Across the pond

…….2009.

I have read – and written – far too many New Year articles in my life to have any faith in predictions or futureology. So am not going to make any predictions for 2009. Since I had an old-fashioned journalistic training, my preference at this time of year was not to comment on the forecasts for the future made by distingished men from many different disciplines, but to look at the future which has already arrived.

Several things have happened in 2008 which make it certain that 2009 is going to be very different from 2008, and very different from any other year in the history of western civilisation.

So what follows is a few facts to substantiate this assertion.

Starting with the last half of the year.

1. American consumer capitalism collapsed for the second time in recent history. There has been a lot of obfuscation amongst the commentators, who have mostly said we are facing, not a depression like that of the 1930s, but a serious recession. That is a matter of opinion and semantics. But the facts are clear as daylight.

During the last half of 2008 both the banks and the American motor industry, the driver, via Henry Ford and the rest, of American consumer capitalism, went bust. They are still there on the High Street, looking after our savings. And selling us cars, most of which are polluting the atmosphere.

They are still there because they have been bailed out by Government money, money which comes from the taxes paid by all citizens. And most of it by wage-earning American tax-payers, not the multi-national banks and other big companies, who pay big salaries to lawyers to help them to legally avoid taxes.

The President who has bailed them out is George W Bush, who is a right-wing Republican and Christian fundamentalist. He has bailed them out by abandoning his own beliefs and handing over billions of taxpayers money to failed capitalists.

Because he did not want to repeat the mistakes of his Republican predcessor, Herbert Hoover, who took charge after the Wall Street crash of 1929, and plunged not only the US, but the whole world into the Great Depression, which blighted the whole world in the early 1930s.

So there at last there is one good thing I can write about George W. He showed himself flexible enough to abandon his beliefs in the face of the evidence. Which was, and is, that American consumer capitalism is bankrupt. And would have died, were it not for Bush shovelling in the money from US taxpayers.

Because the clear difference between today’s world and that of the 1930s is that the world economy is nourished by a variety of economies around the world, many of which are not driven by the same idealogical imperatives as George W.

Chinese capitalism, although it is very effective in undercutting prices on all sorts of goods which sell in UK shops, from kid’s toys to computer stuff, is certainly not American capitalism. And it comes from a society which does not nourish such important American freedoms as the right of the individual citizen to dissent from the majority.

2. But what is quite as important about what actually happened in 2008, started happening in the first half of the year. When the attention of the whole world was focussed on the US election. Because – and the citizens of the world are not idiots – although the US does not dominate the world, as it did in the 1930s in economic terms, it does in terms of military power.

The US has the nuclear capability to end life on the planet earth. Even Putin, the newish boss of Russia, cannot compete with that. So, although he behaves like Stalin sometimes, he is not under any illusion that the world is how it was when Stalin ran the Soviet Union.

He would like to liquidate those Russians, who after the fall of Stalinism cashed in and became multi-millionaires western style. But, since several of them are supported by the west, he can’t.

What he thinks should happen in 2009 is not a subject of many column inches in the western press.

But it surely matters, doesn’t it. Putin, by fair means or foul, governs a large population and probably has more sophisticated nuclear weapons than any other country, other than the US.

So, I want for the rest of this blog, to focus on what happened in the first half of 2008.

The year began with the real possibility that the US might be about to elect the first black President ever. The primaries had shown that the the voters wanted a change from Bush and all the other Republicans, so the contest, then was between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, who had vast support amongst those who had worked for her, and for her husband, Bill, in his two terms as US President.

The battle was hard fought and in doubt until the last minute. Because blacks are still a minority in the US electorate and the fear of blacks is greatest amongst the white working class, who were some of Hillary Clinton’s most enthusiastic supporters.

When it came to the election on 4 November Obama won more easily. Because by that time it was clear that Bush’s devotion to ‘American consumer capitalism’ was built on castles of sand.

The leading banks were bust, though their bosses were still holding on to their million pound bonuses. (And, according to report, are now using their imaginitive abilities to write stunning fiction and make still more money, from people who want temporary relief from the realities of life in 2009.

America needed a change, because many of its decent ordinary citizens, were being threatened with having their homes repossessed by the banks. This is what was foremost when Americans went into the polling booths.

That is why not too many of them were impressed by John McCain, who had the experience to do battle with the President of Iran, if he were so minded to launch his few crude atomic weapons against the US mainland.

Because the problem the US faces in 2009, is not a foreign threat, from Iran, or the Muslim hordes reared on the teaching of bin Laden.

The threat is from the version of capitalism, married with Christian fundamentalism, favored by George Bush, and many others.

Not only America, the world needs a rest from this sort of claptrap.

Particularly when it is promulgated so as to make a division between Christianity and Islam.

Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, accorded with most of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The hatred that much of the Muslim world has for the US is not to do with religion or race.

It is because the US has tried to dictate what other nations should do. In Vietnam. And more recently in Iraq.

Many Americans are unhappy with this.

Because America was founded by people who left their homeland to live a better life elsewhere.

