The sustainable future beckons: an all purpose metaphor

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photo credit to जरा खाजवा की डोक

For me this image is pure poetry, it suggests so many things about our world and even about our human nature: the smile of the driver, the people riding snug and dry in the cab, the no nonsense expression on the little bullock's face. Please feel free to write your own version. DS

Thomas Friedman and the hangman

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In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. Thomas Friedman - NYT

In older factories and, before them, on the farm, there were opportunities for almost everybody: the bright and the slow, the sociable and the awkward, the people with children and those without. All came to work unskilled, at first, and then slowly learned things, on the job, that made them more valuable. Especially in the mid-20th century, as manufacturing employment was rocketing toward its zenith, mistakes and disadvantages in childhood and adolescence did not foreclose adult opportunity. For most of U.S. history, most people had a slow and steady wind at their back, a combination of economic forces that didn’t make life easy but gave many of us little pushes forward that allowed us to earn a bit more every year. Over a lifetime, it all added up to a better sort of life than the one we were born into. That wind seems to be dying for a lot of Americans. What the country will be like without it is not quite clear. Adam Davidson - The Atlantic

The awkward fact about "average" people, or "average" anything for that matter is that there are so many of them... of "us" really, because most of us are average something, one way or another, intelligence, weight, height, sex appeal, you name it.... Anything that savagely attacks the "average" attacks the majority and the majority, barring massive police state repression and even then, will eventually fight back.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.” George Soros quoted in the Daily Beast 

We are being told that we must be more competitive. What does that mean? Another quote from Tom Friedman's globalist panegyric, this time a paean to China.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

Friedman, of course thinks that this is just great, but I simply do not believe that Americans or Europeans would be willing to endure working conditions like that very long without revolting, except, perhaps, during the struggles of a world war. 

Suddenly Karl Marx of all people is reappearing in "polite" conversation and if you take a look at the following quotes taken at random and out of context and compare them with what you have read in the articles quoted above, you'll easily see why:

• Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
• Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor.
• The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
• The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
• (Free Trade) breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

So we are moving toward, or have moved to a society where even in developed countries increasingly a tiny minority lives very well and "average" people, by definition the majority, live badly, return to the living and working conditions of the days of Charles Dickens, conditions that took countless years and endless blood to meliorate... and even an "average" student of history will know that under such conditions revolutions happen.

I'm sorry to keep bringing the old boy up, but it was Lenin who said that a capitalist will sell you a rope on Friday that you are going to hang him with on Sunday... just to make a profit on Saturday... he can't help himself. Vladimir Ilych's mummy must be laughing his little wax head off when they turn out the lights in his tomb at night. DS

Barack Obama: a parenthesis between Bush and Gingrich?

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Who knew, in the exuberance of 2008, that America was electing an introvert? And that one who touched so many felt above the touchy-feely-gritty parts of politics? Maureen Dowd - New York Times

Why does Mitt Romney have money in the Caymans?
Christian Science Monitor

Gingrich is an unabashed egoist ("I think grandiose thoughts") who likes to compare himself to historic figures including Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle, the Duke of Wellington, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He might soon add Jesus Christ to that list because Gingrich has had more political resurrections this past year than the son of God. Ron Fournier - National Journal

Just writing the title of this post gave me the whim whams...We may actually be on the path to seeing Newt Gingrich sworn in as President of the United States of America. The idea is really hard to contemplate.

I think that Romney's tax returns will sink him with today's struggling middle class, the fact that he was born rich and has never invented anything and has only worked in the financial area -- combined with his methacrylate personality -- already has him in trouble, but the mere words "Cayman Islands" should be enough to send him spinning off into Cain-Bachmann-Huntsman, purgatory... And as for Florida, where Romney is supposed to win easily, Gingrich's observation that the Palestinians are an "invented people", should make him a favorite with Florida's many elderly Jewish retirees... he already seems to have the rednecks in his pocket... I'm waiting to see how he will pander to the Cuban community. As I see it Romney is toast...(things have come to such a pass that I hope I am wrong!).

Many people might say that Obama would find Gingrich an easier opponent than Romney, but I am not so sure. Both Obama and Romney are boring, reasonable men, men who will say just about anything that a boring reasonable man would say (Obama can't trot out all the "audacity of hope" stuff again, we've been there, done that)... Gingrich is a nut... and maybe a genuine nut is just what many troubled American people, hard in the grips of nihilism, are ready for now... Somebody that breaks the mold, who takes bullshit to a level where it becomes a liberating sincerity, whose phoniness is cut from whole cloth... That may be the message the voters are sending in this serial adulterer winning handily in a southern state chockablock with Bible-beating family values Evangelicals... Gingrich says phoney, absurd, weird things, but underneath all the pond scum there lurks something "real" about him. Horribly real for many of us, but "real" nonetheless.

And of course, there is always the chance that a third party candidate may appear and screw up all predictions. My reading is that a third party candidate would hurt Obama most... many of his most enthusiastic supporters in 2008 were thrill seekers, joy riders on the wave of hope and change... They might like another "The One", just for the ride.

Anything is possible at a time and in a country which is seriously considering giving Newt Gingrich a permit to open carry atomic weapons. DS

Goodbye to Etta James

Too many leaving too fast! DS

SOPA + PIPA (additional reading)

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If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Thomas Jefferson

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.(...) higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.
Karl Marx

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.(...) “The problem for the content industry is they just don’t know how to mobilize people,” said John P. Feehery, a former House Republican leadership aide who previously worked at the motion picture association. “They have a small group of content makers, a few unions, whereas the Internet world, the social media world especially, can reach people in ways we never dreamed of before.” New York Times

When I was in junior high, I had this wonderful science teacher, Mr. Lazlo, a very vocational teacher who was always finding creative ways of teaching. He even let me turn in my homework in comic book form. I adored him.

One spring Mr. Lazlo brought an incubator to class filled with fertilized chicken eggs. Every day we would cut open one of the eggs and examine the development of the fetuses.

Day by day we saw the fascinating change from a clot of blood to something that looked more like a chicken.

Finally the day came for the surviving baby chicks to hatch.

Little holes began to appear in the shells as the chicks tried to peck their way out.

When the chicks were managing to get their heads free of the shell, Mr. Lazlo suggested that we help some of the chicks get out of the shell and let the others get out the best they could.

