It is truly amazing that the future of health care in the U.S. will be determined by the opinion of the Supreme Court concerning the meaning of our 236 year old Constitution.

Surely, the Founding Fathers who argued over Article One, Section Eight, which includes the Commerce Clause, could not have foreseen that their concern with regulating trade between the colonial states, the Indians and foreign powers, would one day be used to deprive a sigificant minority of Amerians of health care.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is unique among nations in being governed by an ancient document.  Americans are made to worship the stability of their system of government, contrasted to the succession of constitutions that have typified other nations.  But there comes a point where ‘stability’ becomes paralysis. The campaign to amend the Constitution so that it reflects the modern world should get a boost from the Supreme Court’s decision as to whether President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (known derogatorily as Obamacare) is constitutional – even if, by some miracle, it goes against the challengers.

The tendency of the mainstream media to pretend that anything the political establishment does is okay, is as damaging as its tendency to ignore political actions by other powers.  A couple of years ago I noted in this blog that then-President Putin was calling for the dollar to no longer be the world’s reserve currency.  Now the BRICS countries (the major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are holding their fourth annual summit in New Delhi, at which they are actually discussing the creation of alternatives to the Western dominated IMF and World Bank.

Such a project might have appeared as nothing more than a pipe-dream a few years ago, but the financial meltdown – better weathered by the BRICS countries than by the West, by the way – is making it ever more likely.

Stay tuned to places like France 24, (France’s English language service which still pronounces its name in French) RT, or Al-Jazeera – all of which you can find on the web – to know what’s really going on in a world where progressive change rather than paralyzing tradition is operating.

If, like many progressive Americans, you despair of the major news channels, but are lucky enough to live either in the Northeast, D.C., California, the Chicago area, or the Carolinas, you have an alternative:  Russian Television, coyly known as ‘RT’ has been available since October on your local MIND TV channel.  Staffed with American, British and other native English speaking newscasters and hosts, and featuring progressive writers like Chris Hedges, Thom Hartmann, and many others, RT  broadcasts 24/7 to over 100 countries on five continents from its studios in Moscow and D.C.  It’s motto is: “Question More”.

Of course you’ll get Russian news with a Russian slant, but you can allow for that, whereas the world news covered by RT is usually absent form MSNBC or Democracy Now (though some of it may be found on Grit TV – I haven’t checked).

Today, Friday, March 23, I learned that the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, unanimously approved a new law which should make it easier to create and register political parties, requiring only 500 members instead of the 45,000 threshold that contributed to widespread dissatisfaction with the last election.  Also, major Russian energy companies have been trying to delay or opt out of the government’s ambitious privatization program ahead of an imminent power change in the Kremlin.  (You can see these stories at RT.com.)

In international news I learned that a European Security Conference is wrapping up in Moscow, at which President Medvedev called on the United States to get with it: although the U.S. is participating in this conference, Americans don’t hear about it.  Someone may mention in passing that the Russians want our guarantee that a projected missile defense shield will not be targeted at them in writing, making it sound like an unreasonable demand.  This item is particularly interesting because it illustrates the fact that other major players, such as the European Union, are increasingly united and bold in their opposition to America’s plans to rule the world.

RT reporting on the Syrian crisis tends to mirror Russia’s support of President Assad, but it also features members of the opposition.  Of late it has been highly critical of Al-Jazeera’s handling of the crisis, which tends to mirror the American position.  About a week ago RT reported with obvious glee that several anchors and at least one high-ranking manager had quit over what they considered ‘the supposedly third-world friendly’ Dubai-based channel’s pro-Americana bias.

In American news, RT reported today that a woman was injured Wednesday during a police crackdown on OWS, and that the Occupy Movement is calling for a general strike on May first.  This date will probably not mean anything to most Americans, but it has been the rest of the world’s Labor Day for decades.  The call itself is highly significant, since the last time a general strike affected large parts of the U.S. was in 1877 with the Great Railroad Strike.

