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!

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?

My June 21st blog was titled: ‘My Bet is on Huntsman’.

Since declaring, he has been kept out of the limelight, either by decision of the media, or by his own strategy.  It has been amusing to see how, every once in a while, his name would be mentioned, followed by the dismissive comment that nobody knows who he is.

Of late, his name has been mentioned more often, and he has even been shown campaigning.  A little.

Last night he got full exposure with a bantering yet probing interview by Piers Morgan, which both men seemed to enjoy.

Huntsman enumerated all the strengths that I had, culminating with his service as President Obama’s ambassador to Peking.  The second part of the interview will air tonight at 9 p.m.

The face to face – as opposed to brief clips – revealed him to be a white version of Obama, matching him in intelligence and balance, yet jocular where Obama is pondered, feisty compared to no-drama-Obama.

At this point in time, I’d wager that the Republican grownups are a little less distraught, while Obama must be wondering whether it was clever of him to send Huntsman to China – no wild goose chase, it turns out.

The revolts, revolutions and wars that have suddenly erupted in the Arab world have taken the West by surprise because we no nothing about their antecedents.

Anyone who can read French will find an excellent background piece written by an Arab specialist, Mohamed Hassan on www.michelcollon.infoLibye-revolte-populaire-guerre.html?lang=fr. The takeaway is that Libya’s largely tribal society lacked the means to build on Ghaddafi’s revolution, whereas neither Egypt nor Tunisia ever had one.  This explains why Egyptians and Tunisians who took to the streets were seeking more equity, while Libyans, disappointed with Ghaddafi’s ‘revolution’ are seeking more freedom.

As for Iraq, it already had a relatively developed civil society when Saddam Hussein instituted a socialist-inspired regime, providing free education and health care; alas, Saddam continued the megalomaniac leadership that had for decades tried to take over Kuwait, and was a brutal dictator.

The Iranian revolution brought Shi’a Islam – the Islam of the downtrodden – to power for the first time in modern history, in a country whose sophisticated, educated, middle class resented not only its attention to the poor, but its medieval religious aspect.

I was in Cuba when the Egyptian crisis broke, and Latin American intellectuals meeting with Fidel Castro in a six hour televised roundtable, wondered what it might mean for the regime that had inspired their countries’ break with feudalism and American-style capitalism, but where coffee, cooking oil and rice were still rationed after fifty-two years of American blockade and encouragement of revolt.

As Barack Obama surely knows from his conversations with Brazil’s social democratic leaders, a Latin America that is no longer America’s back yard has tends to want development to benefit the many, and will not support efforts to topple any government which, however brutally or clumsily, is trying to level the playing field, for example, Mugabe.

In his role as elder statesman and op-ed writer, Fidel hammers home the message that nuclear power and climate change are the world’s two overriding threats. Were it not for the fact that most socialists tend to agree with his assessment, he would almost seem to be saying that political regimes are irrelevant. The Communist Party Congress to be held next month after more than a decade, will probably emphasize the planetary threat to the physical ‘nation’ while renewing its commitment to the cooperative aspects of  ‘socialism’ required  to solve both national and planetary challenges.

When Americans contemplate each day’s crop of upheavals, they need to bear in mind that socialists and intellectuals are inclined to support any regime that has a com-munity-based approach to problem solving rather than an individual one.  For the United States, the upheavals in the Arab world are about geo-politics – oil and Israel – while for most of the world’s leaders, they are, in one form or another, about equity.

Americans are amazing: we have the best president since Franklin Roosevelt, and yet, even the so-called liberal media can’t stop finding fault. This is proof, if ever it was needed, that tv anchors are paid to provide suspense, not information. They speculate endlessly on what negative effect this or that policy decision, speech, or encounter will have on the 2012 election.

Their endless harping on President Obama’s “performance” feeds negative poll results. It’s no surprise that 52% of voters are dissatisfied with the President’s handling of the Gulf oil spill, when they hear nothing but criticism on TV! Questions to actors in the BP disaster have only one purpose: to elicit negative appraisals of the administration’s behavior.

