By Philip Giraldi

Mark Twain is credited with saying that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Today’s United States is often compared to other historic nations, whether at their prime or about to decline and fall depending on one’s own political perspective. Neoconservatives frequently eulogize Washington as a new Rome, promising a worldwide empire without end carried on the back of a Pentagon bristling with advanced weaponry. Other observers also cite Rome but are rather more sanguine, recalling how in the 5th century the empire failed dramatically and fell to barbarian hordes. Still others note the fate of the British Empire, which came apart in the wake of the Second World War, or the Soviets, whose collapse was brought about by 50 years of unsustainable military spending.

But the historical analogy that appears to be most apposite for post-9/11 Washington is that of the Weimar Republic. To be sure, any suggestion that the United States might be following the same course as Germany in the years that led to Nazism must be pursued with caution because few Americans want to believe that the descent into such extremism is even possible in the world’s most venerable constitutional republic. But consider the following: both the United States and Weimar Germany had constitutions in which checks and balances were integrated to maintain a multi-party system, the rule of law, and individual liberties. Both countries were on the receiving end of acts of terrorism that produced a dramatic and violent reaction against the presumed perpetrators of the crimes, so both quickly adopted legislation that abridged many constitutional rights and empowered the head of state to react decisively to further threats. The media fell in line, concerned that criticism would be unpatriotic.

Both the U.S. and Germany possessed politically powerful military-industrial complexes that had a vested interest in encouraging a militarized response to the threats and highly polarized internal politics that enabled politicians to obtain advantage by exploiting national security concerns. Both countries experienced severe financial crises and printed fiat currency to pay the bills, and both had jurists and political supporters who argued that in time of crisis the head of state must be granted special executive authority that transcends the limits placed by the constitution.

The Weimar Republic, which replaced rule by the German emperor in the aftermath of World War I, was a liberal democracy in the 19th-century sense, which means it had a constitution that guaranteed individual and group rights, multi-party systems, and free elections at regular intervals. It took its name from the city of Weimar, where the constitution was drawn up in a national assembly convened in 1919. From the start, Weimar was plagued by a failure to create a sustainable political culture because of the high level of polarization and violence instigated by both the major and fringe parties, even though the relatively moderate Social Democrats were normally dominant.

Adolph Hitler became German chancellor in January 1933. The chancellor was the head of government, but the head of state was President and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg was a hero of the First World War, and he despised the dangerous parvenu Hitler but foolishly thought he could control him. The National Socialist Party was, however, still a minority party in parliament with 33% of the popular vote when Hitler took charge, holding only three out of 11 cabinet positions. Strong socialist, Catholic, and communist parties actively contested the Nazis’ agenda. The media reflected the political divisions, with many papers opposing Hitler and his government.

Hitler benefited from the political paralysis of Weimar, which had forced his Reich chancellor predecessors to rule by presidential decree to bypass the logjam in parliament, but he could not actually legislate in that fashion and did not have a free ride. There was considerable resistance to his policies. All of that changed, however, when the seat of parliament in Berlin, the Reichstag, was burned down on Feb. 27, 1933. It was an act of terrorism that shocked the nation, and it was eventually attributed to an addled Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, though it was almost certainly carried out by the Nazis themselves. Hitler convinced President Hindenburg to sign a “Reichstag Fire Decree” on the following day, canceling the constitutional guarantees of habeas corpus and freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, and the privacy of communications. It authorized police search and seizure without any judicial warrant. It was no coincidence that the fire took place two weeks before parliamentary elections in which the Nazis, who beat and otherwise intimidated opponents and “monitored” the polling stations, won nearly 44% of the votes. The opposition, including the technically illegal communists, took 42% and Hitler was denied his majority, but he arrested socialist opponents, barred the communists, and was eventually able to form a government with his parliamentary allies.

Cajoling the Catholic parties to vote with him, Hitler subsequently passed the Enabling Act, which gave him the authority to ignore parliament and pass laws by decree. The full name of the Enabling Act was, in English, the “Act for the Removal of Distress from People and Reich.” Aided by leading jurists like Carl Schmitt, who argued that a powerful executive could ignore restraints imposed by bureaucrats and constitutions when required to cope with a “crisis,” and supported by conservatives and the army, Hitler quickly moved to consolidate power. The communist and socialist parties as well as any “new” parties were made illegal. In 1934, upon the death of Hindenburg, Hitler assumed the powers of the presidency, and the army began to swear allegiance to him rather than to the constitution. Germany became a dictatorship, and the rest is history. The March 1933 election was the last free election in Germany until the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949.

Fast forward 68 years. George W. Bush was president in 2001, a year after one of the most polarizing elections in U.S. history. There had been a gradual aggrandizement of the power of the U.S. presidency relative to the other branches of government since the Civil War, but most observers would have conceded that the constitutional separation of executive from legislative from judiciary remained largely intact. All of that was to change when the Twin Towers went down and the Pentagon was struck on 9/11. Though the Bush administration apparently had no hand in those events, the result was not too dissimilar to the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. A number of Bush Pentagon appointees, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, quickly mobilized to exploit the terror attack and pass legislation that would empower the White House and permit a massive military campaign directed against a number of countries that had been targeted for “regime change,” mostly in the Middle East. As a result, Iraq was eventually bombed and invaded even though it did not threaten the United States.

The first anti-terror legislation to pass was the USA PATRIOT Act, the full title of which is the “The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” a euphemism oddly reminiscent of Hitler’s Enabling Act. The PATRIOT Act became law six weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers and was followed by the PATRIOT Act II of 2006. Together, the two laws diminished constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom from the illegal seizure of private property. The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights were all discarded or abridged in the rush to make it easier to investigate, sometimes torture, and jail both foreigners and American citizens.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) followed, creating military tribunals for the trying of “unlawful enemy combatants,” including American citizens. Unlike in a civil or criminal court, the accused needs only a two-thirds vote by the commission members present to be convicted, resulting in a much higher conviction rate. The act suspends habeas corpus and Geneva Convention protections and permits the indefinite jailing of suspects in a military prison without charges or access to a lawyer. Hearsay or even information obtained overseas during torture can be used to obtain the conviction, while detainees do not have access to any classified information being used against them and cannot cross examine or even know the identity of witnesses.

Concurrent with the PATRIOT and Military Commission Acts, advocates of torture also emerged in Washington, not unlike the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s justification of the essentially lawless “Fuhrer State.” Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee declared torture legal because the president has the authority to do anything he deems necessary in time of crisis, the same argument that Hitler’s apologists made in discarding Weimar’s rule of law.

President Barack Obama has expanded the Bush portfolio, repeatedly citing state-secrets privileges to prevent any legal challenges while authorizing the assassination of U.S. citizens overseas based on suspicion, carrying out acts of war against countries with which Washington is not at war, and now, finally, signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which provides for indefinite military detention of anyone anywhere for any reason, including U.S. citizens in the United States, because the “whole world is the battlefield.” Did Hitler behave similarly in contravention of the Weimar constitution? He sure did. And if the expression “global war on terror” had been around in 1933, he likely would have used it auf Deutsch.

Sadly, on the verge of a new year, it is hard to argue that Washington in 2011 is much different from Weimar and Berlin in 1933. Last week, a man in Boston was convicted and sent to prison because he had traveled to Yemen and apparently wanted to join a terrorist group. He didn’t actually join the group; he just wanted to do it. So the age of the thought crime has arrived, something that even Hitler’s house jurist might have thought preposterous. Though we are not yet at the point where the president can declare opposition political parties illegal, Newt Gingrich might entertain the possibility if he were in charge. Pledges of personal loyalty to the leader, disenfranchisement of ethnic and religious minorities, and the burning of books by government fiat have not yet occurred either, but if one parses some of the rhetoric coming out of leading Republican presidential aspirants it is not inconceivable Muslim citizens will be subject to special security monitoring while a bonfire day featuring tracts on global warming and Darwinism might join Dixie Chicks CDs and french fries on the destroy-on-sight list.

While I jest to a certain extent, the power coupled with lack of accountability that has been assumed by the White House should be regarded as a deadly serious matter by every American citizen. If you think Weimar Republic Germany is a long time ago and far away so it can’t happen here, you are wrong. It can happen here, and unless something is done to stop it, it almost surely will happen here. It is happening already.