There is a lot of business news on RT, including what sounds like pretty detailed analysis by several of the channels young, female anchors perched on high stools in short tight skirts.  (Most of the male feature anchors tend to be older and not very attractive…)

Who would have thought that some day Americans would have to rely on Russian Television to find out what’s going on in the world – and at home:

A Marine based in Camp Pendleton, California, created a Facebook page called “Armed Forces Tea Party,” which currently has approximately 19,000 likes and slogans such as “NObama” and “One Nation, under Obama, with poverty and unemployment for all.” Authorities say he has been under the microscope since 2010.

Serendipitously, only days after it cleared Congress, President Obama signed H.R. 347, which makes it a felony to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States.

A feature currently being shone analyses our infatuation with guns, featuring lengthy interviews with Virginia gun owners on the occasion of that state’s lifting of the law the limits gun purchases to one a month.

In sum, all our dirty laundry is hung out to dry by the country we think we defeated twenty years ago. Worldwide.

Family matters have prevented me from posting anything since March 6th.  I hope to be able to return with an imiportant story in the next few days.  The title will be ‘Russia to the Rescue’!

Meanwhile, I urge my readers to go to the following link for the results of some impressive studies about the ethics of the 1% vs the 99% in daily life:

http://www.accountingdegreeonline.net/rich-people-are-unethical/

It was sent to me by Tony Shin, of the Occupy  Wall Street movement.

It is just as wrong to believe the American Occupy movement is leading the worldwide protest, as it is to see it as a mirror image of the protests occurring worldwide, both in terms of its origins and aspirations.

Europeans may have adopted the slogan ‘we are the 99%’, but for them this is merely the up-dated handle of a two-hundred year revolutionary history. The saga that began in a privately-owned square in lower Manhattan on September 17th, 2011, was not organized by unions or other established move-ments or political parties.  It was inspired by first-hand reports of the Arab Spring as well as of the encampments of the Spanish Indignados , victims of the European financial crisis.  Although there are hundreds – even thousands – of ad hoc activist groups in the United States, only a few individuals, mostly academics, are in touch with foreign movements or organizations. In fact, ‘Occupy’ was the result of a dare launched by a brash anti-Madison Avenue magazine called ‘Adbusters’, published in Canada, with a 250,000 circulation.

Straight from Adbusters’ ‘About’ page:

We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist network of the information age. Our aim is to topple the existing power structure and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century.

Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance.

On July 13th Adbusters sent out a call: “Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” and that idiosyncratic message set in motion what followed.

A collectively written book entitled ‘Occupy Wall Street’, recently published by OR Books, traces the entire evolution of a phenomenon that continues to grow outside the tradition of both European social movements and Arab liberation movements.

A detailed description of the encampment in a privately-owned park a few blocks from the U.S. Stock Exchange, reveals the existence of two philosophically separate areas, one where reformists set  up their tents, and the other where more radical participants organized communal sleeping quarters.  The reformists appear to have constituted the main participants in the daily General Assemblies that became the hallmark of the movement, but facilitators (as opposed to ‘leaders’) quickly evolved working groups for every aspect of daily life. During its two-month existence, librarians, medics, artists, cooks, security kept the encampment running, while others planned actions, handled communications and outreach.  Tourists came to admire the phenomenon, and thanks to the ubiquitous availability of the internet, sympathizers from around the world phoned in orders for food to be delivered from nearby restaurants.  Lawyers volunteered to be on call when people were arrested for their activities: activists inked their telephone numbers on their arms.

The encampment lasted until November 17th, when it was violently dispersed by New York Police at the order of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  But not before it had organized resistance to foreclosures in the lower middle class borough of Brooklyn, across the East River, and staked out an indoor meeting place in the atrium of a skyscraper at 60, Wall St.

