making." What was clear was the damage they felt Neda's death had dealt the Islamic Republic and that he had made it much worse by speaking out.

Then they changed tack. "They said 'The Iranian government is proud of you.' They brought me ice cream and biscuits. Then they wanted me to return to my cell. I went back feeling a little relieved. I thought, OK, let me turn off my light. It was like a searchlight shining straight on my face. Then I realised there was no switch to turn it off."

After months of torture, Makan was finally released on bail, thanks to the pressure placed on the regime by Neda's family, Amnesty, and other international organizations. Once released on bail, Makan's family and friends urged him to flee the country. Despite his initial reluctance to run, he finally escaped. "I didn't want to leave. For one, I believe this movement has not died out, and will never die out. But when I saw the constraints I was under, that they had me under constant surveillance, and that I had to keep silent, I really couldn't stand it," he said. And exile does have certain benefits: Now Makan can speak out, and more fully continue his mission to keep Neda's memory alive. "Now I have left Iran, I can cry out. To break the silence."

He also speaks about the days leading up to Neda's death, and her involvement in the protests. While neither Neda nor Caspian were particularly political, he says that Neda "joined the protesters from the beginning" and had only one goal: "democracy and freedom for Iranians." He recalls discussions they had about the dangers of the demonstrations:

"She said, 'You support me in everything I do, why not this?' I said, 'You don't understand these people. What happens if they catch you?' She said, 'It's not important, Caspian. It's my duty.' She said: 'Caspian, let me tell you the truth. I think that under the circumstances we now have, we're all responsible. Even if we'd had a child, I'd carry my child to these demos on my back.' That's when I realised I couldn't prevent her from going."

He says Neda attended virtually every demonstration. Although he sometimes went with her, Makan was not with Neda on the day of her death. He was taking photographs of demonstrators in another part of the city (Makan worked as a photographer), capturing image after image of security guards beating the protesters. He heard news of his girlfriend's death in the early morning, around the same time that the video clip of Neda, blood pouring from her face as her father screamed, was making its way around the world.

Makan now lives in a small apartment in a city he does not know. He keeps his whereabouts unknown, out of fear for the long reach of the Iranian secret police. Neda's parents, who still reside in Iran, face similar difficulties, but like Makan, they refuse to be silent. On November 4th, Neda's parents were attacked and detailed at a protest. A source told the Times of London that members of the security forces threatened them, saying they could meet the same fate as their daughter. Even more recently, Neda's tombstone was destroyed by supporters of Iran's current regime. A recording captured Hajar Rostami, Neda's mother, weeping over her desecrated grave and crying "My child has no gravestone... You bastards! Why don't you leave my child alone?" From exile, Makan added:

"The breaking of Neda's gravestone broke the hearts of millions of freedom-loving people around the world. The repressors, believing they can stifle the cries for freedom, have even attacked, beaten, threatened and insulted Neda's parents. This is while the Islamic Republic of Iran denies Neda's murder."

Caspar Makan: I Cannot Believe It Yet. I Still Think I Will See Neda Again." [Guardian]
Grave Of Neda Soltan Desecrated By Supporters Of The Regime [Times]

Related: Neda Soltani: Student & Symbol (And Why She Ought To Be Both)

In the LA Times today, Borzou Daragahi is able to write about what we know about her life, and death, due to her friend (and music teacher) Hamid Panahi, who was with Neda when she died, and doesn't expect to survive himself.

Neda Agha-Soltan was born in Tehran, they said, to a father who worked for the government and a homemaker mother.

They were a family of modest means, part of the country's emerging middle class who built their lives in rapidly developing neighborhoods on the eastern and western outskirts of the city.

Like many in her neighborhood, Agha-Soltan was loyal to the country's Islamic roots and traditional values, friends say, but also curious about the outside world, which was easily accessed through satellite TV, the Internet and occasional trips abroad.

The second of three children, she studied Islamic philosophy at a branch of Tehran's Azad University until deciding to pursue a career in tourism. She took private classes to become a tour guide, including Turkish-language courses, friends said, hoping to someday lead groups of Iranians on trips abroad.

