Johann Hari

Is your life worth more to your government than a few pence added onto Big Oil's share price? At first, this will sound like a foolish question. But sometimes there is a news story that lays out the priorities of our governments once the doors are closed and the cameras are switched off. The story of the attempt to trade the Lockerbie bomber for oil is one of those moments.

Let’s start in the deserts of Iraq – because the Lockerbie deal might just reveal what really happened there. Many people were perplexed by Tony Blair’s decision to back George W. Bush’s invasion, which has led to the deaths of 1.2 million people. Blair said he was motivated by opposition to two things – terrorism and tyranny. First off, he said Saddam Hussein might give Weapons of Mass Destruction to jihadis. When it was proven in the rubble after the invasion that Saddam had no WMD and no links to jihadis – as many critics of the war had said all along – Blair declared he would do it all again anyway, because Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, and all tyrants should be opposed.

Most critics of the war said the real reason was a desire for Western access to Iraq’s vast supplies of oil. This debate has gone on for years. Now it emerges that Tony Blair plotted to hand a convicted terrorist – the worst in modern British history – to a vicious tyrant, in exchange for access to oil for British corporations. It seems to settle the argument in the darkest possible way.

Here’s how it happened. Just before Christmas in 1988, a flight from London to New York City was blasted out of the sky above Scotland by a bomb in the cargo. All 259 people onboard were killed, along with 11 on the ground. One man was convicted for the mass murder at a Scottish trial in 2000: Abdelbasset al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer. Following the bombing, most Western governments imposed sanctions on Libya that forbade their companies to invest there. If you are opposed to terrorism and tyranny, it was a happy ending: an alleged terrorist was tried in open court and convicted, and a tyrant was shunned.

But within a few years Tony Blair was not happy. Why? The oil company BP wanted to be able to drill down into Libya’s oil, and tap the profits that would gush forth. Their then-CEO, John Browne, flew to Tripoli in the company of MI6 agents to find out what the dictatorship wanted in return for opening the country’s wells. It was, of course, clear. They wanted Megrahi back.

BP has admitted it lobbied Tony Blair to hasten into effect a prisoner exchange with Libya. They say they didn’t specifically mention Megrahi – but there was no need to. There were no other Libyan prisoners of particular note in Britain.

Blair’s administration was so intertwined by that point with the oil company that it was often dubbed “Blair’s Petroleum”. There was a revolving door between BP and Downing Street: BP execs sat on more government taskforces than all other oil companies combined, while Blair’s closest confidantes like Anji Hunter and Phillip Gould went to work for the corporation. He made two of the corporation’s successive CEOs into Lords, even appointed one as a minister to his government, and slashed taxes on North Sea oil production, causing BP’s share price to sky-rocket. By 2005, he was talking to Lord Browne at Downing Street dinners about what he would do after he left office. There were rumours at the time he considered working for BP.

Blair responded to BP’s lobbying with apparent pleasure. His Foreign Office Minister, Bill Rammell, assured Libyan officials that Blair did not “want Megrahi to pass away in prison.” His Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, said a desire for Libya’s oil was “an essential part” of this decision. So Straw began negotiating a prisoner swap agreement, and urged the Scottish authorities to release the convict. He told the Scottish government in a leaked letter that it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to let Megrahi go.

The chief negotiator for the Libyans was Mousa Kousa, a thug who had been expelled from Britain after bragging about plots to murder democratic dissidents here on British soil. These supposed opponents of tyranny didn’t blush.

There are, of course, some serious commentators who argue that Megrahi was framed. It’s a legitimate debate. But if he was, it should have been settled in court, at an appeal, not in a dodgy deal with a dictator to benefit BP.

Both sides now admit what was happening: they were trying to trade a convicted mass murderer for oil. Saif Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator’s son and second in command, said it was “obvious” that attempts to free Megrahi were linked to oil contracts, adding “we all knew what we were talking about.” When he later appeared on a TV chat show alongside Megrahi, he told him: “In all the trade, oil and gas deals which I have supervised, you were there on the table. When British interests came to Libya, I used to put you on the table.”

There is no question there was a plot. The only question is whether the plot worked, or whether it got what it wanted anyway by a remarkable coincidence. It was, ultimately, up to the Scottish politicians whether to release Megrahi, and they publicly refused a prisoner swap. We know that Straw lobbied them to do it, but they insist they made the decision independently on “compassionate grounds.” A year ago, Megrahi was sent home to Triploli to be greeted by cheering crowds after serving eleven days for each person murdered. Officially, the Scots had assessed him to have only three months left to live.

There are several facts that batter these claims with question marks. The most obvious is that, eleven months later, Megrahi isn’t dead. It’s the most amazing medical recovery since Lazarus. Or is it? It turns out the doctors who declared him sick were paid for by the Libyan government, and one of them says he was put under pressure by Libya to offer the most pessimistic estimate of life expectancy. Susan Cohen, whose only daughter died in Lockerbie, says: “Why didn’t the Scottish pay for the doctors?”

Indeed, a detailed investigation by the Sunday Telegraph reported that “the Scottish and British governments actively assisted Megrahi and his legal team to seek a release on compassionate grounds” – suggesting they were hardly neutrally trying to discover the medical facts. The Libyan dictatorship certainly took the release as a gift from the British government. The tyranny’s chief spokesman, Abdul Majeed al-Dursi, said: “This is a brave and courageous decision by the British… We in Libya appreciate this and Britain will find it is rewarded.” BP has indeed been rewarded: it is now drilling in Libya.

But releasing him this way was certainly easier. It’s hard to tell the public you released a mass murderer out of compassion for him, but it’s almost impossible to tell them you did it for oil. Senator Charles Schumer of New York says: “Once Megrahi is released, all the roadblocks to that oil deal are removed. If anyone thinks this is a coincidence, I have a bridge to sell them in Brooklyn.”

This affair seems to reopen the Iraq debate, in a way that vindicates Blair’s most severe critics. Tony Blair’s remaining defenders say he was motivated in Iraq by a hatred of terrorism and tyranny and had no regard whatsoever for getting access to oil. Yet at the very same time the Labour government was plotting in Libya to hand the worst terrorist in British history to a tyrant in exchange for oil. It’s proof that oil and corporate power were a much bigger factor in driving foreign policy than the public rhetoric of opposing tyranny or terror.

David Cameron refuses to establish an investigation into how this was allowed to happen. He has tried to soothe anger by saying he will release all the relevant documents – but the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, added soon after that Blair’s permission will be needed before any records of his conversations are shown to the public. Imagine if the police allowed suspects to take this approach: “Certainly, officer, you can look under my coffee table. But not in any of my wardrobes. Good day.”

For the families of all the innocent people slaughtered in Lockerbie, this has been a cold-water education in what their governments really value. Cohen, remembering her murdered 20 year-old daughter Theodora, says: “Western governments seem to be run by one thing now – the great God money. All that matters now is profits and money. Blood-money.”

There’s a revealing little postscript to this tale. Last month, Blair went to Libya on behalf of the large corporations who now employ him. He was greeted by Gaddaffi himself – who tortures dissidents and terrorizes his population – “like a brother”, according to the Libyans. There has even been rife press speculation that, now they need a CEO, Tony Blair will go to work for BP. In many ways, it seems, he always has.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

To read his latest article for Slate, click here

Noam Chomsky is one of the most hysterically abused figures in the world today. Even his critics have to concede that his work inventing the field of linguistics -- and so beginning to decode the structure of how language is formed in the human brain -- makes him one of the most important intellectuals alive. But when he applies the same rigorous scientific method to figuring out the structure of how power -- especially the American government's - works, he is pepper-sprayed with smears. He is a self-hating Holocaust denier, a jihad-loving traitor, a Pol Pot-licking communist, and on and on.

If all you know of his work is the smears, then his new book Hopes and Prospects will be a revelation. In his rather dry understated way, he excavates the reality behind the babbling Babel of 24/7 corporate news, and places long-buried truths on the table for us to examine. Every one is sourced to the leading academic journals, the best experts, the sharpest medical advice -- yet each one is a shock if you rely on news brought to you by corporations and corrupt right-wing billionaires.

So, for example, he uncovers the story of why Haiti is so poor, and could be shaken to pieces by an earthquake that would have killed only a handful in California. It's a story of man-made earthquakes, one after another. The country was the first to rebel against slavery and to successful cast off the whip-hand -- and so it was brutally punished by the French Empire. Every time it has begun to rise onto its feet, it has been kicked back down, with the American Empire taking over to topple its elected leaders (the last was put on a plane at gunpoint in 2008) and stifle any moves towards development.

But who knows? Who has heard about it? Who ties to hold our leaders accountable for it? Chomsky is trying to rescue crimes from the memory-hole, so we can remember them. He explains that Ronald Reagan -- the great hero of the American right -- was a great champion of jihadism. It was Reagan who encouraged Pakistan to simultaneously become viciously fundamentalist, and acquire nuclear weapons. Chomsky coolly condemns "the global jihad launched by Zia and Reagan," launched for geopolitical reasons, with no concern for the after-effects.

But Reagan remains unstained. Chomsky quotes the great American historian Francis Jennings, who noted of early twentieth century leaders: "In history, the man in the ruffled shirt and gold-coated waistcoat levitates above the blood he has ordered to be spilled by dirty-handed underlings." Instead, Chomsky says, history is too often ruled by the maxim spelled out by Thucydidies: "The strong do as they wish, while the poor suffer as they must."

But it doesn't have to be this way. This is a book weaved through with hope and awe at all the people who have managed to slip beyond imperial control and establish real democracy. Chomsky's strongest model -- and the world's -- is Bolivia's experiment with radical democracy. After thirty years of having neoliberalism forced on them by the West, including the cost of water being pushed beyond their grasp, the Bolivian people rose up and elected the first indigenous leader since the European conquests. Since then, it has had the fastest fall in poverty and the most rapid growth in Latin America.

In his cool blizzard of facts and academic sources, the hot air of his critics seems to melt away. To pluck one example, the leftist-turned-neoconservative journalist Nick Cohen has accused Chomsky of being soft on jihadism (as well as of "not being bothered" by "the crimes of Adolf Hitler"). Yet Chomsky points out that an analysis of official data for the government-supported RAND corporation found that the invasion of Iraq caused a "seven-fold increase in jihadism." If you really hate jihadism, you have to figure out what actually reduces it, rather than engage in bluster. Chomsky supported the path that produces fewer jihadis, while Cohen supports the path that produces more.

Chomsky presents all this plainly, and with -- and this is often overlooked -- a sly sense of humour. Describing the growing rebellions in Afghanistan, he notes: "People have the odd characteristic of objecting to the slaughter of family members and friends." He picks through the Wonderland of U.S. propaganda-speak for the most comical examples. To pluck just one: Kennedy courtier Hans Morgenthau said that the "reality" of U.S. foreign policy lies in its "transcendent ideals", and when the historical record suggested the U.S. had fallen short of it, this was merely "an abuse of reality." He sternly warned that we must not "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself."

When I was shamefully wrong about the war in Iraq myself, it was an email exchange with Noam Chomsky -- where he laid bare the best evidence about what was motivating the U.S. government -- that helped me figure out where I had gone so badly wrong. Hopes and Prospects is a book that can do the same for many more people - a treasure-trove of truths that shouldn't be left buried in our over-flowing sandpit of propaganda and lies.

So now we know. If you are a 44-year-old man, you can drug and anally rape a terrified 13-year-old girl as she sobs, says "no, no, no," and pleads for her asthma medication, and face no punishment at all. You just have to meet two criteria: (a) You have to run away and stay away for a few decades, and (b) You need to direct some good films. If you manage this, not only will you walk free. There will be a huge campaign to protect you from the "witch-hunt" of the laws forbidding child-rape, and you will be lauded as a hero.

Polanski admitted his crime before he ran away, and for years afterwards, he boasted from exile that every man wants to do what he did. He chuckled to one interviewer in 1979: "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But... fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!"

But this is not enough, it seems, for the Swiss government to return him to the United States to face trial. They have found a legalistic loophole that enables them to let him go - while admitting "national interests" may be a factor in the release. This may be a reference to pressure from neighboring France to free their citizen. As a Swiss citizen, I think I can say without being offensive - we all remember the bargains Swiss governments have made in the past to preserve their "national interests." This is in a long tradition of helping criminals and calling it Swiss hard-headedness.

The campaign to release Polanski has leeched into the open a slew of attitudes that I thought were defeated a generation ago. Whoopi Goldberg said it wasn't "rape-rape." Others hinted darkly that she wasn't a virgin at the time of the rape. So if a 13 year old has been raped before, she's fair game for all future rapists?