The ones we helped soon died. Apparently the act of getting out of the shell was a vital part of their development. DS

Iran's bomb... the bottom line

Here’s the bottom line: an Israeli attack unites Iran in fury, locks in the Islamic Republic for a generation, cements the Syrian regime, radicalizes the Arab world at a moment of delicate transition, ignites Hezbollah on the Lebanese border, boosts Hamas, endangers U.S. troops in the region, sparks terrorism, propels oil skyward, triggers a possible regional war, offers a lifeline to Iran just as Europe is about to stop buying its oil, adds a Persian to the Arab vendetta against Israel, and may at best set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions a couple of years. Roger Cohen - NYT

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The selling point of starving or beating Iran into submission is that if they had an atomic bomb they would use it to attack Israel, who has at least 200 such weapons. The idea being that Iran is planning to turn Israel, its Jewish inhabitants and a considerable number of Palestinian Muslims into a radioactive Auschwitz.

The Persians, though notably strict in their religious practice, are eminently rational. They are just as rational as Khrushchev's USSR. They would not start an atomic exchange that would mean the annihilation of their country. The biggest problem brought on by the Iranians having a bomb would be that all the other countries in the region would want one too.

An atomic-weaponized Middle East would not mean a nuclear free for all, but it would mean that Israel's and America's freedom of action to behave like a colonial power "punishing the natives", would be forever curtailed.

It would be impossible for the USA to encourage Israel to continue a war like the one against Hezbollah in 2006 until it "finished the the job" or to have invaded Iraq for that matter either.

With atomic weapons in the mix, any action by Israel that could remotely set off to a general war in the Middle East, one with even the remotest possibility of an atomic exchange, would have to be snuffed out at the first whiff of smoke.

Lobby or no lobby, the USA would have to keep Israel on a very tight leash and Israel and their lobby know that. This would certainly cramp Israel's style, and many Israelis would find that restraint intolerable and a significant number of the "best and the brightest" of Israel's technological elite, who could find work anywhere in the world on 24 hours notice, might possibly take their families and head out for safer climes.

The fear of not being able to sufficiently intimidate the Muslim population of the Middle East, not any fear of Israel's perishing in a nuclear holocaust, is at the bottom of America and Israel's drive to eliminate Iran's nuclear program. DS

Why do they suddenly quote Marx and Gramisci in the Financial Times?

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All of a sudden Karl Marx and Marxist thought are being talked about in the most unlikely places... like the Financial Times. Here is a sample that I identify a lot with from Gideon Rachman, the FT's chief foreign affairs commentator. Like Rachman, when I was a student I couldn't make any sense of Marx either.

"The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.” That statement from the Prison Notebooks of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was a favourite of student Marxists when I was at university in the 1980s. Back then it struck me as portentous nonsense. But Gramsci’s observation does resonate now – in an age of ideological confusion. Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

It is a little like what Mark Twain said,

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

Commenting on Gideon's Gramsci quote, I would counter-quote with what Marx himself said on the transition from one historical period to another, something which so many of us feel is happening right now

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Quite naturally, there are many people who believe that Marx's thinking is valueless because the Soviet Union collapsed in ruin and that Marx was to blame for it. They forget that Marx didn't create the Soviet Union, Lenin did that, using Marx as an intellectual tool. Where Marx said, not before "material conditions have matured in the womb of the old society itself", Lenin believed that the "new social order" could be delivered by Caesarian section. He was wrong and instead of the the moneyless, classless society that Marx vaguely predicted would succeed our system, Lenin gave birth to a sort of state capitalism, whose definition might have been the old soviet joke, "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".

Having said that, it is doubtful if the czarist regime could have ever industrialized Russia, defeated Nazi Germany and put the first man in space as Lenin's creation did. The irony of course being that the USSR's collapse made a perfect example of what Marx had said, that "new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself." Lenin's C-section revolution produced a rigid, dogmatic system that couldn't adapt to the post-industrial, information society trends. They were the ones that were "old". In the end they were brought down because their brand of "capitalism" was more fragile than ours, which as we are discovering now, doesn't mean that our system isn't also fragile.

In a sense we may be about to die of success, we may be spinning off the road, like a car in an ice storm. We like to think that our system is about "freedom" and democracy, but it is probably about consumption. We produce more and more stuff with fewer and fewer people; pay is stagnant for the mass of consumers, who can only stay in the game with credit, which has dried up. But it was grand while it lasted. That is what the soviet block never managed to do.

Here is a classic joke from the now defunct German Democratic Republic.

A man is walking home from work, when he sees a long line forming in front of a government store, he asks the people what they are in line for and they tell him "lemons"... Frantically he runs home, arriving much earlier than normal, and finds his wife in bed with his next door neighbor, confronting them furiously he shouts:

What are you doing here, don't you know that today they are selling lemons?

What brought the GDR down and the rest of Really Existing Socialism, including the USSR along with it, was not really people's chaffing under the repression of totalitarianism, but rather our system's miraculous ability to produce and distribute an infinite variety of affordable consumer goods, which their godless, planned economy couldn't. Free health care, social equality, guaranteed employment, good schools (Angela Merkel graduated from the University of Leipzig) and guaranteed housing couldn't compete with our cornucopia.

The essence of our system is a quite recent -- and never before in history achieved -- endless variety of things, many of them amazingly cheap, to choose from.  Think about it, you wander into a shopping mall looking to buy some deodorant and you'll be forced to choose between dozens of different brands at many different prices until you find exactly the one that suits your pocketbook or your "unique lifestyle" and image. You can eat your favorite fruit at any time of the year, flown in from the other side of the planet. This is freedom!

However it appears that we produce more and more with fewer  and fewer people and the majority's earning power has stagnated to the point where the newly impoverished would-be consumers can only pay to play by going deeply into debt. And now credit has dried up.

So Marx's idea expressed in "Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", was that when our system reached its full potential, its inner conflicts would cause it to collapse.

What would that "full potential" look like?

Maybe it would be interesting to look into the opinion of venture capitalists, after all they risk their money on predicting that future. I recently stumbled on an interesting one, Steve Jurvetson, who is a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson a firm with affiliate offices in more than 30 cities around the world and over $7 billion in capital commitments. The video I am featuring below comes from the Stanford Center for Professional Devopment, and in it Jurvetson speaks about the future. He is a very effective communicator and allthough a lot of what he says sounds like pure science fiction, it most certainly isn't. 