Article courtesy Philip Giraldi

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

Occupy Des Moines protesters confronted anti-Muslim activist Tom Trento, founder of The United West, outside a Des Moines church on Friday, Nov. 19 as six Republican presidential candidates pandered to Christian fundamentalists gathered inside at a “Family Thanksgiving Forum” sponsored by the controversial conservative group, The Family Leader.

“It’s the type of bigoted group that some Republicans welcome,” said Des Moines Catholic Worker Frank Cordaro, referring to Trento’s organization, which claims to be “uniting western civilization to defeat Sharia Islam.”  The United West website declares that it one of its immediate goals is, “the mobilization of Americans and Europeans to stand firmly for the defense and protection of the State of Israel.”

“We just called him out for being a bigot,” said Cordaro, after Trento and his video camera crew sought to interview Occupy Des Moines activists.

Occupier Ross Grooters said Trento attempted to split Occupy activists off from the group and goad them to “spread a message of hate against Jewish and Islamic people, which is not what Occupy is about.”

“Trento was trying to get statements that he could use for his propaganda.  We surrounded him and told him that we don’t support bigotry.  We shouted him down and shamed him,” said Cordaro.

Some 2,000 conservative Christian evangelicals from across Iowa and beyond came to the event organized by Bob Vander Plaats, President of The Family Leader, to see Fox News pollster Frank Luntz moderate a discussion among Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum.  The candidates declared their views on religious issues including abortion and gay marriage while repeatedly attacking liberals and President Barack Obama in the sanctuary of the evangelical First Federated Church in Des Moines.

Gingrich told the crowd inside the church that his message to the Occupy movement is, “Go get a job right after you take a bath.”

“It’s pretty clear that we are having an effect.  When Newt Gingrich is speaking to his supporters about Occupy and the Occupy movement, that’s a win for us,” said Grooters.

Late in the day, Occupy Des Moines activists rallied again and marched from Nollen Plaza to the Hy-Vee Hall, site of one of the Iowa Democratic Party’s largest fundraisers of the year, the Jefferson Jackson dinner, to protest the appearance of keynote speaker Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

“Rahm Emanuel, in my mind, isn’t too much different from the GOP right now,” said Grooters.

“He is the definition of a corporatist Democrat.  He too takes money from big banks and big corporations, and he, too, is essentially bought,” said Grooters.

An Occupy Des Moines flyer handed out at the rally reminded readers that, “as an investment banker, Emanuel made ‘more than $18 million in just two and a half years, turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients and directing his negotiating prowess and trademark intensity to mergers and acquisitions.’

“‘After Mr. Emanuel left banking to run for Congress, members of the securities and investment industry became his biggest backers, donating more than $1.5 million to his campaigns dating back to 2002.’”  The handout cited the New York Times, 12/3/08.

It also noted that as Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel consistently opposed effective health care reform and the single-payer option.

In 2006, as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, then-Rep. Emanuel worked to prevent the nomination and election of progressive Democratic candidates, effectively scuttling the progressive agenda.

Outside of Hy-Vee Hall a group of about 50 Occupiers chanted, “Banks got bailed out!  We got sold out!” and castigated Mayor Rahm Emanuel for having Occupy Chicago protesters jailed.  Several speakers demanded that Emanuel stand up for human rights and support First Amendment speech.

Bill Stansbery of Ames, a member of Veterans for Peace, was among a group of anti-war Occupiers protesting at Hy-Vee Hall.  Stansbery held up a placard bearing the message, “Slash Money for Military!”

“It’s obvious that we are spending too much money on the military and too much money on war.  We could use the money for other things here at home,” said Stansbery.

We need to get the big money, including the defense corporations, out of politics, said Stansbery.

Occupy Des Moines press committee spokesperson Stephen Toothman, wore a lapel tag with the message, “Ask An Occupier.”  Toothman said the group’s actions at the Republican Family Thanksgiving Forum and the Democratic Jefferson Jackson Dinner are part of its ongoing campaign of nonviolent educational protests and occupations in advance of the Iowa Caucuses.

By Juan Cole

From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to Oakland, a new generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state that has dominated the world ever since the Cold War ended. The massive popular protests that shook the globe this year have much in common, though most of the reporting on them in the mainstream media has obscured the similarities.

Whether in Egypt or the United States, young rebels are reacting to a single stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting. They have taken to the streets, parks, plazas and squares to protest against the resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the impunity of the white-collar criminals who have run riot in societies everywhere. They are objecting to high rates of unemployment, reduced social services, blighted futures and above all the substitution of the market for all other values as the matrix of human ethics and life.

Pasha the Tiger

In the “glorious thirty years” after World War II, North America and Western Europe achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and relatively low levels of inequality for capitalist societies, while instituting a broad range of benefits for workers, students and retirees. From roughly 1980 on, however, the neoliberal movement, rooted in the laissez-faire economic theories of Milton Friedman, launched what became a full-scale assault on workers’ power and an attempt, often remarkably successful, to eviscerate the social welfare state.

Neoliberals chanted the mantra that everyone would benefit if the public sector were privatised, businesses deregulated and market mechanisms allowed to distribute wealth. But as economist David Harvey argues, from the beginning it was a doctrine that primarily benefited the wealthy, its adoption allowing the top one per cent in any neoliberal society to capture a disproportionate share of whatever wealth was generated.

In the global South, countries that gained their independence from European colonialism after World War II tended to create large public sectors as part of the process of industrialisation. Often, living standards improved as a result, but by the 1970s, such developing economies were generally experiencing a levelling-off of growth. This happened just as neoliberalism became ascendant in Washington, Paris and London as well as in Bretton Woods institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This “Washington consensus” meant that the urge to impose privatisation on stagnating, nepotistic postcolonial states would become the order of the day.

Egypt and Tunisia, to take two countries in the spotlight for sparking the Arab Spring, were successfully pressured in the 1990s to privatise their relatively large public sectors. Moving public resources into the private sector created an almost endless range of

opportunities for staggering levels of corruption on the part of the ruling families of autocrats Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis and Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. International banks, central banks and emerging local private banks aided and abetted their agenda.

It was not surprising then that one of the first targets of Tunisian crowds in the course of the revolution they made last January was the Zitouna bank, a branch of which they torched. Its owner, Sakher El Materi, a son-in-law of President Ben Ali and the notorious owner of Pasha, the well-fed pet tiger that prowled the grounds of one of his sumptuous mansions. Not even the way his outfit sought legitimacy by practicing “Islamic banking” could forestall popular rage. A 2006 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks observed, “One local financial expert blames the [Ben Ali] Family for chronic banking sector woes due to the great percentage of non-performing loans issued through crony connections, and has essentially paralysed banking authorities from genuine recovery efforts.”  That is, the banks were used by the regime to give away money to his cronies, with no expectation of repayment.

Tunisian activists similarly directed their ire at foreign banks and lenders to which their country owes $14.4bn. Tunisians are still railing and rallying against the repayment of all that money, some of which they believe was borrowed profligately by the corrupt former regime and then squandered quite privately.

Tunisians had their own one per cent, a thin commercial elite, half of whom were related to or closely connected to President Ben Ali. As a group, they were accused by young activists of mafia-like, predatory practices, such as demanding pay-offs from legitimate businesses, and discouraging foreign investment by tying it to a stupendous system of bribes. The closed, top-heavy character of the Tunisian economic system was blamed for the bottom-heavy waves of suffering that followed: cost of living increases that hit people on fixed incomes or those like students and peddlers in the marginal economy especially hard.

It was no happenstance that the young man who immolated himself and so sparked the Tunisian rebellion was a hard-pressed vegetable peddler. It’s easy now to overlook what clearly ties the beginning of the Arab Spring to the European Summer and the present American Fall: the point of the Tunisian revolution was not just to gain political rights, but to sweep away that one per cent, popularly imagined as a sort of dam against economic opportunity.

Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Rothschild Avenue

The success of the Tunisian revolution in removing the octopus-like Ben Ali plutocracy inspired the dramatic events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and even Israel that are redrawing the political map of the Middle East. But the 2011 youth protest movement was hardly contained in the Middle East. Estonian-Canadian activist Kalle Lasn and his anti-consumerist colleagues at the Vancouver-based Adbusters Media Foundation were inspired by the success of the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square in deposing dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Their organisation specialises in combatting advertising culture through spoofs and pranks. It was Adbusters magazine that sent out the call on Twitter in the summer of 2011 for a rally at Wall Street on September 17, with the now-famous hash tag #OccupyWallStreet. A thousand protesters gathered on the designated date, commemorating the 2008 economic meltdown that had thrown millions of Americans out of their jobs and their homes. Some camped out in nearby Zuccotti Park, another unexpected global spark for protest.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has now spread throughout the United States, sometimes in the face of serious acts of repression, as in Oakland, California. It has followed in the spirit of the Arab and European movements in demanding an end to special privileges for the richest one per cent, including their ability to more or less buy the US government for purposes of their choosing. What is often forgotten is that the Ben Alis, Mubaraks and Gaddafis were not simply authoritarian tyrants. They were the one per cent and the guardians of the one per cent, in their own societies – and loathed for exactly that.

Last April, around the time that Lasn began imagining Wall Street protests, progressive activists in Israel started planning their own movement. In July, sales clerk and aspiring filmmaker Daphne Leef found herself unable to cover a sudden rent increase on her Tel Aviv apartment. So she started a protest Facebook page similar to the ones that fuelled the Arab Spring and moved into a tent on the posh Rothschild Avenue where she was soon joined by hundreds of other protesting Israelis. Week by week, the demonstrations grew, spreading to cities throughout the country and culminating on September 3 in a massive rally, the largest in Israel’s history. Some 300,000 protesters came out in Tel Aviv, 50,000 in Jerusalem and 40,000 in Haifa. Their demands included not just lower housing costs, but a rollback of neoliberal policies, less regressive taxes and more progressive, direct taxation, a halt to the privatisation of the economy, and the funding of a system of inexpensive education and child care.

Many on the left in Israel are also deeply troubled by the political and economic power of right-wing settlers on the West Bank, but most decline to bring the Palestinian issue into the movement’s demands for fear of losing support among the middle class. For the same reason, the way the Israeli movement was inspired by Tahrir Square and the Egyptian revolution has been downplayed, although “Walk like an Egyptian” signs – a reference both to the Cairo demonstrations and the 1986 Bangles hit song – have been spotted on Rothschild Avenue.

Most of the Israeli activists in the coastal cities know that they are victims of the same neoliberal order that displaces the Palestinians, punishes them and keeps them stateless. Indeed, the Palestinians, altogether lacking a state but at the complete mercy of various forms of international capital controlled by elites elsewhere, are the ultimate victims of the neoliberal order. But in order to avoid a split in the Israeli protest movement, a quiet agreement was reached to focus on economic discontents and so avoid the divisive issue of the much-despised West Bank settlements.

There has been little reporting in the Western press about a key source of Israeli unease, which was palpable to me when I visited the country in May. Even then, before the local protests had fully hit their stride, Israelis I met were complaining about the rise to power of an Israeli one per cent. There are now 16 billionaires in the country, who control $45bn in assets, and the current crop of 10,153 millionaires is 20 per cent larger than it was in the previous fiscal year. In terms of its distribution of wealth, Israel is now among the most unequal of the countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Since the late 1980s, the average household income of families in the bottom fifth of the population has been declining at an annual rate of 1.1 per cent. Over the same period, the average household income of families among the richest 20 per cent went up at an annual rate of 2.4 per cent.

While neoliberalism has produced more unequal societies throughout the world, nowhere else has the income of the poor declined quite so strikingly. The concentration of wealth in a few hands profoundly contradicts the founding principles of Israel’s Labour Zionism, and results from decades of right-wing Likud policies punishing the poor and middle classes and shifting wealth to the top of society.

The indignant ones

European youth were also inspired by the Tunisians and Egyptians – and by a similar flight of wealth. I was in Barcelona on May 27, when the police attacked demonstrators camped out at the Placa de Catalunya, provoking widespread consternation. The government of the region is currently led by the centrist Convergence and Union Party, a moderate proponent of Catalan nationalism. It is relatively popular locally, and so Catalans had not expected such heavy-handed police action to be ordered. The crackdown, however, underlined the very point of the protesters, that the neoliberal state, whatever its political makeup, is protecting the same set of wealthy miscreants.

Spain’s “indignados” (indignant ones) got their start in mid-May with huge protests at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Plaza against the country’s persistent 21 per cent unemployment rate (and double that among the young). Egyptian activists in Tahrir Square immediately sent a statement of warm support to those in the Spanish capital (as they would months later to New York’s demonstrators). Again following the same pattern, the Spanish movement does not restrict its objections to unemployment (and the lack of benefits attending the few new temporary or contract jobs that do arise). Its targets are the banks, bank bailouts, financial corruption and cuts in education and other services.

Youth activists I met in Toledo and Madrid this summer denounced both of the country’s major parties and, indeed, the very consumer society that emphasised wealth accumulation over community and material acquisition over personal enrichment. In the past two months Spain’s young protesters have concentrated on demonstrating against cuts to education, with crowds of 70,000 to 90,000 coming out more than once in Madrid and tens of thousands in other cities. For marches in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, hundreds of thousands reportedly took to the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, among other cities.

The global reach and connectedness of these movements has yet to be fully appreciated. The Madrid education protesters, for example, cited for inspiration Chilean students who, through persistent, innovative, and large-scale demonstrations this summer and fall, have forced that country’s neoliberal government, headed by the increasingly unpopular billionaire president Sebastian Pinera, to inject $1.6bn in new money into education. Neither the crowds of youth in Madrid nor those in Santiago are likely to be mollified, however, by new dorms and laboratories. Chilean students have already moved on from insisting on an end to an ever more expensive class-based education system to demands that the country’s lucrative copper mines be nationalised so as to generate revenues for investment in education. In every instance, the underlying goal of specific protests by the youthful reformists is the neoliberal order itself.

The word “union” was little uttered in American television news coverage of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, even though factory workers and sympathy strikes of all sorts played a key role in them. The right-wing press in the US actually went out of its way to contrast Egyptian demonstrations against Mubarak with the Wisconsin rallies of government workers against Governor Scott Walker’s measure to cripple the bargaining power of their unions.

The Egyptians, Commentary typically wrote, were risking their lives, while Wisconsin’s union activists were taking the day off from cushy jobs to parade around with placards, immune from being fired for joining the rallies. The implication: the Egyptian revolution was against tyranny, whereas already spoiled American workers were demanding further coddling.

The American right has never been interested in recognising this reality: that forbidding unions and strikes is a form of tyranny. In fact, it wasn’t just progressive bloggers who saw a connection between Tahrir Square and Madison. The head of the newly formed independent union federation in Egypt dispatched an explicit expression of solidarity to the Wisconsin workers, centering on worker’s rights.

At least, Commentary did us one favour: it clarified why the story has been told as it has in most of the American media. If the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were merely about individualistic political rights – about the holding of elections and the guarantee of due process – then they could be depicted as largely irrelevant to politics in the US and Europe, where such norms already prevailed.

If, however, they centred on economic rights (as they certainly did), then clearly the discontents of North African youth when it came to plutocracy, corruption, the curbing of workers’ rights, and persistent unemployment deeply resembled those of their American counterparts.

The global protests of 2011 have been cast in the American media largely as an “Arab Spring” challenging local dictatorships – as though Spain, Chile and Israel do not exist. The constant speculation by pundits and television news anchors in the US about whether “Islam” would benefit from the Arab Spring functioned as an Orientalist way of marking events in North Africa as alien and vaguely menacing, but also as not germane to the day to day concerns of working Americans. The inhabitants of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan clearly feel differently.

Facebook flash mobs

If we focus on economic trends, then the neoliberal state looks eerily similar, whether it is a democracy or a dictatorship, whether the government is nominally right of centre or left of centre. As a package, deregulation, the privatisation of public resources and firms, corruption and forms of insider trading and interference in the ability of workers to organise or engage in collective bargaining have allowed the top one per cent in Israel, just as in Tunisia or the US, to capture the lion’s share of profits from the growth of the last decades.

Observers were puzzled by the huge crowds that turned out in both Tunis and Tel Aviv in 2011, especially given that economic growth in those countries had been running at a seemingly healthy five per cent per annum. “Growth”, defined generally and without regard to its distribution, is the answer to a neoliberal question. The question of the 99 per cent, however, is: Who is getting the increased wealth? In both of those countries, as in the US and other neoliberal lands, the answer is: disproportionately the one per cent.