She was, in other words, just a regular person, doing regular things.

The Guardian's Robert Tait and Matthew Weaver have gleaned more information from Soltani's supposed fiancé, Caspian Makan, who was originally interviewed by BBC Persia.

She was no rock thrower at the ­vanguard of a movement for regime change , but, according to her fiance, Caspian Makan, a young woman who may have ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Makan said she had been in a car in central Tehran with her music teacher when they were caught in a traffic jam. He said the pair had left the car to escape the heat.

It was when she was walking down ­Karegar Street talking on her phone that the shot rang out.

"Neda's aim was not Mousavi or Ahmadinejad, her target was her ­country," Makan said, adding that although she hadn't planned on ­demonstrating, she was sympathetic to the protest movement.

By some accounts, Soltani was shot either by a rooftop sniper or a passing Basij militia member on a motorcycle; she was either on her way to observe the protests or headed home and stuck in traffic in a hot car. It probably doesn't really matter that those details are under dispute: in a country with no right to bear arms among its citizens, no one without power authorized by the state could have shot her.

Iran is now claiming that her death was staged, in an effort to prevent more Iranians from making Soltani a symbol and a martyr. The government has warned her family not to speak to the press, canceled her memorial service and sent the Basiji in to drive off mourners. They hope, apparently, to make her not just an ordinary woman, but something less than ordinary. (And, in a small ray of light, they may be quietly telling the Basiji and other forces to lay off female protesters, giving women even more power in the uprising.)

Meanwhile, others in and outside Iran seek to make Soltani — and her senseless murder — something more. Joe Joseph of the Times of London says:

Posters of her bloodied face have been held aloft by protesters in Los Angeles and New York. Overnight "I am Neda" has become the rallying cry of the protest movement, echoing the solidarity of those Roman slaves who claimed, one after the other, "I am Spartacus".

Neda's fame marks the moment when Iran's repression emerged from the forest of newsprint and became personal. We are all Iranians now.

Peter Popham of The Independent goes even further and decries the humanization of a woman whose death is not iconic.

Too much information already. The myth is more glorious without it.

John McCain eulogized her on the Senate floor yesterday, hailing her now-iconic status; Ulrike Putz of Germany's Der Spiegel hails her as "a kind of Joan of Arc"; the President of the United States says she was "on the right side of history." Can one be an icon in death and still retain one's humanity?

Kate Harding at Salon wondered the same thing yesterday:

An icon, a martyr, a symbol, a slogan. Not so much a person anymore. We don't even know for sure if Neda, which means "the call" or "the voice" in Farsi, was her real name or an embellishment for the cause. (For that matter, as Putz points out, we can't actually confirm that the video is real.) While her family grieves for the woman they loved, the world tweets, "Neda is my daughter, I have one just like her." Really?

Harding thinks that witnessing Soltani's death is an expression of privilege, rather than an atonement for it — and serves only to erase the memory of the real Neda. Dana Stevens, Susannah Breslin and Meghan O'Rourke at Double X essentially agree, with calling it a "snuff film" that "instrumentalizes" (Stevens) and "fetishizes" (Breslin) Soltani, with O'Rourke adding, "In reducing it to a symbol, it becomes monolithic rather than intimate." I think that ignores the fact that, for many people, watching Soltani die was an incredibly intimate act, even as they were doing so with millions of other people.

Tami at Racilicious does have a critique of the obsession with Soltani that I find particularly compelling: why did so many people have to watch Soltani die before they cared — and (why) would they decry the same graphic treatment of a white person's death?

But why does the Western world (and here I refer mostly to the dominant culture, not marginalized groups) have to see these things to be shaken from its complacency?

We did not need to see bloodied bodies to understand the horror of Columbine. After the first live footage of people in the World Trade Center jumping to their deaths, those gruesome images disappeared. It was too much. We don't need to see carnage to understand horror when the bodies involved are mostly white. To show brutal images of the dead is generally seen as unseemly and disrespectful. Consider the uproar when some newspapers published images of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in the early 90s. But deaths like Neda's we feel we must see, need to see. What does it say when we feel squeamish and protective about the deaths of some, but not others?