In this massive, elegant, brightly lit space with waterfalls and palm trees, bankers and traders of the neighborhood come for a quiet sandwich, while homeless take refuge from the street, just sitting or perhaps playing chess – not a surprising Manhattan scene.  Occupy working groups hold meetings there, in full sight and sound of the other users of the space.

As with this out of the ordinary meeting place, what has probably gone unreported outside the U.S. (where the phenomenon itself has only been consistently reported in the blogosphere!) is the vast number of protests that were organized across New York.  The City University of New York alone counts 480,000 (four hundred and eighty thousand) students, and there are in addition about one hundred private colleges and universities in the city, including Columbia.  Students, young workers and the unemployed with time to spare make up the major portion of Occupy activists, and this is what distinguishes the phenomenon from the myriad of anti-war, pro-reform, groups that have persisted since resistance to the war in Vietnam and the nationwide civil rights movement.  These have been kept alive by members of the ‘old left’, who are gradually dying out, participation by anyone under fifty a rarity. Through a medium uniquely familiar to them, the Occupy Movement re-activated American youth. They have been joined and supported by the ‘old Left’,  and  include every segment of that population:  radical women, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, LGBTs and any other minority you can think of.

For two months, Zucotti Park renamed Liberty Plaza, was a unique venue for artists, and tourists flocked to the oblong space as much for its festive atmosphere as to witness the now ubiquitous ‘mic check’. This unique communication tool came into being when the mayor banned microphones, speakers and even battery-powered bullhorns from the encampment, promising thirty days in jail to violators. To overcome this impediment, the participants in a rally or meeting repeat, phrase by phrase, what a speaker says, until those farthest away have heard the phrase.  Speaking in unison builds a powerful sense of togetherness, which more than made up for the slowness of proceedings.

In Philadelphia, where I live, the Occupiers, camped on an enormous plaza in front of City Hall, welcomed the homeless, who often suffer from addiction, and tried to help them. When they realized the problem could not be solved in an encampment, they leaned on city authorities to become more active.  Following a two-week notice by the mayor, the camp was evicted on December 6th, with the participation of mounted police.   It has since repaired to various indoor locations, mainly a neighboring Quaker Meeting House and a Methodist church.  (American Churches are where most anti-war and other progressive groups have been welcome, in a tradition that goes back to the Underground Railroad and reached its zenith with the Civil Rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King.)

Through daily actions and meetings, OccupyPhilly.org actively creates community, while exploring the modalities through which community can effect change.  From deep breathing to the incredibly quiet atmosphere of more than a hundred people weighing in on both process and content through hand signals, the Occupiers debate issues of non-violence vs violence, elections vs. alternative solutions, and the best way to join forces with other groups.

Which is a nice segway to  the crucial difference between the Occupiers and the 99%ers in the rest of the world: Occupy brings together ‘people of faith’ or ‘belonging to faith-based traditions’, Anarchists, Democrats (especially Black Democrats) who hope that somehow Obama will get it together in a second term, libertarians (who make it easy for some to claim/wish that in reality the Occupiers and the Tea Partiers have a lot in common), ‘faint-hearted’ liberals and those who think social democracy would be a good thing.

Almost since the beginning, the media has been asking: “What do they want?  What’s their program?” Journalists are aware that around the world the 99% have very definite ideas about what they want, but they never reveal what those ideas are, because they’re usually farther left than social democracy. Even ‘The Swedish model is only mentioned in the American press when it runs into a snag, implying that our 99%ers are not missing anything. No matter the evidence, ‘liberal democracy’, which gives each citizen a vote, is touted, in the oft-quoted phrase of Winston Churchill, as ‘the worst system with the exception of all others’. If people want the financial system to be regulated, that’s up to the Congress that results from the one man one vote system, and if there are lobbyists, why that’s part of free speech, even if the idea would make Churchill turn over in his grave.

