When was the last time the leaders of the world’s major players succeeded each other in Washington over a critical situation?  You probably can’t remember and neither can I.

Since World War II, Washington has been the uncontested locus of world diplomacy (though the U.N. meets in New York….).  Every sitting American President has been photographed in the Oval Office dispensing American advice – but more often orders – to his counterparts around the globe.

Recently, America’s foremost critics of U.S. foreign policies and domestic power have stepped up their public pronouncements, identifying the United States as a police state and challenging the Obama administration in court. However they do not appear to have noticed a sea change: it is now President Putin who receives his peers one after the other in search of a solution to the Syrian crisis. This shift is not due to Russia’s power along, but rather a function of the rise of the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, an alliance whose clout the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge.  Its members have different types of governments, but they agree on the need to curb aggression and save the planet from a climate  meltdown. Crises in China’s back yard will see Peking in the forefront. As the country geographically closest to the Middle-Eastern crisis, it is Russia that takes the lead.

In the last two weeks, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, British Prime Minister David Cameron, U.N. Secretary Ban Ki Moon have journeyed  in turn to Sochi, a resort on the Black Sea, to meet with Vladimir Putin. The last time anything remotely similar happened was in February, 1945 when the Big Three (Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union) meet at Yalta, another Black Sea resort, to discuss the future of soon to be liberated Europe.

The Yalta Conference would go down in history as the event that sealed the fate of Eastern Europe, leading to a Cold War that lasted until 1991, when the Soviet Union imploded, Eastern Europe having emerged from behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ starting in 1989.

At the time of ‘Yalta’ no one could have imagined the world would witness a period even more violent than the Second World War, in which not one, but many rulers would resort to the methods ‘copyrighted’ by the Nazis, but that is the situation we’re now living. The Russian President has an even bigger job on his hands than did Roosevelt and Truman, because in 1945 the world’s population was only 2 billion, whereas now it is more than 7 billion. About half that number are fighting to maintain a way of life organized around religion (Being), while the other half relentlessly pursues their resources in order to further a way of life organized around consumption (Having), which they want no part of.

There are also small groups of individuals in the ‘modern’ world who recognize they are riding on a runaway train, as Morris Berman put it in his recent work ‘Why America Failed’. Led by intellectuals like Berman and Chris Hedges, they can protest till the cows come home, their efforts will be in vain. For the arrow of time is irreversible, and the only thing that puts its forward movement on a different trajectory is a significant increase in the flow of energy through the system. In political terms, that flow of energy is called revolution, and no existential impasse has ended without it.

P.S. For a detailed discussion of the applicability of systems theory to politics, see A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness

A female advisor to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad speaks to Sophie Shevardnadze on RT today.  The program also airedyesterday, but I had muted my TV as I wrote.  Today I listened to it from start to finish, and the final words were an emphatic statement that the crux of the entire Middle East situation was the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the specific importance of Syria being its alliance with Hezbollah.  Sorry I didn’t note the woman’s name: she made a lot of sense.

Israel is not so much ‘in the eye of the Middle East storm’ as it is the eye of the storm.

The wave of terrorism that struck the world in 2001 has many causes, among them poverty and foreign exploitation of mineral wealth, which can easily be exploited by religious extremists. However, the Western media’s decades-long near silence on the Israeli occupation of land attributed by the United Nations to the Palestinians, removes from the public perception of the ‘war on terror’ a vital element that can be added to any grievance on the part of Muslim populations: the unlawful subjugation of one member of that community.

As I write this, Peter Lavelle’s ‘Crosstalk’ on RT discusses the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and its shocking insistence on continuing to build settlements on land that was intended by the international community to be part of a Palestinian state, while accusing the Palestinians of refusing to restart negotiations.

Given its geographic position, surrounded by Muslim countries in the throes of revolt against their respective governments, the Jewish state would appear to be in existential danger, not from Iran, but from its neighbors on all sides. The fact that life goes on as usual suggests that Israel will feel invulnerable as long as it can count on unconditional American support.