As some people have no doubt noticed, there are few things I hold sacred, and few things I won't look at, so I come at this from a slightly different angle. I think we should bear (or should have borne) witness to those people who leapt from the World Trade Center. I think it was important to watch what happened to the soliders in Mogadishu. I think we should bear witness to the wounds and deaths of our soldiers in Iraq; I think we should watch when our government executes some one; I think we should see the pictures of what soldiers did in our name in Abu Ghraib. I thought we should see more than Benazir Bhutto's coffin carried through the streets of Rawalpindi — and that we should see the suffering of the other people who died that day [caution: those link to graphic imagery] — and not just the sanitized version someone else thinks we should see. And I think, in no small part, that we should look at real violence for the very reasons Kate Harding pronounced herself unaffected by it.

I did not cry or shake with horror. Because what I saw was actually too familiar to me — from crime dramas, war movies, the thousands of fictional depictions of violent deaths I've seen in a lifetime of watching various screens. This time, the thought kept going through my head, "This is real, this is real, this is real." But it was no match for almost 30 years' worth of knowing that when I see blood gushing out of a chest or a mouth, it's actually red-tinted corn syrup; that when I see the spark of life leave a victim's eyes, they only stay that way until the camera shuts off and the actress stands up; that when I hear the screams of frantic bystanders, they've been recorded over and over until the most chilling possible version was achieved. None of that was true, this time. My brain knows that, on one level — but on another, deeper level, I am so desensitized to similar imagery, I can't fully process it.

Most of the violence Americans see in their lives is fake and, yes, I think it can desensitize us. We fetishize violence in the movies, with dramatic sprays of blood and acrobatics; we sexualize it on television every time two men on CSI stand over a beautiful-but-supposedly-dead nude actress: it comes wrapped in a bow, a mystery solved in an hour or two, a family's grief mitigated by justice or a villain's rightful end, and we walk away satisfied and satiated by it. Real violence isn't pretty, it doesn't always result in justice and it rarely feels satisfying. If Harding can't wrap her mind around a real murder because she's seen so many fake ones, that makes her (and most of us) quite lucky — but that's not necessarily a good thing. If you never see man's inhumanity to man, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just makes it easier to compartmentalize, and decide to ignore, whether it's on our streets or in some far away place teeming with people that don't look like white American and don't speak our language when they scream.

To Iranians, the sight of a violent death doesn't hold the same meaning as it does to Americans — their government conducts public executions and it has violently put down protests before. And yet, Soltani's death — and her visage in death — holds meaning to them, too. So, while I agree with Tami that we shouldn't be willing to show dead people of color and yet shy away from showing dead Caucasians, I disagree that the solution is to train our eyes away from the results of violence all together. It's to stop treating dead white people (or dead Americans) as something more horrifying to bear witness to than anyone else.

Family, Friends Mourn 'Neda,' Iranian Woman Who Died On Video [LA Times]
How Neda Soltani Became the Face Of Iran's Struggle [The Guardian]
Iran Says Courts Will Teach Protesters A Lesson [Reuters]
Woman's Slaying In Protests Creates An Opposition Icon [Washington Post]
Women In The Vanguard [Andrew Sullivan]
Like The Student In Tiananmen Square, Neda Has Become A Tragic Icon [Times of London]
Neda – The Tragic Face Of Iran's Uprising [The Independent]
McCain: Neda Killing "Defining Moment" Of Iran Crisis [Politico]
Neda Becomes A Symbol Of the Protests [Salon]
Obama Hails "Courageous" Iranian women [Salon]
I am not Neda [Salon]
Is The "Neda" Video A Snuff Movie? [Double X]
Of Course The Neda Video Is A Snuff Movie [Double X]
On Watching Neda's Death [Double X]
Must Brown People Be Martyred For Americans To Be Motivated? [Racialicious]
Before and After the Assassination, in Photos [Wonkette]
What They Sort of Showed You [Wonkette]

Earlier: "Neda Is My Daughter, I Have One Just Like Her"

LATOYA: Ok, let's rock. But first I want to add something to the discussion we were having yesterday. I went back to my site to decompress the thoughts on what should and should not be shown in terms of coverage of tragic events.