President Bush failed by every criteria when Katrina struck, yet this was a natural disaster that had been waiting to happen (with insufficient protection for New Orleans); policemen shot people hovering under a bridge, the thousands that took refuge in a sports complex had no water for days, yet the only thing on the minds of officials was the possibility of looting. People clung to anything that floated til they were (sometimes) rescued. And “Brownie” was praised.

I think Americans have forgotten just how incompetent the Bush administration was. And ironically, because it was so incompe-tent, they expect nothing less than miracles from his successor. As the President would say, “Let’s be clear”: No human being has ever been responsible for the number of catastrophes and blunders this president inherited. The greatest economic debacle since 1929 began before he entered the Oval Office and is not over. He inherited two and a half wars in Southwest Asia – with two more looming in the Horn of Africa; is expected to finally end Israel’s war with the Palestinians, of which we are a part. Meanwhile, at home he’s facing a border/drug/arms crisis with Mexico, largely because the previous admi-nistration did not implement immigration reform.

And he should have made sure the rot in the Office of Minerals Management was dug out so that the greatest ecological disaster the country has ever known would not strike a still recovering Gulf Coast?! Even as other industrial disasters occur almost daily, and while the coal industry continues mountain-top mining of the most polluting substance?

Americans cursed and wrung their hands for eight years over the most inept AND crooked president the country has ever had (not to mention a Darth Vader vice-president), then, having managed to beat the skeptics and the racists and elect a man who is his exact opposite, who could produce the kind of outcomes most of us are desperate for, we feel betrayed because he doesn’t have a magic wand.

We fault him for bowing to the generals’ demand for a surge in Afghanistan after eight years of wasted efforts to turn a tribal country into a liberal democracy (which suddenly, turns out to have untapped precious minerals galore). The same explanation prevails for Obama’s failure to endorse calls in Copenhagen for serious action on climate change: one of his hands is tied by the military complex, the other by the industrial complex, and alas, he’s not Houdini.

The larger picture is this: pre-Reconstruc-tion Americans are determined to make America’s first black president pick up the tab for the disasters created by his pre-decessors, not only to ensure he cannot be reelected, but also to preclude another such crazy idea from entering the heads of voters – who might dare to back an Asian or Hispanic for president next time.

At first I didn’t believe it when a friend told me that Cuba was holding maneuvers to forestall any possible American invasion.  Coincidentally, I’d just been reading the latest issue of In These Times , which has a feature on Cuba written by half a dozen Cubans living on the island.  All the contributors agree that the biggest problem is getting enough food, and there seems to be a disconnect between salaries, the value of the convertible peso, and the cost of basic items such as shoes or transportation.

Under these circumstances, and with a new American president who seems inclined to mend fences with the regime in Havana, I wonder why Cuba would spend money and resources to carry out military maneuvers which, we are told, had been planned in 2004, when Bush was President and there was no end in sight to the standoff.

I turn on the television and hear a ranking Republican senator declare that given the need to send about 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan to prop up a blatantly corrupt government, we should suspend the heroics on health care.

It is unlikely that the administration will cave to this recommendation. But sending troops to Afghanistan – or “finishing the job”, an ugly expression that Obama has taken over from Bush with his war – may do more to alleviate the American jobless rate than the dire fate of Afghan women. Similarly, Raul’s maneuvers are intended to show Barack that he should not try to roll back the leftward movement in Latin America, even if that means continuing hard times for Cubans.

Every government does what it has to do to stay in power, whether it be a fifty-year old regime in dire need of renewal, or looming mid-term elections threatened by hawks.

The November 16th issue of The Nation is not only of special interest because of the interview with Mikhail Gorbachev by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Professor Stephen F. Cohen. It includes a revealing analysis of Yugoslav nationalism that led to war after the break-up of the country, and a no less revealing, in-depth article on what the global economic meltdown did to to the tiny Baltic state of Latvia  – and why.  Toward the end of that article one member of the mostly female new team at the Ministry of Economics, laughs and says: “I want a Latvian Obama.”

There could well be a Latvian Obama. The tragedy, for us, is that the real Obama will never have the Latvian tools with which to make the American economy right.  First of all, he doesn’t have anything even remotely resembling a Ministry of Economics – think of that for a minute: a Ministry of Economics!  Even if in a large country like ours we would need to break economic matters down into several specialized ministries as is the case in most European countries, the vaunted American presidential system may be why for years China referred to the United States as a “toothless tiger”.