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who led the campaign, said a little bit of child molestation isn't his problem when Great Art is at stake. He wrote: "Am I repulsed by what he got up to? His behavior is not my business. I'm concerned about his movies. I like The Pianist and Rosemary's Baby." That's worth saying again: this campaign was led by a man who thinks the drugging and raping of a child is "not my business," when compared to a film about Satan inseminating Mia Farrow.

The novelist Robert Harris, who is a friend of Polanski's, said: "It strikes me as disgusting treatment." He wasn't talking about the child-rape. He was talking about the attempt to punish the child-rape. He said Polanski was being subjected to a "lynch mob." Where is this lynch mob? All I can see are people patiently suggesting the law should be enforced, and he should be given a fair and open trial. This is the polar opposite of a lynching: it is sober justice.

Do these defenders of Polanski understand what they are saying? Do they mean it? Harris has four children. If a great film director drugs and rapes them tomorrow, will he call the police, or will he say it would be "disgusting" to do so? Would he say the police and prosecutors trying to protect his children were a "lynch mob" and shoo them away? If the rapist ran off, would he say that after three decades on the run (boasting about his crime) he should walk free? I doubt it. So why do Harris' words suggest he thinks Polanski's victim is worth less than his own children?

Now the campaign has succeeded. So congratulations to Whoopi and Bernard and Robert: an unrepentant, bragging child-rapist won't face his day in court, thanks in part to you. Have fun at the victory party. But -- just a word of advice -- you might want to leave your daughters at home.

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world, just so they could make a fatter profit.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis like they were hit by a tsunami. "It was very painful," a woman my age called Abeba Getaneh, told me. "My children stopped growing. I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either. We were told the swelling Chinese and Indian middle classes were pushing it up, but as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand from those countries for them actually fell by 3 percent over this period.

There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It's true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land - but that was a gradual process that wouldn't explain a violent spike. It's true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food - but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn't the biggest factor.

To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache - but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.

For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer and the global price is high, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked well.

Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into 'derivatives' that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.

So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to financial speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutschebank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merryl Lynch - and on, and on, provided they think the price can be jacked up, until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles' crop at all.

If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, 'Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay', explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English."

Poetry found its break broke with straightforward representation of reality when T.S. Eliot wrote 'The Wasteland.' Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand. As Lanchester puts it: "With derivatives... there is a profound break between the language of finance and that of common sense."

So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? How could this parallel universe of speculation affect her? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was itself deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in contracts that were speculating on theoretical food that would be grown in the future - and the speculators drove the price through the roof.

Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldman's pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market, and they were looking for somewhere else to make their stash of cash swell. They started to buy massive amounts of derivatives based on food: they reckoned that food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded onto this ground and decided to buy, buy, buy.

So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for contracts based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price for food on people's plates massively rose. The starvation began.

The food price was now being set by speculation, rather than by real food. The hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that even on the regulated exchanges in the US - which take up a small part of the business - 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely to inflate the price and sell it on. Even George Soros said this was "just like secretly hoarding food during a hunger crisis in order to make profits from increasing prices." The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.

When I asked them to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, Merrill Lynch's spokesman said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were a little more detailed in their response: they said "serious analyses... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a single statement by the OECD.

How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period - but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows this speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.

So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. This is what happens when you follow the claim that unregulated markets know best to the end of the line. The finance sector's Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict such misery, and barely even notice?

If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How long would it last then? How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears the Senate - drenched in speculator-donations - may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.

Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble from swelling, probably soon. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. In the UK, the World Development Movement is launching a week of action this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 for your marching orders. In the US, click here to find out what you can do. The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please - do anything you can to make sure they never, never do that to us again."

Has our crude awakening begun, at last? It’s not just the pelicans of Louisiana that are flapping and flailing in an oil slick – it’s all of us. We live permanently doused in petrol. Every time we move further than our feet can carry us, or eat food we didn’t grow, or go shopping, we burn more barrels. Petrol pours off each of us like an invisible sweat. The twentieth century was propelled into the stratosphere on a great gushing geyser of oil, and in the adrenaline-frenzy, nobody wanted to ask where it was coming from, or what it would cost us in the end.

But in this decade, the true costs of oil – the ones that have been steadily accumulating since 1901, when it began to spurt from a hilltop in Texas – have begun to finally distract our gaze from the speed-dial. They silently dominate almost every long-term question we face.

Extracting oil from the ground has almost always been disastrous for the people who live nearby. The only thing that is unusual about this morphing of “Drill, Baby, Drill” into “Spill, Baby, Spill” is that, this time, the world noticed the victims. From the Niger Delta to Azerbaijan, the world is littered with places poisoned by the petroleum industry.

To pluck one random example, Ecuador’s oil pipeline – fuelling California – is located above ground, next to roads. It leaks constantly. The oil companies have to pump water into the Amazonian oil fields in order to extract it, which leaves behind a toxic soup of mercury, benzene and chromium 6. For decades, they simply pumped it into the local rivers – causing an epidemic of cancers and severely deformed babies. A US court calculated that the unpaid liabilities for destroying so many lives total more than $27bn. Who has heard of it?

Big Oil is occasionally, fleetingly honest about how it works. Sadad al-Husseini was vice president for exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, and he said of the industry: "If your tanker is old and you ought to retire it, you keep it working. If you have an offshore platform that is beyond the boundaries of a certain country and you can dump chemicals into the sea, you do. If you have to abandon a facility that is a pollutant, you abandon it without cleaning it up. If you’ve hired people and you can work them in unhealthy environments where you’ve got sulphur dioxide, you do it. All these are ways in which you say, it’s not my problem. It’s not my cost.”

This will only metastasize from here on in, because we have already burned up all the easy-to-access oil. The last year in which humans found more oil than we burned was when I was born: 1979. The sources that remain are in hard-to-reach places: far beneath the oceans, or the Arctic, or beneath conflict-zones, where protections are more lax, and accidents are more likely and even harder to staunch.

But it is now clear that oil does not only trash local environments. That was only a taster before the main course. It turns out oil spills so many warming gases into the atmosphere when it burns that it is radically altering the biosphere. The Arctic just hit its lowest level of sea ice for this time of year since records began. NASA says we could be on course for the hottest year yet known. The International Energy Agency warns that if we can extract and burn the remaining oil left, we will be on course for 6 degrees of global warming – a level that hasn’t been seen for 251 million years, when it triggered one of the biggest mass extinctions in the fossil record.

The people who say we shouldn’t worry about global warming because we’ll find a way to adapt further down the line should look again at the Gulf. The most powerful country on earth can’t stop a single leaking pipe. How will they – or the rest – deal with rapidly rising sea levels, the drying up of agricultural land, and super-charged hurricanes?

It doesn’t stop there. Oil-fever has driven the other great stories of this century. The demand for petrol is massively increasing, just as supply gets harder to meet – a virtual guarantee that we will fight for what remains. The invasion of Iraq, which has caused a million deaths, was a down-payment on this dystopia. It also leads our governments to support some of the world’s worst dictators in return for easy access to their ol’ black magic: we pay the Saudi dictatorship, and they use the cash to whip women who dare to sit behind the wheel of a car and to promote vile fundamentalist hatred of us.

As our addiction to oil goes on longer and our supply becomes more squeezed, we will become even more like junkies who are prepared to suck up to any dealer or rob anyone to get our next fix. In the film ‘Three Days of the Condor’, Robert Redford says free people will never back wars for oil. His CIA boss replies: “Ask ‘em when they’re running out. Ask ‘em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ‘em when their engines stop. Ask ‘em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ‘em. They’ll just want us to get it for ‘em.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can stop this SUV. We can get out. It wouldn’t even be that hard, compared to the challenges faced by previous generations. The technologies exist to replace oil now. For example, if we lined just 0.3 percent of the Sahara – the area of Belgium - with solar technology, it would meet all of Europe’s energy needs indefinitely.

Yes, it’s expensive, but we are already spending that money on making the dirtiest fuels cheaper. Oil Change International have shown that $250-400bn is currently spent every year subsidizing the use of fossil fuels, while renewable energy sources get less than $12bn. Switch the money and you’re almost there – and you have a massive jobs program to rebuild our infrastructure thrown in for free.

We will have to make this switch in the end, because the oil will run out. The only question is – do we do it now, skipping all the wars and all the warming, or do we wait to do it on a trashed and unraveling globe?

As long ago as 1979, Jimmy Carter gave a devastating speech saying the need for the West to wean itself off oil was “the moral equivalent of war.” Nothing happened. Barack Obama’s Oval Office address last week had more detail about the prayers we should offer to shrimp farmers than how his words about moving beyond oil could be made real. The stimulus cash didn’t go towards building green energy: when Obama last week wanted to boast about the fiscal stimulus, where did he go? To the 10,000th road that has been built.

Why? The clue to the biggest cause lies in the current Gulf disaster, where the crudest forces can be seen in microcosm. The oil companies gave so many “gifts” to the safety inspectors that, by this year, they were often just handed the inspection forms and told to fill them in themselves. On the national stage in the US, politicians on all sides (including Barack Obama) are sprayed with petro-money at election time. Gradually, they become an oiligarchy that sees moving beyond petrol as irrational: turning off the spigot would turn off their election funds. A more subtle but just as certain process happens here in Europe. To protect the profits of a very rich minority, the public interest is lost in a broken pipeline.

And so we are all left slithering in the global oil slick. Yet the anger of the sane citizenry – those of us who don’t want to engage in collective self-destruction – has been weirdly muted. Most of us know instinctively that we can’t carry on like this. Most of us know Big Oil is a swelling tumour. But it is still much more common to see protests for cheap oil than to see protests to build a world beyond it. We wait passively for a rational politician to emerge through the corruption, when we should be relentlessly pressuring them all.

The oilman John Paul Getty once joked: “The meek will inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.” If the sane proponents of a post-oil world stay so meek and mild, we may not inherit much worth having at all.

We are emerging now from a long dream- boom, built on a mess of financial trickery rather than on producing anything worthwhile. In the Nineties and the noughties we didn’t become more efficient or more productive – we simply became better at being conned. All the “triumphs of deregulation” bragged about by market fundamentalists from Ronald Reagan to Tony Blair were built on a nitroglycerine- base of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. The profits went almost entirely to the richest one per cent, while the bill after the burst goes to all of us.

It will take years to drive out all the delusions that cropped up in the mirage years. Even now, the bank lobbyists are fighting against re-regulating their sector – with the money we gave them in the bail- out. A few addled market fundamentalists are still singing their old tunes, warning that regulation will lead to “disaster”, as if the disaster hasn’t already happened in the system they midwifed into the world.

But under the cover of this row, more bad ideas are trying to crawl out of the rubble unnoticed. One of the most dramatic changes in the fake years was the transformation in pay for people at the top. In 1980, the average CEO in America and the UK took 42 times the average worker’s wage. By 2000, it was 531 times. Did CEOs become 12 times more effective? Or was this another trick of the boom-light?

The answer – and the solution – lies in an excellent book by the business writer David Bolchover called Pay Check: Are Top Earners Really Worth It? (Coptic, £11.99) It contains a stark contrast. In 2008, the CEO of the world’s largest and most successful bank earned £150,000. His name is Jiang Jianqing, and he runs the Industrial and Commerce Bank of China. By contrast, the head of the most unsuccessful investment bank earned £22m. His name was Richard Fuld, and he ran Lehman Brothers.

How does the CEO class in Britain and America justify the gap? It has constructed what Bolchover calls the “talent ideology”. Just as Rio Ferdinand is one of a handful of men who can kick a ball with great skill, just as Angelina Jolie is one of a handful of women who can pack out the multiplexes, so there is a handful of people who can be CEOs of large companies. They determine whether corporations rise and fall. They carry billions on their backs. For great talent, you must pay great cash.

But is it true? If you look at the biggest surges in CEO pay, they bore almost no relation to their "talent" at all. You can prove it on a graph. To pick just one example: CEO pay at the top of the global investment banks soared when the overall global economy was booming. Then, when the global economy sank, their pay dipped a little (although never even close to the level it had been before the boom). In truth, as Bolchover explains, "Whether he had talent or not was irrelevant. He just happened to be the head of a company that was performing, more or less, as it would have done with a different leader... He was not a hero [or] a dunce. He was just there." It's like paying the captain of a ship a massive bonus when the tide comes in, and then dipping it a tiny amount when the tide goes out, while he brags about his "genius" at every turn.