Jurvetson gave the lecture in the video below at Stanford back in 2009 and although it is an hour long, I think that anyone interested in where the world is heading should watch it carefully.  Even stop the video and go back and watch and listen to some parts more than once.

This is the Kurszweil chart that Jurvetson uses in his presentation.  I am putting here so that you can study it it in detail. DS

Themes for 2012: The Technology (special for the 20 somethings)

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Probably the most useful service that older people can perform for young people is to convey to them the reality of life-modifying change. Anyone in their sixties, or older today, has seen the "unthinkable" occur several times in the course of their lives and as the song goes, they have probably been "up and down and over and out", enough times to have absorbed or at least have some intuition of the Buddhist concept of "annica" or impermanence: the constant flux of life.  Having seen so much of it, having had to recycle themselves, perhaps several times, having seen the young and the beautiful wither and die, many older people hate and fear change.

For an older person to welcome change requires having embraced the spiritual value of annica and presents for them a constant inner struggle. 

Younger people of course, usually welcome the idea of change, perhaps because though sensing its value, they have little idea of its price.

Lets look at the changes the future may bring to those who have a lot of future to look forward to.

First read this about 3-D printing:

(snippet)  Using computerised designs, techniques such as three-dimensional printing will enable businesses based in Birmingham or Belize to make complicated parts for products from forklift trucks to space rockets that could be assembled virtually anywhere. Customer choice over how the artifacts look will increase, with only minimal compromise concerning quality or cost.

Or this:

(...) users create “a real mix of wonderful things and practical things” with his device. Hobbyists have printed small bridges for their model train sets, while engineers prototype products and repairmen print spare parts for out-of-production cameras. “It’s an innovation machine,” says Mr Pettis. “We’re out to democratise engineering.” Financial Times

Or this:

At some point in the future, or so I'm told, households will construct products out of raw materials, and businesses will simply create the formulas that turn atoms into goods. Fareed Zakaria - "The Post American World"

The idea is that you put some powder you order on the Internet into a washtub, add water and out walks a TV set, thus putting millions of Chinese people out of work.

Does this sound a bit  farfetched?

Now, think about what I just did, I got a Kindle for Christmas and then went online and in a few minutes downloaded, for free, more books than I probably could ever read in the rest of my life.

Next step, think how this 3-D printing device or the concept of producing complex computer generated, tangible objects at home will develop over the next 20 years -- it will become more efficient, with more features and cheaper and cheaper and more bandwidth -- you may be too young to remember what computers were like and what they cost only 20 years ago (much too young to remember the Commodore 64 of the 1980s)  then lets take that to its logical conclusion: at some point, I will be able to download the pirated plans for the Kindle itself and my "printer" will construct it for me, right here in my house... the only obstacle, the laws protecting intellectual property. We see that all the thrust of the new technology is attacking our present pre-digital legal system.

Now read the following excerpt from Onkel Karl:

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.

Reading that you can see that the old fellow was quite prophetic. Perhaps all this change will be peaceful, but as the property owners try to protect their property, perhaps not.

Maybe you think, "I'll be OK, I'm good at maths and sciences". Those who have, or plan on having, post-graduate degrees in math and engineering, thinking that their future is assured in an information-intelligence economy, should be looking warily over their shoulders at the advances in artificial intelligence (AI). They might ponder on the programs that today allow computers to defeat the world's most skillful chess players.

If we take as a working hypothesis that artificial intelligence is now at about the same stage as personal computers were at the beginning of the 1980s and project the trajectory of AI  to follow a similar path as the PCs into the coming three decades, these graduates could easily picture their futures, armed with their PHD in math, finding employment as security guards, gardeners, nurses or sex slaves of...  the one percenters. 

Bottom line: our system is amazingly artificial and almost impossible to sustain and the devil will take the hindmost if the hindmost don't put up a fight.

So get ready twenty somethings, this is the world your generation is going to live in, be shaped by and try to shape in your turn. DS

Themes for 2012: Petraeus and the fantasies of Hugo Chávez

The Magic General

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speculated on Wednesday that the United States might have developed a way to give Latin American leaders cancer, after Argentina's Cristina Fernandez joined the list of presidents diagnosed with the disease.Chavez, Fernandez, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, Brazil's Dilma Rousseff and former Brazilian leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have all been diagnosed recently with cancer. All of them are leftists.(...) "this is very, very, very strange ... it's a bit difficult to explain this, to reason it, including using the law of probabilities." (Hugo Chávez). Reuters

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Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's irrepressible president/strongman (take your pick) is more or less accusing the  United States of America of giving several left wing, Latin American leaders, including himself, cancer. Absurd.

The most disturbing part of this absurd accusation is what makes it absurd... As far as I know it is impossible to "give" people cancer, but I would not doubt for a moment that if it were possible, the CIA might try to do it... They have done even crazier stuff than that in their time with often quite disastrous results. Today they are doing things that no previous administration had ever dared to do before and some of that would be really hard to top.

Under the Obama administration, we seem to be entering a "golden age" of the CIA, where accusations like the one Chávez is making would be par for the course.

People reveal themselves by what they say and what they do, especially by what they do. By naming "magic general", David Petraeus, to run the CIA, Obama gives the game away.  Covert operations, drones, Israeli style targeted assassinations and the destabilizing of other countries' governments or economies by the CIA and front organizations, is now going to be the preferred or "smart" way of managing the empire... more cost effective than the hitherto horribly indecisive, hideously expensive or dismally failed armed adventures featuring thousands of uniformed soldiers, corrupt private contractors, aircraft carrier battle groups, etc. What could be smarter than that?

And what is most disturbing thing of all this "pragmatism" and smartness, is that the firewalls between what the US military and espionage establishment is allowed to do abroad and what is is allowed to do at home, even habeas corpus, are being breached. This gets to a point where "smart" moves into a territory that the British would call "too clever by half"... where the USA is in the gravest danger of outsmarting itself. DS

Themes for 2012: America's relations with Israel

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The United States of America's relationship with Israel is probably the touchiest subject in American politics... a classic "third rail", touch it and you die, sort of subject, and yet it has become one of the major focus points of US political life.  How can it be impossible to question something this important in a democracy without being expelled into the outer darkness, where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth?

It is a subject that has fascinated me since I was a young man. Way back in the 1970s, when I was a budding, (never really flowered), news photographer, I lived for nearly a year in Tel-Aviv. Israel was a very different place then, a very austere, egalitarian, socialist country and very popular with progressives on both sides of the Atlantic. Many things have happened since then to change all that, suffice to say that everything in the previous sentence has been turned completely upside down.