We’re only seeing that now, in the aftermath of the economic meltdown that nearly did in several countries.  I  had noticed from the beginning of the financial crisis that the countries that were driven to the brink, such as Iceland, were countries that had abandoned stodgier, but safer economic practices to emulate the American way.  I cannot recall what the other countries were at the moment, but apparently, Latvia was one of them.  As the writer, Kristina Rizga points out, unlike its two Baltic neighbors, Estonia and Lithuania, left opposition parties have not been part of the ruling coalition in Parliament since 1991 (when the Soviet Union was dissolved).  She writes:  “That has meant that neoliberalism has dominated Latvian politics virtually unchallenged since 1991”  Elsewhere, Rizga quotes Valdis Novikovs, who emigrated to England, then returned.  As the cost of labor doubled from 2006 to 1008, he noticed that his countrymen were traveling to Germany and Finland to buy cheaper clothes and furniture.  In 1007, Latvia had the second-highest trade deficit in the EU, after Bulgaria.

What’s my point here?  The United States cajoled, bribed, pressured the rest of the world into following its economic model of “shock capitalism”.  Those that have most successfully limited the damage of the world meltdown are those in the west that are, or in Eastern Europe have managed to partly remain, social democratic after the fall of communism.

President Obama, alas, has no social democratic structures to work with.

Taking a cue from the brilliant Harpers’ Index, I’m starting a slightly different one.  It will be something like a game score card, tallying the “strikes” that left and right make in a game that would be funny if it were not deadly serious.

One for the left: Ralph Nader comes out with a book entitled:  “Only the superrich can save us”.  (This is not meant as a joke.  It is a novel based on the fact that all revolutions are led by the upper class.)

One for the right: The National Endowment for the Arts is called out for contacting artists to suggest that they illustrate some of the President’s important themes, such as global warming and health care.  The NEA is a government agency and therefore must remain “non-political”!

One for the left: Michael Moore’s film “Capitalism: A Love Story” may do more to alert Americans of the idiocy of their political system than all the intelligent, well-documented, well-written books on the subject.

One for the right: ACORN, a national community organizing collective that helped Obama get elected, is accused of skullduggery on a par with Lehman Brothers.

Readers may wonder why I bother with these carryings-on.  It’s because little by little, the right is inching its way toward something that would be worse than a come-back: the closing of a trap around a people that led the world for half a century.  Like a great ship that cannot turn on a dime, the “force” that Chris Hedges referred to when, a few years ago, he wrote “War is a Force that Give us Meaning”, is now a force that is taking us, not “down a slippery slope” but on a descent into hell.

As I write in “A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness”, one has to be on the right side of the issues, all the while knowing that we can only tend toward our goals, which can never be irreversible. For many of us, this is getting more and more difficult.

The trap that the right, via a constant barrage of “revelations”, is closing around the American people, would outlaw political activity in so many ways, to so many categories of people and circumstances, that we could scarcely call ourselves a polity.

Theoretically, the President has a “bully pulpit” to make his views known, but a federal agency cannot invite artists to illustrate his goals. And unlike countries with parliamentary systems with multiple – often many -  political parties, we do not have “party” newspapers, hence the bully  pulpit is a fiction, because the president has no media outlet to get his case across to the population at large.  The press is supposed to be a watchdog, but it has turned into a sinister voice for every indiscriminate negativism.  The so-called ‘objectivity’ of the most powerful news channel, CNN is but a veil over the insidious tones of its presenters – as opposed to its “analysts” who have an official ax to grind: Democrat or Republican.

President Obama is not only a prisoner of the forces that allowed him to become president, stacking his cabinet with the star players of our economic disaster, his cool and his intelligence are shackled by chains forged over two hundred plus years of constitutional, legislative and other devices intended to keep the few on top.

It is unlikely, under these circumstances, that the superrich will save us, because by and large they are as ignorant as the masses.  Our only hope is that the rest of the world will save us by forcing global reforms, and asserting the power of the many.