i haven't had a chance to read this yet, but the guardian just released a copy of the world bank report on biofuels that was to be--um..suppressed:
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-file...0/Biofuels.PDF
i'll get back to this...
later:
hiredgun: i don't think that the steiglitz claim about a fundamental crisis unfolding for neoliberalism is at all melodramatic. we're already in it. but unlike the retrospective constructions of crisis so dear to historians and other analysts, who necessarily based their modelling practices on the past, a crisis in real time seems marked largely by incoherence and/or a certain randomness of actions, which are functions of instabilities of meaning. retroactively, crisis is typically modelled as transition--they aren't the same thing. it's a kind of pollyanna view, in fact, to see in crisis a version of "it all works out in the end"---which is what crisis models generally demonstrate. teleological fallacy and all that.
the world bank piece is interesting--it's claims are quite strong, quite clear and pretty well demonstrated by the data--but i'll defer setting about a debate, figuring that anything i say is a spoiler and it's better for you to read it and post stuff in response.
suffice it to say that if this report is right at all, what the bush people have been saying is yet another instance of ideology conservative-style, which is delusional claims supplemented with footnotes which reference information shaped by those same claims.