I was very happy there, I met many interesting people, heard innumerable, fascinating, anecdotes and participated in political conversations where I got a crash course in geopolitics... and probably most important of all, I had a wonderful Israeli girlfriend and participated in her family's life.  You could say that Israel made a strong impression on me and that I "bonded" with that country.  At the same time that I loved the place and the people,  even back then I had the feeling that,  by holding onto the territories they had conquered in the Six-Day War, taking their resources and oppressing  the inhabitants, Israel was entering into a soul destroying bargain, selling its moral birthright for a mess of pottage. 

Sometimes nothing is more unrealistic than realism. Israel's moral position is/was of much more strategic value to Israel's survival than a few kilometers of military "strategic depth" or the vapors of any biblical "entitlement". This is becoming clearer with every passing news cycle. The political awakening and mass enfranchisement of the Arab peoples expressed in the words, "Arab Spring", is only accelerating this process, the amount of political energy being released is massive

With Binyamin Netanyahu as Israel's prime minister the two state solution, which already showed clear signs of rigor mortis, has begun to stink.

As Thomas Friedman has pointed out, from that point on we are looking at a clear alternative of official apartheid or opportunistic ethnic cleansing as alternatives to the liquidation of the present "Jewish state", not necessarily the end of a state where Jews live comfortably, but the end of a so defined democratic "Jewish state".

I think that Netanyahu would be comfortable with either apartheid or ethnic cleansing although I think he would prefer the latter to the former. As the reality of this sinks in, America's relationship with Israel will inevitably become increasingly conflicted.

This conflict could be symbolized by the American people choosing Barack Obama as their president. Despite his every pledge of loyalty and support of Israel he is not trusted by the Israeli government or their US lobby.

This conflict is not about what  Americans actually voted for when they elected Barack Obama, but what they thought they had voted for and although they may not realize it, what they think they voted for sends a powerful message to Israel. A message which conflicts with Israel's very foundations. 

Americans voted for a person who by birth  belongs to no particular "tribe" or ethnic group, an amalgam of races and cultures: a person who is a symbol of some sort of "new man", freed from any historical or ethnic preconditioning. This "Adam" quality, perhaps more than any other, excited and continues to excite Americans and many others around the globe.

However this quality is in direct conflict with Israel's whole raison d'être.

To avoid being tiresome, only one example that could sum it all up: Israel is a country where a racial-religious qualification is needed to buy or lease state owned land.  This simply cannot be squared with what the Americans voted for when they voted for Barack Obama. The question is: how are those who voted for what Barack Obama symbolizes supposed to have a "special relationship" with a country predicated on religious or racial identity? I am not talking about diplomatic, commercial, military or friendly relations with such a state, America has always had, has and will always have such relations with many much less attractive states than Israel, but a "till death us do part", special, most important ally, relationship?

How could two countries be more different? If any people in the world have a long memory, it is the Israelis, and no people in the world have or have ever had such a short memory as the Americans. Israel is all about purity of pedigree and lineage, of maintaining the group intact. There are literally endless discussions in Israel on the subject, "who is a Jew ".   America is defined by an ancient argument between the country's culture and the country's values. Race prejudice is as old and rooted in American culture as the European colonization of America. In his inaugural speech President Obama observed that 60 years ago his father would not have been served in a Washington restaurant: that's the way it had been for hundreds of years.

Americans, in electing Obama, have symbolized the repudiation of their own tribal history and traditions and have chosen to reinvent themselves in accordance with the foundational principals of the Republic. Israelis by choosing to reoccupy land they haven't lived on for thousands of years, have chosen to reinvent themselves by embracing their own tribal history and traditions. What each country stands for is diametrically opposed to what the other stands for and their national trajectories are traveling in opposite directions. That will be an increasingly important theme in 2012 and the years to follow, of that I am sure. DS

2011: the year of the Arab Spring and the year that we killed bin Laden

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“The foreseeable future is Islamist – this much we know. It’s just a reality that people have to come to terms with,” says Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Doha Center. “People want to see Islam play a larger role in political life and liberals are going to have to learn to speak the language of religion and stop being the anti-Islamist choice.” Financial Times

2011 was the year that the US bagged Osama bin Laden. Some commentators think that this was a great victory, the beginning of the end of the "war on terror". Frankly, I think that if anything, his living so long after bringing down the towers and setting up the USA for two wars that have done enormous damage to our economy, was a huge defeat for American prestige. Dead, bin Laden is as much or more of a symbol, for those who need a symbol, than he was while alive. I cannot imagine that any other such small group of people as Al Qaeda have ever done so much damage to an enemy, one which is considered the most powerful country in the history of the world. The cost to them in dead, wounded and captured, and the money they have spent, is infinitesimal compared to the pain they have inflicted on their enemy.

Most of all, their success is as a catalyst for change in the world of Islam. As we have seen in the Arab Spring, Islam vertebrates any alternative to the military-secret police-oligarchy structure of the security states which have been the clients of the west since they became "independent" of direct colonial rule, nothing else is strong enough or well organized enough. Somewhat similar to the Catholic Church in communist Poland.

What Al Qaeda has done has been to widen the playing field. Before bin Laden showed how serious all this was, Turkey's Erdogan would never have been considered a "moderate", someone that could be a positive example to the Muslim world. The same could be said about the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, some of whose DNA runs though al Qaeda's veins... they too are seen as moderates when compared to the fanatical Salafists... Now they are being hopefully compared to "Christian Democrats". They owe this to Al Qaeda.

What Al Qaeda want to do is to overthrow what they perceive as the client or puppet regimes of the United States in the Middle East and they are using  US power jujitsu fashion to do that. By drawing the USA into ever more aggressive actions in the world of Islam they stimulate aversion to the "moderate" regimes that cooperate with America, in doing so, thus hastening their demise.

What is Al Qaeda's purpose in bringing down these regimes?

To restore the "Caliphate".

Huh?

Now this caliphate business may sound like something right out of the "1001 Arabian Nights", redolent of Sindbad the Sailor and Aladdin and his magic lamp, or a world empire,  but here it might be useful to recall that the last Islamic caliphate ended as recently March 3, 1924, when Kemal Ataturk closed it down, threw out the Sultan (Caliph) and officially ended the Ottoman empire and westernized Turkey.  Basically then, what al Qaeda are trying to achieve is the Islamic restoration of what was the Arab part of the Ottoman empire, but run by Arabs not by Turks...That's what Lawrence of Arabia (Peter O' Toole)  was promising the Arabs (Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn)... remember?

