If someone is caught cheating in the Olympics or another sporting event, the athlete is immediately disqualified, and it is seen as a disgrace. In the case of the recent election in Afghanistan, however, cheating has been rewarded and even praised by no less than the President of the United States himself.

President Obama said that he contacted Hamid Karzai shortly after the Afghan president said he would abide by the results of a presidential election held in August.

"I wanted to congratulate him on accepting the certification of the recent election," Mr. Obama said.

How quickly have we forgotten how many Western leaders hailed the August 20th vote as an example of "democracy," a democracy mired with fraud. And we're not talking here about a few hundred "hanging chads," but rather more than one million ballots (cast on August 20) that were discounted due to the "coefficient of fraud," as the Electoral Complaints Commission refers to it. Mr. Hamid Karzai now says he wants a better and cleaner presidential election run-off in November to bring stability to Afghanistan at a time when Taliban violence is at its worst in eight years of war. The Afghan leader has played down fraud allegations but bowed to international pressure by ordering a run-off as a way to bolster the election's credibility at a time when Washington is weighing whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.

"Now that we are holding the second round in two weeks, I want it to be better than the first round," Karzai said.

Why isn't Mr. Karzai being held responsible for this blatant act of election fraud? And who can guarantee that a repeat of the fraud won't happen? Or that all hell won't break loose during the run-off? Since the August 20 vote, five suicide bombs alone have ripped through the capital Kabul.

Meanwhile, as President Obama ponders sending more troops to Afghanistan, and anxiety and anticipation are building up over the run-off, a recently released UN report says that Afghanistan produces 92% of the world's opium. The equivalent of 3,500 tons leave the country each year, fetching more than $65 billion to fund global terrorism. The Taliban's direct involvement in the opium trade allows them to fund a war machine that is becoming technologically more complex.

The report also says that every year, opium kills five times more people in NATO countries than all the NATO lives lost in eight years of fighting against the Taliban. So here is something to think about: according to the CIA's World FactBook, Afghanistan's entire GDP in 2008 was $22.27 billion. President Obama's decision to send 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to bolster security earlier this year has failed, and the country is just as unstable as ever. Would 40,000 additional troops help? Perhaps for a short while, but with the Taliban and Afghan warlords earning this kind of money from the opium trade, not only can they buy politicians, but they can also keep this war going for a hundred years. Afghanistan is not the "good" war.

Original article published in the Huffington Post.
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For World Food Day 2009 (which is tomorrow, October 16th!), Link TV is helping to promote a campaign called Stand Up, Take Action, a movement now four years in the running. As part of the framework for the UN Millennium Development Goals adopted by global leaders in the year 2000, worldwide hunger and poverty must be eradicated by the year 2015. A lofty endeavor, you say? Maybe. But millions of global citizens are demanding that this promise be kept, or at the very least, kept a priority. Each year, through events organized by Stand Up, Take Action, attention is called to this ongoing issue, and the movement is growing. Last year, it broke its own Guinness World Record for the largest mobilization around a single cause in recorded history. Click here for events taking place this weekend in your area.

Watch this video and join the countdown to World Food Day!



Link TV has a lot of great food and hunger related programming, that can be found on our ISSUE: Food page, like a new Michael Pollan special called “Deep Agriculture”, and more. Also, learn about the coffee industry and Fair Trade practices that are effecting small farmers in poor countries around the world from Dean Cycon, Founder and CEO of Dean’s Beans.

In the latest episode of Global Pulse, host Erin Coker asks whether China's 60th anniversary festivities were a display of power for the world or just for Chinese citizens. Watch the episode and leave your comments below!

Media worldwide covered China's celebration of 60 years of communist rule, acknowledging China's rise over the past six decades, while also pointing out its spotty human rights record and the barring of its own citizens from attending the festivities.

Such general wariness of the Communist Party of China's (CPC) celebration may be indicative of a greater global anxiety concerning China's new place on the world stage. In marrying the tenets of communism with explosive economic growth, the country has, perhaps, come to embody the worst of communism and capitalism -- reckless urbanization within the rigid framework of a repressive authoritarian system. The result? A growing power whose rapid industrial expansion and repression of personal freedoms is both a detriment to its people and a possible threat to western interests.

Some experts question the durability of the so-called "authoritarian capitalism" model. "The more open and competitive an economy becomes, the greater the pressure to liberalize political institutions and democratize civil society," notes Tim Dunne in a Guardian editorial. "China wants the former while resisting the latter."

For state-run Chinese media however, capitalism remains an opposing ideology that is distinct from both the country's government and its burgeoning economy. A recent opinion piece in the state-run People's Daily extols socialism as the country’s historical choice, while an article on the CCTV website attributes China's private sector expansion to the country's larger socialist market economy.

