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President Obama has taken the leap; let’s hope he finds some remaining Palestinian ground to land on. Given his new commitment, if he fails, I wonder if he is willing to lay blame where it duly resides for Israel’s continued rogue action—in Washington D.C.

Returning to the US, the civilizing impact of the activism of the ’60s naturally elicited efforts to restore order and discipline. One component has been the state-corporate economic programs, which, particularly since the Reagan years, have broken the link between economic growth and social and economic health. Under these programs of financialization of the economy, real wages for the majority have stagnated while the limited benefits system declined, and inequality has soared to unprecedented heights

Obama knows this perfectly well, which is why he was blustering some while back about not running for office to serve a bunch of fat cat Wall Street bankers, and may also explain some of his tentative moves to lightly tax and regulate the parasites. Indeed, in the wake of the loss of Massachusetts, Obama has talked up his reforms yesterday, promising a ‘fight’ with Wall Street firms who tried to sink his proposals. These are not radical reforms – if the multi-millionaire Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne approves of them, they aren’t that radical

Meanwhile, the call to “mobilize” 100 billion dollars in climate financing by 2020 is vapor. As Hugo Chavez said, “If the climate were one of the biggest capitalist banks, the rich governments would have saved it.” Instead within a decade we’ll muster up a year’s worth of US government spending on bombing villagers in Waziristan. Washington’s priorities are clear. Saving AIG is more important than saving the planet

For much of this past American century, as in others bestridden by Empires that came before ours, the morals guiding relations between states have been those of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. To quote the murderer Raskolnikov: “he who can spit on what is greatest will be their lawgiver, and he who does the most will be rightest of all.” It’s ugly, so we prefer to cover it up and tell ourselves stories, most often about our benevolence, or “the shining city upon a hill” we call our homelan

This, of course, is not to say that terrorism doesn’t exist; it obviously does, and on a global scale. The world’s biggest terrorists are, of course, the U.S. and Britain, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people this century alone, and the intimidation and displacement of millions more. Terrorism also obviously exists on a much smaller scale from other groups too, but not as many of them are “al-Qaeda” as we are told, and indeed, their threat to “our very civilization” – even collectively – is greatly exaggerated (and pales in insignificance when compared with our threat to theirs)

In thinking about international affairs, it is useful to keep in mind several principles of considerable generality and import. The first is the maxim of Thucydides: the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must. It has an important corollary: every powerful state relies on specialists in apologetics, whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just, and if the weak suffer it is their fault. In the contemporary West, these specialists are called “intellectuals,” and with only marginal exceptions, they fulfill their assigned task with skill and self-righteousness, however outlandish the claims, a practice that traces back to the origins of recorded history

While history seldom provides us with easy or straightforward lessons, it does suggest that the Boston gay rights protesters had the right idea – and that those working for progressive change in America today could do a lot worse than get hold of some tea bags of their own

We do not live in a totalitarian society – the public potentially has enormous power to interfere. The goal, then, is to persuade the public that corporate-sponsored political choice is meaningful, that it makes a difference. The task of politicians at all points of the supposed ’spectrum’ is to appear passionately principled while participating in what is essentially a charade

President Obama has acknowledged that “we can’t talk forever” about the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. “At some point,” he said recently, “steps have to be taken so that people can see progress on the ground.” This attitude sheds a cautious ray of hope that the United States may be finally considering a policy shift gauged by facts on the ground instead of the number of meetings held to discuss a peace process. This is a wise starting point

Jeff Gore talks to the man Sarah Palin accused of being a “terrorist” and friend of Barack Obama’s in the election campaign 2008

Is Obama’s new age of multilateralism all it’s cracked up to be?