Is this really that weird?

If you stop and think for a bit and you know your world history since WWI, you will recall that every attempt to mobilize the Arabs in order for them break from the grip of the colonial powers and the USA: pan-Arab nationalism, local nationalism, Arab varieties of socialism, military dictators or a mixture of all of these, has proved ineffectual in advancing the agenda of unity and full sovereignty. Naturally Britain, France and, of course, the USA were pleased by this failure and have always done everything in their power, from bribes to coups, to assassinations, to make that outcome inevitable. Oil or Israel, its all the same from the pan-Arab nationalist point of view, keeping the Arabs down was always the bottom line.

By a process of elimination pan-Arab nationalism has hit on the most reductive version of Islam as the only movement, ideology and source of political energy that is so decocted and fibrous and emotionally satisfying to it adherents that it cannot be co-opted, re-engineered, de-contented and manipulated by the USA.

I have thought of a rather outlier example of how this works, drawn straight from American culture: jazz.

At the end of the 1930s jazz had developed to point where white musicians were able to play it very well. Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden and Gene Krupa, would be notable examples. Many young African-American musicians, notably Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie, felt that their music was being stolen out from under them by white people and set out to create a way of playing that was so original and complex that the white musicians simply couldn't play it. Thus was "Be-bop" born.

What many Muslims, violent and non-violent alike seem to have hit on is that their ancestral religion is indigestible by globalization. It is a music that globalization, in its American version, simply cannot play: a sort of divine be-bop.

Today in countries like Egypt, even moderate Muslims, people that don't plan on putting a bomb in anybody's jockey shorts, are wearing beards and hijabs and chorusing, "Islam is the answer": They see it as a vaccine against being digested and assimilated and then excreted by the dynamics of globalization.

Are Muslims just being insanely paranoiac when they accuse the United States of trying to "destroy" Islam?

In my opinion, yes and no. "Yes", from the American point of view, where we think it jolly nice if some people go to church on Sunday, others go to temple on Saturday and, what the heck, others can go to mosque on Friday if they want to... but for the rest of what is left of the week, it is business as usual or else.

"No", from the point of view of many Muslims, if by "to destroy" means "to trivialize" their religion, which, in their view, is a seven day, 24 hour a day project, which is the arbiter of all human affairs. This is contrary to the rules of our economic system: within globalization the "market" has taken on the role that Islam assigns to God. Therefore Islam being indigestible in its present form must be reshaped or "Disneyfied" if you will. Except it can't be and still be Islam.

More than confronting the American people themselves, it seems to me that Muslim fundamentalists are confronting history's most powerful exponent of a system that was once described as turning "all that is solid into air" and profaning everything sacred; leaving commerce as the fundamental activity of all human beings. If we consider in what shape our economic system has left the teachings of Jesus Christ, perhaps the Muslims aren't as far off target as they appear at first glance.

If you stop and think about it, every traditional relationship between human beings that ever existed anywhere, clan, tribe, nationality, religion, family authority, has been either dissolved or degraded by our economic system: this is what we have lost in exchange for our standard of living. We happen to be cool with that, but not everybody else is.

Be that as it may, the principal objective of Muslim fundamentalists, in my opinion, is to eject an alien civilization (us), and all those who empower it (ME regimes), from the spiritual-emotional center of Islam. At heart this is just an continuation of the dismantling of the Euro-American (white) domination of the world that began at the end of WWII, a domination which globalization has given a new breath of life.

So basically this is yet another "national liberation struggle". If we look at the cost-effectiveness of everything Al Qaeda have done since the attack on the USS Cole and the African embassies and compare it with the sacrifices made by the Vietnamese people to finally gain their independence, I imagine that sooner or later the Muslim fundamentalists are going to succeed in driving us out of the Middle East.

What happens then?

Obviously if there is a general Islamist revolution in the Middle East followed by the Magreb, with America's client regimes falling like dominoes, it would have the immediate effect of pushing the price of oil through the roof and that alone would bring on a major economic crisis. It would be every man for himself as Europe, Japan and China scrambled to assure their energy supplies. This might bring protectionism roaring in, if it didn't start a series of wars. Israel, of course, might always do something crazy, but I think that in such a situation, observers might be amazed at how "prudent" the Israelis could be, if Egypt, Jordan and Syria, for example, fell to the Muslim Brotherhood in short succession.

Whatever finally happened, the period of transformation would be a harrowing, violent roller coaster ride, however, when the transformation had been completed, we would find the resulting situation:

1. The new rulers would immediately have to find some way of feeding their populations
2. The only thing they would have to sell to feed them would be oil
3. The thirst of the developed and developing nations for oil would be as great as ever.

In those three points we have the makings of a workable peace.

What would that peace look like?

The best model I can think of would be some Muslim/post-Christian version of the Treaty of Westphalia, a miracle of diplomacy whereby Protestants and Catholics managed to end the "Thirty Years War", religious conflict in Europe, and perhaps most importantly enshrined the idea of state's non-meddling in the internal affairs of other states. This idea of inviolable sovereignty had managed to limp along for hundreds of years until Bush, Blair and now Obama, under aegis of the neocons and liberal interventionists trashed it... with the results we are living with today.

In some perfect neo-Westphalian world, the Muslim minority of Europe would be allowed to practice their religion in peace and the Christian and Jewish minorities in the Middle East practice theirs. Too good to be true? Well, the part about Christians and Jews being able to practice their religions in peace in the Middle East is a workmanlike description of how the Ottoman empire worked, otherwise how do you think that 19th century Zionist settlers under the patronage of the Rothschilds were allowed to settle in Palestine in the first place? And not just the Ottomans, many westerners don't realize that until Israel's appearance on the scene there had been a vibrant Jewish community in Mesopotamia for over 4,000 years!

The bit about the Ottoman empire being a place where the three religions "of the book" lived in peace is why, contrary to many commentators, I view very favorably Turkey's moves to cool their relations with Israel and reclaim a prominent place in the world of Islam. Turkey's role in the post-American-hegemony, multipolar world of compartmentalized and case by case globalization is a key one.