The same principle runs across many industries. The CEOs of oil companies can rake in half a billion dollars a year when the oil price is high – but how is that their achievement? Conversely, after the crash, CEOs who could not have shown less talent – who oversaw the destruction of their companies – walked away with fortunes. No: “talent” was always a cover for seizing the most they could get. In practice, these men were setting their own wages, with little supervision from shareholders. Imagine you could go into work tomorrow and do the same. Wouldn’t you be earning more than you are today – or than you deserve? I hereby demand that GQ pay me £40,000 for this column, now, with a £20,000 bonus for meeting my deadline and an extra £10,000 for not torching their offices.

Yes, there is a real talent in being a CEO – but it is not especially rare. Bolshover argues that there are a dozen people in the hierarchy of any large company who would be as plausible a CEO as anybody who gets the job, and dozens of contenders who could be poached from a competitor, and hundreds in other fields.

Of course, the very same people who told us the market would deal efficiently with subprime mortgages and credit default swaps are throwing up their hands and saying that the market will deal efficiently with CEO pay. But it doesn’t, and it won’t.

There is a better way. Bolchover suggests when a company has narrowed its CEO selection down to six good candidates, it should ask everyone on the shortlist to name the lowest wage and bonus package they are prepared to work for. The one who comes in with the lowest bid should get the job. (There would be a reasonable floor to make sure independently rich people didn’t fill them all by offering to work for £1.)

Plenty of extremely able people would be happy to run a major corporation for a fraction of the current pay: the prime minister earns £130,000 a year, and there’s no shortage of candidates. Government regulation should make this standard practice. Suddenly, instead of the endless puffing up of CEO pay, it would start to fall to reasonable levels. It would be hugely popular: a poll for the Financial Times found 80 per cent of us think business leaders are overpaid.
It would be a sign – at last – of a return to sobriety after the crazed, confected amphetamine rush of the boom-dream.

This column appeared in the June issue of GQ magazine.

Since we first prowled the savannahs of Africa, human beings have displayed a few overpowering and ineradicable impulses—for food, for sex, and for drugs. Every human society has hunted for its short cuts to an altered state: The hunger for a chemical high, low, or pleasingly new shuffle sideways is universal. Peer back through history, and it's everywhere. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift. The Chinese were brewing alcohol in prehistory and cultivating opium by 700 A.D. Cocaine was found in clay-pipe fragments from William Shakespeare's house. George Washington insisted American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of their rations. Human history is filled with chemicals, come-downs, and hangovers.

And in every generation, there are moralists who try to douse this natural impulse in moral condemnation and burn it away. They believe that humans, stripped of their intoxicants, will become more rational or ethical or good. They point to the addicts and the overdoses and believe they reveal the true face—and the logical endpoint—of your order at the bar or your roll-up. And they believe we can be saved from ourselves, if only we choose to do it. Their vision holds an intoxicating promise of its own.

Their most famous achievement—the criminalization of alcohol in the United States between 1921 and 1933—is one of the great parables of modern history. Daniel Okrent's superb new history, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, shows how a coalition of mostly well-meaning, big-hearted people came together and changed the Constitution to ban booze. On the day it began, one of the movement's leaders, the former baseball hero turned evangelical preacher Billy Sunday, told his ecstatic congregation what the Dry New World would look like: "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever rent."

The story of the War on Alcohol has never needed to be told more urgently—because its grandchild, the War on Drugs, shares the same DNA.

To read the rest of this article over at Slate magazine, click here

...discussing my article about the real Climategate. I think Democracy Now is the best newscast in the world - if you don't listen every day, you should.

Why did America's leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests--and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as "unworkable" and "unrealistic," as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted "brands" in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world's worst polluters--and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed.

To read my cover story for The Nation, America's best-selling political magazine, click here.

Osama Bin Laden’s favourite son, Omar, recently abandoned his father’s cave in favour of spending his time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever travelled the other way. Osama’s vision can’t even inspire his own kids. But Omar Bin Laden says his father is banking on one thing to shore up his flailing, failing cause – and we are giving it to him.

The day George W. Bush was elected, Omar says, “my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs — one who will attack and spend money and break [his own] country.” Osama wanted the US and Europe to make his story about the world ring true in every mosque and every mountain-top and every souq. He said our countries were bent on looting Muslim countries of their resources, and any talk of civil liberties or democracy was a hypocritical facade. The jihadis I have interviewed – from London to Gaza to Syria – said their ranks swelled with each new whiff of Bushism as more and more were persuaded. It was like trying to extinguish fire with a blowtorch.

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hang-over from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama’s orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians. We may not have noticed, but the Muslim world has: check out al-Jazeera any night.

Obama ran on an inspiring promise to shut down Bush’s network of kidnappings and secret prisons. He said bluntly: “I do not want to hear this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that… but as a parent I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanomo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.” He said it made the US “less safe” because any gain in safety by Gitmo-ing one suspected jihadi – along with dozens of innocents - is wiped out by the huge number of young men tipped over into the vile madness of jihadism by seeing their brothers disappear into a vast military machine where they may never be heard from again. Indeed, following the failed attack in Detroit, Obama pointed out the wannabe-murderer named Guantanomo as the reason he signed up for the Jihad.

Yet a string of recent exposes has shown that Obama is in fact maintaining a battery of secret prisons where people are held without charge indefinitely – and he is even expanding them. The Kabul-based journalist Anand Gopal has written a remarkable expose for the Nation magazine. His story begins in the Afghan village of Zaiwalat at 3.15am on the night of November 19th 2009. A platoon of US soldiers blasted their way into a house in search of Habib ur-Rahman, a young computer programmer and government employee who they had been told by someone, somewhere was a secret Talibanist. His two cousins came out to see what the noise was – and they were shot to death. As the children of the house screamed, Habib was bundled into a helicopter and whisked away. He has never been seen since. His family do not know if he is alive or dead.

This is not an unusual event in Afghanistan today. In this small village of 300 people, some 16 men have been “disappeared” by the US and ten killed in night raids in the past two years. The locals believe people are simply settling old clan feuds by telling the Americans their rivals are jihadists. Habib’s cousin Qarar, who works for the Afghan government, says: “I used to go on TV and argue that people should support the government and the foreigners. But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so?”

Where are all these men vanishing to? Obama ordered the closing of the CIA’s secret prisons, but not those run by Joint Special Operations. They maintain a Bermuda Triangle of jails with the notorious Bagram Air Base at its centre. One of the few outsiders has been into this ex-Soviet air-hangar is the military prosecutor Stuart Couch. He says: “In my view, having visited Guantanomo several times, the Bagram facility made Guantanomo look like a nice hotel. The men did not appear to be able to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo.”

We know that at least two innocent young men were tortured to death in Bagram. Der Spiegel has documented how some “inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex.” The accounts of released prisoners suggest the very worst abuses stopped in the last few years of the Bush administration, and Obama is supposed to have forbidden torture, but it’s hard to tell. We do know Obama has permitted the use of solitary confinement lasting for years – a process that often drives people insane. The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit some of them, but in highly restricted circumstances, and their reports remain confidential. In this darkness, abuse becomes far more likely.

The Obama administration is appealing against US court rulings insisting the detainees have the right to make a legal case against their arbitrary imprisonment. And the White House is insisting they can forcibly snatch anyone they suspect from anywhere in the world – with no legal process – and take them there. Yes: Obama is fighting for the principles behind Guantanomo Bay. The frenzied debate about whether the actual camp in Cuba is closed is a distraction, since he is proposing to simply relocate it to less sunny climes.

Once you vanish into this system, you have no way to get yourself out. The New York lawyer Tina Foster represents three men who were kidnapped by US forces in Thailand, Pakistan and Dubai and bundled to Bagram, where they have been held without charge for seven years now. She tells me there have been “shockingly few improvements” under Obama. “The Bush administration rubbed our faces in it, while Obama’s much smoother. But the reality is still indefinite detention without charge for people who are judged guilty simply by association. It’s contrary to everything we stand for as a country… I know there are children [in there] from personal experience. I have interviewed dozens of children who were detained in Bagram, some as young as ten.”

Today, Bagram is being given a $60m expansion, allowing it to hold five times as many prisoners as Guantanomo Bay currently does. Ghopal reports that the abuse is leaking out to other, more secretive sites across Afghanistan. They are so underground they are known only by the names given to them by released inmates – the Salt Pit, the Prison of Darkness. Obama also asserts his right to hand over the prisoners to countries that commit torture, provided they give a written “assurance” they won’t be “abused” – assurances that have proved worthless in the past. The British lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith estimates there are 18,000 people trapped in these “legal black holes” by the US.

As Obama warned in the distant days of the election campaign, these policies place us all in greater danger. Matthew Alexander, the senior interrogator in Iraq who tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says: “I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite Abu Graib and Guantanomo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight… We have lost hundreds if not thousands of American lives because of our policy.” The increased risk bleeds out onto the London underground and the nightclubs of Bali. I oppose these policies precisely because I want to be safe, and I loathe jihadism.

President Obama has been tossing aside the calm jihad-draining insights of candidate Obama for a year now. Whenever Obama acts like Bush, listen carefully – you will hear the distant, delighted chuckle of Osama Bin Laden, and the needless stomp of fresh recruits heading his way.

This week, a disaster hit the United States, and the after-tremors will be shaking and breaking global politics for years. It did not grab the same press attention as the fall of liberal Kennedy-licking Massachusetts to a pick-up truck Republican, or President Obama’s first State of the Union address, or the possible break-up of Brangelina and their United Nations of adopted infants. But it took the single biggest problem dragging American politics towards brutality and dysfunction – and made it much, much worse. Yet it also showed the only path that Obama can now take to salvage his Presidency.

For over a century, the US has slowly put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. On Tuesday, they were burned away in one whoosh. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can suddenly run political adverts during an election campaign – and there is absolutely no limit on how many, or how much they can spend. So if you anger Goldman Sachs by supporting legislation to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, you will smack into a wall of 24/7 ads exposing your every flaw. If you displease Exxon-Mobil by supporting legislation to deal with global warming, you will now be hit by a tsunami of advertising saying you are opposed to jobs and The American Way. If you rile the defence contractors by opposing the gargantuan war budget, you will face a smear-campaign calling you Soft on Terror.

Representative Alan Grayson says: “It basically institutionalizes and legalizes bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them – and beat to death the politicians that don’t… You won’t even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It’ll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft.” In 2008, Exxon Mobil made profits of $85bn. So if they dedicated just 10 percent to backing a President who would serve their interests, they would have $8.5bn to spend – more than every candidate for President and every candidate for Senate spent at the last election. And that’s just one corporation.

To understand the impact this will have, you need to grasp how smaller sums of corporate money have already hijacked American democracy. Let’s look at a case that is simple and immediate and every American can see in front of them: healthcare. The United States is the only major industrialized democracy that doesn’t guarantee healthcare for all its citizens. The result is that, according to a detailed study by Harvard University, some 45,000 Americans die needlessly every year. That’s equivalent to 15 9/11s every year, or two Haitian earthquakes every decade.

This isn’t because the American people like it this way. Gallup has found in polls for a decade now that two-thirds believe the government should guarantee care for every American: they are as good and decent and concerned for each other as any European. No: it is because private insurance companies make a fortune today out of a system that doesn’t cover the profit-less poor, and can turn away the sickest people as “uninsurable”. So they pay for politicians to keep the system broken. They fund the election campaigns of politicians on both sides of the aisle, and in return, those politicians veto any system that doesn’t serve their paymasters. Look for example at Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic candidate for Vice-President. He has taken $448,066 in campaign contributions from private healthcare companies while his wife has raked in $2m as one of their chief lobbyists, and he has loyally blocked any attempt in the Senate to break the stranglehold of the health insurance companies and broaden coverage.

The US political system now operates within a corporate cage. If you want to run for office, you have to take corporate cash – and so you have to serve corporate interests. Corporations are often blatant in their corruption: it’s not unusual for them to give to both competing candidates in a Senate race, to ensure all sides are indebted to them. This runs so deep that Congressman James Clyburn says the US has become a “corpocracy.” It has reached the point that lobbyists now often write the country’s laws. Not metaphorically; literally. The former Republican congressman Walter Jones spoke out in disgust in 2006 when he found that drug company lobbyists were actually authoring the words of the Medicare prescription bill, and puppet-politicians were simply nodding it through.

But what happens if politicians are serving the short-term profit-hunger of corporations, and not the public interest? You only have to look at the shuttered shops outside your window for the answer. The banks were rapidly deregulated from the Eighties through the Noughties because their lobbyists paid politicians on all sides, and demanded their payback in rolled-back rules and tossed-away laws. As Senator Dick Durbin says simply: “The banks own the Senate,” so they had to obey. The result was that the banks made staggering profits – and were immediately rescued when they smashed the world economy. The only people who paid for it were the public, all over the world.