If you were wondering why outraged young people around the globe are chanting such similar slogans and using such similar tactics (including Facebook “flash mobs”), it is because they have seen more clearly than their elders through the neoliberal shell game.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website.

Article courtesy Al Jazeera English online

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

More than 150 Iowans gathered in Des Moines on the west side of their state capitol on a cool, overcast Palm Sunday afternoon, April 17, to walk for peace. Once again, as in years past, the procession was led by a small donkey. The Independent Monitor talked with several of the participants.

“I come here every year to walk in this procession,” said Vern Naffier, a board member and former chair of the Progressive Coalition of Central Iowa.

“We want to see peace in the world, and we need to speak up for it. I’m a person of faith, and I believe that God wills peace for his world and for his people,” said Naffier.

“We [Americans] are the world’s biggest weapons manufacturer. We outdo everybody else all together, and that isn’t right. We’re the only nation that has military bases all over the world. We are quite militaristic. We’re spending a lot of money on that when we should be building up our own country,” said Naffier.

America’s enormous weapons industry and war machine are a problem, said Naffier.

“Unfortunately, it provides employment for a lot of Americans, but it’s not the right kind of employment. We need to re-deploy our resources for peaceful uses,” said Naffier.

“I think it’s very important to have a presence, especially on Palm Sunday, for peace throughout the world,” said Janet Rosenbury.

“Too many lives are lost; too much money is spent on war. That money could be put toward helping the poor and other problems,” said Rosenbury, a member of Plymouth Congregational Church who serves on the board of Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, ACLU of Iowa, and One Iowa.

“I’m here because I think resorting to war does not work. I think it’s bad politics, and most of all it’s bad for human life. It moves us in the wrong direction,” said Bob Brammer, a former spokesperson for the Iowa attorney general’s office.

“We have to have a witness coming from our faith perspective. We have to find alternatives. We’ve caused enormous disasters already, and our warlike approach to every crisis is only making things worse,” said Brammer.

“I think some of our leaders are trying to do the right thing, but I don’t think they have enough skepticism and abhorrence of war. It just isn’t working,” said Brammer.

The economic crisis may have a silver lining if it persuades Americans that war is no longer affordable, said Brammer, who retired from state government in 2010.

The event attracted a diverse group of participants, young and old, from a variety of backgrounds.

“We believe that Jesus would have wanted peace, would have disapproved of the war, and would have disapproved of the fighting, the weapons, the killing,” said Heather Minard, a member of First Christian Church who came to walk with her family and friends.

“I am so tired of wars and hate, and I think this is something I can do to support peace,” said Bengu Tekinalp, a Drake University professor who met and walked with one of her colleagues. Tekinalp, who is originally from Turkey, said she was raised Muslim and carries on many Muslim traditions but is not religious.

“I’m not Christian, but I support the cause of peace,” said Tekinalp.

“I’m here because I believe in peace, and I think our government devotes way too much of our treasure to war. I think it’s long past time for our soldiers to be home from Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Stephanie Dirks, a member of Our Lady of the Americas Catholic Church.

Carmen Lampe-Zeitler spoke about the Palm Sunday Procession as a representative of the Des Moines Area Ecumenical Committee for Peace (DMAECP).

“We’ve been doing this since the first Palm Sunday after the Iraq War began. The point of the procession is that we believe Jesus would have us do whatever we can to make peace in the world. On Palm Sunday, he began his last stand against ‘the powers that be’ and he did that not as a soldier coming in, not as the military coming in, but humbly, on a donkey,” said Lampe-Zeitler.

“We feel like that was a symbol for his way of doing things. As Christians, on Palm Sunday it feels like marching for peace, putting our feet to the work of prayer for peace, is the thing that ought to be done. So, we’ll march and we’ll meet at St. John’s Lutheran Church for a prayer service,” said Lampe-Zeitler.

“I’m here today because we want to celebrate the original meaning of Palm Sunday,” said Eloise Cranke, a member of First United Methodist Church of Des Moines and co-coordinator of the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA)’s Iowa Chapter.

“We believe that Jesus was a peacemaker in his day, and we are called to be peacemakers in our day,” declared Cranke.

Sponsoring and co-sponsoring organizations included the Des Moines Area Religious Council, American Friends Service Committee’s Iowa Program, MFSA-Iowa, DMAECP, and several area churches.

Palm Sunday Peace Procession, Des Moines, 2011

M. K. Bhadrakumar

Twice during the past week senior United States officials have let it be known that the Barack Obama administration has chosen to adopt a highly selective approach to the ferment in the Middle East.

The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couched the message in appropriate diplomatic idiom in Washington last Tuesday in a speech at a gala dinner celebrating the US-Islamic World Forum before an audience of dignitaries from the Middle East including

the foreign ministers of Qatar and Jordan and the secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Conference.

Clinton acknowledged that the ”long Arab winter has begun to thaw” and after many decades, a ”real opportunity for lasting change” has appeared before the Arab people. It, in turn, raises ‘’significant questions” but it is not for the US to provide all the answers. ”In fact, here in Washington we’re struggling to thrash out answers to our own difficult political and economic questions,” she said.

Following a long-winded appreciation of the “Arab revolt”, Clinton hit the nail on its head: ”We understand that a one-sized-fits-all approach doesn’t make sense in such a diverse region at such a fluid time. As I have said before, the United States has specific relationships with countries in the region. We have a decades-long friendship with Bahrain that we expect to continue long into the future … Going forward, the United States will be guided by careful consideration of all circumstances on the ground and by our consistent values and interests.”

Two days later, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates picked up where Clinton left off. At the ground-breaking ceremony of the national library honoring George Washington in Virginia last Thursday, Gates dipped into the oldest annals of America’s young history to underline that US has always pursued a selective approach to democratic aspirations and values of other peoples.

When George Washington was confronted with the consequences of the French revolution, he didn’t allow himself to be swayed by the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity but instead weighed in the terribly dangerous prospect of the possible ‘’spread of violent French radicalism to our shores”, the negative consequences of estrangement from the British in terms of disruptions in the ”lives of ordinary Americans by impeding trade” and the ”fragility of America’s position at that time”. Therefore, he adopted a neutrality policy toward France and chose to make a peace treaty with Britain although he was accused of doublespeak, sellout, et al.

Gates acknowledged that the US always ‘’struggled” with ideals while doing business with terrible autocrats. So, what matters today is that ”many of the [Arab] regimes affected have been longstanding, close allies of the United States, ones we continue to work with as critical partners in the face of common security challenges like al-Qaeda and Iran.”

Is the democracy project so terribly important? Gates had an answer: ”An underlying theme of American history going back to Washington is that we are compelled to defend our security and our interests in ways that in the long run lead to the democratic values and institutions … When we discuss openly our desire for democratic values to take hold across the globe, we are describing a world that may be many years or decades off.”

Significantly, Gates was speaking after a tour of the Persian Gulf region against a complex backdrop of Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Bahrain to crush the lively democracy movement, frictions in the relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, a jump in oil prices into triple digits and signs that Riyadh might consider expanding its mammoth US$60 billion deal to buy arms from the US.

At any rate, coming out of a 90-minute meeting with the Saudi King Abdullah, Gates said he saw ”evidence” of Iranian meddling in Bahrain. Gates’s visit was followed up within a week by a trip to Riyadh by the US National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon, who handed a letter from Obama to Abdullah. All indications are that a deal has been stuck whereby the Obama administration will not queer the pitch for the autocratic Persian Gulf rulers by dabbling in the democracy project in the region.

On the contrary, Washington will allow Saudi Arabia to have a free hand to tackle the movements for democratic reforms in the region and forestall any regime changes in the region. Accordingly, the Saudis are moving on three different tracks. First, they have done everything possible to portray the democracy movement in Bahrain, which has serious potential to overthrow the regime in Manama and trigger a domino effect, in starkly sectarian terms as an issue of Shi’ite empowerment. The Saudi calculation by stoking up the latent fires of sectarian prejudices in the Sunni mind is to somehow prevent a unified, pan-Arab democracy movement from taking shape.

Second, Saudis are giving a coloring that that the democracy movements in the Persian Gulf are in actuality a manifestation of Iranian meddling in the internal affairs of the Sunni states in the region. The Iranian bogey comes naturally to the Saudis for rallying the Sunni states in the region under its leadership as well as for striking sympathetic chords in influential Washington lobbies (although the Obama administration has been so far inclined to view the protests as essentially home-grown movements that arose out of genuine local problems accumulating through decades of authoritarian misrule).

