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.

Finally!

World-renknowned economist Jeffrey Sachs who, among other things, administered shock treatment to one of the Eastern European countries after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, has now come to realize that this is not the right path. He supports the OWS movement.

On Fareed Zakaria’s GPS today he stated clearly that countries need a mixed economy, a collaboration between government and business.  He duked it out calmly but convincingly with British conservative economist Niall Ferguson, a leading proponent of the argument that the 1% create jobs, and a regular on GPS.

I have been waiting for a long time for someone authoritative to come out of the closet on this, and Sachs made my day.  He stated that other developed countries, including those in Europe, having significantly higher tax rates than the U.S., which allows their governments to invest in infrastructure, education, health, and housing.

Having lived in half a dozen European countries (on both sides of the then Iron Curtain) I have been trying to get this message across to my compatriots.  But who am I?

Here is an excerpt from Sach’s bio as it appears on the home page of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/1770:

“Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation.  For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing.  He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.”

Ironically, Zakaria chose to end his program with the news that Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was reelected by a landslide, after continuing her dead husband’s social democratic economic policies.  The Nestor de Kirchner brought the party that grew out of the Peronist movement into the Socialist International.

Under the two Kirchners, Argentina went in ten years from a failed economy to 9% annual growth.  Zakaria felt obliged to close on a familiar note of warning: inflation is creeping up in Argentina, and soon it will be time for a reckoning.

I am not an economist, but I would bet that economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman would tell Zakaria that it is possible to tinker with the system to prevent inflation from getting out of control.

Today Fareed Zakaria interviewed various ‘experts’ on how to get America back on its feet: the diagnosis was severe, but all his guests agreed that if we do the right things, America’s best days are ahead.  (Never mind that, according to Tom Friedman, we are not only behind China, but also Brazil… And never mind that the fault lies as much with the media as with government.)

Sadly, From what I’m reading about New York and witnessing in Philadelphia, the much hoped for movement on the left that could be the counterpart to the Tea Party, shows the same lack of ideological literacy. Both want to ‘take back America’, one focusing on bootstraps, the other on cumbaya. The Tea Party thinks we can return to the early days of the country, when almost anyone could get rich if he were shrewd. The Occupy Wall Street and Move to Amend (the Constitution) movements model their demands on the Declaration of Independence, emphasizing the right of the people to be heard, but failing to mention the right to overthrow a government that doesn’t hear them.

With different emphases, both movements are about preserving a three hundred year old ‘liberal’ system.  The Tea Party sees solidarity as individual subordination to ‘the state’, urging competition and personal responsibility; the Occupiers also decry behemoth government, but  rather than calling for states ‘rights’ they favor decentralization, local power and cooperation. Both are out of synch with the rest of the world, which, starting more than a century ago, has tended to replace ‘liberalism’ with various forms of social democracy, based on cooperation and solidarity.

Pundits harp on the shortcomings of our system of education: not enough math and science (never mind that reading is at an abysmal level). Never do they mention the social sciences, the history, geography and economics of various governing systems. A pretty teenager at the occupation of Philadelphia’s City Hall held a sign that read: “Let’s Remain Focused and Not be Like The Tea Party”. I could not convince her that what made the Tea Party dangerous was precisely its ability to focus.

The suggested amendments to the Constitution and the list of grievances of the Occupy movement constitute a good start.  But to think that the present economic system can be reformed is as much a misconception as the one that led to Mikhail Gorbachev’s downfall. Believing the Soviet system could be reformed, he was ousted by Boris Yeltsin, who understood that it wasn’t meeting the needs of the people. But central planning was replaced in Russia and Eastern Europe by the American free market system instead of the social democratic systems that had brought prosperity to Northern and Western Europe, making them vulnerable when the financial bubble burst.

Unless the occupy movement accepts that it is indeed engaged in a mighty class war, it will be co-opted. Here’s an excerpt from Van Jones’ ‘Take Back the American Dream’ Conference of October 4th:

“A coalition of liberal organizations are planning to push for a liberal agenda and recruit progressive politicians at every level of government — with or without President Obama.

Taking hold of the momentum generated by the “Occupy Wall Street” protests occurring across the country, the liberal leaders have drafted plans to implement what they call an “American Autumn” — a realignment of American politics inspired by the pro-democracy protests in the Middle East dubbed the “Arab Spring.”

Really? Do Robert Reich and Jan Schakowsky think we can solve our problems by bringing together various shades of liberalism, as opposed to the ‘messy’ mix of liberals, communists, socialists, sunnis, shi’as, salafists, copts and others who together are trying to overthrow their authoritarian/liberal regimes?

Thanks partly to the failure of our mainstream media to inform and enlighten, most of the participants in our protest movements do not know that even when the European right governs, it cannot eliminate the gains made by working people in the last century. The demonstrations in Europe are presented as betrayals of the liberal cause, requiring IMF style austerity measures. But Europe’s financial crisis follows on the siren’s call of deregulation in a script written by the United States. Our ‘occupy’ movement should emulate the people of Europe, by affirming the superiority of cooperation over competition and solidarity over profit. After all, even liberalism’s star performer Tom Friedman touts a public/private system, only he doesn’t call it social democracy – yet.