It’s important for the worldwide 99% to know that the Occupy Movement is coming from a long history of declining trade-union membership and effective-ness. In the early fifties, as the Cold War ramped up, Senator Joseph McCarthy held months of infamous hearings for the purpose of identifying Communists in and out of government, and its legacy has been a total lack of American ideological literacy even among most activists.  It appears that the majority of Occupy participants continue to assume that system reform represents the best hope for a better America, as it fights desperately to maintain an Empire fast slipping from its grasp.

However during the course of the winter, the dichotomy represented by the two areas of encampment at Liberty Park has given rise to a separate group calling for world-wide revolution http://occupywallst.org/.  According to its website: “OccupyWallSt.org is the unofficial de facto online resource for the growing occupation movement happening on Wall Street and around the world. We’re an affinity group committed to doing technical support work for resistance movements. We’re not a subcommittee of the NYCGA (New York City general Assembly) nor affiliated with Adbusters, anonymous or any other organization.”

Ideology is slowly coming to the fore, and I discover that Philadelphia has a long Anarchist tradition.  I ponder whether that is why the space for Marxism and its offshoots has remained empty here in my home town where there is so much Brotherly Love.

The January 21st issue of The Economist has a fascinating supplement on State Capitalism: everything you need to know but didn’t know it. The daily news needs to be reframed in this context.

As rebellion ramps up across the world, for the same reasons as always – the trampling of the many by the few – leaders and pundits still think in terms of the old paradigms: capitalism vs socialism.  But there’s a new system taking shape which is no better than the old one and could be worse in terms of saving the planet.

Any system that relies on continued growth contributes to the end of the planet as a human habitat. Capitalism, socialism and state capitalism all belong in that category.

According to The Economist , under state capitalism, the state holds a significant share in major economic institutions and industries, enabling it to  regulate and encourage activities it deems in the national interest.  It is being practiced in China, Russia, Brazil, India, and through sovereign funds in Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, among others. Interestingly, the British conservative journal admits that ‘the long era of state activism has left a surprisingly powerful legacy’, mentioning that France’s electric company is 85% state-owned, Japan’s tobacco company is 50% owned by the government, and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom is 32% state-owned.  What it does not mention is that this situation evolved as part of Europe’s hundred plus year old history, of ‘enlightened’ state control over valuable resources and services.

As America’s railroads were being built by private money, Europe’s were built by nations.  Nineteenth century German Chancellor Bismarck invented the welfare state, and if Russia and China are today the foremost state capitalist systems, that is not unrelated to their communist past.

Humans will eventually breed themselves out of existence, thanks to ‘growth’, ‘progress’, and modern medicine (birth control having come too late), unless the pollution considered necessary to their survival is stopped. We have a choice between seeing 10 billion inhabitants living at an early  agricultural level by mid-century, or making drastic changes to our lifestyle now. (I beg science buffs not to dispute this deliberately grand generalization. Pay attention, instead, to the gist.)

The gist is that the choice is no longer between capitalism and socialism, but between state capitalism and decentralization. Between worldwide military/industrial/fascist power that is blinded by hubris, and small, participatory communities. Increasingly, some will try to overthrow the most powerful machine man has created, and others will build new ways of relating to one another, as they wait out the machine’s inevitable demise through war and depletion of the resources which enable it.

While the U.S. and Europe worry about the fate of their market economies, with Greece, the cradle of democracy, speeding to default, the new economic giants are inventing new ways to run their economies. The question is whether state capitalism will eventually contribute to saving the planet or not. And whether worldwide protesters and Occupiers will succeed in creating a different kind of society if they do not.

Today the Indian government proposed setting up a multilateral bank exclusively funded by developing nations to finance their projects. The proposal has been circulated to the BRIC group: Brazil, Russia, India and China – as well as to South Africa, and will be discussed alongside the meeting of Group of 20 finance ministers in Mexico City this weekend.

The World marches on without the Greatest Empire ever known.

Birgitta wrote: “Dear Deena Stryker - you can help by raising the awareness about the injustice all of us has to deal with by not having the same legal rights online as we have offline. Like someone said in relation to my case: we have all become Americans now- and not in a good way.”