The Saudi ploy is working. During a visit to Manama early March, Gates himself had urged the al-Khalifa family to swiftly undertake political and social reform. By early April he is a changed man who claims he senses an Iranian hand behind the protests.

Third, and potentially quite tricky, is the Saudi propensity to see the case in both Bahrain and Yemen as open-and-shut. The intervention in Bahrain is taking a violent turn with every possibility that it will radicalize the opposition and possibly force it – or at least elements within it – to resort to insurgent attacks. A Bahraini variant of Lebanon’s Hezbollah seems to be in the making.

The Saudis have also waded into the Yemeni tribal politics and are dictating the contours of the transfer of power from President Ali Abdullah Saleh, ignoring the potency of Yemeni nationalism, which resents Saudi hegemony. Again, Saudis propagate that Iran is fueling the Houthi rebellion in north Yemen. (Western observers rule out any extensive ties between Iran on the one side and the Houthis or the Bahraini Shi’ites.)

What are the Saudi calculations? A longstanding objective of the Saudi national security strategy remains, namely, to exercise its quasi-hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) served this purpose for decades. But the GCC dispensation can easily unravel in today’s uncertain circumstances if there is regime change in any of the member states. Riyadh has mooted the idea of the GCC transforming into a “Gulf Confederation” with a common and unified foreign, security and defense policies – under Saudi leadership, of course, under the garb of collective security.

In military terms, this would facilitate the creation of joint armed forces under a unified command with a rapid reaction force that could act in any of the GCC states. In other words, Saudi Arabia hopes to assume the role of the provider of security for the GCC territories.

Riyadh felt disillusioned by the US’ ”abandonment” of Hosni Mubarak and quite obviously, in the Saudi estimation, there was no real inevitability about Mubarak’s exit if only Washington had stood by him. The behavior of post-Mubarak Egypt also adds to a sense of isolation in Riyadh. Significant shifts have begun appearing in Egypt’s regional policies already. Cairo is moving toward establishing diplomatic relations with Iran (broken off since the Islamic Revolution in 1979); Cairo ignored US and Israeli protests and allowed for the first time two Iranian warships to pass through the Suez Canal; Cairo is allowing Hamas leaders in Gaza to use Cairo airport as a transit point for travel to and from Damascus; Cairo is mellowing toward the Hezbollah in Lebanon.

What hits Riyadh most is that Cairo will be disengaging from any containment strategy toward Iran and may gravitate toward the nascent strategic axis involving Syria, Turkey and Iran. Egypt is swimming toward mainstream Arab politics, whereas Saudi Arabia never had much fondness for pan-Arabism.

This growing sense of isolation prompted the Saudi leadership to invoke its ultimate reserves of influence in Washington – the Pentagon. The promise Abdullah made to Gates – that Saudi arms purchases from the US this year will exceed the $60 billion deal (which is already the biggest in US history) – changes the entire complexion of Persian Gulf security from the American perspective. Obama interprets arms sales to foreign countries as the means to create jobs at home. And if the Gulf Confederation idea takes hold, the sky is the limit for lucrative arms deals since a joint military will be created by the petrodollar states involving land, air and naval forces.

The speeches by Clinton and Gates suggest that the Saudis have succeeded in making Obama reassess the Arab spring in the Persian Gulf region. Obama is never short on resonant words. Still, presenting with conviction his (revised) vision of the New Middle East in the major policy speech he is expected to make isn’t going to be easy.

(Courtesy Asia Times Online)

By Pepe Escobar

At the sixth al-Jazeera forum in Doha in mid-March, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu gave a remarkable speech. He argued that the great 2011 Arab revolt was “necessary in order to restore the natural flow of history”. According to him, “abnormalities” had to be corrected; the carving-up strategy of colonialism (which, for instance, severed historical links between Damascus and Baghdad); and the Cold War (which, for instance, made enemies out of Turkey and Syria). The time had come, he said, when an ordinary Arab can change history.

Turkish FM Davutoglu (Image courtesy of Turkish Daily News)

Davutoglu also stressed that the Middle Eastern masses – “who want respect and dignity” – must be heard. He emphasized the need of transparency, accountability, human rights, the rule of law, and that “the territorial integrity of our countries and the region must be protected” – referring specifically to Libya and Yemen.

Then there was the Leaders of Change summit in Istanbul, also in mid-March. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described Turkey as “a democratic social state based on social justice”. He also did not mince words when criticizing the West for not really supporting the great 2011 Arab revolt – or at least procrastinating; and he warned about the temptation of invading Libya as the US invaded Iraq. If there were any regime change in Libya, it should come from within, not via foreign intervention.

Erdogan also had time to destroy the failed concepts of end of history, clash of civilizations and the war on terror, while Davutoglu chastised the West for believing that “Arab societies didn’t deserve democracy, and needed authoritarian regimes to preserve the status quo and prevent Islamic radicalism”. Their conclusion: what’s going on in the Middle East today holds out the promise of showing the way towards a “global, political, economic and cultural new order”.

Now that’s the kind of talk when you want to position yourself as a regional leader and the ultimate bridge between East and West. Erdogan already held the moral high ground among the Arab world’s masses; he had explicitly called, from the beginning, for president Hosni Mubarak to step down in Egypt. Soon everyone from Casablanca to Muscat was talking about the Turkish model as the blueprint for the new Arab world. But then came Libya.

Turkey had billions of dollars invested in Libya, not to mention over 20,000 workers (evacuated in a matter of days). Ankara also clearly saw how the West was making a major power play for a possible new Libya. From inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Turkey forcefully condemned United Nations resolution 1973 while being at the forefront of sending humanitarian help. And all this while Turkish business already prepared their return to Libya.

These moves spell out a very skillful diplomatic game – to say the least. The question, thus, is inevitable; what is Turkey really up to?

Full power ahead

Before 2050, Turkey will be the third European power and the ninth world power – with more people than Germany, a first-class army, and a capability to display plenty of soft power via its good universities, a strong and diverse economy, technical know-how and the ruling party’s ability to “sell” its brand of democratic Islam.
Soon Turkey may become a full-time member of the hot BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Last year, at a summit in Brasilia, the coming of “BRICTS” was seriously discussed.

No wonder eyebrows have been seriously raised. Western misconception, fueled by centuries of historical baggage, fears Erdogan of the Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) party as a neo-Ottoman sultan – and aspiring caliph – leading an informal empire ranging from the Eastern Mediterranean to Western China, from the Balkans to the Middle East (and he might even – God forbid – go for the reconquista of Jerusalem …)

Even before the great 2011 Arab revolt, the US State Department’s eyebrows had been particularly affected. One of the WikiLeaks cablegate’s most explosive revelations was the labeling of Erdogan as unreliable and even “anti-American” – as he is a practicing Muslim cultivating serious and political ties with Iran, not to mention being too independent from Washington in all regional matters, from Iraq to Central Asia.

President Barack Obama was forced to place a courtesy call to Erdogan last December. In other times, that call would subtly imply that any Turkish president who really supports the US should not fear a military coup. But these are multi-polar times … If only the State Department had bothered to understand the sophisticated Turkish take on a region the Sublime Porte (the palace entrance to the chief minister of the Ottoman Empire) dominated for half a millennium.

Go East, young Turk

The point was never that America is losing Turkey – or that Erdogan is a neo-Ottoman caliph (whatever that means …) The point is to understand what Turkey’s strategic depth is all about. It’s all in a book: Stratejik Derinlik: Turkiye’nin Uluslararasi Konumu (Strategic Depth: Turkey’s International Position), published in Istanbul in 2001 by Ahmet Davutoglu, then a professor of international relations at the University of Marmara, now Turkey’s foreign minister.

Davutoglu hails from Konya, in the south central steppes of Anatolia, where the great 13th century Sufi poet Rumi is buried (Rumi, by the way, was an Afghan, born in Balkh, although “Rumi” means literally “Anatolian”). Konya also happens to be the heart of the AKP party. But much more than expressing the worldview of a new political/religious elite from Anatolia and cities in the Black Sea defying the traditional, secular elites of Istanbul and Ankara, the book by the “neo-Ottoman Kissinger” is an organic expose of current Ankara geopolitics.