Opponents of that support need to realize that the American government’s decades-long policy is not so much about saving Israel from its neighbors as it is about keeping those neighbors’ governments in the hands friendly to us for as long as possible. Israel’s prowess in IT, weaponry and spying (a word I prefer to the euphemistic ‘intelligence’) is never mentioned by the press, yet as Andrew Bacevich pointed out in a recent op-ed piece: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-we-became-israel/, Israel and the United States share not only know-how but fundamental attitudes toward war.

It is truly astonishing that activists continue to indict Israel’s supposed ‘hold’ on American foreign policy, when the relationship between this giant and its David is clearly one of mutual benefit, and for that reason not about to end any time soon.  Washington evidently feels that the value Israel brings to its ability to destabilize, attack and occupy countries of economic interest out weights the inconvenience that Israel’s behavior toward those countries represents, certain of the ability of the two countries joint strategic resources to overcome any foe.

Since I began watching Russia Today – referred to by American politicians as ‘Putin’s Channel’ – I’ve been trying to figure out what the Russian President’s message is.

A recent guest of Thom Hartmann’s confirmed what I have been writing here: although Russia’s switch to capitalism began with a free-for-all, with its industries auctioned off to a clique of oligarchs, twenty-some years later, ‘Putin’s channel’ promotes a healthy mix of cooperation and competition. Steve Keen, author of ‘Debunking Economics” says the U.S. needs to return to making stuff rather than playing with financial bubbles. Another recent TV guest, economist Peter Brian Henry Dean of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, and author of the new book ‘Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth” noted that cooperation was indispensable to early American success, and points out that during the Cold War the Soviet Union promoted cooperation but failed to provide a framework for competition, while the U.S. did the opposite. Noting that both countries had to add their respective missing element, he added that Russia has embraced economic competition while maintaining the socialist inspired commitment to political cooperation embodied by the United Nations. The United States however continues to condemn social spending at both the domestic level and in its choice of foreign governments to back.

RT Documentaries on both foreign and domestic subjects suggest that Putin’s vision is a capitalism that harks back to FDR, where the 99% were protected from the excesses of the 1%. However, he’s not only concerned about politics and economics: the Russian leader appears to also hanker after an era when ‘fun’ was ‘clean’ and families were intact.  (The Pussy Riot trial is less a defense of religion than the belief that all freedoms have limits, in contradiction to Washington’s unqualified commitment to the First Amendment.)

I can’t conclude this article without mentioning the fact that the state of modern society, characterized by unlimited freedom, is what most troubles Muslims, hardening retrograde attitudes among Muslim clerics, delaying both women’s emancipation and democratization.

Egyptian President Morsi’s recent troubles over death sentences meted out to football fans who caused the deaths of seventy people exemplifies the Muslim Brotherhood’s determination to preserve the respect for the lives of others that characterizes all religions, as opposed to Western acquiescence to ‘anything goes’.

Capitalism provides the practical conditions for innovation, but the world as a whole only benefits when it is practiced within a framework of cooperation, and the same is true of societies.

P.S. Over the weekend, the new Chinese Premier Li Keqiang made the following statement at a press conference: “Our government will work with the Obama administration to build a new type of relationship between great countries.”   He also condemned confrontation, particularly in cyberspace: “I think we should not make groundless accusations against each other, and spend more time doing practical things that will contribute to cyber-security,”

> A Palestinian leader being warmly received in Moscow.

> China deciding to provide better social services.

> Latin American guerrillas educating peasants.

These are three stories that are in the news today.  The first and third are covered by RT, and I came across the second on a CNN web page devoted to China.

Predictably, the CNN story has a business focus;   however unlike the attitude of American business toward health benefits, which it tacitly approves (“The country can’t afford them”), the story on China emphasizes the benefit better health coverage will bring to the Chinese economy: people will spend more on consumer goods instead of saving for health needs. True to the basic tenet of American journalism, which often enables subliminal messages, CNN does not comment on the difference between the American and Chinese views on the economic advantages of subsidized health care.

The third story, featured on RT, is about the complex relations between independent gold miners in Columbia, the FARC guerrillas, and foreign mineral companies.  With the price of gold soaring, the long-standing tradition of small-scale mining – now carried out with the help of cell phones – has entered into conflict with large companies. The documentary moves from detailed coverage of the mining process and its health hazards, to political education and adjudication of village squabbles by modern day versions of Cuba’s guerrilla fighters, assisted by laptops.