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you reregulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

His attempt at healthcare reform is dying because he thought he could only get through the Senate a system that the giant healthcare corporations and drug companies pre-approved. So he promised to keep the ban on bringing cheap drugs down from Canada, he pledged not to bargain over prices, and he dumped the idea of having a public option that would make sure ordinary Americans could actually afford it. The result was a Quasimodo healthcare proposal so feeble and misshapen that even the people of Massachusetts turned away in disgust.

Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are “persons”, so they have the “right” to speak during elections. But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state – and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator. This is the same Supreme Court that ruled that the detainees at Guantanomo Bay are not “persons” under the constitution deserving basic protections. A court that says a living breathing human is less of a “person” than Lockheed Martin has gone badly awry.

Obama now faces two paths – the Clinton road, or the FDR highway. After he lost his healthcare battle, Clinton decided to simply serve the corporate interests totally. He is the one who carried out the biggest roll-back of banking laws, and saw the largest explosion of inequality since the 1920s. Some of Obama’s advisors are now nudging him down that path: the pledge for an appalling anti-Keynesian spending freeze on social programmes for the next three years to pay down the deficit is one of their triumphs.

But there is another way. Franklin Roosevelt began his Presidency trying to appease corporate interests – but he faced huge uproar and disgust at home when it became clear this left ordinary Americans stranded in the fog of a depression. He switched course. He turned his anger on “the malefactors of great wealth” and bragged: “I welcome the hatred… of the economic royalists.” He launched a programme of redistributing power from the corporations back towards the people, and put in place tough regulations that prevented economic disaster and spiralling inequality for three generations.

There were rare flashes of what Franklin Delano Obama would look like in his reaction to the Supreme Court decision. He said: “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americas.” But he has spent far more time coddling those interests than taking them on. The great pressure of strikes and protests put on FDR hasn’t yet arisen from a public dissipated into hopelessness by an appalling media that convinces them they are powerless and should wait passively for a Messiah.

Very little positive change can happen in the US until they clear out the temple of American democracy. In the State of the Union, Obama spent one minute on this problem, and proposed restrictions on lobbyists – but that’s only the tiniest of baby steps. He evaded the bigger issue. If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it – and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull. At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the Court tried to stymie the New Deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured by Americans to be as radical in democratizing the Land of the Fee.

None of the crises facing us all – from the global banking system to global warming – can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress. If Obama funks this challenge now, he may as well put the US government on e-Bay and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?

In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And – at their current rate of acceleration – they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the twenty-first century. These facts sound, at first, preposterous. The idea of machines that are designed to whirr out into the world and make their own decisions to kill is an old sci-fi fantasy – picture a mechanical Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing up a truck and muttering “Hasta la vista, baby.” But we live in a world of such whooshing technological transformation that the concept has leaped in just five years from the cinema screen to the battlefield – with barely anyone back home noticing.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within twenty years.

The NATO forces now depend on a range of killer-robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatized by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a “drone attack” against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that’s an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it “chooses.” Fox News proudly calls it “the G.I. of the twenty-first century.” And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, who will leave these models looking like a ZX Spectrum or the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.

At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and ‘die.’ So the military is building ‘autonomy’ into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

This is “one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare,” according to P.W. Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA. In his must-read book ‘Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First century’, he warns: “Humanity has started to engineer technologies that are fundamentally different from all before. Our creations are now acting in and upon the world around us.”

Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage. The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more “sophisticated” ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn’t fought by you any more: it’s fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts.

The military say this is a safer model of combat. Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command says of the warbots: “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.” Why take a risk with your soldier’s life, if he can stay in Arlington and kill in Kandahar? Think of it as War 4.0. There are proposals to bring this model home into domestic law enforcement too: the Department of Homeland Security recently requested money to buy eighteen drone planes to patrol the US-Mexico border.

But the evidence punctures this techno-optimism. We know the programming of robots will regularly go wrong – because all technological programming regularly goes wrong. Look at the place where robots are used most frequently today: factories. Some 4 percent of US factories have “major robotics accidents” every year – a man having molten allunimium poured over him, or a woman picked up and placed on a conveyor belt to be smashed into the shape of a car. The former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was nearly killed a few years ago after a robot attacked him on a tour of a factory. And remember: these are robots that aren’t designed to kill.

On its first public outing in 2007, one of South Africa’s first warbots went haywire  and began firing explosive shells all around it at the rate of 550 a minute. Nine soldiers died. Think about how maddening it is to deal with a robot on the telephone when you want to pay your phone bill. Now imagine that robot had a machine gun pointed at your chest.

Robots find it almost impossible to distinguish an apple from a tomato: how will they distinguish a combatant from a civilian? You can’t appeal to a robot for mercy; you can’t activate its empathy. And afterwards, who do you punish? Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch says: “War crimes need a violation and an intent. A machine has no capacity to want to kill civilians … If they are incapable of intent, are they incapable of war crimes?”

Robots do make war much easier – for the aggressor. You are taking much less physical risk with your people, even as you kill more of theirs. One US report recently claimed they will turn war into “an essentially frictionless engineering exercise.” As Larry Korb, Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of defence: “It will make people think, ‘Gee, warfare is easy.’

If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did – or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If we weren’t losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I’d like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take “us” out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill “them.”

There is some evidence that warbots will also make us less inhibited in our killing. When another human being is standing in front of you, when you can stare into their eyes, it’s hard to kill them. When they are half the world away and little more than an avatar, it’s easy. A young air force lieutenant who fought through a warbot told Singer: “It’s like a video game [with] the ability to kill. It’s like… freaking cool.”

When the US First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq was asked in 2006 what kind of robotic support it needed, they said they have an “urgent operational need” for a laser mounted onto an unmanned drone that can cause “instantaneous burst-combustion of insurgent clothing, a rapid death through violent trauma, and more probably a morbid combination of both.” The request said it should be like “long range blow torches or precision flame throwers.” They wanted to do with robots things they would find almost unthinkable face-to-face.

While “we” will lose fewer people at first by fighting with warbots, this way of fighting may well catalyze greater attacks on us in the long run. US army staff sergeant Scott Smith boasts they create “an almost helpless feeling… It’s total shock and awe.” But while terror makes some people shut up, it makes many more furious and determined to strike back. Imagine if the skies over Washington and Manhattan were filled with robots controlled from Torah Borah, or Beijing, and could shoot us at any time. Some would scuttle away – and many would be determined to kill “their” people in revenge. The Lebanese editor Rami Khouri says that when Lebanon was bombarded by largely unmanned Israeli drones in 2006, it only “enhanced the spirit of defiance” and made more people back Hezbollah.

Is this a rational way to harness our genius for science and spend tens of billions of pounds? The scientists who were essential to developing the nuclear bomb – including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and Andrei Sakharov – turned on their own creations in horror and begged for them to be outlawed. Some distinguished robotics scientists, like Illah Nourbakhsh, are getting in early, and saying the development of autonomous military robots should be outlawed now.

There are some technologies so abhorrent to human beings that we forbid them outright. We have banned war-lasers that permanently blind people along with poison gas. The conveyor belt dragging us ever closer to a world of robot wars can be stopped – if we choose to. All this money and all this effort can be directed towards saving life, not ever-madder ways of taking it. But we have to decide to do it. We have to make the choice to look the warbot in the eye and say, firmly and forever, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

This article appeared in the Independent

It was a dark year, 2009, sealing a dark decade. It began with the world in economic free-fall and the Gaza Strip being bombed to pieces (again). We watched the vicious crushing of a democratic uprising in Iran, a successful far-right coup in Honduras, and the intensification of the disastrous war in Afghanistan. It all ended at Brokenhagen, where the world's leaders breezily decided to carry on cooking the planet.

But in the midst of all this there were extraordinary points of light, generated by people who have refused to drink the cheap sedative of despair. The left-wing newsman Wes Nisker said in his final broadcast: "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." I want – in the final moments of 2009 – to celebrate the people who, this year, did just that: the men and women who didn't slump, but realised that the worse the world gets, the harder people of goodwill have to work to put it right.

Inspiration One: Denis Mukwege. The war in the Congo is the worst since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe: it has killed more than 5 million people and counting. As I witnessed when I reported on the war in 2006, the violence has been turned primarily on the country's women: one favourite tactic is to gang-rape a woman and then shoot her in the vagina. For years these women were simply left to die in the bush. But one man – a soft-spoken Congolese gynaecologist with a gentle smile – decided to do something mad, something impossible. With scarcely any equipment and no funding, he set up a secret clinic for these women.

He was told he would be killed by the militias for undoing their "work". The threats said his own daughters would be murdered if he didn't stop. Everyone thought he was mad. But he knew it was the right thing to do. He became the Oscar Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes, saving the lives of tens of thousands of women. In the midst of a moral Chernobyl, he showed that the best human instincts can survive and, in time, prevail. It is rumoured he was number two in the Nobel Committee's list for the Peace Prize. He should have won.

Inspiration Two: Liu Xiaobo. A year ago, a petition began to circulate in China demanding that its one billion citizens be allowed to think and speak freely. "We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes," it said. As if they were the Irony Police, the Chinese authorities promptly arrested the authors and many of its signatories. One of the most articulate and brave – Liu Xiaobo – was sentenced to 11 years in a re-education camp for "subversion".

The Chinese authorities believe human rights are a "plot" to weaken China. In fact, China will be immeasurably stronger when it stops persecuting its citizens when they try to develop their minds and defend each other.

Liu is not alone. Hu Jia is in prison for warning about China's hidden Aids crisis. Huang Qi is in jail for warning that the poor construction of school buildings in Sichuan – because the builders bribed the local authorities – meant hundreds of children died unnecessarily in the earthquake. There is a long list, and for every prisoner, thousands more are too frightened to speak. But these dissidents stand as models of the truly great nation China will be one day, when it stops persecuting these people and starts electing them.

Inspiration Three: Evo Morales and Malalai Joya. Although they were born thousands of miles apart, these two people embody what real democracy can mean. When Evo Morales was a child, the indigenous peoples of Bolivia weren't even allowed to set foot in the capital's central square, which was reserved for white people. Today, he is the President, and for the first time in his country's history, he is diverting the billions raised from the country's natural resources away from the pockets of US corporations. It is building schools and hospitals for people who had nothing, and poverty is being eradicated in a stunning burst of progress.

Malalai Joya is the youngest woman ever to be elected in Afghanistan, and she was swiftly banned from taking her seat because she kept speaking up for the people who elected her – against the violent fundamentalist warlords our governments have put in charge of the country. They keep trying to murder her, but she says: "I don't fear death, I fear remaining silent in the face of injustice ... I am ready, wherever and whenever you might strike. You can cut down the flower, but nothing can stop the coming of the spring."

She and Morales are authentic democrats, in contrast to the parody of it offered by Hamid Karzai and – too often – our own leaders.

Inspiration Four: Amy Goodman and the team at Democracy Now! It's not hard to despair of the US at the moment, when even the silver-tongued King of Change seems unable to get real healthcare and cuts in warming gases through his corrupt Senate, and he is ramming harder into Afghanistan. A large part of the problem is the atrocious US broadcast media. The TV news is one lengthy blowjob for the powerful, seeing everything from the perspective of the rich, and ridiculing arguments for progress. It serves its owners and its advertisers by poisoning every political debate with death-panel distractions and silence for the things that matter.

But there is one remarkable exception. Broadcasting from a tiny studio in New York, on a budget raised entirely from its viewers, comes Democracy Now! Every day, the hour-long broadcast – hosted by the wonderful Amy Goodman – tells the real news. While the nightly news fills up with junk and gossip, they calmly, cleverly explain what is really happening. For example, while ABC and NBC were fixating on Tiger Woods' genitals, Democracy Now! was in Copenhagen, explaining how the world's rainforests were being stiffed. They, at least, can tell the trees from the Woods. It is the best single source for making sense of the world that I know – and it is a model of what the American media could be if it treated its viewers with respect.

Inspiration Five: Peter Tatchell. Long before it was trendy to support gay equality, there was Peter Tatchell, taking huge risks for what was right. As one of the pioneers of direct action to oppose bigotry against gay people, he was never afraid to put his own body in the path of bigots. In 1999, he performed a citizen's arrest on the murderous Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and was beaten so badly by his bodyguards he has never recovered. This year, he went to Moscow to defend the gay rights march there from viciously anti-gay police, and was beaten again. This year, he announced he had to withdraw from running as the Green candidate in Oxford East because the damage was so severe.

Almost unbelievably, some people who claim to be on the left have attacked Tatchell because he criticises homophobes who happen to be black, Arab or Asian in exactly the same way he criticises people who are white. (He tried to arrest Tony Blair and Henry Kissinger for war crimes just as surely as he tried to get Mugabe.) But the real racism would be to hold non-white people to lower standards, as if their bigotries were less real or less deadly. A person who chooses to persecute gay people is monstrous and should be stopped – whatever their skin colour, and whatever their culture. Tatchell has dedicated his life to that cause, and he deserves our endless thanks, not dishonest abuse.