Davutoglu places Turkey at the center of three concentric circles. 1) Balkans, Black Sea basin, Caucasus. 2) Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. 3) Persian Gulf, Africa and Central Asia. Thus he places Turkey as the privileged gateway for accessing the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

In the former bipolar world, Ankara was a passive actor – a mere weaponized arm of the US/NATO. Now Turkey is a key player in the Middle East; as Davutoglu puts it, “this is our home”. As influence areas go, Turkey may claim no less than eight: Balkans, Black Sea, Caucasus, Caspian, Turkic Central Asia, Persian Gulf, Middle East and Mediterranean.

Many may not know – although the Pentagon does – that Muslims control no less than eight strategic bottlenecks for global naval traffic: Dardanelles, Bosphorus, Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Hormuz, Malacca, Sonda and Lombok, plus the condominium in Gibraltar.

To put this all in perspective Davutoglu even comes up with a formula: neo-Ottomanism + pan-Turkism + Islam = Great Turkey.

Neo-Ottomanism links to Arab lands but also the Balkans; pan-Turkism links to Central Asia; and Islam links to the whole dar-al-Islam, the lands of Islam, from Morocco to Indonesia. This is what Russian strategists would call the “near abroad”. So as much as Germany is the central and autonomous power in Europe, Davutoglu stresses that Turkey performs the same role further east. It’s all based on cultural and economic vectors – soft power, not weapons.

There are doubts about strategic depth. But the key point is that, in economic terms, Turkey would love nothing better than to become the new China. For this to happen, it’s essential to configure Anatolia as the ultimate Pipelineistan strategic crossroads for the export of Russian, Caspian-Central Asian, Iraqi and Iranian oil and gas to Europe.

That’s exactly where Turkey meets its top trade partner, Germany. But it may be a long and winding road ahead. A Transatlantic Trends 2010 poll revealed that only 38% of Turks and 23% of Europeans believe Turkey will ever be accepted into the European Union (EU). This does not mean that Turkey has given up on Europe; it’s now applying a different strategy.

Crucially, Davutoglu ranks the partnership between Turkey and Iran as equivalent to France and Germany. It’s under this marker that should be analyzed the link between Ankara and Brasilia at the UN Security Council last year against Washington, London and Paris over the ultra-strategic Iranian nuclear dossier.

Davutoglu’s circle in Ankara is very much aware that the Orientalist-named Middle East has been for over half a millennium the privileged arena of an Ottoman-Safavid rivalry.

Syria – close to Iran – is a critical case. Ankara has been advising Damascus to reform – and fast. In the words of Turkish President Abdullah Gul, “There can be no closed regime on the Mediterranean coast. [President Bashar] Assad is aware of this, too … We are sharing our experiences with him and we do not want chaos in Syria.”

At the same time, Ankara knows very well the House of Saud is freaking out with the increasingly closer relationship between Ankara and Tehran. Yet it helps that Gul lived in Jeddah for many years and knows how the Saudis think. Plus the fact that the Ottomans knew everything one needed to know about the power of sectarianism in the Middle East. A firm realpolitik signal is that Ankara did not oppose the Saudi invasion of Bahrain (well, just a little).

An explosive neighborhood

Now momentarily buried by all the turbulence related to the great 2011 Arab revolt, a crucial regional fact is that Ankara now sees Tehran as the golden door to Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. This means certified extra turbulence ahead for Washington, Jerusalem and US Arab client states, as Turkey has become a forceful, inescapable actor in both the Iranian and the Palestinian question (no wonder after the Mavi Marmara episode Erdogan became informally known as “the King of Gaza”).

A sound Davutoglu maxim though is “zero problems with the neighbors”. And what a dodgy neighborhood that is. In Turkey, there are more Azeris than in Azerbaijan; more Armenians than in Armenia; more Albanians than in Albania and Kosovo; more Bosnians than in Bosnia; and more Kurds than in Iraqi Kurdistan. These are all potential powder kegs.

For example, Ankara is very active economically in Iraqi Kurdistan – but at the same time there are ample suspicions that the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli Mossad may be behind renewed Kurdish attacks against Turkish forces in southeast Anatolia.

Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, is awash with Turkish clothes and beer (while in Shi’ite Basra, in southern Iraq made in Iran Saipa and Peugeot cars rule and Iranian pilgrims make the economy of Karbala and Najaf turn). Turkey is a top investor in hotels, real estate, industry and energy in Iraqi Kurdistan; 55% of total foreign investment, including Turkish oil company TPAO, which is developing two Iraqi gas fields. Turkey and Iran fiercely compete for greater influence in Baghdad.

The Russians are coming

As I noted in previous Pipelineistan stories, Turkey also has to play a finely balanced game involving its Caucasian neighbors – while it simply cannot afford to antagonize Russia.

In a nutshell, former Cold War enemies Turkey and Russia are trying, together, to find a way to manage the Caucasus and Central Asia – but with their sights also set on the Middle East and the Balkans. This complex evolution implies limiting US expansion and controlling radical Islam, everything subordinated to Pipelineistan. For Washington it’s hard to stomach that Russia and Turkey are now strategic partners.

Moscow needs Turkey to pump out energy to Europe and the Middle East while also thwarting the Western obsession of building Pipelineistan bypassing Russia. After all, Russia wants to monopolize European energy markets, Eurasian producers and supply routes. No wonder this is bound to cause a lot of tremendous problems for the Turkey-Russia strategic partnership.
Ankara knows that Moscow knows it carries a lot of leverage with Europe as a key natural gas transit country. Brussels desperately wants the troubled Nabucco pipeline – which should link Erzurum to Vienna. Moscow for its part wants the South Stream pipeline via Bulgaria. A possible solution would be Nabucco carrying Turkmen gas that would arrive in Turkey via Russia; but, the Europeans and Americans object, that is no diversification at all.

Russia is already Turkey’s number one trade partner; 70% of its exports are in energy, 20.5% in metals and 3% in chemical products. Russia represents 25% of the foreign market for Turkish construction companies. Turkey is a tourist Mecca for Russians (no visa is necessary). A $20 billion made in Russia nuclear power station – already ratified by the Turkish parliament – will be built in Turkey, to be completed by 2019.

All this is now possible because pan-Turkism – the push to agglomerate the Turkic world from the Adriatic to the Wall of China, all the rage during the 1990s – is over. It was after the 2008 Russo-Georgian-Ossetian war that everything crucially changed. Moscow won. Georgia kissed goodbye to NATO. And Ankara got the message.

The new configuration does make a lot of sense. In energy terms, Turkey depends on Russia for almost 80% (Gazprom supplies 63% of its gas and 29% of its oil). In 1997, they signed a deal for Blue Stream – Pipelineistan crossing the Black Sea and arriving in Samsun in Turkey; the Western arm arrives from Bulgaria. Now there’s even room for a Blue Stream-2, a gas pipeline linking Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus and maybe Israel.

Relax and float downstream

But the really juicy Turkey-Russia game is South Stream. From the Russian port of Beregovaja, South Stream crosses Turkish territorial waters in the Black Sea to the Bulgarian terminal of Varna, and beyond to Italy and Austria.

Well, it was a juicy game until Moscow started toying with the idea of replacing South Stream with a trans-Black Sea liquefied natural gas (LNG) project. What this proves is how volatile is the Turkey-Russia energy relationship.

On a (shaky) parallel track, Ankara is also on board the alternative – the ever-elusive Nabucco. Nabucco is crucial not only because of its huge projected capacity, but because it involves extremely complex negotiations to sign deals with Turkmenistan, Iran or Iraq that could potentially turn everything upside down in Pipelineistan.

So now it’s no secret that Ankara dreams of regional cooperation and improving relations with Europe under the matrix of energy. Iran for its part wants to export more gas via Turkey – not only out of its own, giant South Pars field but bringing Turkmen gas as well.

Call it a permanent fixture of the New Great Game in Eurasia: Ankara playing alongside Tehran to provide Europe with Iranian and Turkmen gas. Both have serious geopolitical affinities. Both are fighting Kurdish separatism. Erdogan and Ahmadinejad know only too well that the only alternative to the US-supported Caucasian corridor to get natural gas to Europe is Iran – which is linked not only to the Turkmen side of the Caspian but also to the huge Turkmen Daulatabad fields (near Mashhad in Iran) and their connection to Erzurum.