BIRGITTA JONSDOTTIR, a major figure in the Icelandic Revolution and now parliamentarian, is in a legal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice over TWEETS!

She posted this message:

“Overview @EFF on my ongoing legal battle with the USA #DoJ in relation to my volunteer work for #WikiLeaks in 2010. https://t.co/H2W2TGMk.”

I hope readers will circulate this information.  It’s important for everyone.

As we watch, helpless, the Greatest Imperial Power the world has ever known is allowing itself to be propelled into the Greatest War Ever Fought in pursuit of the oil that will enable it to continue to grow until it snuffs out human life. The presence in the White House of an eminently educated, aware man, has been no match for the Darth Vader like forces intent on seeing the 99% march lemming-like off a cliff.

Hyperbole?  I don’t think so: Even in the good old days of the Cold War there were enough weapons around to wipe out most of humanity: now they have proliferated, and a very small country is playing a game of chicken with the rest of us, supposedly to save itself from annihilation. Israel has not signed the non-proliferation treaty, and no one (except perhaps our president) knows how many nuclear weapons and delivery systems it has. The Jewish state claims to fear annihilation by Iran, which claims it’s not producing weapons but nuclear fuel for the day when its oil runs out.  (Unrelatedly, but similarly, Greece, which teeters on the brink of a default which could, theoretically, bring down the carefully nurtured ten year old Euro system, claims, with similar dramatic emphasis, that it is being ‘threatened’ by a fellow NATO member, Turkey, forcing it to cut pensions and salaries in order to preserve its military budget. Is there something about Mediterranean peoples that inclines to overstatement?  The Greek-Turkey standoff has been going on for so long that it isn’t even worth my while to Google it. My eighties book on the (then) potential for reunification of Europe, has an annex on the Greek/Turkish standoff.  I haven’t revisited the issue since, but it seems that nothing has changed.  (Cyprus comes into this equation, but it is more complicated than that.)

The Sunni/Shi’a divide, epitomized by Iran and Saudi Arabia, as I pointed out in a recent blog, is as relevant to all of this as the survival of a small state that refuses to play nice because it has a powerful backer – or the geopolitics of oil. Iran had a democratically elected president in 1953, (Mossadegh) who was overthrown by the CIA.  Then, in the eighties, when Sunni-ruled Iraq waged an eight-year war on Shi’a Iran, we backed Iraq (under the same Saddam Hussein whom we would overthrow in 2003…). That ultimately gave us Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution (a modern outcome of Shi’a ideology). Iran’s client state Syria has been ruled by a Shi’te sect, the Alawites, for decades.  Putting an end to the civil war that opposes a mainly Sunni population to President Bashar Al Assad via military intervention of one type or another is not so much going to ‘isolate‘ Iran, as it will protect Israel. (Syria has been known as ‘the front-line state‘ by Palestinians and their supporters, because unlike Israel’s other border states – but like Iran – it has been a staunch Palestinian ally.)

European progressive blogs suggest the U.S. intends to choose a ship that has outlived its usefulness and sink it in the Straits of Hormuz, claiming it to be an act of war by Iran. If this sounds far-fetched, Franklin Roosevelt, who knew of the Japanese intent to bomb Pearl Harbor, moved our newer ships out of harm’s way.  And of course there was the shelling of the Maine off of Havana in 1898, used as a pretext for war with Spain and the acquisition of Cuba.

We can expect war with Iran and regime change in Syria, unless the thought of the combined capabilities of Russia and China forces Washington to rethink its justification for supporting Israel, right or wrong. Our closest ally Britain, is already involved in preserving the U.S. Sixth Fleet’s Bahrain base, where the ever down-trodden Shi’a of the Arab world are saying ‘Enough!‘  (A former high-ranking member of Scotland Yard, forced to resign in the wake of the Murdoch phone hacking scandal, quickly found new employment training the Gulf monarchy’s police…..)