What do they all have in common, all these people? When Mukwege built his clinic, they said he'd be dead within a week. When Tatchell said gay people could be equal, they laughed in his face. When Morales and Joya ran for office, they said people like them could never win. They dismiss Liu and Goodman now; but their arguments will win, in time.

They show that when the world gets worse, that's not a reason to slink away in despair. On the contrary: it's a reason to work harder and aim higher. As the essayist Rebecca Solnit says: "Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable." That should be the epitaph for these remarkable people – and for 2009.

Et år efter hans valgsejr er mange Obama-tilhængere kommet i tvivl. Vel er hans sygesikringsreform en forbedring, men den dækker stadig ikke alle amerikanere og bliver næppe et troværdigt alternativ til de private forsikringsselskaber og deres ågertakster - hvis den vedtages. Hans miljøhold vandaliserer den vigtige konference i København ved udmeldinger om, at USA - verdens største CO2-udleder af opvarmninsgasser - ikke underskriver en klimaaftale med juridisk bindende restriktioner. Han har sat nogle af de afreguleringsfanatikere, som var med til at fremkalde Den Nye Depression - Lawrence Summers m.fl. - i spidsen for økonomisk genopretning. Og trods klare fremskridt i forhold til Bush - ophør for tortur, genoptagelse af stamcelleforskning, ingen støtte til Honduras’ kupmagere - spørger stadig flere: Hvorfor leverer han så lidt og så langsomt?



To små historier om de kræfter, som driver deres spil i amerikansk politik, belyser hvorfor. Ved første øjekast ligner de uhyrlige karikaturer, men kendsgerningerne er enkle: De instanser, som blokerer for fremskridt - Republikanerne i Senatet og den enorme koncernlobbymaskine, der finansierer begge partier - er i de seneste måneder gået sammen om at forsvare to sager, som har ringe folkelig støtte: voldtægt og slaveri.



Den første begynder i Irak i 2003. De private vagtværn, som Bush-regeringen sendte for at bevogte olierørledningerne, ville ikke rodes ud i dyre og besværlige retssager, hvis noget gik galt. Følgelig fritog Bush-holdet dem fra at være underlagt irakisk lov - et skridt så vidtgående, at en senator kaldte det ‘licens til at dræbe’. Og hvis firmaernes medarbejdere angreb hinanden? De private selskaber insisterede på, at de kontrakter, som deres ansatte skrev under på, skulle fastslå, at uanset hvad der måtte ske, så ville det blive ordnet internt ved ‘voldgift’? Hvorfor? Advokatbistand i en retssag kunne koste firmaerne hundredtusindvis af dollar, mens et voldgiftspanel kunne fås for nogle få tusind.



Der var andre omkostninger: Ifølge hendes vidneforklaring festede 20-årige Jamie Leigh Jones, der var ansat af firmaet Halliburton, med nogle arbejdskammerater en aften i Irak, da hun fik en drink med bedøvelsesmiddel. Da hun vågnede, blødte hun fra sin vagina og anus. Hendes brystimplantater var flået af. Skaderne var så alvorlige, at hun måtte gennemgå rekonstruktiv kirurgi på sine kønsdele. Hun var blevet massevoldtaget af de syv mænd, hun drak med. Da hun klagede, blev hun låst inde i en container uden mad og drikke i 24 timer. En læge tilså hendes sår og udtog DNA-prøver, som senere ‘bortkom’. En vagt forbarmede sig og lånte hende sin mobiltelefon, hvorpå hun ringede til sin far, som ringede til Amerikas ambassade - først da blev hun løsladt.



I et Irak i opløsning var der ingen hjælp fra irakisk politi. Halliburton insisterede på, at hun var kontraktligt forpligtet til at lade et voldgiftspanel se på sagen, og at det var udelukket at rejse tiltale i USA. Da Leigh Jones gik i offentligheden, stod også mange andre amerikanske kvinder frem og berettede om lignende erfaringer under deres arbejde i Irak.



Den demokratiske senator Al Franken krævede nu en lovændring, der slog fast, at intet firma, som hindrer voldtægtsofre i at gå rettens vej, må betales med amerikanske skatteyderpenge. Men Senatets republikanske flertal stemte imod. Hvorfor? Fordi de private sikkerhedsfirmaer er stordonorer til Republikanernes partikasse.



En gruppe demokratiske senatorer forsøger at få indføjet en ændring i den seneste toldlov, der sikrer, at ingen varer produceret af slaver kan sælges i USA. Forslaget lyder ukontroversielt - så ukontroversielt som at straffe voldtægtsforbrydere. Men koncernlobbyisterne modarbejder det ihærdigt bag kulisserne. Som nyhedsbrevet Inside US Trade rapporterer: »Dele af erhvervslivet et dybt bekymrede over de potentielle følger. En kilde fortæller, at lobbyister tæt på finansudvalget vil indlede en modoffensiv. Amerikanske industrigrupper og udenlandske regeringer (i lande, der bruger slavearbejdskraft, red.) vil danne ad hoc-koalitioner, som kan sende et klart budskab.«



Nok er disse eksempler ekstreme, men de afslører en magtfuld understrøm i alle politiske spørgsmål (og i begge partier) i USA. For at forstå hvorfor skal man holde sig to ting for øje: For det første at koncerner er indrettet på en eneste ting: at skabe afkast til sine aktionærer. Holdes profitbegæret ikke i ave af love og fagforeninger, vil det brede sig uhæmmet - fra miljøødelæggelser til voldtægt og slaveri, som disse sager er os en påmindelse om.



Den anden faktor har at gøre med den måde, politiske processer fungerer i Amerika. Hvis man som politiker vil vælges, må man være stjernerig eller rejse en formue af bidrag fra koncerner, der kan betale ens tv-reklamer. Før man kan appellere til vælgerne må man først appellere til koncernerne. Det gør man ved at forsikre dem om, at man vil tjene deres interesser. Og så snart man er valgt, må man please dem skridt for skridt, ellers betaler de ikke til ens genvalgskampagne. Dette er det vilkår, som selv nok så fornuftige og velmenende politikere er oppe imod - og det trækker den amerikanske regering længere væk fra folkets vilje.



Obama måtte bane sig vej op igennem dette system. Nu er han dets fange. Dette forklarer hans relative fiasko. Sygesikring er så vanskelig, fordi forsikringsselskaberne betaler Republikanere og højre-Demokrater i Senatet for at forpurre alle skridt i retning af universel dækning. Jo, måske ville 17.000 uforsikrede amerikanere hvert år blive reddet fra at dø, men deres indtjening ville blive svækket. Tilsvarende er det svært at få reduceret CO2-udledningerne, fordi olie-, gas- og kulselskaber betaler senatorer over hele det politiske spektrum for at modarbejde skridt, der skal reducere afhængighed af fossilt brændsel.



Indtil videre har Obama forsøgt at få koncernerne med på sin agenda ved at forsikre dem om, at forandringerne også kan gavn dem. Men dette udvander uundgåeligt hans forslag, ofte til det værdiløse.



Afgørende progressive forandringer kan han først gennemføre, i det øjeblik han får reformeret hele det politiske system, så det først står til ansvar for det amerikanske folk og ikke for koncerner. Han er nødt til at ændre spillets regler, forbyde big business at yde politiske kampagnebidrag og erstatte dem med statsfinansiering. Lobbyindustrien må lukkes. Obama bør holde en stor populistisk tale, der fordriver pengemændene fra demokratiets tempel. Alternativet er at blive hurtigt viklet ind i et system, hvor forsvar for voldtægt og slaveri ses som endnu en dags arbejde i Washington D.C.

Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the US – the single biggest emitter of warming gases – will not sign up to any legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery. Despite the real improvements on Bush – such as the end of torture, the resumption of stem-cell research, and opposition to the coup in Honduras – many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?

A pair of seemingly small stories about the forces warping American politics can help us to answer this question. At first glance, they will seem like preposterous caricatures, but the facts are plain. The institutions that are blocking progress on all these issues – Republicans in the Senate, and the mighty corporate lobbying machine that bankrolls both parties – have rallied over the past few months to defend two causes with very little popular support in the United States: rape and slavery. No, really. If we begin to explain how this came to pass, then we might see why the American political system is malfunctioning so badly, even after a landslide victory for change.

Let's start with rape. This story begins in Iraq in 2003. The private military contractors sent by the Bush administration to guard the oil pipelines didn't want to get bogged down in expensive legal cases if anything went wrong. When it came to Iraqis, the Bush team simply exempted them from all Iraqi law, in a move so sweeping one Senator called it "a license to kill". But what about if their employees attacked each other, or other Americans? The private companies insisted all their employees sign contracts saying that, whatever happens to them, they will settle it in in-house, through "arbitration". Why? While representing the company at a real legal trial costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, an arbitration panel costs a few thousand. It saves cash.

This policy came, however, with a different price tag. According to her later sworn testimony, Jamie Leigh Jones – a 20-year-old working for the contractor Halliburton/KBR – was hanging out with co-workers one night in Iraq when her drink was spiked. When she woke up, she was haemorraging blood from her vagina and her anus. Her breast implants were ripped. The damage was so severe she later needed reconstructive surgery on her genitalia. She surmised she had been gang-raped by the seven men she had been drinking with. When she approached Halliburton/KBR, she says they locked her in a metal container with no food or water for 24 hours. A doctor came to see her wounds and took DNA evidence, although it was later "lost." A guard took pity on her and loaned her his cell phone. She called her father, who called the American embassy – and only then was she released.

In an Iraq that was collapsing all around her, there was no chance of the Iraqi police investigating. Halliburton/KBR insisted that her contract required the alleged gang-rape to be addressed by the company's private arbitration process, forbidding any claim in the American courts. (If this was how they treated blonde English-speaking American girls, what did they do if Iraqis said they had been abused?) After Leigh Jones went public, many other American women came forward to say they had similar experiences working in Iraq. Her legal team argues the refusal to allow rape to be pursued through the courts created a climate where it was more likely to happen.

The Democratic Senator Al Franken, when he heard about this, was horrified, and tabled a simple amendment to the law. It demanded that no company that prevents rape victims from having their day in court should receive taxpayers' money any more. Rape is rape. A majority of Republicans in the Senate – including John McCain – voted against the amendment. Why? The private contractors are major donors to the Republican Party, but the Senators claim this didn't affect their judgement. No – they said that Franken's proposal was a "vendetta" against Halliburton/KBR with "political motives". Franken pointed out any company trying to stop rape victims getting justice would be treated exactly the same by this law. The Republicans ignored him. They voted to maintain a system where some rape is not pursuable in a court of law.

At the same time, a group of Democratic senators have tried to amend the latest customs bill to ensure that nothing produced by slaves should be sold in the United States. It sounds uncontroversial – as uncontroversial as punishing rapists, in fact. Yet corporate lobbyists are militating behind the scenes to oppose it. As the private subscription-only newsletter "Inside US Trade" reported: "Business groups are worried by the potential effects", and a source tells them there will be, "a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee mark-up of the bill... US industry groups and foreign governments [ie those that use slave labour] could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message." They will fight for their right to use slave labour.

These examples are extreme, but they reveal a powerful undertow that is at work on all political issues (and both main parties) in the United States. To see how, you have to understand two processes. The first is the nature of corporate power. Corporations are structured to do one thing, and one thing only: to maximise profit for their shareholders. No matter how personally nice or nasty their CEOs are, if they put anything ahead of profit, they will be sacked, and replaced by somebody who doesn't. As part of a tightly regulated market, this can be a useful engine for growth. But if it is not strictly reigned in by the law and by trade unions, this pressure for profit will extend anywhere – from trashing the environment to rape and slavery, as these cases remind us. The second factor is the nature of the American political process today. If you want to run for elected office in the US, you have to raise a fortune from corporations or the super-rich to pay for TV advertising. So before you can appeal to the voters, you have to appeal to the corporations. You do this by assuring them you will serve their interests. Once you are in office, you have to keep pleasing them at every step, or they won't pay for your re-election campaign. This two-step overwhelms the positive instincts the individual politicians may have to do good – and drags the US government further and further from the will of the people.

Obama had to climb through this system, and he is currently imprisoned by it. It explains his relative failure so far. Healthcare is proving so hard because the insurance companies are paying both Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Senate to thwart any attempt to provide universal healthcare coverage. Yes, it would save the 17,000 Americans who die every year because they lack insurance but it would depress their profits. Reducing carbon emissions is proving so hard because the oil, coal and gas companies are paying Senators across the spectrum to crush any moves to reduce oil, coal and gas use. And on, and on.