Barrack Obama has not reacted to the many things that have been happening since he won the vote. Because he does not take power until later this month, although tradition dictates that the out-going President consults with the incoming President.

What he has to deal with when he takes office, is a world that is quite different from the world as it was when he started his campaign.

Since then, as this blog demonstrates, American consumer capitalism has collapsed.

So Obama is faced with a task that is even more daunting than that faced by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1932. To save America he has to produce a new New Deal.

But he does not, like Gordon Brown, have to try and save the world.

The world of 2009 is very different from the world of 1929. The world’s economy is now supported by many varieties of capitalism and post-Stalinist socialism.

But in many ways what has been happening in the US in the last few years is just what was happening in the 1920s.

American bankers, stockbrokers, and other financiers, were then cashing in on the gullibility of the multitude. They created an atmosphere that suggested that ordinary people could borrow far beyond their means, because the boom would go on forever. And their house would be worth far more than they had paid for it, in a few years.

At the end of the 1920s some of the greedy financiers were thowing themselves off skyscrapers. Today, according to report, the bankers who made their millions from loaning money to people who could not afford to pay, are turning their talents to writing fiction, so that they can build on the wealth amassed through their bonuses.

This is not the kind of society the founding fathers of America subscribed to. But the new President of the US, who has to deal with this situation is the first black President in US history.

Which latches into quite different imperatives.

He has an impossible job. Americans, and Brits, are having to face the consequences of Thatcherism and Reaganism, the notion (I don’t think it is worthy to be called a theory) that the boom could go on forever. So long as you gave all citizens the license to make their millions, without any government regulation.

That led to a few citizens, many not entrepreneurs, but salaried employees of the banks and other big companies, making millions is bonuses. By encouraging the ordinary citizen to do, what the bankers of my youth warned them against – borrowing more than you could afford to pay back.

Obama has said very little about what he intends to do over the last two months. I hope this means that he wants to think about it, rather than be pushed into quick solutions.

But at least I am thankful that I supported him.

Just imagine what it would be like now if John McCain was going to be the next President. He was more experienced in military matters, so that if the US were facing a nuclear attack from Iran, as was mentioned during the campaign, McCain had the experience to deal with it.

The reality of 2009 is that the Iranian President has plenty of his own problems, so the likerlihood of him launching a nuclear attack is near zero. And even if he did his nuclear arsenal is puny compared with the US.

McCain would have been a disaster in dealing with America’s 2009 problems, which result from eight years of devotion to ‘un-regulated capitalism’ under. George W. And a lot of tacit support from around the world. Most notably from the supposedly Labour men in the UK, Tony Blair and his financial ‘expert’, Gordon Brown, now UK PM.

On this, the first day of 2009, the death threat is not from Iran, nor Muslim fundamentalists. It is from the state of Israel, who have used their sophisticated western weapons to murder more than 400 residents of Gaza. Their justification is that Palestine has been launching rocket attacks against Israel, which have killed 4 Israelis.

They have launched their attacks over Christmas, when the newspaper are relatively empty of news. And during the period when the US is in the long wait, before the new President takes over from the out-going President.

For someone like me, who has spent many hours arguing against anti-semitism it is a very sad day indeed. The victims are now bullying the people of Gaza, with killing weapons provided by American consumer capitalism.

And they are doing it in the few remaining days before Barack Obama takes power.

They are trying to force their concerns to the top of his agenda.

But at the cost of the lives of 400 residents of Gaza, most of whom were not Hamas terrorists.

This is profoundly depressing.

Israel is adopting the same callous tactics to the Palestinians which Hitler and Stalin adopted towards the Jews. Not because the Palestinians are a threat to their country, but because they want to exclude them from it.

The Israelis, who have been saved from oppression, are now oppressing the inhabitants of the land they have settled in.

And, incredibly they are doing it just before the leadership of the US, which is primary bankroller of Israel, is due to be taken over by a black man, who though he is a Christian, has Muslim ancestors.

In this context the Israeli attack is not only callous, heartless and bullying, it is lunatic in terms of strategy.

The incoming US President has far more pressing matters he has to deal with than Israel. And even if he rated Israel a top priority, there is not much any US President can do for Israel. Israel is a complex political problem, where the interests of America are often at odds with the wishes of America’s Jewish population.

These problems can only be solved by dialogue. Between the people who live in the region.

But, though I am gloomy about Israel, I am not totally pessimistic about 2009.

We have a new US President who is quite different from George W Bush, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He is also quite different from Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and James Baldwin.

I have never met him. But I don’t think that is a disadvantage, because I have followed his campaign from the start. And there is no journalist I have read who even claims to really know him, and what he will do when he takes power.

What he has said himself, and consistently throughout his campaign, is that he wants change. But, equally emphatic in his campaign is the message that he wants to unify America. He not only wanted to win the election he wanted to win the continuing support of the majority of Americans.

At one level this is hopelessly idealistic from the vantage point of someone like me who has lived in the US and seen the huge contradictions between the American myth and the reality.

But maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama can make a difference.