Of course the joker in the deck is Israel. There is always a possibility that Israel might, finding itself "eyeless in Gaza", Samson-like pull the whole thing down around their ears, but I don't think so. I imagine rather that there will be a series of tipping points, where American public opinion visibly sours on Israel's involving the US in an endless, fruitless series of wars that deteriorate America's power and endanger American lives and  the cost of gasoline, combined with the aforesaid rise of Islamic republics in the Middle East and the Magreb... not to mention Iran's future possession of the atomic bomb, followed closely by Egypt and Saudi Arabia (then probably called the Islamic Republic of  Mecca and Medina). These tipping points will send many Israelis with double nationality heading for the doors and make it obvious to those who stay that a more accommodating manner of behavior, shall we say, is now required.

"Yihye tov" as the Israelis say, which more or less means, "things will get better," but more accurately, "it will be alright on the night," meaning: "with optimism plus improvisation things will probably turn out OK". DS

Merry Christmas from News Links

David Seaton's News Links

The Holy Family with St Anne,
1628, Rubens, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

I have been posting this same piece every Christmas since 2006, so you might call it an "instant tradition". I wrote it in the depths of Bush's hate filled "war on terror", but I don't see any reason to ever stop posting it.

______________

At Christmas time we commemorate the birth of a mysterious being: a miracle working Jewish carpenter, said to be the king of heaven. One who, even for those that do not believe in him, has been the central, self-defining, personality of Western civilization for over two thousand years.

Christmas is a time to be with family and friends, or to think of them and to remember them lovingly if they are very far away or no longer among the living. It is also a time when Christians are urged to wish for 'peace on earth, good will to men' and consequentially obliged to practice the Christian virtues of forgiving and loving their enemies. However, in order to truly love one's friends and to truly forgive and to begin to love one's enemies, it is obviously essential to first begin by being able to distinguish between one's friends and one's enemies. This is not always as easy as it would appear at first glance.

Today the relations between Islam and Christianity need, more than ever, to be examined and revised. Westerners ignorance and lack of appreciation of Islam is doubly aggravated by their ignorance of Muslim's traditional knowledge and esteem of Christianity... An esteem borne out by the number of Muslims named, "Miriam," (Mary) and "Isa", (Jesus).

Tragically, little is known in the West of Islam's affection for the Virgin Mary (Umm Isa) to whom an entire chapter of the Koran is devoted.  Christmas time is uniquely suited to listening to its spellbinding recitation.

Karen Armstrong, a former nun and perhaps the English language's most interesting writer on comparative religions, published the article quoted below in The Guardian back in December of 2006. It makes a perfect Christmas meditation in these times of hatred and intolerance. DS

The Muslim prophet born in Bethlehem
Karen Armstrong - Guardian

Abstract: In 632, after five years of fearful warfare, the city of Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army. No blood was shed and nobody was forced to convert to Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad ordered the destruction of all idols and icons of the Divine. There were a number of frescoes painted on the inner walls of the Kabah, the ancient granite shrine in the centre of Mecca, and one of them, it is said, depicted Mary and the infant Jesus. Immediately Muhammad covered it reverently with his cloak, ordering all the other pictures to be destroyed except that one. This story may surprise people in the west, who have regarded Islam as the implacable enemy of Christianity ever since the crusades, but it is salutary to recall it during the Christmas season when we are surrounded by similar images of the Virgin and Child. It reminds us that the so-called clash of civilisations was by no means inevitable. For centuries Muslims cherished the figure of Jesus, who is honoured in the Qur'an as one of the greatest of the prophets and, in the formative years of Islam, became a constituent part of the emergent Muslim identity. There are important lessons here for both Christians and Muslims - especially, perhaps, at Christmas. The Qur'an does not believe that Jesus is divine but it devotes more space to the story of his virginal conception and birth than does the New Testament, presenting it as richly symbolic of the birth of the Spirit in all human beings (Qur'an 19:17-29; 21:91). Like the great prophets, Mary receives this Spirit and bears Jesus, who will, in his turn, become an ayah, a revelation of peace, gentleness and compassion to the world.(...) The Muslim devotion to Jesus is a remarkable example of the way in which one tradition can be enriched by another. It cannot be said that Christians returned the compliment. While the Muslims were amassing their Jesus-traditions, Christian scholars in Europe were denouncing Muhammad as a lecher and charlatan, viciously addicted to violence. But today both Muslims and Christians are guilty of this kind of bigotry and often seem eager to see only the worst in each other. The Muslim devotion to Jesus shows that this was not always the case. In the past, before the political dislocations of modernity, Muslims were always able to engage in fruitful and stringent self-criticism. This year, on the birthday of the Prophet Jesus, they might ask themselves how they can revive their long tradition of pluralism and appreciation of other religions. For their part, meditating on the affinity that Muslims once felt for their faith, Christians might look into their own past and consider what they might have done to forfeit this respect.  READ IT ALL

Cher North Korea — mon semblable, — mon frère!

David Seaton's News Links

The great preponderance of this so-called truth is a confection of outright lies—not merely false but, more perniciously, a form of unreality, imposed with such relentlessness and violence on a people hermetically sealed from any alternative sources of information that it has become their only reality. A North Korean who does not believe the state’s every claim is left with the void of dumb disbelief, for it is impossible in Kim Il Sung Nation—as the North is sometimes described in its own proclamations—to find anything else to believe in.  Philip Gourevitch - The New Yorker

Hollywood, the news industry and television, all corporate controlled, have become instruments of inverted totalitarianism. They censor or ridicule those who critique or challenge corporate structures and assumptions. They saturate the airwaves with manufactured controversy, whether it is Tiger Woods or the dispute between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. They manipulate images to make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge, which is how Barack Obama became president. And the draconian internal control employed by the Department of Homeland Security, the military and the police over any form of popular dissent, coupled with the corporate media’s censorship, does for inverted totalitarianism what thugs and bonfires of books do in classical totalitarian regimes.(...)The civic, patriotic and political language we use to describe ourselves remains unchanged. We pay fealty to the same national symbols and iconography. We find our collective identity in the same national myths. We continue to deify the Founding Fathers. But the America we celebrate is an illusion. It does not exist. Our government and judiciary have no real sovereignty. Our press provides diversion, not information. Our organs of security and power keep us as domesticated and as fearful as most Iraqis. Capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, when it emasculates government, becomes a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force, best described as inverted totalitarianism, is plunging us into a state of neo-feudalism, perpetual war and severe repression. The Supreme Court decision is part of our transformation by the corporate state from citizens to prisoners. Chris Hedges - Truthdig

surrealism [səˈrɪəˌlɪzəm]

n
A movement in art and literature characterized by the evocative juxtaposition of incongruous images in order to include unconscious and dream elements.