MEGAN: Sure.

LATOYA: And after reading through the points made by my readers, the answer was pretty clear: We want more truth in coverage. Violence can be a part of that truth, but most of us are concerned that violent coverage is more for ratings and shock value. Violence happens, and it should be reported on. But asking for more bodies and gore won't necessarily lead us to truth, you know?

MEGAN: And, on the other hand, the American media sanitizes the violence for fear of turning viewers off, and for fear of getting in trouble with the FCC.

LATOYA: Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. Like I said before, it depends on who the victims are. That largely dictates what kind of coverage is provided. Your reference to porn yesterday was apt, because I forgot this phenomenon has already been termed disaster pornography.

MEGAN: I disagree that there's any honesty in our coverage, period. I know that, in other countries, there was more coverage of people hurling themselves from the towers on 9/11. I know that, in other countries, there is more honest carnage shown. Our news generally shows people crying as a stand-in for the results of violence. No, disaster porn is different. Disaster porn is fetishizing the violence. There's a difference between showing it and making it beautiful or erotic.

LATOYA: You don't think we fetishize the violence?

MEGAN: I think we fetishize fake violence, and then don't show real violence, so we end up fetishizing violence we never really see.

LATOYA: Part of that fetish led to the comparisons of the war surges with video games. And ultimately, I wonder if violence can be applied effectively at this point because again, the treatment depends on the victims. Nameless bodies piling up in Iraq? Sure, we could show them the citizens, but because Iraqis have been so othered (insert Katt Williams' joke about insurgents here) would it have an impact? And would it have the same impact if we showed the casualties in Iraq, but continued to hide the deaths of our own?

MEGAN: I think it did in Vietnam. And I think we should show both.

LATOYA: But times have changed since Vietnam.

MEGAN: I think humans should be fully aware of what we can do and are doing to one another.

LATOYA: We are literally inundated with data and images of suffering.

MEGAN: And they still carry power over people. Even those images of Vietnam still do.

LATOYA: We are in a different time, war photography has changed, how we perceive war and death has changed and I think we need to look toward a different version of truth. If those images still held the power you say, why are we still engaged in these wars? Why do people not commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima or listen to the survivors of that bombing, some of whom are still living and speaking out?

MEGAN: I mean, I don't want to gross anyone out in the morning, but go look at the pictures of the Bhutto assassination aftermath I picked out when I worked at Wonkette. Tell me that it looks like what you see on TV. Tell me that it looks like what you saw on the news then, or even this weekend. Tell me is isn't horrifying and sickening and much more real. And then think that this is what you didn't actually see in Mumbai, but that it was there too. No amount of blood on a floor can convey that carnage, or that horror.

LATOYA: But is it really, Megan?

MEGAN: And, so, no. It's not at all the same as listening to a survivor, or watching someone cry — even a kid.

LATOYA: We remember that — we're knee deep in news everyday. But do people?

MEGAN: Do people look? They're hardly ever given a chance to.

LATOYA: It's kind of like dealing with the images of starving kids in other nations. Particularly in Africa (and I hate just using a continent as a blanket term.) For a while, it tugged on people's heartstrings.

MEGAN: We're still engaged because people have short memories.

LATOYA: But then, strangely, people just started to accept this is how things are. Africa is just fucked up, no rhyme, no reason to it, and it will never get better.

MEGAN: We aren't engaged because people have short memories. Every place is fucked up. And the solutions are not easy solutions. People gave money, and it didn't get better.

LATOYA: And that mindset is part of the reason why it is hard to motivate people to take action and to protest. If you go for shock (which is what I feel the media is doing) you have to continually shock on a larger and larger scale to take action. Truth is more potent than that. It is less jarring than that initial shock to the system, but longer lasting.