While the U.S. is still behaving as though together with its allies like Israel and Great Britain, it dictates world outcomes, the world goes about its business without us. On February 20, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan held their third trilateral conference – this one focusing officially on counter-terrorism – in Islamabad, but also providing a venu for Iran to affirm its rights and its position in the region.

Brinksmanship is only justified in a world in which one major game is being played.  The information isolation of Americans, feeling safe between two giant seas, is a tragedy, for it leaves them ignorant of the other games being played on the world stage.

I recommend replacing MSNBC with Al Jazeera, which can be found once a day in most areas, and also, RT, the coy acronym for Russia’s English Service, which, with the participation of American and British journalists, gets Putin’s message across, but also much of importance to Americans.

Observers seem surprised that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has accepted to create a multi-party system, even as he goes on killing his people. A Facebook comment by a young Iranian woman a few days ago, tells why: all systems, all regimes, are equally undemocratic.

So Syria’s Russian allies must have suggested that a parliamen-tary system wouldn’t change anything, and after all, it’s an elegant way out.

Although that fact is staring them in the fact on their own streets, they didn’t realize that  the Syrian rebels, whoever they are, like the young Iranian woman on Facebook, have known for some time that democracy is only a word, and that in one way or another, to one extent or another, leaders always manage to get around it.

Until the 99% get the gist.

A month or so ago the media had fun with a shot of Mitt Romney crossing his legs as he tried to deal with an embarrassing question from an interviewer.

Today’s picture of President Obama meeting at the White House with the future president of China could give rise to similar comments, but except perhaps from Fox News, they are unlikely to be forthcoming.

Chinese vice-president Xi, a slightly burly man, sat obviously at ease legs apart, at the standard diagonal angle from his host, who could be observed with legs tightly crossed.

Meanwhile, in one of those serendipitousmoments, RT (Russian Television) showed Chinese president Hu Jintao receiving Europe’s financial leaders in Peking, where they had come to solicit help from the country they had brought to its knees with the Opium wars a hundred and fifty years ago.

Following the news, RT underlined the Shi’a/Sunni divide in Bahrain (see my  yesterday’s blog), and aired a smartly produced program entitled ‘The Spirit of Resistance’ about grass roots opposition to government and corporate greed in half a dozen developing countries.

And a retired army colonel, Douglass MacGregor, spoke brutally about the America’s continued presence in Iraq, saying Obama had capitulated over everything.

The program airs from Washington. Is there more to Obama’s crossed legs than meets the eye?

Yesterday’s news made me realize I had neglected a fifth item in my last blog.  Several channels mentioned the Shi’a in their coverage of the troubled Muslim countries of Bahrein, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria.  It should be clear by now that a very old antagonism hovers in the background of the story about oil.  Iran, Iraq and Azerbaijan are the largest majority Shi’a countries.  But Shi’a constitute nearly forty percent of the total Muslim population of the Middle East. The Shi’a arc begins in India, where they constitute around one third of the Muslim population of that predominantly Hindu country.  Shi’a constitute a majority in Azerbaijan, with significant minorities in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kurdistan. Iran and Iraq and tiny Bahrein have majority Shi’a populations. but Shi’a also make up over 35% of the population in Lebanon, over 45% in Yemen, approximately 30% in Kuwait, over 20% in Turkey, and 15% in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Roughly speaking, the Shi’a constitute a northern arc beginning in central Asia,  and encompassing up to 200 million people.

The Sunni arc occupies the southern rim of the Middle East and Near East landmass, starting at the tip of the Arabian peninsula in Yemen, and centered in Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Sunni country, where religious authority is held by the puritan Salafists, whose Wahhabism inspired Al Qaeda. Along the Mediterranean lies Egypt, which since the days of Nasser has had a strong national and secular component, followed by have the countries of the Magreb: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania, the Western Sahel and finally, up its west coast, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.