DS

A salute to Thomas Friedman

David Seaton's News Links

Last Tuesday the 13th Thomas Friedman did a very brave thing, he published the following:

I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused. Thomas Friedman - New York Times

This is a sample of the response he got:

The notion that the only reason politicians support Israel is because of Jewish money is a central myth of a new form of anti-Semitism which masquerades as a defense of American foreign policy against the depredations of a venal Israel lobby. This canard not only feeds off of the traditional themes of Jew-hatred, it also requires Friedman to ignore the deep roots of American backing for Zionism in our history and culture. Jonathan S. Tobin - Commentary

Anybody that reads my stuff will know that I am no fan of Thomas Friedman, but I have to admit that he has taken a very brave stand by writing the column he published last Tuesday in the New York Times. It is brave because you can be sure that Friedman, who is an observant Jew and an active participant in his community's life, is going to come under very heavy pressure from that community for what he wrote.  This is what Judge Richard Goldstone went through before he recanted from the UN report that bears his name:

When Richard Goldstone returned home to South Africa last May for his grandson’s bar mitzvah — an event that he was almost unable to paticipate in because of protests planned against him — he also attended a separate meeting whose details were kept secret until now. In the wake of Goldstone’s bombshell retraction of a key finding in the famous report that bears his name, those aware of what occurred at that meeting, individuals who have known him through the years, felt moved to disclose what happened. They joined many others in puzzling over what had prompted the famous jurist to change his mind — and, they hoped, Israel’s fate. The meeting, an official parlay between Goldstone and a cross-section of 10 of the South African Jewish community’s top leaders, had a profound impact on Goldstone, said one participant and another senior official briefed on it afterward.(...) The meeting in South Africa came on the heels of Goldstone’s 11th hour decision to attend his grandson’s bar mitzvah — a decision he took only after threats were withdrawn by prominent community members to protest outside the synagogue. Did all this add up to an emotional punch that would cause Goldstone’s turnaround? It may be too simplistic to reduce the process to that. But several friends cited what they viewed as the cumulative toll of a stream of calumny hurled at the famously unemotional jurist.“It has been like watching an innocent man whipped at the stake,” said Goldstone’s friend Letty Cottin Pogrebin, founder of Ms. magazine. Forward

This is all par for the course, the default reaction of the Israel lobby is and always has been, "the whole world are hypocrites, Israel is terribly misunderstood, your eye punched my fist", when the problem for Israel is that, with every passing day, Israel is getting better and better understood than ever before and the mechanisms that give Israel impunity are getting clearer every day too. As even the head of Mossad says, Israel is getting to be a burden and not an asset for the USA. The question is how long can you keep a lead balloon airborne?

What Israel and friends of Israel should be concerned about is that the number of people in the "west" who are thoroughly sick of Israel is growing exponentially. The problem is that the people now in power in Israel believe that everyone who isn't Jewish, if you only scratch the surface, is a default antisemite anyway and it is naive to try to conform to their hypocritical rules of conduct.

Of course, in the end, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can lower the bar on judging what is antisemitism to the point where anyone that wont give a moral blank check to Israel is an antisemite. Then you are putting decent people in the same bag with David Duke and decent people resent that sort of thing.

Finally, people will have had enough and no matter how much military might or political leverage is employed, universally adverse opinion reaches a tipping point. People will simply refuse to swallow any more. At that point things begin to move very quickly and no amount of hasbara will hide the simple reality of an apartheid rogue state, armed with atomic weapons, that has managed to unman the American political class.

So today, it is hats off to Thomas Friedman, who has done something braver than many of us will ever have the chance to do. DS

The Global Village and the Global Village Idiot

David Seaton's News Links

Decontent: Auto industry term for removing features from upcoming model years, usually to save money. Urban Dictionary

There is a very dangerous mood about. Simple contempt for the political representatives, the media and the giants of finance, abounds. This is an inflammable mass, like gasoline vapors, just waiting for a spark. So much contempt for others always contains much self-contempt, which is perhaps humanity's most murderous emotion.

America has the good fortune to possess noble, time-tested, institutions, but institutions without people to color in the lines are only historical curiosities to be studied in libraries. Society and institutions are not one and the same thing. Great institutions, of themselves, are not enough; the society that inhabits them counts for much more. Institutions and societies can be hollowed out and the process is mysterious to all who live through it. We must also include our new technologies in the mix; they lend the speed of light to man's natural cupidity and stupidity and make our era look even more sordidly tacky than it would if all we had were the steam engine and the telegraph to magnify our will and transmit our desires.

We have come to a point where, with this alignment of the planets, in many countries around the world anything could happen. Only our long democratic history and our constitutional traditions reassure us that all will finally be well.

However, if we say that Guantanamo is twenty first century America's answer to habeas corpus, FISA, twenty first century America's answer to English common law, the Republican primary debates twenty first century America's answer to Abraham Lincoln and the bailout of the banks, twenty first century America's answer to free market capitalism; then how much of all that is really left?

A global village is bound to have a global village idiot. DS

Chris Hedges: impossible to tell more truths better and in less time

David Seaton's News Links

Since I live under a rock, Chris Hedges was completely off my radar, but I can't remember hearing more truths in 27 minutes in my whole life than those contained in this video. I find it especially interesting that a graduate of Harvard Divinity School should be a war correspondent. To have been good enough at it to become a bureau chief of the New York Times and then get canned for denouncing the invasion of Iraq is to have achieved a rare perfection. He seems to me a worthy successor to Noam Chomsky (may he live a hundred years). DS

Russia: be careful what you wish for

David Seaton's News Links

I think one should always be careful what one wishes for.. We've already seen it ourselves, how all the a la page Egyptian bloggers and tweeters and facebookies simply opened the door for the Islamists. 

Think about it for a moment.... What is the biggest party in Russia opposing Putin?

The Communist Party, right?

If you were Russian and angry about what so much of the developed world is angry about today: growing social and income inequality... who are the natural ones in Russia to address that issue directly?

The Communist Party, right?

If you were a Russian nostalgic for a glorious, triumphal past, who represents that in Russia?

The Communist Party, right?