What will it take for Washington to face the fact that Tehran holds an unparalleled geopolitical role for Ankara? As a Caspian nation, Iran facilitates the transport of Turkmen gas to the European networks without having to solve the ultra-complex juridical status of the Caspian itself (is it a sea? Or is it a lake?) Bottom line: if Turkey does not court Iran it will lose the bandwagon of Turkmen gas flowing to Europe; and that would mean Europe being even more dependent on Russia.

By positioning Turkey as the ultimate energy bridge between East and West, Davutoglu acted like a Vegas high roller; if you’re not a source you’ve got to find a way to become a player. Turkey imports no less than 93% of its oil and 97% of its gas. 55% of the imported gas is used to generate – very expensive – electricity.

The energy offer is there: from Russia, the Caspian, and the Middle East. And the demand is also there: from the European Union (EU) and from world markets via the Mediterranean. No less than 72% of the world’s hydrocarbons are lying nearby. Is it any wonder that Ankara is having dreams over “strategic synergies”?

Where’s my energy drink?

The key political question, once again, is that Turkey’s new delicate positioning entails serious friction with traditional allies – the US, the EU and Israel – as it gets closer and closer to Russia, Iran and Syria, and as it asserts a leadership role (and is viewed as a model) across the fast-evolving Middle East.

Yet energy – not ideology – is the key. The Turkey-Brazil mediation last year over Iranian uranium enrichment; the good commercial relations with the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq; the good relationship with Azerbaijan involving agreements about the Shah Deniz gas field. All these developments are subordinated to an overarching theme: energy.

In this high-stakes game, some European governments are more skillful players than others. If you think former US president Bill Clinton was the king of triangulation, you haven’t seen Italian Prime Minister Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi yet. The triangular Pipelineistan relationship between Italy, Turkey and Russia is now a classic. At the Group of 20 meeting in Seoul last year, Berlusconi, Erdogan and Medvedev retreated to a key trilateral meeting just to talk Pipelineistan.

A Gazprom board member told the Roman daily La Repubblica that in exchange for Gazprom’s expansion in Europe, Prime Minister Valdimir Putin opened to Berlusconi and the Italian ENI energy giant the exploitation of Caspian gas in Kazakhstan (ENI will particularly relish this now as it runs the risk of being shut down in the “new” Libya, with or without Muammar Gaddafi).

Turkey now wants to develop Pipelineistan not only along an east-west axis but a north-south as well; this means a complex web of relations with no less than nine countries – Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. Even before the great 2011 Arab revolt, serious negotiations were ongoing regarding an Arab Pipelineistan that could link Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad. This would do more to unify and develop the new Middle East than any “peace process”, “regime change” or, for that matter, peaceful uprising.

Yet a serious storm in the horizon may throw this Pipelineistan chapter on the rocks; it’s the US missile shield project, in fact a triad of missile shields to be deployed in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The great 2011 Arab revolt may have pushed the issue to the background, but it has not disappeared.

Washington has blamed Iran as the rationale for installing a NATO-controlled missile shield in Europe. Healthy cynicism would instead point to an European shield actually aimed at Russia and an Asian shield aimed at China. But then there’s the possibility of a NATO missile shield installed in Turkey – which would be aimed against Iran, and in a lesser measure, Syria. No wonder this Pentagon/NATO gambit, discussed last year at the NATO summit in Brussels, immersed Ankara in serious political turmoil.

Years after Davutoglu’s book, a look at the official Turkish energy strategy, published a year ago by the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, reveals that transport of energy and gas is the pillar of five strategic themes. The new Turkish foreign policy does seem to be based on very realistic assessments around the key theme of energy. Whichever way we look at it, it’s a complex maze of geopolitics and public and private investments. It may take much more than a missile shield to smash this strategy to pieces.

The fact is that Turkey’s polycentric roles – as an energy bridge between East and West, as a model for the new Arab world, as a key player in the New Great Game in Eurasia – are now more crucial than ever. Sultans of swing – indeed.

(Courtesy Asia Times Online)

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik

by Michael Gillespie

Speaking at a press conference aired nationally several hours after a mentally unstable young man killed six people and wounded 19 during an assassination attempt in which U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head in Tucson, AZ on Saturday, January 8, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik expressed the concerns and sentiments of many Americans regarding violence in media, cultural decline, and the dangerously divisive tone and content of our political discourse.

“I think it’s time as a country that we need to do a little soul-searching, because I think the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business and what we see on TV and how our youngsters are being raised, that this has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in. And I think it’s time that we do the soul-searching,” said Dupnik.

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry. … All I can tell you is that there is reason to believe that this individual may have a mental issue, and I think that people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol,” said Dupnik.

Toward the end of press conference, Dupnik reiterated his criticism of inflammatory media programming: “Let me just say one thing, because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech. But it’s not without consequences.”

Dupnik, a sheriff for 30 years and an Arizona law enforcement officer for more than 50 years, directly addressed elements of a socially-destabilizing dynamic at the center of American cultural and political life. He was not the first to do so, and the questions Dupnik raised are not new ones. In her book, Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment, published in 1998 during a series of 15 school shootings across the USA that took more than 40 lives between 1995 and 2000, Sissela Bok noted, “The United States has the highest levels of homicide of any advanced industrial nation in the world.”

“Is it alarmist or merely sensible to ask about what happens to the souls of children nurtured, as in no past society, on images of rape, torture, bombings, and massacre that are channeled into their homes from infancy?” asked Bok, who received her B.A. and M.A. in psychology from George Washington University in 1957 and 1958, and her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1970.

Formerly a Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University, Bok is currently a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard School of Public Health. The accomplished philosopher and ethicist hoped for a wide-ranging debate about the mass marketing of violence as entertainment, a public discussion that would lead to effective remedies and a reduction in gun violence. As evidenced by continued high levels of gun violence in America, including a school shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 that took 32 lives, despite a general reduction in crime rates, that discussion never quite seems to find purchase or result in any significant reduction of violent programming in media. Instead, by many standards our nation falls ever more obviously into decline, becomes more and more violent, and our politics are increasingly polarized, more divisive than at any time since the Civil War.

Most Right-wing Big Media talk show celebrities and pundits, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Republican 2008 Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, mightily offended by Dupnik’s remarks, responded defensively and angrily during the following days as a media frenzy developed. Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, and others who fan the flames of angry political rhetoric have a lot to lose should Americans lift themselves out of their Big-Media-induced paralysis and demand effective action based on the sheriff’s concerns. Media giant Clear Channel pays Limbaugh about $38 million per year. That amount doesn’t include his income from speaking engagements, the stock market, or other investments. Beck’s annual income from Fox News, Premier Radio Networks, Simon and Schuster, and other sources has been reported to be some $32 million. Palin, who quit her job as governor of Alaska to pursue a lucrative career in Big Media, signed a multi-year contract with Fox News and is reported to have earned some $12 million since deciding that she didn’t want to become “a lame duck.” Those millions, a mere fraction of the amount of loot Limbaugh and Beck earn for inciting fear and loathing, is about one hundred times what Palin would have earned had she remained governor of Alaska.

“Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them,” said Palin on January 12, denying any connection between media violence, talk radio vitriol, and gun violence.

The vast majority of media figures involved in what is called the public discussion have chosen to ignore the issue of violence in media programming, preferring instead to cast doubt on any suggestion of a causative link between overheated political rhetoric and the Tucson shooting while focusing on mental illness and questions about gun control legislation.

On January 11, one of the nation’s most accomplished former law enforcement administrators, one whose area of expertise is motivation and behavior, commented on the issue of violent media programming and angry political rhetoric.

“I’ve been asked this question about the movies and the media and the negative impact of violence in these areas, which is much more profound and significant than a little political rhetoric,” said Roger Depue, a 21-year veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a former chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, during an interview conducted by Charlie Rose.

“What I basically say is, ‘Most people can handle it. Most people can deal with it, normal, stable individuals, they can see it for what it is, and they can deal with it. But if a person is predisposed, or if he is psychotic, or if he is having these dangerous fantasies and something like that comes along, it can trigger, it can cause him to go off in that direction,’” said Depue.

Though two of the nation’s most experienced law enforcement professionals, one at the local level and the other at the national level, voiced grave concern about violent media programming and its socially destabilizing effects in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, when President Barack Obama spoke in Tucson at the memorial service for the victims on January 12, he told the nation, “… none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired.”

As the President’s remarks suggest, it is most unlikely that what will pass for a national public discussion of violent media programming and bitter political rhetoric will, in reality, be wide-ranging, meaningful, or productive.