As for the first story, you have to be old enough to remember the Cold War to appreciate its irony: During that period, Moscow and Washington vied for influence in the Third World, and each had its client states and allies. Since then, most third world countries have come to see Washington as an adversary that is either out for its resources or raining bombs. These countries are once again looking to Moscow, no longer to emulate its centralized economic system, but because Russia opposes Washington’s aggressive stance. The presence of Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian head of the Israeli occupied West Bank reflects Russia’s support for the Palestinians, in direct opposition to America’s support for Israel, even as it relentlessly pursues its goal of ridding Palestine of its historical inhabitants in defiance of international law.

Broadly speaking, unlike the Cold War period, when Peking’s Communist party looked to Moscow as a Big Brother, the twenty-first century finds the two countries allied against Washington – even though one is still under Communist rule, while the other seeks to tame capitalism. Neither ideological nor cultural differences now prevent Peking and Moscow from forming a common front against Washington and backing the demands of the 120 Third World countries newly organized under the banner of the fifty year old Non-Aligned Movement.

The deja vu is stunning – but not nearly as much so as the planetary transformation it reflects and its implications for an American foreign policy focused on domination rather than cooperation.

Maybe Washington isn’t sure which strings to pull today in Egypt: a propos the violent appearance of a Black Bloc (the current international anarchist label) in Egypt detailed yesterday, the New York Times today bent over backwards to play down that development.  Commenting on President Morsi’s trip toGermany to solicit financial help, the Times writes:

“At several public appearances, Mr. Morsi appeared defensive while describing the situation in Egypt. He attributed much of the violence to remnants of Egypt’s deposed government, or so-called infiltrators, including a little-known group that the Egyptian authorities have turned into a scapegoat and called a national security threat.  (In my book a scapegoat is usually a victim, certainly not a threat. Of course a second degree reading would imply that Morsi is trying to blame the anarchists for the desperate situation of his country, still…)

Oblivious to its deteriorating writing standards, the Times continues:

“On Tuesday, Egypt’s public prosecutor declared that the group, which calls itself the Black Bloc, was a terrorist organization and issued warrants for its members’ arrests. Five people were detained on Wednesday, state news media reported.”

So now a movement that is active worldwide, including the U.S., becomes a nickname for an obscure bunch of Egyptian agitators who however constitute a ‘national security threat’.

Yesterday I wrote that Washington is probably pulling many strings in Egypt – anything to keep the country under its influence and prevent it from denouncing its treaty with Israel.  It would now appears to have realized that the situation is so bad in Egypt, as it goes through the painful transition to a pluralistic society, that highlighting the existence of a worldwide anti-authoritarian movement only hurts America’s cause.

As Israel launches attacks in Syria, and dismisses the UN Human Rights quadrennial review that termed West Bank settlements a violation of international law, requiring the immediate withdrawal of all Israelis from the occupied territory, the threat from Egypt’s fledgling Black Bloc pales in comparison to the rising stakes in the neighborhood.

But as I wrote yesterday, it’s important to take the long view of the gist.

What’s this?  The New York Times today ran an extensive story about the new group on the protest scene in Egypt called The Black Bloc, (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/world/middleeast/egypt-protests.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig) while RT and France 24 both ignore the anarchist group that claims to have 20,000 members and is causing the military to warn that the country risks disintegrating.

Digging into on-line news outlets, I found that the BBC did a lengthy story on the Black Bloc last Sunday January 28, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-21228852), but appears to have dropped the story since.

Cautious observers will claim that it is too soon to pronounce this an important development, but my sense of ‘the gist’ tells me that the appearance of a Muslim anarchist group marks a watershed. It is one more indication that we are witnessing a worldwide cultural conflict between vulgar consu-merism on one hand and aspirations for a better life that includes a higher moral plane. In Egypt that moral plane is embodied by Islam, but its foundation is the same as that espoused by Black Bloc movements worldwide, whose public face, by the way, is called Anonymous.

In a few days the reason for the news blackout that does not follow the usual international dichotomy should become clear.  My first guess is that the U.S. is probably pulling many strings in the largest Muslim country in the Middle East which is also Israel’s neighbor.