MEGAN: See, I don't think the media is going for shock, because they have to put it on the airwaves. The story I linked to yesterday, that I wrote — they took one of the photos in the set I just linked to, cropped out much of the carnage and then blurred the rest so that you couldn't see. They are giving you a piece of the truth, but not the whole truth. Period. And so the truth remains shrouded. I don't think the truth of Mumbai is a crying child — let alone a crying white child. But that's the truth that people are willing to look at.

LATOYA: I'll cosign, but I don't think the truth is blood on the floor either.

MEGAN: Or, rather, people here. I think the truth is the body on the floor. It's the loss of life. It's the lack of energy in a face.

LATOYA: Anyway, on that note, let's talk about terrorism. As it was dominating the Washington Post coverage this morning. So apparently, a WMD attack is imminent.

MEGAN: Well, that doesn't surprise me. If we think all that planning that went into Mumbai was the end of it, then we're fooling ourselves.

LATOYA:

The report, ordered by Congress last year, concludes that terrorists are more likely to obtain materials for a biological attack than to buy or steal nuclear weapons. But it says the nuclear threat is growing rapidly, in part because of the increasing global supply of nuclear material and technology.

"Without greater urgency and decisive action by the world community, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013," says the draft report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. The Post reported excerpts from an earlier draft in Sunday's editions.

I am watching to see how the India/Pakistan thing shakes out. India is pushing hard to get Pakistan to hand over people they think were involved in the attacks.

MEGAN: Of course they are. I believe we were keen on then handing over people that were involved in 9/11 and Daniel Pearl's murder once upon a time. I wish them luck with that. I'm more concerned that we're talking about nuclear and biological weapons being used in a terror attack and Homeland Security is years behind on things designed to detect them.

LATOYA: Okay, so I know I've been going on all kinds of tangents this morning (and we've only been talking 15 mins) but it's a big picture kind of day for me. Not only is Homeland Security behind on detection, but our infrastructures won't support an attack.

MEGAN: Or, rather, won't support a decent response to an attack.

LATOYA: Our local governments are stretched to the max and cutting vital services everyday - do you think we're in a position to respond to a major biological attack? With our current health care system?

MEGAN: Hell, it's more than 7 years after 9/11 and emergency responders still can't communicate with one another in many cases. Hospitals are closing.

LATOYA: Right. Why isn't this a part of counterterrorism measures? Our infrastructures need to be stable and funded so if - heaven forbid - something does happen, we can actually minimize the damage.

MEGAN: It is, actually. It's just that getting the bandwidth required for communications back from the phone companies we sold it to was a complete clusterfuck in Washington for years.

LATOYA: head desk

MEGAN: The company that owned it — Nextel — didn't want to give it back without major concessions and new bandwidth. There was lobbying, and gobs of money to be had.

LATOYA: I thought corporations had human rights under the law. Can't we force them to be good citizens?

MEGAN: The government chased its tail (and the bandwidth) for most of the last 7 years. That's why Homeland Security is so far behind on it. That, and no one there has any idea what the fuck they are doing. Nope. Welcome to Washington.

LATOYA: Maybe I should buy one of those Corporate America flags from Adbusters after all...

MEGAN: Back to biological weapons,

Meanwhile, although recent intelligence assessments have warned that a biological attack poses the greatest terror threat, signature defense measures - including the multibillion-dollar Project Bioshield to stockpile antidotes - have made only limited strides, according to Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security.

"There has been a modest amount of work done in that venue, candidly," Ridge said in a recent interview. He said Americans "have spent billions on the development of a bio-defense stockpile but they don't have much to show for it."

LATOYA: More minor notes getting lost in the terrorism frenzy. The EU is concerned that we aren't providing enough aid to developing nations. I swear — what can we buy with a billion dollars? Obviously, not what we were expecting.

MEGAN: Yes, let's talk about that during a recession, when we're trying to provide aid to ourselves. Our own states are asking for aid money now.