In Yasheng Huang's 2008 book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, the MIT professor points to reforms of governance, not market reforms, as crucial for China’s brand of capitalism to thrive. "Many of the endemic problems in the Chinese economy today—massive pollution, corruption, inefficient capital deployment, land grabs, and so forth—cannot be tackled without…reforms of Chinese political governance," a Reuters article notes in an analysis of Huang's book.
 
In the end, whether seen as a pure success story, a threat to the west, or the worst of two economic systems, China's continuing rise assures that it will not be ignored.

The execution of seventeen recovering addicts in last week's shooting in Juarez struck me as one of the most perverse crimes I have ever heard of in my life. Despite having read about a wide variety of atrocities in war -- the killing of pregnant women and children in Rwanda, or the dragging of charred American bodies through Fallujah -- this act struck me as something so cold as to be sub-human. Yet it was the not first time either. Fifteen others have been killed previously in this exact way in Juarez in the last two years.
 
The violence in Juarez seems to be ignored by most of the media, yet this is truly one of the world's prime war zones right now. A recent New York Times video report stated that in 2008 a civilian was more likely to be killed in Ciudad Juarez than in Baghdad.

Wednesday's attack came on the same day that at least twenty-three others were killed around Mexico, including the number two security official in President Felipe Calderon's home state of Michoacan. It also came just a week or two after Mexico officially decriminalized personal use of many formerly illicit drugs. The new orders for police are that they are to refer addicts to treatment clinics rather than take them into police custody. After Wednesday's attack though, that option may no longer seem so safe.

It seems clear that we Americans share some of the blame for this violence; though perhaps there have been good intentions in criminalizing marijuana, cocaine and other substances, when our prohibitions are combined with our high demand, we have ended up giving these cartels incentive for their work. And now apparently, the weapons that have come through our borders have allowed them to create carnage in their country.

This is a war many of us can can shut our eyes to on a daily basis, because we are not losing anyone there in Mexico. Yet this war is so close to us at the same time: the war zone of Juarez stands a few miles across the border from the relatively safe city of El Paso, Texas.

We can try to keep this violence and chaos out though militarizing the border, and perhaps that will allow us to continue turning a blind eye to this bloodshed. However, it will not absolve us of the responsibility and obligation to help search for an end to this conflict. Some cartels may be brought down, and the centers of violence may move from one city to another, as they seem to be moving now towards Central America. However, as long as the economic incentive exists for these cartels' work, can we really expect to see an end to this violence?

The Hip Hop Hoodios are a unique band who layer Latin and American Jewish cultures over rap. We've broadcast their videos "Ochos Kandelikas" and "Gorito Cosmico" and thoroughly enjoyed the band's cheesy, smart (and smartass) attitude.  I really like their latest video "Times Square," but it simply won't fit into the definition of "world music" with a shoehorn. And you KNOW I'm a moderate when it comes to that category. But still, the subject is close to my heart, so I'm presenting it here anyway. 

I went to high school in Manhattan, on 46th Street and 6th Avenue, and so I have watched the gentrification of Times Square with a combination of nostalgia and unease.  I don't know if it makes sense to mourn the passing of an area that was admittedly dangerous and seedy. It's easy to say the place has "lost its edge" and is now totally "Disneyfied." Yet, for some reason, I do feel that there is something that has been lost...and what about the ongoing re/de-construction on the Bowery (lower 3rd Avenue) where a new generation of young professionals will soon be living in renovated flophouses? On the bright side, maybe they can exorcise the sad karma of a million ruined lives. But what has happened to those souls who used to inhabit both of these urban areas; the impoverished, the hopeless and the addicted. Where do they go now? Is our trend towards gentrification simply putting a bandaid over a larger social wound?

For those of you who love Desert Blues, that loping, hypnotic guitar music that we associate with the Tuareg and the Saharawis, consider this: The electric guitar has reshaped traditional Saharawi music, but the situation in the refugee camps grows more dire every day, with fewer and fewer guitars for young people to play, thus further endangering an already endangered cultural legacy.   
Got an electric guitar that is gathering dust somewhere?  Want to put it to truly good use? Check this out!

Okay, if you've gone to the URL above, you know that this is a great site.
It's maintained by my old friend Angel Romero, and it's a terrific resource for what is going on in world music, and as you can see, what is happening on many tangential levels.

This just in from a friend who thought it was worth sharing.  He's right.
Istanbul's Sulukule, the world's oldest Gypsy settlement, known for its music & dance clubs, is being demolished by developers to make way for gentrification. If you have ever been entranced by the sound of Turkish Roma clarinet, read this and weep.

Good-bye, Gypsies: The Loss of 1,000 Years