I saw it twice, so I’m not imagining things: President Obama’s affirmation that international affairs do not have to be solved through war elicited no reaction from the public on the Washington Mall.

That same public reacted enthusiastically to Obama’s endorsements of solidarity, education, immigration reform, gay rights, and even global warming.  But the the faces in the crowd looked perplexed at the announcement from its president that the United States – which has a thousand foreign military bases – does not have to resort to war in its dealings with the wider world.

This would seem to indicate that the devoted work of peace groups around the country is not reaching those who braved the cold to watch the President take office for the second time amidst growing U.S. involvement in disputes around the globe.

In 2012, the most over-worked words in the American vocabulary were ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’.  But the meaning of the words has become distorted beyond recognition.

Legislation adopted by various government agencies since 9/11 shows that the ‘war on terror’ is not about territory or resources, but about ideology, More precisely it is about the fear that activists could turn a significant portion of the American population against the system of winner-take-all capitalism.

Section 802 of the Patriot Act signed into law by President Bush in 2006 was expanded on October 26, 2011 by President Obama to include domestic as opposed to international terrorism. A person engages in domestic terrorism if, within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, he/she commits an act “dangerous to human life”, (…) that “appears to be intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping’.

The FBI definition also includes the words ‘to intimidate or coerce a government in furtherance of political or social objectives’. And the latest Homeland Security definition refers to any “act that is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive to critical infrastructure or key resources … intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

If the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack can rightly be called terrorists, groups and individuals whose aspirations and beliefs conflict with those of official America cannot. Yet in the most widely reported example, the deliberately non-violent Occupy movement has been infiltrated, pepper sprayed, clubbed and jailed. At the start of the new year we learned that an August 2011 memo from the F.B.I.’s New York field office describes how its personnel discussed “the planned Anarchist protest titled ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ scheduled for September 17, 2011” with New York Stock Exchange officials. In the United States, ‘terrorist’ is equated with ‘anarchist’.

Though Americans have relatively short historical recall, this coupling harks back to two early twentieth century events: the political assassination that led to the First World War, and the conviction for murder of two Italian immigrants in the 1920‘s widely believed to have been motivated by the men’s anarchist beliefs.

The 1920’s also saw a bloody Jewish campaign to free Mandate Palestine from British rule, carried out by the Haganah and the Irgun. The latter’s motto ‘only thus’ was inscribed beneath a hand holding a rifle against a map of mandatory Palestine, openly suggesting that force was the only way to “liberate the homeland”.

This campaign was echoed by underground movements that thwarted German occupations during the Second World War. As in the case of the Jewish militias, the organizations involved were not called terrorists, but ‘paramilitary’ organizations.

Undeterred by logic, the current government of Israel, along with the United States, Canada, the European Union, Turkey and Japan, calls Hamas a terrorist organization, while the Arab nations, Iran, Russia, Norway, Switzerland, the United Nations and most Latin American countries  do not.

America’s fear of outsiders and foreign ideologies did not begin with the 9/11 attack, nor even with the Cold War against Communism. Declaration of Independence states that “…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, ….evinces a design to reduce (men) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.’ Fear that citizens could attempt to change the United States’ form of government followed almost immediately upon its adoption.

Two decades later, in the 1790s , the United States was on the brink of war with France and the government feared that aliens living in the United States would aid the French side. Congress easily passed four laws, known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts, that raised the residency requirements for citizenship from 5 to 14 years, and permitted the arrest, imprisonment, and deportation of aliens during wartime. The Seditions Act made it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the Government.

After the attack of 9/11, fear of subversion gave rise to legislation that not only makes a mockery of the Declaration of Independence, but, in the tradition of the Aliens and Seditions Act directly contradicts the judicial guarantees of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the Constitution. Confronted with non-state actors with worldwide ambitions, the age-old American fear of foreigners metastasized: Both Bush and Obama cast aside the centuries’ old tradition of British common law known as Habeas Corpus, which protects citizens from unjust imprisonment.

Every American President takes an oath to defend the Constitution, yet the government is now free to read personal emails, listen to our phone conversations, train cameras on us in the street or eavesdrop on public transportation. The mere voicing of dissent qualifies as terrorism and can land any citizen in jail without charge or hearing for the rest of his life. In a typical slight of hand, the increasingly interchangeable use of the term “extremist” – which originally applies to political views – and “terrorist” fosters public acquiescence of these measures in the name of si-called ‘national security’.