If you simply found yourself as a Russian, impoverished, with an absurd pension and no medical care... who you gonna call?

The Communist Party, right?

And if a revolution/rebellion destabilized the present power structures in Russia, who are trained from infancy to relish and exploit such a situation, to become the "vanguard" of such a situation?

The Communist Party, right?

History is a laugh riot, when you think about it. DS

Occupy Wall Street: Plan - B

David Seaton's News Links

Foreclosure is a national tragedy and a relentless drag on economic growth. Jobs can’t be created until demand increases, and demand won’t increase until consumers get out of debt, and housing is the biggest obstacle. If we had healthy institutions, the White House, both parties in Congress, the leaders of the biggest banks, and consumer groups would have sat down together and worked out a solution that keeps millions of people in their homes without wiping their debts completely clean. But we don’t, and so the history of the past few years has been written by Rick Santelli and Occupy Wall Street. George Packer - New Yorker

The big question that people who want to change things have to ask themselves over and over is "what is to be done". That is the question that OWS must ask itself and answer quickly if it doesn't want to peter out into irrelevance... something that would be tragic if it were to occur.

The role of OWS is pedagogical, it is about raising awareness, consciousness. This is the terrain of what is known as the "propaganda of the deed". A practical, non-violent, American illustration of this would be the lunch counter sit-ins and  freedom riders of the Civil Rights Movement, photogenic action which captured the attention of the media daily and soon the imagination and the "hearts and minds" of the American people. These acts were the thin wedge that opened up the conscience and the consciousness of Americans and changed the face of America.

In my opinion the tragedy of mass foreclosures and thousands upon thousands of Americans being evicted from their homes in the midst of the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression is an issue that has the same transformational potential.

Here is another quote from George Packer's article, that shows that political work is waiting to be done:

There’s no powerful D.C. lobby supporting Americans in Foreclosure, no mass movement of underwater mortgagees. Like unemployment, it’s a trauma that isolates people, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Few things could be more inspiring of compassion, empathy and fellow feeling than watching men, women and children being torn from their homes and ejected into the streets... only a heart of stone (and there are plenty of those) could fail to be moved by such a sight. Anyone who stands up for them and defends them is bound to win the sympathy and support of most decent human beings.

Showing the evicted -- or the about to be evicted-- that they are not alone, not leaving them to fend for themselves, would be the fulcrum that could turn the OWS into a powerful lever for changing the political life of America forever, in the same way that the Civil Rights Movement did.

How would this defense take place?

On one hand it would require an army of lawyers working pro bono to review all paper work leading to the foreclosures as much of it appears to be shoddy, slapdash and even outrageously fraudulent. Organizing this army of investigators and putting them on the case would win the gratitude and even the love of millions of Americans.

The next line of defense would be direct actions of non-violent, civil disobedience. Sit-ins, where dozens, hopefully hundreds, of activists would have to be carted away, one at a time, by police before the eviction could ever take place... with all the media recording it... every day, everywhere in America. The impact would be tremendous, transformational.

During these months of occupations, friendships of the like-minded without number have been made and a huge network of the politically conscious has been created. This instrument should be put to use in a way that connects in solidarity with the deepest fears of their fellow citizens. In doing this, a much, much more powerful instrument will be created, one that could forever change and purify the face of American politics. DS

Egypt

David Seaton's News Leaks

The first round of voting in Egypt shows a strong showing for the Islamic parties, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the more extreme Salifist party Al-Nour. At this point the Islamists appear to have taken two thirds of the vote. 

This first round took place in urban districts where more western oriented parties were expected to make a good showing. The next round of voting will take place in rural areas, which are more traditional and conservative, so the final result will probably have the Islamists with clear, governing majorities. In the west there is now much wailing and gnashing of teeth at this turn of events. In my opinion, whether this is bad news or good news for the west depends much more on us than on the Egyptians.

The first task of a democratically elected government is to deliver the goods to the voters. As Egypt's tourist industry is probably its biggest source of foreign exchange, I would imagine that a stable, democratically elected government of any ideological color would try to create an environment where tourists feel safe. In my opinion a democratically elected Islamic government might be the most efficient bulwark imaginable against terrorist groups aiming to disrupt tourism, thereby emptying that government's coffers. Starting a war with Israel would also be a distraction from eliminating corruption and bringing better social services to the population, which have always been the hallmark issues of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is likely that in the medium to long term the most important result of the Egyptian revolution will be Egypt's return to being the intellectual and cultural center of the Arab world...  Without Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are only poor substitutes. A democratic Egypt (Islamic or not) will dynamize the entire region... neutralizing that soft power was Washington's aim in supporting Mubarak.

Probably the greatest danger to Israel from the new Egypt would come from Egypt's soft power, not its military forces. More than tanks and rockets, Egypt means movies and books and the Al-Azhar university (founded in 970AD). This renewed cultural projection and prestige will change the entire texture of Arab culture and Sunni Islam in the coming years.

The biggest error hand wringers are making is to confuse Egypt with Iran. Shiite Islam is a minority in the Muslim world and Iranians are not Arabs. The religion of Egypt is Sunni Islam and Egypt is the largest and most important Arabic speaking, Sunni Muslim country, so whatever the effect of an Islamist Egypt will be, it will be bigger than the effect of an Islamist Iran, because it will occur within the dominant religious current and in the principal language of the Middle East and in its most important nation.  It will be most interesting to see if Egypt joins Saudi Arabia in opposing Iran or whether they will extend their hand to the Ayatollahs.

As far as the USA is concerned the problem of the Middle East is a problem of domestic American politics. Israel is the measure of all things and Israel is a society in crisis and just as a person with a toothache, when tiny Israel twinges, the US political establishment can think of little else. And just as a person with a toothache has problems thinking straight. American policy in the Middle East is wallowing in incoherency and has been for years.

Israel is not in a happy situation, all the tides in the region are running against them and with all their eggs  in the American basket they watch uneasily  as the USA  pulls back from its military involvement in the Middle East.  Certainly any democratic regime in Egypt or any other Arab country is not going to be friendly to Israel, certainly while the Palestinians are being treated as they are...  As it stands today, I cannot image any revitalization and empowerment of the Arab masses could ever benefit Israel, I think it is way too late for that. The Israelis had a real chance for peace after Bush the First won the opening round of the Iraq war, they passed it up, too bad for them, ... Like Bessie Smith once put it, if they make their own bed hard, that's the way it lies. DS