The Sunni/Shi’a fault line of the Eurasian continent where these two arcs meet is deepening, and the current fight over the future of Syria is the first round in a larger fight between Islam’s Sunnis and Shi’a as to which will dominate the Middle East. A resurgence of the traditionally down-trodden Shi’a across the Muslim world is a subset of the Arab Spring, but its ramifications go beyond the Arab or Muslim world.

Repeated visits by Iran’s President Ahmedinejad to Latin America do not seem incongruous if one considers the fact that Shi’ism has always been the revolutionary form of Islam, making it a natural ally of left-wing secular regimes, however far-flung.  In the seventh century, Mohammed’s cousin and designated successor, Ali, was brutally struck down by representatives of the merchant class. His followers, most of whom are ruled by wealthy Sunni majorities, represent the Muslim 99%.0   A must read if one is to understand the importance of Shi’ism today, is Resistance : The Essence of the Islamist Revolution by the British international civil servant Alastair Crooke. It gives the lie to lose talk about ‘terrorism’, and shows just how handicapped our diplomates would be in a philosophical conversation with them.

The Iranian Islamic revolution, changed the Shia–Sunni power equation in Muslim countries from Lebanon to India, arousing the traditionally subservient Shia, to the alarm of traditionally dominant Sunnis. What makes Syria unique is that it involves a reverse Sunni-Shi’a divide: strongly backed by Shi’a Iran, the Alawi minority, a Shi’a sect, rules over a majority Sunni population while its neighbor Lebanon, which it dominated militarily from 1975 to 2005, continues under the influence of Hezbollah, a fighting Shi’a minority.

When the veil of ignorance about Shi’ism is torn away, it becomes clear why both Russia and China have opposed strong measures against Syria: In a special section of the January 21st Economist , both these superpowers are described as paragons of State Capitalism.  What is significant about this assessment by a conservative publication is that the purpose of State Capitalism is to create greater equality among the classes. (On a more prosaic note, Russia must also bear in mind the majority Shi’a population in Azerbaijan, and China must be mindful of the 2% of Muslims, located mainly in the areas that border Central Asia, Tibet and Mongolia, i.e. Xinjiang, Ningxia, Gansu and Qinighai provinces,  known as the “Quran Belt”.

America’s commitment to Israel – the main thing that interests many Americans  - must be seen in this light. It was born of belated shame for Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to grant asylum to Jews being slaughtered by Hitler.  Then, as things evolved in the neighborhood of the Jewish Homeland, Israel, founded on modern, democratiic principles, was our natural ally against the majority Others: ‘backward’ Arabs, whose oil we coveted.  The Janus tail of oil supply and Zionism is now wagging the American dog, forcing us to permit behavior by the one that endangers the other.

It is folly to believe that we can somehow make everything right for Israel, but if we follow the daily news, we can see that America is determined to steer the political turmoil among her neighbors to its advantage. There is nothing new about this.  The Eurozone crisis is the long-term consequence of America’s post-World War II domination of Western Europe, which began with the ‘generous’ Marshall Plan: we saved Europe from the Nazis in order to remake it in our cowboy capitalist image. Then, using the tools of the late twentieth century, we did the same to Eastern Europe. Now, as the European 99% rebel against the world America created, and the remedies being forced down their throats after its failure, we are determined to steer the Arab Spring toward political/financial regimes that will espouse that model.

Fortunately for us and for them, its people see the writing on the wall.