So far, Obama has tried to co-opt the corporations into his agenda by ensuring they will profit from any changes, but this inevitably waters down the proposals, often to the point of uselessness. The Cap and Trade legislation before Congress, for example, will barely limit carbon emissions at all because it has been gutted to please the polluters.

He will only achieve significant progressive change if he reforms the political system itself – to make it accountable to the American people, not the corporations. He needs to change the rules of the game. Ban big business from making political donations, and replace it with state funding. Shut down the lobbying industry. Make a big populist speech announcing you are driving the money-lenders out of the temple of democracy: it'd be surprisingly popular in a country where people can see they're being ripped off every day. The alternative is to become rapidly complicit in a system where defending rape and slavery is seen as just another day's work in Washington DC.

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?

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The chief executive of Tesco, Britain's largest private employer, has issued a warning: are kids dont no nuffink. Terry Leahy said this week that our educational standards are "woefully low", and that young recruits to Tesco often have to be taught basic literacy, numeracy and communication skills before they can be unleashed on the aisles or stockrooms.

He's not alone. This warning rumbles across the country. A friend of mine is an academic at a middle-ranking university, and she recently showed me some of her students' essays. "It's quite normal for them not to know how to use paragraphs, or commas, or to be able to spell," she said, shaking her head. Some are barely literate, despite a clutch of A-levels. She found the same at two other universities.

It's not enough to glibly announce that there's no problem, as the Government did this week. Yes, a Chicken Little cry that educational standards are plummeting echoes across every age: one of the oldest tablets ever discovered in an archaeological dig warns that the kids of today aren't what they use to be. Yes, there are still a lot of good schools. Yet there are more children getting into Oxbridge every year from the pool of 300 kids at Eton than from the 300,000 kids on free school meals. Either you believe those Etonians are born smarter – an absurd proposition – or our school system is failing poor children on a vast scale. How many great minds are we allowing to atrophy just because they weren't born to wealth?

It doesn't have to be like this. A far better system is possible; we just need to follow the evidence. And the road-map runs through – of all places – North Carolina. Something extraordinary has been happening in the state's schools over the past few decades, and the best guide to this experiment is an important new book by Professor Gerald Grant called Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.

He looks at two very similar cities – Syracuse in New York State, and Raleigh in North Carolina. They are both 1950s boomtowns turned to 1980s ghost towns. It's the same-old, sad-old story: industry shrivelled and the white middle classes stampeded to the suburbs, leaving behind shell-cities scarred by poverty. Yet there is today an extraordinary gap between these cities. In Syracuse, only 25 per cent of 12-year-olds can read, write or do arithmetic to the appropriate basic level – while in Raleigh, it is 91 per cent. Almost all of the schools in Syracuse fail; none of the schools in Raleigh do. What are they doing differently?

Raleigh's governors decided to do something bold and unconventional: they looked to the scientific evidence. In 1966, Professor James Coleman was commissioned by the White House to conduct the largest study, to that time, of what makes good pupils succeed and bad pupils fail. After years of on-the-ground analysis, he came up with something nobody expected. He found that the single biggest factor determining whether you do well at school or not isn't your parents, your teachers, your school buildings or your genes. It was, overwhelmingly, the other kids sitting in the classroom with you. If a critical mass of them are demotivated, pissed off and disobedient, you won't learn much. But if a critical mass of them are hard-working, keen and stick to the rules, you will probably learn. Watch any 10-year-old: they are little machines for snuffling out the sensitivities of their peer group, and conforming to them.

Facing their schools' failure in the 1980s, the Raleigh school board returned to this evidence and tried to puzzle out: how should it change the way we run our schools? Touring the schools, they could see why the research was right. Children from poor families need more help than kids from rich families. They are more likely to have chaotic home lives, less likely to have the importance of education drilled into them from birth, and they have lower expectations for themselves.

In small numbers, in an ordered environment, these poor children can quickly be brought up to the level of the rest, and indeed exceed them in many cases. But when they form the majority of a school's pupils, the teachers can't cope, discipline breaks down, and learning stops. A school for poor children soon becomes a poor school.

So they formulated a bold – and strikingly simple – solution. They wouldn't allow any school, by law, to have more than 40 per cent of its children on free school meals, or more than 25 per cent of children who were a grade below their expected level in reading or maths. Suddenly, the children who needed the most help wouldn't be lumped together where their problems would become insurmountable; they would be broken up and fanned out across the educational system. Raleigh merged its school system with white suburban Wake County, so they became one entity, sharing pupils. In order to soothe suburban suspicion at this change, Raleigh turned a third of its inner-city schools into specialist academies, offering excellent music or drama or language specialisms. Soon, children were bussing in both directions every morning, in and out of the suburbs.

Many conservatives savaged the plan as "social engineering" and said it was doomed to fail. Some parents were angry, and a few decamped for the private school system – until the results came in. Within a decade, Raleigh went from one of the worst-performing districts in America to one of the best. The test scores of poor kids doubled, while those of wealthier children also saw a slight increase. Teenage pregnancies, crime and high school drop-out rates fell substantially.

It's not hard to see why. Each school had a core majority who respected the rules and valued education – and the other kids normalised to their standards. Those who found it tough could now be given special attention, because they weren't any longer surrounded by a mass of equally troubled kids. Today, 94 per cent of parents in Raleigh say they are happy with their child's education. School boards supporting this integration keep getting re-elected.

Raleigh succeeded because it built genuinely comprehensive schools: in which rich, middle-class and poor kids learned together. In Britain, we tell ourselves we have built "comprehensives" – but, except in a few enclaves, we have done nothing of the sort.

We allocate school places according to how close you live to a school. This immediately creates a social apartheid where middle-class children have successful schools in leafy suburbs, while poorer children are ring-fenced in sink schools and end up at Tesco at 16 with few useable skills. (Rich children are creamed off entirely into private schools.) Comprehensivisation didn't fail; it didn't happen.

There are only a few areas in Britain with genuinely mixed schools, like Grampian – and they get the best overall results. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kent, where children from the middle and the rich are creamed off into grammar schools where just 1 percent of kids are on free school meals. They have the worst overall results in the country.

There are only a few areas in Britain with genuinely mixed schools, like Grampian – and they get the best overall results. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kent, where children from the middle and the rich are creamed off into grammar schools in which just one per cent of kids are on free school meals. They have the worst overall results in the country.

So we know how to make schools work: integrate them. Occasionally, our politicians take a tiny step that brings us closer to this. The Labour council in Brighton allocates school places by lottery; the Tories say they will abandon catchment areas, letting a few poor kids slip through. But both only tinker at the extreme social segregation that crowbars apart the educational system. All sorts of policies pull in the opposite direction, like the outrageous tax breaks given to private schools, the expensive uniforms and “voluntary fees” of many good schools, or the covert social selection now widespread across the system, especially in faith schools.

Integration is a good policy for bleak recession times since it delivers dramatic improvements at little extra cost. Raleigh actually spends less than the US national average on its schools, and 25 per cent less per pupil than failing Syracuse. In the long term, integration actually saves us a fortune in welfare payments and prevented crime.

Yes, the right will scream at first that it is "an attack on the middle class". In fact, it is a great compliment to the middle class: it wants to use their children and their values as the sun around which every child's education revolves. Yes, some parents will scream that they don't want their kids being taught alongside "chavs" and "pikeys". This should be called out bluntly – it is bigotry.

A democracy is based on a bargain: every child gets a chance to succeed, whatever their background. Today, we are breaking our deal. We are leaving millions of children to fail, just because their parents didn't have money. Do we want to be a country where our children are sorted at five into different playgrounds according to Daddy's bank account? Do we want to be an place where rich children only glimpse poor children from the car window as they are driven to their better, plusher school, and their better, plusher lives? Or do we want something better for our kids?

Our politicians insist that "we're all in this together". This will only be true if – at last, and at least – our children go to school together.

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarized by the comedian Bill Maher: “The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital.”

The election of Obama – a centre-left black man – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right’s view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin. When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn’t compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of “Drill, baby, drill” have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right’s world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama’s rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to… the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren’t fringe phenomena: a Research 2000 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn’t born in the US, or aren’t sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has “questions to answer.” No amount of hard evidence – here’s his birth certificate, here’s a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here’s the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up “death panels” to euthanize the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed – with a straight face – that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here’s what’s actually happening. The US is the only major industrialized country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can’t afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can’t access the care they require. That’s equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being “killers” – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can’t do so honestly: some 70 percent of Americans say it is “immoral” to retain a medical system that doesn’t cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It’s totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn’t want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched somehow to include the disabled. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking point, Palin declared the system “downright evil”, and they were off.

It’s been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against “death panels” have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors’ Daily claimed that if Steven Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its “socialist” healthcare system. Hawking responded was a polite cough that he is British, and “I wouldn’t be here without the NHS.” Arthur Laffer, the right-wing economist lauded by David Cameron, claimed on CNN that it would be a disaster if the government got its hands on Medicare, the program providing healthcare for the elderly, paid for entirely by… the government.

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy-world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear Saddam Hussein had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was “the greatest hoax in human history”, and all the world’s climatologists were “liars”. The American media then presents itself as an umpire between “the rival sides”, as if they both had evidence behind them.

It’s a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy –reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective. But that’s not these what so-called “conservatives” are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy, that is only a thin skin covering raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top, this is mere cynical manipulation: one of Bush’s former advisors, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as “nuts” as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe it. They are being cruelly manipulated into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn’t laugh; I wanted to weep.

Indeed, if you spend any time with American right-wingers – as I have, reporting undercover on events like the National Review cruise and the Christian Coalition Solidarity Tour of Israel – you soon find that your arguments don’t centre on philosophy. You have to concentrate on correcting basic factual errors about the real world.

They insist Europe has fallen to Islam, since Muslims immigrants are becoming a majority and are imposing sharia law. In reality, Muslims make up 3 percent of the population of Europe, and most of them oppose sharia law. They insist Franklin Roosevelt caused the Great Depression, and should have cut government spending. In reality, whenever he did cut spending – as he tried periodically throughout the 1930s – the economy began to tank. But explain this patiently – with a thousand sources – and they simply shriek that you are lying, and they know “in their heart” what is true. They insist gay marriage would cause the institution of the family to collapse. In reality, where it has already been introduced in Europe, heterosexual families continue just as before. On the list goes: evolution is a lie, a blastocyst is akin to a baby, torture produces actionable intelligence…

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have “faith” – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don’t have “faith” Australia exists, or fire burns: you have evidence. You only need “faith” to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has tried to conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has shamefully assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying that he “doesn’t want to kill Grandma.” Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them. His healthcare plan is weaker and harder to explain as a result.

But this kind of mania can’t be co-opted: it can only by over-ruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people with the maddest fears. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, “It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It’s not how change happens.”

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizaro-cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan should be – shrill, baby, shrill.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

When you are just one person sitting on a warming planet – when you see economies collapsing, wars raging, and reasons for fear on every corner – how should you react? What can you do? The current cluster of crises has stirred mood-responses that you can hear in every bar and coffee shop. It’s worth looking at them, because beyond their siren messages, there is a road to real change that is being neglected.

The first mood is to feel powerless, and to turn this into a defiant pessimism. You know the script. I can’t make any difference. It’s all going to happen, whatever I do. The political conversation is remote and boring and has nothing to do with me anyway. I’m going to buy an extra-big lock for my door, hug my kids a little tighter, and sit out the storm.

We all have these moods from time to time, but they have now turned into the default mode of citizens in the supposedly advanced democracies.

The second mood seems to be the opposite, but is actually its flipside. It says: what we need is a heroic leader who will save us. Enter Barack Obama. He’s clever and articulate and has a conscience. He’s the photographic negative of George W. Bush. He will sort things out. Leave it to him; breathe out at last.

Both these moods leave you – the ordinary citizen – inert. All you can do is focus on your own personal life and wait, for disaster, or salvation. But these twin dispositions leave out the real option that is waiting for you. It is the only one that has ever delivered political change in the past, and it is the only one that will pull us out of the ditch now. It is where ordinary individual citizens – you – come together and raise their voices and offer solutions of their own.

To get there, you have to deal first with the people who say that politics is irrelevant and boring and they don’t care. I always offer them one fact. According to the best scientific evidence, if we have five degrees of global warming – which is now a significant possibility in my lifetime, unless we change our behaviour fast – there will be global crop failure. Food will not grow.