America has become the most violent nation on earth and one of the most repressive. Even a cursory examination of the relevant statistical studies provides ample evidence. Though it incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country, the USA leads the wealthy nations of the world in gun deaths, murders, suicides, and accidental shootings, according to a 1998 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. Another long-term CDC study found that while “the overall annual death rate for U.S. children aged less than 15 years declined substantially [primarily as a result of decreases in death associated with disease] during the same period, childhood homicide rates tripled, and suicide rates quadrupled.” The study of 26 high-income countries found that the overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children aged less than 15 years was nearly 12 times higher than among children in the other 25 countries combined. The firearm-related homicide rate in the United States was nearly 16 times higher than that in all of the other countries combined; the firearm-related suicide rate was nearly 11 times higher; and the unintentional firearm-related death rate was nine times higher.

Why, one might ask, with this information widely available, do Americans not rise up and demand action to reduce violence in media programming, vitriolic political debate, and gun violence? The short answer is surprisingly simple—Big Media and Big Politics prevent a productive public discussion and the implementation of necessary reforms.  What the public will get instead is what it has always gotten in the past, a seeming sincere but brief and superficial debate designed to protect the status quo.  Real reform that would save lives might also negatively affect the profitability of criminally irresponsible Big Media corporations that are heavily dependent on ever more violent programming.

American life and culture are increasingly characterized by violence not because it must be so, but because Big Media corporations very deliberately make it so. Modern American life is saturated with violent entertainment fare produced by Big Media corporations that subject audiences to a relentless and ever-present barrage of media violence. Violent entertainment programming on screens of all sizes is enormously lucrative and socially destabilizing. Violent media programming is designed and carefully crafted to be exciting and especially attractive to younger, immature, politically and socially naive audiences. Typically combined with salacious story lines and images, media violence speeds up the heart rate and has an addictive quality, which allows corporations to capture and to hold the attention of large audiences, which are sold to advertisers for huge amounts of money.

Most violent media programming is freighted with political messages and content crafted to suit the agendas of powerful and influential special interest groups. Perhaps the most egregious example is the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias that has long been prevalent in Big Media entertainment and news—also known as infotainment—programming. Audiences thus accustomed to and enamored of the notion that violence is the response of first choice in challenging situations are far less likely to question their government’s unnecessary, illegal, and immoral wars abroad, or the “collateral damage”, torture, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and other war crimes that characterize neoconservative foreign policy. Big Media reporters, editors, and producers are trained to self-censor, to avoid information not in sync with the prevailing ethos of the Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex, to cooperate with the retired generals who serve as pundits in Big Media venues where they invariably publicize the Pentagon’s talking points while promoting the latest high-tech weapons system. So-called “defense industry” corporations work hand-in-glove with Big Media corporations, and indeed many of the largest are or have been jointly-owned and operated.

Though it desensitizes vast audiences to violence, few politicians object to the ubiquitous use of socially-destabilizing sexualized violence in entertainment media product because their political campaigns, which are enormously expensive, take place largely if not exclusively in Big Media environments. To say the least, politicians hesitate to criticize or attempt to regulate the powerful industry that controls the venues in which their political fortunes are decided. No critical, meaningful, productive public discussion of media violence or vitriolic political discourse—much of which is more about entertainment and partisan politics than about news—can take place in Big Media venues where it would be moderated by wealthy celebrity propagandists in the employ of Big Media corporations that control the public airways and use them with little or no regard for any legitimate public interest or the common good. Thus Americans are treated to the spectacle of our president ever so carefully tip-toeing around senior and former senior law enforcement professionals’ plainly stated, well-informed, and realistic concerns about the socially-destabilizing and too often deadly effects of media violence and violent political rhetoric.

Thus our country, our culture, and our economy deteriorate as Big Corporations wax fat, while our bankrupt and increasingly corrupt government lurches drunkenly into history, the most violent and destructive force on the planet, for now.

Crown thy good with brotherhood?

Or, How the mighty are fallen.

By: Frank Scott

Our heads are filled with stories about the danger of trillions of dollars in debt and deficits with little if any mention of the real problem they represent. It is not the debt but what we are indebted for that threatens the future of our nation. If we owed hundreds of trillions of dollars – which may soon be the case – and every American was employed, housed, educated, cared for without question in time of ill health or economic need and safe from warfare and violence from inside the nation or out, such debt would not be any problem at all.
Borrowing today and paying back tomorrow shouldn’t mean we lavishly spend most of the borrowed money on weapons, waste, cosmetics and pets, causing us to scrimp on health, education and social life while complaining that we have too much debt. We have to control our spending on things only a minority of us actually want or really need, and begin changing priorities to satisfy the shared needs and wants of the great majority. This can’t happen under the domain of forces that mislead us into social divisions that exaggerate differences and minimize similarities to protect a perverse commodity culture and a degenerate political order that defines minority rule as democracy.
The present renewal of the drive to dismantle Social Security and turn it over to private profiteers is one among many of the lies and distortions offered as solutions for our problems which will only make them much worse. Increasing budgets for inhuman war and decreasing budgets for human service only make sense to anti-social forces which profit from divide and conquer policies. These reduce Americans, especially the working majority, to special interest and identity groups whose common cause is sacrificed to private competition while ruling minorities practice a lucrative socialism at their expense.
Our imposed common condition of privately shaped ignorance needs to become a liberated common cause of social democracy in order to transform our economy before it transforms us into a totally failed society.
All people need housing, safe communities, health care, education, transportation and the free time necessary to pursue interests other than simply working to maintain those needs. But we are socialized to accept a lack of any and all of those things for far too many of our number, believing that those who don’t have them are simply undeserving. This divisive condition is part of the political economy that replaces citizenship with consumerism and substitutes anti-social competition for social cooperation.
When people seek community in religious gatherings where they worship deities that call for solidarity and love among humanity, and leave those places to practice competitive individualism and economic warfare amongst themselves, the society in which they practice this split personality is suffering more than a collective mental disorder. That disorder is part of the economic foundation that is taught to us as a natural order of what is called god’s universe, except when god is being communed with at church, ashram, temple or other place of worship of the beautiful immaterial ideal in order to escape the ugly material reality. This fractured dualism makes it possible for a society to be in great debt in order to make war, create poverty and destroy the natural environment, while lacking the material and spiritual sustenance of life for a majority of the human community.
If we are all god’s children, as many believe, we need to stop treating some of our kin folk like excrement. The human family is dysfunctional under profit and loss rules in which values that sound good in words about love, compassion and brotherhood turn out to be deeds of hate, waste and mass murder. We cannot be ethical people practicing high minded morals in the midst of a collectively immoral economy that trashes ethical behavior with murderous attack on humans and all other parts of the natural environment.
The earth is treated as a profit making commodity and we see it erupting in gushers of oil that threaten far more than the profit margin of one petroleum company. Humans are treated as nothing more than commodities by the same system, and it cannot and should not be blamed on individual corporate CEOs or political and media gas bags who simply follow the systemic dictates of creating profit for some at the expense of all. That is the religion of the market under private control, creating benefit for a minority at enormous cost for the great majority. That cost is being reflected in greater numbers of personal lives as this economy suffers what is called a recession, but even more telling signs are revealed in the rapid breakdowns in life support systems that can no longer withstand the ravages of being treated like marketable commodities rather than what they are; the substance of our lives.
Nature is our nature and not some product which we can simply market and sell for profit at the mall. When we incur colossal debts in order to create massive destruction of nature, we are destroying the very substance of ourselves. That cannot go on and will only be changed by a motivated and informed public that demands service to humanity – itself – before service to a private commodity market. The growing numbers who profess that another world is possible are voicing the necessity, not just the possibility. We will have that other world or we will not have any world at all. And creating that future organism is worth going into far more debt than any we have incurred for generating this present grotesque antihuman and rapidly failing mechanism.

By: The Associated Press

Reduce your debt by 60%! Stop collection calls! Be debt-free in 12 months!

 The siren song of debt-settlement services is getting harder to ignore these days, especially if your finances are out of control or creditors are knocking at the door. Read the full story

By Christopher Leonard, AP Business Writer

Courtesy of the Associated Press

In a brutal job market, here’s a task that might sound easy: Fill jobs in nursing, engineering and energy research that pay $55,000 to $60,000, plus benefits. Read the full story