LATOYA: Well, if you look at the reports:

The World Bank has said that developing countries are facing a 'perfect storm', with the convergence of slowing growth, a withdrawal of private capital, and higher interest rates on their debt.

The Bank says that growth in developing countries will fall by two percentage points to 4.5% next year, as the volume of global trade contracts for the first time since 1982.

But aid agencies have criticised the fact that neither the head of the World Bank or the IMF, or many other world leaders from rich countries, have come to the talks.

LATOYA: I recently spent a few weekends in the company of some rock star National Security experts —- most notably Lorelei Kelly, formerly of the White House Project — and they all had the same answer to this one. Where we invest the money is the problem.

MEGAN: I don't mean to be terribly flip about it, actually. Foreign aid, when done well, is important. But, yes, where we send it is at issue.

LATOYA: Instead of investing in people and infrastructure, we invest in governments and weapons.

MEGAN: More microfinance and less stock market development, please.

LATOYA: According to Lorelei, the security policy of the 21st century has to include helping countries to develop and educated populace. Umm... I'm on the fence about microfinance.

MEGAN: Oh, and let's eliminate the Mexico City Policy, while we're at it.

LATOYA: It has great benefits.

MEGAN: And, notably, it's cheap.

LATOYA: But...

MEGAN: And it also doesn't generally end up in the hands of dictators to build more palaces.

LATOYA: My girl Tanglad opened my eyes to the other side of microcredit.

In her study of Grameen Bank microcredit programs in rural Bangladesh,* Leila Karim finds that the focus on the 98 percent loan recovery rate hides how beneficiaries are co-opted into “a political economy of shame.”

Microcredit works by appropriating the only social capital poor women possess — their virtue and family honor. Among the Ifugao women in the northern Philippines,** microcredit beneficiaries are grouped into cohorts of five to fifteen members. They are given clear instructions: “You are all responsible for the loan and have to make sure that no one defaults.”

This lays the foundation of a very effective surveillance system, wherein poor women monitor other poor women. And the poorest women, the ones who need loans the most, are evicted from the group to minimize the risk of default.

Given the surprising lack of entrepreneurial or job skills training in microcredit schemes, it’s not unusual for a member to default on her loan. This is when things get even uglier, as the other women in the cohort are forced to extract payment.

In Bangladesh, for example, women march off together to publicly scold a member who falls behind on her loan payments. The cohort would also scold her husband in public. If she could not produce the money, the other women in her cohort would take anything that could be sold for loan payments — her cows and chicks, grain from her family’s pantry, uprooted trees and plants from her yard. Even her gold nose-ring, an important symbol of marital status for rural women.

When even these repossessions were not enough to repay the loan, the cohort could instigate the ultimate dishonor of ghar bhanga (literally, “house-breaking”), where the defaulting member’s house is sold off to pay for the microloan.

I think it's a good tool, but not a solution. Just like with capitalism, some people will flourish and thrive under microcredit, and some won't. Oh, some background — Tanglad writes from the Philippines, a major export zone, and ground zero for monitoring the effects of globalization.

MEGAN: That's true. But, like the protesters who argue that vast swaths of the developing world should not have to pay back their loans to lending institutions, I disagree that structuring a system without consequences for default is a good plan. Like, say, what we're seeing with Fannie and Freddie here.

LATOYA: This is also true. I'm not sure Tagland is arguing for that though — she's basically asking that some of the worker protections we enjoy are extended to the developing world, which would allow for more women to take traditional jobs. But, that would also make labor more expensive, which defeats the purpose of exporting. (She also blogs about labor activism and the people who vanish each year for asking for the rights we enjoy.)

MEGAN: I'm for labor protections, but the idea that we'll pay the same wages in the Philippines as here isn't going to function. There will always be labor cost differentials.

LATOYA: True — but do we have to pay the dirt cheapest wages at all times? I know you watched that Primark documentary.

MEGAN: That is, for better or for worse, how capitalism functions. Management buys labor for what laborers are willing to sell it for. It's the purpose of organized labor, to set an agreed-upon floor.