Are you bored by this prospect? Is that dull? You won’t be bored when you are hungry. Martha Gellhorn, the great war correspondent, said: "People will often say, with pride: 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.'" Be serious. It might seem remote; it might seem difficult; it might be a world away from the arcane mumblings of Nancy Pelosi and Michael Steele; but unless you are a psychopath, you care.

Far from being some dreamy call to kum-by-ya, collective political action is the single biggest reason your life is incalculably better than your great-grand-parents’. When people first called for equality for women, when people first started to conduct scientific experiments, when people first suggested paid weekends and holidays for ordinary workers, they were greeted by the same glib pessimism we hear today. It’ll never happen! What can we do? But ordinary people who believed they were necessary gathered together. They spoke and argued and marched and lobbied in their defence – and they won.

These achievements were never handed down by people at the top. Who was the leader of feminism? Who was the leader of scientific progress? Who was the leader of workers’ rights? Sure, there were inspirational individuals along the way. But they happened as a result of millions of ordinary people demanding it, and never giving up. If we had waited for leaders to spontaneously see the light, we would be waiting still.

That’s why the unquestioning faith in Barack Obama of the past year – now slowly dispersing – has been as disempowering as despair. Both ask nothing of you. In reality, Obama will only be a good President if ordinary people pressure him to be one – if they shove him away from his errors (like aerial bombardment of Pakistan) and push him to pursue his good goals more vigorously (like building universal healthcare at home).

Trusting him to do the right thing is a basic misunderstanding of how progress happens in a democracy. You choose the best leader available within the power structure – which Obama undoubtedly was – and then you pressure him like Hell. Great democratic leaders permit the public mood to prevail over the entrenched vested interests blocking their will. It’s an art, but it’s not the most important art: that lies with you, and me, and all ordinary citizens.

That’s why I get angry when I see movies or plays venerating leaders as quasi-Messiahs. In the otherwise-excellent new play at London’s Trafalgar Studios, ‘The Mountain-Top’, Martin Luther King is given a premonition of Barack Obama as The One that will come after him. In the movie ‘Bobby’, about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, one character asks in tears: “Jack’s dead. Bobby’s dead. King’s dead. Who’s left?” The response is – all of you. Bobby Kennedy’s mind was changed on Vietnam by the vast public protests by ordinary people; Martin Luther King had power because he was part of a huge movement of concerned citizens. Neither were lone heroes: there is no such thing in political life.

If you don’t turn onto politics, politics will turn on you. In any society, the people who already have power will try to get the state to work in their interests. Every day, the oil companies and the billionaires are lobbying for their interests – and they speak far louder than their numbers, because they have so much hard cash. If you sit back, shrug, and say you can’t do anything, their interests will prevail over yours.

That’s how we got into the credit crunch that endangers your job, and the climate crunch that endangers your ecosystem. Banks spent billions on lobbyists and PR-mongers to make our governments scrap the rules restraining them, so they could then pile up mountains of risky profit. In the end, it caused the financial house to fall down on us all. Similarly, Big Oil and Big Coal spend a fortune to stop governments making the urgent transition to clean energy that we need. It will cause the ecological roof to fall in. In both cases, a small concentrated private interest prevailed over the public interest – and you were screwed.

Politicians respond to the pressures put on them. The banks and oil companies and billionaires never stop putting on their pressure, waving their cheques, and making their threats. We need to make sure our collective voices talk louder. The only way to do that is to give your time and energy and dedication to demand genuine democracy.

This isn’t something remote. It’s very simple and very practical. Choose one or two groups, and donate a few hours of your time a week. There are a thousand of brilliant campaigning organizations – I’d recommend Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Womankind Worldwide, and Common Sense for Drug Policy, just for starters. They all have work for you to do, now. If there isn’t a group for the cause you most believe in, start your own.

Political change rarely happens in a satisfying orgasmic flash, but if enough of us demand it, it comes in the end. Democracy – real, campaigning democracy, not the dessicated Westminster variety – works like those Push Ha’Penny machines you find in old arcades. You remember: thousands of two pence coins lie on a moving shelf, and you have to drop in coins of your own in the hope it will cause the pennies to tumble down for you to collect. Sometimes it feels like you are wasting your coins and the piles aren’t moving even a millimeter – but then a ker-ching landslide happens, often when you least expect it.

You are not powerless. You are surrounded by millions of people who share your frustrations and share your instinct for justice and rationality. It is your job as a citizen to connect with them. Together, you are powerful. If you remain alone and apart and soaked in cynicism, you can be sure the Rupert Murdochs and Wall-Marts and Exxon-Mobils will be fighting for their interests – against yours, and humanity’s.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

Nobody feels like hanging out tinsel to mark Barack Obama’s first one hundred days – least of all the President himself. After the cheering crowds in Grant Park and the choked-up crowds on Inauguration Day went home, he has been left with a depression, a slew of wars, and an unraveling climate. Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, said politicians “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose” – and Obama has had to hit the prose hard. So now George W. Bush has been dispatched to torture only the English language, has “change come to America”, as Obama promised?

To the people who shrug and say they’re all the same, answer with four words: torture and stem cells. Under Obama, the United States government no longer tortures. Its Jack Bauers have been sent back to base. Instead, it publishes the evidence of the moral Chernobyl that occurred in the soon-to-shutter Guantanamo Bay. There is a battle within the Obama administration – and Obama’s soul, I suspect – about whether to prosecute the Republican politicians responsible. He should: jailing torturers is worth any political row.

Similarly, under Obama, the Christian fundamentalist block on using stem cells for medical research is over. British scientists have already used blastocysts to invent a cure for the most common form of blindness. Now American scientists will be able to pull humanity forward too. If you say there is no difference between Bush and Obama, then you are saying torture and stem cells don’t matter.

But equally, those who believed that the problems with US state power dissolved in the yes-we-can euphoria of November have been proved wrong. Obama’s actions have been morally mixed, because he is reacting to a torrent of pressures – not least from huge corporate donors, who are exerting pressure for the US to control resources and maximise their profits across the globe.

The American President makes policy on two areas that will determine the future of our species: global warming, and nuclear weapons. While the Bush administration ramped up both threats – blithely building “more useable” nukes, and vandalizing any attempt to control warming gases – Obama has pivoted.

Obama’s environmental appointments have been startling good. As Energy Secretary, he appointed Professor Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who says that if we carry on emitting as we do now, “there's a 50 percent chance we may go to 5 degrees centigrade [of warming in this century]. We know what the Earth was like 5 or 6 degrees centigrade colder. That was called the Ice Ages. Imagine a world 5 degrees warmer. The desert lines would be dramatically changed. The West is projected to be in drought conditions. [For that] there is no adaptation strategy.”

It has been little noticed, but with Obama’s approval, the Environmental Protection Agency has classified carbon emissions as harmful to human health. This means Obama can now secure a sharp reduction in gas emissions overnight, without any further legislation.. But he hasn’t done it yet, even as his countrymen belch out the highest emissions on earth. He is still fiddling with failed mechanisms like Cap and Trade preferred by big business, rather than Chu’s preferred solution of a carbon tax. As if on cue, an ice sheet the size of Jamaica has just broken off from Antarctica and melted into the seas. The climate can’t wait.

On nuclear weapons, Obama has been more bold. After the Cuban Missile Crisis came within inches of incinerating us all in a final flash, there was a global agreement called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It had two equal prongs: the existing nuclear powers would multilaterally reduce their weapons – eventually to zero – and in return nobody else would tool up. But for decades now, the NPT has been disintegrating as all sides ignore it.

In a speech in Prague, Obama said that if we don’t revive it, “we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.” To stop this nightmare, he has announced that the US and Russia – who hold 95 percent of all warheads – will begin slashing their stockpiles in an attempt to begin momentum towards “a world without nuclear weapons.” He will convene a conference in Washington D.C. next year to try to spur all nuclear states to join in, and to gather support for sanctions against states that may try to go nuclear.

This will be a brutally difficult process – but it will be harder still to live in a world where apocalyptic weapons are spreading from state to state, and possibly beyond. It is a bold step towards sanity.

Obama’s reaction to the engulfing depression has commanded most attention – except for his purchase of a puppy. This is the most mixed of all the President’s policies. His financial appointments have been a disgrace. He has put in charge the very people who brought us to this calamity in the first place: Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, and Larry Summers, the director of the White House National Economic Council, were the architects of deregulation in the Clinton administration. They peeled back the last inches of FDR-era protection that could have prevented this crash – and then danced off to Wall Street to make millions from it. Last year alone, Summers raked in $8m from Wall Street firms he is now bailing out.

But what about the program Obama has made them enact? He is absolutely right that there needed to be a big government stimulus, paid for by temporary government debt. He explained plainly: “Economists on both the left and right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending. You see, when this recession began, many families sat around their kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back. That is a completely responsible and understandable reaction. But if every family in America cuts back, then no one is spending any money, which means there are more layoffs, and the economy gets even worse. That's why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand.”

This has been proven to work countless times. The right-wingers who deny this – and shriek about growing debt – are ignoring reality as plainly as those who deny evolution or global warming.

Some of the $787bn stimulus has been pushed in good directions: some 16 percent is going towards building a low carbon economy, and blood is flowing into the arteries of education and infrastructure after decades of Reaganite cuts. But far too much has been slathered at the top, bailing out Summers and Geithner’s old colleagues. It was necessary to prop up the banking system – if the ATM machines had run dry, the economy would have collapsed – but Obama’s team have simply handed billions over to appalling institutions, without receiving any control in return. Any more stimulus funds need to flow from the bottom up, concentrating on keeping people in their homes, and on local and state banks. But they don’t have armies of lobbyists or vast campaign contributions behind them – so they may be left in the cold. Worse still, the stimulus is way too small. As this year’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has warned, “You can’t jump half-way across a chasm.”

As if all this wasn’t enough, Obama has three wars on his hands. Yes, three. The most disastrous is in Mexico, where he has pledged military support to a war against the armed drug cartels, and even authorised plans to seal the border if Mexico collapses. But every time you knock out a drug cartel with force, you trigger a new war for control of their patch – and even more violence. The only way to restore Mexico to peace is – as a bevy of Latin America leaders now warn – to take drugs into the legal economy and bankrupt the criminals. Yet Obama – a former drug user himself – refuses to do it.

Obama is right to begin the withdrawal from Iraq, as more than 70 percent of the country's people demand. But he is flooding these troops into Afghanistan and bombing the tribal areas of Pakistan – into a fantastically complex conflict.

The idea that this is an estrogen-drenched fight for women’s rights lies discredited. The government the US installed is flirting with laws that forbid women from leaving their houses without their husband’s permission. It even legalizes marital rape. As Fatima Husseini, one of the heroic young female protesters in Kabul, said: “It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way he wants.” The US and her allies are now backing one group of foul misogynists against another.

Nor is it possible to see how we can win against the Taliban while we are committed to destroying 60 percent of Afghanistan’s economy – the opium crop. There is a danger that by ramping up the war, rather than trying to negotiate a solution, legalize the drug crop, and break away the less extreme parts of the resistance, he will simply stimulate more opposition. The flooding of US troops into the region has already spurred a surge of Talibanism in Pakistan, pushing their rag-tap troops to within sixty miles of the capital, Islamabad.

Yet somehow, no-drama-Obama remains impressively Zen and sweatless in the middle of this whirlwind. Should we have “faith” he will do the right thing? Absolutely not – and the very idea is dangerous. You should pick the best leader available, and then pressure him or her like hell. Obama is dramatically better than Bush – but in the end, he will only be as good as the pressure put on him by ordinary people. FDR came to power as a budget-balancing centrist, until the American people forced him to the left, and to greatness. One hundred days in, are they ready to shove Obama to act on his own best instincts? He ain’t Franklin Delano Obama yet.

In the smoking rubble of market fundamentalism, we are all being forced to rethink the principles that order our societies – and one small, shining idea is rising from the wreckage. It is the idea of human equality.

The need for us to return to this, our best and most basic instinct, is spelled out in a new book by Professor Richard Wilkinson and Dr. Kate Pickett called ‘The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.’ It is the culmination of twenty-five years of scientific research. The truths it contains provide us with a compass to rebuild our societies – and a reason to be profoundly optimistic. There is a way we can make our societies dramatically better – and the impulse to do it is hard-wired into each of our brains.

It starts with a stark realization. For millennia, there was one obvious and necessary way to improve human life: raise material living standards. If you are hungry, you will be made a lot happier by food. If you are thirsty, you will be made a lot happier by water. The human impulse for self-improvement was simple: give us more, and give it to us now. But we now know from reams of studies that once your basic needs are met – once you pass the magic number of $25,000 a year – something changes.

