President Barack Obama wants to convince the world that he is actually a liberal after all.
First he not-so-hastily follows Vice-president Joe Biden's support for gay marriage to assure us he is a social liberal. Then, last week at the G8 meeting, he announces The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition -- a $3 billion corporate investment initiative to end hunger in Africa -- to remind us he is still an economic liberal.
Not that the world needs reminding.
Like Bush, Clinton and every other president since Ronald Reagan, Obama believes that proprietary technologies, unregulated global markets and the unchecked power of corporate monopolies will solve all our social, economic and environmental ills. Never mind that 30 years of economic liberalization has impoverished the farmers of the global South, kicked off global warming, pushed the number of hungry people up over 1 billion and dragged us into the largest world-wide economic depression since -- well, the last liberal Great Depression.
The New Alliance is an initiative to convince the world that government and industry are finally doing something about world hunger. But as one African civil society group pointed out, it is not new and it is not an alliance.
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