In 2011 on New Year’s Eve, Barack Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the government to detain Americans without criminal charge or trial. This year, and again on the eve of the New Year, Obama renewed for five years the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to keep people locked up for as long as it wants without providing any evidence of wrong-doing, and to assassinate American citizens without trial.

Thus has the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ been transformed into the land of the fearful and the home of the meek.

Today the big news for me is that Fareed Zakaria has been allowed to inform his listeners that the best countries to live in are those of Scandinavia!  And this was no passing remark.  The CNN talk show host used the United States’ low grades in everything from education to health care compared to other countries to explain that although Sweden, Denmark and Norway tax more than other developed countries, their citizens are better educated and have the highest standard of living in the world.  Departing from the decades-long dismissal of the northern welfare states as both unsustainable and too expensive, Zakaria admitted that taxes are high, but in return no one is left in need.  At a time when austerity is rampant elsewhere these countries would not consider putting limits on unemployment compensation or other supports to those in need.

The fact that a widely watched TV host can now provide these facts without being obligated to add a strong of negatives or condemnation is the equivalent of a ship initiating a one hundred and eighty degree turn. We know this can only be done gradually because ships are cumbersome, but hopefully, this ship represents a different second term for Obama.

An ever so slight change in Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s tone vis a vis Israel following the UN decision to grant Palestine non-member observer status – which implies recognition – was con-demned by the U.S., however that condemnation was followed by an equally unmistakable condemnation of Israel for initiating building 3,000 new settlements which would cut the occupied West Bank in two, virtually foreclosing any possibility of a two-state solution.

Although mainstream television can talk of nothing but the fiscal cliff, the real news these days is that notwithstanding very scary contradictions, the American ship of state may at last be slowly beginning to turn toward the rest of the world.

The bad news today on RT is of renewed chaos in Egypt, of Syrian rebels threatening to use chemical weapons, as an 8,000 man US troop carrier heads for the Syrian coast. The good news is that privately-owned U.S. prisons are the perfect answer to outsourcing. People the free market doesn’t have jobs for are locked up on the slightest charge, where, in privately-owned prisons they complete with third world factories making clothes and other items for big box stores and designers, raking in billions for their keepers.

For MSNBC and its sisters, the world is limited to the debate over the ‘fiscal cliff’. Maybe that’s because even as Mitch McConnell clings to the Republican hard line, stocks rise. The bad news is that Obama’s quest for middle class tax breaks is as elusive as King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail. The good news is that England’s future queen Kate got her morning sickness under control, and can be seen leaning weakly on William’s arm.

No less importantly, talks jointly sponsored with Norway between the FARC rebels and the Columbian government entered their second round in Havana, as North Korea prepares to launch a long-range rocket.

Luckily, NASA issued a statement affirming that contrary to Mayan predictions, the world is not going to end on December 21st ‘or any time this year”. So what’s not to like?  After all, Pearl Harbor was seventy-one years ago!

This morning, as usual, I got up and turned on the TV to RT’s hourly news. Seeing reports of violent clashes in Egypt following approval of President Morsi’s constitution, I think: “The US has got to have a hand in this.”  For days I had been guessing that it was probably not fortuitous that Morsi gave himself sweeping powers right after playing a major role in diffusing the Israeli threat to invade Gaza, after eight days of horrific bombing.  But I hadn’t completed the thought. Now I was hearing on RT that indeed that connection exists, and big time.

According to the commentator, Morsi’s Gaza intervention established his bona fides as a valuable partner in America’s quest for Middle East control: We have to abandon our erstwhile right-wing allies because the Arab street simply will not tolerate them any longer, but better they be replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, the ‘con-servative’ Islamic party, than by the Salafists – or socialists. In any case, Morsi knew that the US would not intervene on the side of the Egyptian street if he gave himself sweeping powers.  The quid pro quo was seen today with Hillary Clinton taking the Israelis to task for announcing the building of 3,000 new homes in the occupied West Bank.

Let’s see if this scenario plays out.