LATOYA: But our capitalism ain't capitalism. Laborers are willing to sell things for so low because they don't have many other options, and major players rig the market so that many countries are forced to import food and other vital necessities at above cost. I feel like a lot of our global problems can be solved by understanding the flow of money and labor. So many things stem from that: the artificial understanding of cost, the desperation that leads to terrorism, the food crisis.

MEGAN: Well, I think the importation of goods that could be locally produced cheaper is a remnant of colonialism, so thank Britain for that.

LATOYA: And just shrugging and saying "hey, that's the way things are" ignores how this system has hyper-evolved over the last fifty years.

MEGAN: But it's also a lack of free markets in those countries that would allow the market to function properly — which is to say, if it can be produced cheaper locally, in a functioning market, it would be.

LATOYA: False. Not if we prohibit them from doing so!

MEGAN: But there are still a lot of governments in the developing world that rely on command economic structures.

LATOYA: Hang on, let me pull out my old post standby...

MEGAN: We don't prohibit countries from producing goods. We prohibit them from exporting them to us by our tariff structure, or make it less economically viable by our farm subsidization programs. That isn't the same thing.

LATOYA: Actually, we do. We can put restraints on the money we provide unless the country meets the conditions we set. This happened in Malawi. We told them that in order to get funding from us, they could not farm their own food. Analysts decided it was cheaper for Malawi to import food and sell other goods and services. This led to a massive food shortage for a few years. The government finally decided to defy the recommendations (at great risk - because that could mean the end of the money stream) and subsidized its farmers the way we do. And that ended the food crisis for two consecutive years.

MEGAN: Now, that is an oversimplification of what went on, honestly.

LATOYA: They sent the emergency aid to other nations. Now, every African nation is not Malawi.

MEGAN: We didn't prohibit them from farming their own food. We refrained from giving them money to pay for a subsidy program.

LATOYA: Megs, if they rely on that money, isn't that a prohibition? Now, it's not like every single situation works out this way.

MEGAN: So we're supposed to fund every other country's farm subsidy program?

LATOYA: Global finance works in strange ways, and impacts different nations differently.

MEGAN: We shouldn't be funding our own.

LATOYA: We are funding our own — but, yes, we need to shift to helping nations become self-sufficient.

MEGAN: The point of subsidies is that it encourages inefficiencies. Subsidies don't encourage self-sufficiency.

LATOYA: In some nations. And in some nations, it prevents starvation. Yes, they can. If you check the food experts take on this, our insistence on an efficient market lead to this mess in the first place.

MEGAN: No, there are plenty of factors which led to the underlying problems that then necessitated the use of subsidies.

LATOYA: Like the droughts. But there is a reason the global south continues to reject a whole slew of policies that they see as ensuring their dependence on foreign aid and imported food.

MEGAN: Or the inefficient farming system that relied upon one, high-intensive food stuff.

LATOYA: What, like Mexico?

MEGAN: Maize is not an efficient crop. It's also debilitating on the soil and — notably — not native to Africa.

LATOYA: Who structured most of their eating habits around what could be bountifully grown and then found themselves fucked over following the import/export strategy prescribed?

MEGAN: In no small part because we subsidize heavily the growing of it here. Which we should stop, but we won't, because no one else will either. Subsidies either have to be multilateral disarmament, or they will never go away.

LATOYA:

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of U.S. government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on U.S. imports in the first place?

From the Nation Manufacturing a Food Crisis. Damn, it's close to 10.

MEGAN: Notably, we also subsidize the production of ethanol — and impose heavy tariffs on cheap Brazilian ethanol to keep the prices high.

LATOYA: Resume tomorrow? I'll call Lorelei about national security and grab my copy of notes from the Global South.

MEGAN: Or maybe we'll have just convinced the government to forgo ethanol tariffs and farm subsidies by then.

LATOYA: Farm subsidies fuck us up — but that's my day job, so I'm biased. We'll talk more about that tomorrow too.

MEGAN: Farm subsidies fuck a lot of shit up, and it isn't my day job. But, yes, tomorrow!