On the BBC website:

“Concerns over Israel-Gaza unrest

International concern is growing over the upsurge of violence between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces, as cross-border attacks continue.”

Concurrently, Fareed Zakaria’s GPS hosted Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jeffrey Sachs, the international economist, among others, for a surprisingly frank discussion of world chaos.  Bravo!

Rarely has one talk show furnished so much material for a comment as Fareed Zakaria’s GPS today.

The progressive economist Robert Reich, whose new book is ‘Aftershock’, was pitted against Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, in a contentious discussion of what to do to save the country from financial collapse. When I tuned in, Stockman was warning that we risk the same fate as Europe, which is currently trying to save Greece from default and the Euro with it.

True to form, Robert Reich was saying all the right things about the U.S., but still doesn’t have the nerve to say the one thing about Europe that might make people sit up and listen: Europe’s financial crisis happened because its money men went along with ours.

Recent derogatory references to Europe include one from Newt Gingrich, who described Obama as ‘a European-type socialist’.  This is intended to counter the news that the Europeans have solid safety nets. Instead of providing moral arguments against free health care and long unemployment benefits, Gingrich warns that if we were to implement Keynesian measures, putting the unemployed to work on much-needed government projects, WE WOULD END UP LIKE EUROPE, which is facing the debacle of its currency.  What an incredibly misleading short-cut!

I’m betting right here that the Euro is not going to fail, because the countries that use it have powers over their financial systems that we cannot even dream of. Notwith-standing France’s reputation for frivolity – lately embodied by the man who was tipped to be the next, socialist president and known familiarly as DSK – France placed highest on a graph in this week’s ‘Economist’ that reflects the amount of money spent on social programs – even higher than Sweden and Germany.  (Tellingly, the U.S. doesn’t even appear on the chart.)  France’s unemployment rate is also the highest among the countries listed, at 9.1%.  But it was consistently around 10% during the eighties and nineties, when I was living there! At that time, Minister of Labor Martine Aubry bucked the right-wing opposition to lower the work week from 40 to 35 hours, where it has been ever since, and as ‘The Economist’ admits, no one goes hungry in France.

Iceland was the first country to go broke, a couple of years ago, but it quickly – and publicly – recognized that it had created a financial bubble by joining American schemes. Zakaria announced that Iceland is rewriting its constitution. Iceland’s first parliament goes back to the tenth century, its first formal constitution dates from 1849.  Now the people have decided to stop amending it, and to crowd-source a new one. Suggestions made on social media are discussed and voted by a constitutional council on television. Readers familiar with Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’ will recall that Iceland was his prime example of a country extinguishing itself. The Islanders remember their history.

Currently, there is a campaign in the U.S. Congress to increase the number of hours high school students are allowed to work, because they can be paid less than adults, while  David Stockman’s opposition to government works programs was: ‘The bond market won’t tolerate it’. An in-your-face affirmation of the upside-down values we allow ourselves to be governed by.

Not to mention our lack of information. When Fareed Zakaria interviewed experts on Syria and Iran, we learned that the Syrian regime is likely to endure because it has a serious base of support. As usual, we were not given the explanation for that support, which is that the ruling Ba’ath Party considers itself a socialist party. Nor were we told that the oft-mentioned cozy relationship between Syria and Iran is due to the fact that the Shi’a, Iran’s majority, represent the left-wing of Islam – which is why the working class by and large supports Ahmedinejad.

(When we wonder why Russia is reluctant to back military action against Libya – and why it defended Milosevic’s ‘socialist’ Serbia – we have to see past its recent transformation into a market economy, to five hundred years of Mongol occupation, where everything belonged to the government and princes were expected to serve the Khan. Turkey also came under Mongol rule in the thirteenth century, so its cooperation with socialist-led Brazil in trying to broker a deal that would allow Iran to ship its nuclear waste abroad for reprocessing, is not surprising.  Most peoples have internalized their history, Americans perhaps less than most, when you consider that we are witnessing a new McCarthyism.)

The latest wrinkle on the Iranian political scene is the rift between Ahmedinejad and the cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the ‘supreme leader’, who condemns “deviation, liberalism, and American-influenced leftists”. (A phrase to ponder at some future date.) According to Maziar Bahari, an Iranian Canadian journalist, (‘And Then They Came for Me’) , Ahmedinejad’s latest retort to the man who is officially his superior, is that Iranians can communicate directly with the Shi’a’s future savior, the Twelfth Imam, without mediation by a cleric. Will Shi’a Islam have its own Reformation?

If you think that’s far-fetched, a sorry report in the latest ‘Mother Jones’ entitled ‘Escape from Missouri’ describes a growing trend among born-again American Protestants to send their wayward daughters to girls’ institutions run along religious lines that practice unbelievable cruelty. I can’t help comparing this with traditional Muslim treatment of women.

Finally, I need to add this, because I’ve known it without having any references for it: This week’s ‘Banyan’ page in ‘The Economist’ looks into the origins of Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s idea of a “harmonious society’: the golden age of Chinese philosophy when Confucius and Lao Tse called for “Utopian visions of universal harmony”. The Peking-based philosopher Zhao Tingyang admits that harmony will be out of reach for 200-300 years, when countries will opt for a system of world government. Too bad we won’t be around to see it.