Events come thick and fast.  No time to write every day.  So here are four briefs, each of which do not, in my opinion, warrant 500 words from me, because others provide that.  What they don’t provide are the backstories:

1) Greedy Bastards: Kudos to MSNBC’s Dylan Rattigan for showing that there are solutions to most every problem, and when individuals decide to find them, they can.  One comment: greedy doesn’t just happen, didn’t even just happen because one thing led to another and people had fun playing with other people’s lives: American Greed is forged in the classroom: what else to expect when, from nursery school on, kids are taught to do better than their piers, to come out on top, to win the prize.  In the recent Nation (Nov, 16th 2011) marking 20 years since the overthrow of the Soviet Union, Russians are reported as often being nostalgic for the sense of solidarity that was part of the Communist ethos (if not always practiced by the State).  Anna Makarenko, the great Soviet educator of the early 20th century, gave Soviet education a firm basis in cooperation.  Our system couldn’t be more different.

2) The turmoil the world is experiencing has two layers(inadvertent shades of Marx…): the economic layer is recognized as a worldwide phenomenon, hurting the poor and the poverty-stricken in every nation.  But there is a deeper layer, whether North or South, East or West, and that is religion.  In the Middle Ages Christians fought Muslims for hundreds of years, embarking on veritable ‘crusades’.  But only listen to the Tea Party’s latest standard-bearer, Rick Santorum, and it’s clear that the United States is in the midst of a home-grown religious crusade, even while it fights Muslims abroad. And the fervor is matched.  (I agree that the religious war has been reawakened partly to counter improving employment numbers, with a view ousting Obama in November. (Although Born-Again Christianity has made inroads abroad, it is unlikely to every be as powerful in secular-minded Europe as in Africa or Latin America, but nonetheless, the world is embroiled in a financial crisis doubled with a multi-pronged religious war.)

3) Religions are not people. Probably inspired by Mitt Romney’s famous quip that corporations are people, Rick Santorum (again) appears determined to establish that religions, too, are people, and should not have to pay for health care items that contradict ‘its’ conscience. (We used to say, its teachings, but note the slippery slope among Catholic opponents of the President’s new initiative.)

4) Finally, to understand what is happening in Syria, look at Egypt.  These two countries are the most powerful of Israel’s neighbors: for decades we paid handsomely to keep Egypt at least neutral where Israel was concerned.  Now the Egyptian people have overthrown the ruler we pampered, and are determined to have their say in their country’s policies.  It’s not the Muslim Brotherhood that is to be feared, nor even the Salafists per se, but the momentum built up by people who have lost their fear. No matter who sits at the top of the pyramid, Egypt can no longer be expected to support Israel, as it continues to cut off it nose to spite its face.  By arresting NGO workers and threatening to put them on trial, Egypt’s new rulers are taking a page from Iran, which arrested and tried American tourists (who, contrary to the aid workers in Egypt, were most likely just tourists).

Whatever the way they treat their people, Egypt’s (‘interim’) rulers have every reason to suspect that with Mubarak gone, the United States is trying desperately to ensure their loyalty, by, among other means, enlisting the cooperation of NGO workers (such as the son of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood).

The situation in Egypt leads to a very plausible suspicion that the uprising in Syria has been aided and abetted by the United States.  It is likely that a considerable number of Syrians are fed up with their government for any number of reasons, be they religious, tribal or economic. But is it unlikely that American agents infiltrated from Israel – or when possible from Lebanon – have had a hand in encouraging and perhaps arming their discontent? I find that irresistibly plausible.  Just think of the increased danger Israel has been in since the birth, a year ago, of the Arab Spring. Aside from that, not a day goes by without Israel and its protector, the United States, threatening Iran, because that country could eventually produce the nuclear weapons that Israel already has.  If Israel were to give in to its worst demons and actually assault Iran, would it not feel more secure if the Egyptian and Syrian governments could be counted on to remain neutral?

The prospects are currently not good in Egypt.  All the more reason for the White House, yesterday, to have mooted, for the first time, the possibility of considering some form of armed intervention against Syria’s Assad. Several news channels (perhaps the BBC and CNN – or maybe Democracy Now) showed a young Syrian man pointing to what was either a wounded or a dead young child, asking “How many Syrians have to die before you come to our rescue?”

That sounded very much like the anguished plea of someone who was led to expect Western support.