We carry on accumulating and accumulating, because it’s what we’ve grown to think will give us happiness, but it works less and less. And after a while, this unhindered chasing of More More More by the very richest begins to make us miserable – and corrodes some of the other basics we need as humans.

One of our most basic psychological needs is for status – to feel that we are a valued member of our tribe. We evolved in small, very egalitarian tribes of hunter-gatherers, and have only lived outside them for a few minutes in evolutionary terms. So when we feel our status is threatened – or there is no way of becoming respected by the rest of the tribe – we begin to malfunction in all sorts of ways.

Indeed, other than being chased by a wild animal or worrying that our supplies of food, water and shelter will be cut off, nothing makes humans more anxious than panic about our status. Endless clinical trials show what happens to our bodies when we feel we are going to lose our status and could end up being looked on as inferior. Our bodies lock into a “fight-or flight” response, where our heart and lungs work harder, our blood vessels constrict, and we burn up our energy stores fast. Our systems flood with a hormone called cortisol.

If this lasts only a short period, it can be good for us: it helps us escape that growling lion, or pull ourselves out of the wreckage of a crashed car. But if it goes on for weeks or months, we begin to suffer all sorts of dysfunction – as we’ll see in a moment.

Yet we have built our societies on exaggerating this status panic – and we have been ratcheting it up over the past thirty years. The more unequal a society is, the more intense it becomes. Even if you slip to the bottom in Sweden, it’s not so very different from the top. But when there is a long social ladder and the bottom rung means humiliation and poverty, everyone at every rung feels a sweatier need to cling to their place – and the society starts to go wrong. This isn’t left-wing speculation: it is an empirical fact.

Japan and Sweden are very different societies, but they are consistently at the top of the charts for every indicator of social success. They have low violence, low mental illness, low teenage pregnancy, low drug addiction, low obesity, low prison populations, high life expectancy, and high levels of friendship and trust. They are economically highly equal societies. The US and Portugal are also very different societies, but they are consistently at the bottom of the charts. They are highly unequal societies. If you plot countries on a graph, you see the causal relationships with striking clarity. Increase inequality, and every one of these dysfunctions shoots up with it.

How can this be? When we are locked in stress, we get sicker. High cortisol levels corrode our insides and massively increase the risk of heart-attack. We eat more – and our bodies store fat differently. It hugs them to our middles, rather than storing them lower down, in our hips and thighs. We are far more likely to break down into depression or mental illness, or to snap and attack somebody. James Gilligan – the psychiatrist running the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School – explains that acts of violence are “attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation – a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable or overwhelming.” He adds that he has “yet to see a serious act of violence that did not represent an attempt to undo this ‘loss of face.’”

And when we are locked in stress, we become more suspicious of the people around us. In highly equal Sweden, 66 percent of people feel they can trust their fellow citizens – and as a result have the highest levels of friendship in the developed world. In highly unequal Portugal, only 10 percent of the population trust the rest: see the bars on the windows.

It can be easier to see how this model of stress and humiliation affects us by looking at our evolutionary cousins. In a recent study, scientists at the University of North Carolina took twenty macaque monkeys, divided them into groups of four, and put them in separate enclosures. In each little group, they formed hierarchies, with some at the top, and some at the bottom. They then made it possible for the monkeys to give themselves a dose of cocaine by pulling a lever. The dominant monkeys took very little cocaine – while the subordinate, humiliated monkeys took huge amounts. They were, in effect, compensating themselves for being at the bottom of the pile with no way out. Now think about the rates of drug addiction in Detroit, or South Central Los Angeles, or the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

Our elites have adopted an ideology – the extreme inequality of market fundamentalism – that simply doesn’t suit our species. It makes us sick and aggressive and anxious. This doesn’t just affect the poor: the studies show the disastrous effects of inequality run right up the ladder.

It doesn’t have to be this way. By democratically taxing the rich and using the money to lift up the poor, we can make life better for all of us. Of course there must be some income differentials – but nothing like our own grotesque rates. Plato suggested the richest person should be allowed to earn fives times the wage of the poorest person, which seems fair to me. The evidence is in, and it is plain: a more equal society is a happier, safer, and healthier one. (The obvious exception to this rule is Communist societies. They were incredibly miserable: if equality is imposed by crazed tyrants, at the expense of freedom, then it has none of these positive effects.)

Wilkinson and Pickett explain how the US would change over time if we taxed and invested our way to the same levels of economic equality as social democratic Sweden: “The proportion of the population feeling they could trust others might rise by 75 percent – presumably with matching improvements in the quality of community life; rates of mental illness and obesity might similarly be cut by about two-thirds, teenage birth rates could be more than halved, prison populations might be reduced by 75 percent, and people could live longer while working the equivalent of two months less a year.”

In Britain, “levels of trust might be expected to be two-thirds higher [with all the improvements in community life that brings], mental illness more than halved, everyone would get an additional year of life, teenage birth rates would fall by a third, homicide rates would fall by 75 percent, everyone could get the equivalent of almost seven weeks extra holiday a year, and the government would be closing prisons all over the country.”

It’s a shining vision – and not utopian. It exists now in a free, democratic country. Most Americans and Brits intuitively want it: over 80 percent say the income gap is too high. It is only the undemocratic, concentrated power of the wealthy that holds us up.

And there is another, even more sombre reason why we need to democratically equalize our societies. We are now highly likely to face a series of destabilizing and dangerous climate shocks. In his book ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Survive’, Jared Diamond looks at the societies throughout history that have faced similar shocks. The difference between the ones that died out and the ones that survived was relative equality. If the elite stands far above the population and can insulate itself from the effects of the shock – for a while, at least – then the society doesn’t make it through. We need to reorganize ourselves now, while we can.

At the end of the failed age of market fundamentalism, the long-suppressed democratic cry for equality is emerging once again. Its glow should be at the core of how we move beyond this cold, cold depression.

The tears are finally drying – the tears of the Bush years, and the tears of awe at the sight of a black President of the United States. So what now? The cliché of the day is that Barack Obama will inevitably disappoint the hopes of a watching world, but the truth is more subtle than that. If we want to see how Obama will change the world – for good or bad – we need to trace the deep structural factors that underlie US foreign policy, and tease out what he will do about them. A useful case study of these pressures is about to flicker onto our news pages for a moment – from the top of the world.

Bolivia is the poorest country in Latin America, and its lofty slums 4000 metres above sea level seem a world away from the high theatre of the inauguration. But if we look at this country closely, we can explain one of the great paradoxes of the United States – that it has incubated a triumphant civil rights movement at home, yet thwarted civil rights movements abroad. Bolivia shows us in stark detail the contradictions facing a black President of the American empire.

The President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has a story strikingly similar to Obama’s. In 2006 he became the first indigenous President of his country – and a symbol of the potential of democracy. When the Spanish arrived in Bolivia in the sixteenth century, they enslaved the indigenous majority and worked millions to death. As recently as the 1950s, an indigenous person wasn’t even allowed to walk through the centre of La Paz, where the presidential palace and city cathedral stand. They were (and are) routinely compared to monkeys and apes.

Morales was born to a poor potato-farmer in the mountains, and grew up scavenging for discarded orange peel or banana skins to eat. Of his seven siblings, four starved to death as babies. Throughout his adult life, it was taken forgranted that the country would be ruled by the white mestizo minority; the “Indians” were too “child-like” to manage a country.

Given that the US is constitutionally a democracy and its Presidents say they are committed to spreading democracy across the world, you would expect them to welcome the democratic rise of Morales. But wait. Bolivia has massive reserves of natural gas – a geo-strategic asset, and one that rakes in billions for US corporations. Here is where the complications set in.

Before Morales, the white mestizo elite was happy to allow US companies to simply take the gas and leave the Bolivian people with short change: just 18 percent of the royalties. Indeed, they handed almost the entire country to US interests, while skimming a small percentage for themselves. In 1999, an American company, Bechtel, was handed the water supply – and water rates for the poor majority doubled.

Morales ran for election against this agenda. He said that Bolivia’s resources should be used for the benefit of millions of bitterly poor Bolivians, not a tiny number of super-rich Americans. He kept his promise. Now Bolivia keeps 82 percent of the vast gas royalties – and he has used the money to increase health spending by 300 percent, and to build the country’s first pension system. He is one of the most popular leaders in the democratic world. In slums across South America, I have seen this pink tide rising through the barrios and favelas, where millions of people are seeing doctors and schools for the first time in their lives.

I suspect that a majority of the American people – who are good and decent – would be pleased and support this process if they were told about it honestly. But how did the US government (and much of the media) react? George Bush fulminated that “democracy is being eroded in Bolivia”, and a recent US ambassador to the country compared Morales to Osama Bin Laden. Why? To them, you are a democrat if you give your resources to US corporations, and you are a dictator if you give them to your own people. The will of the Bolivian people is irrelevant.

There is another layer of disagreement between Morales and US power. Bolivians have a widespread millennia-long tradition chewing coca leaves, or brewing them in tea: it’s a good way of keeping your energy up when you are doing grinding work at such a high altitude. But in the 1980s, the Reagan administration announced that this was contrary to the demands of the “war on drugs”. They trained and paid for elite white military units to forcibly “eliminate coca.” They rampaged across the Bolivian countryside destroying the crops of desperately poor people. Evo Morales – a coca farmer himself – saw them burn a peasant farmer alive, an experience he says “changed me forever.” He wants to legalize coca for private use – and he is supported by 80 percent of Bolivians.

For these reasons, the US has been moving to trash Morales. Latin America still lives in the shadow of its own 9/11: on September 11th 1973, Henry Kissinger and the CIA conspired to murder the freely elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, to stop his programme of democratic socialism from proceeding.

Over the past few years, the techniques have become a little less crude. By an odd quirk of fate, almost all of Bolivia’s gas supplies are in the east of the country – where the richest, whitest part of the population lives. So the US government has been funding and fuelling the hard-right separatist movements that want these regions to break away. Then the mestizos would happily hand the gas to US companies like in the good ol’ days – and Morales would be left without resources. The interference became so severe that last September Morales had to expel the US Ambassador for “conspiring against democracy.” This weekend, Morales is holding a major referendum on a new constitution for the country which will entrench the rights of the indigenous people.

Enter Obama – and his paradoxes. He is obviously a person of good will and good sense, but he is operating in a system subject to many undemocratic pressures. Bolivia illustrates the tension. The rise of Morales reminds us of the America the world loves – its yes-we-can openness and civil rights movements. Yet the presence of gas and coca reminds us of the America the world hates – the desire to establish “full spectrum dominance” over the world’s resources and send troops barging into their countries, whatever the pesky natives think.

Which America will Obama embody? The answer is both – at first. Morales has welcomed him as “a brother”, and Obama has made it clear he wants a dialogue, rather than the abuse of the Bush years. Yet who is Obama’s Bolivia advisor? A lawyer called Greg Craig, who represents Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada – the hard-right former President of Bolivia who imposed some of the most extreme privatizations of the 1980s, and is now wanted on charges of genocide in Bolivia for the massacres of indigenous protestors. Craig’s legal team says Morales is (yes) leading “an offensive against democracy.”

The structural pressures within the US political system that drove hostility to a democratic civil rights leader like Morales up to now have not dissolved in the cold Washington air. The US is still dependent on foreign fossil fuels to keep its lights on, the drug war bureaucracy will continue its senseless crusade, and US corporations still buy Senators from both parties. Obama will still be swayed by those factors.

But while this is a reason to be frustrated, it isn’t a reason to be cynical. Why? Because while he will be swayed by those factors, he will also subtly erode them over time. Obama has made energy independence – a massive transition away from foreign oil and gas, and towards the wind, sun and waves – the centre of his governing programme. If the US is no longer addicted to Bolivian gas, then its governments will be much less inclined to topple anybody else who wants to control it. (If they’re off oil, they’ll be much less invested in the Saudi tyranny and petro-wars in the Middle East too.)

Obama also says he wants to peel back the distorting effect of corporate money on the US political system. He is already less slathered in corporate cash than any President since the 1920s. The further he pushes it back, the more breathing-space democratic movements like Morales’ get to control their own resources. He also seems to be a less fanatical drug warrior than his predecessors, offering praise in the past for those who believe the US should concentrate on treating addicts at home rather than trying to burn and fumigate their supply from every forest or mountain on earth.

But we will see. If you want to know if Obama is really altering the tectonic forces that drive American power, keep an eye on the rooftop of the world.

Mr President-Elect, that was the easy part. Yes, becoming the first black President by a landslide – winning even the former capital of the Confederate slaveocracy, Virginia – didn’t seem like a stroll at the time. But now there is a pile of ticking time-bombs waiting in your in-tray and you have to defuse each one of them, fast. Welcome to the next four years of your life.

Some of the challenges that define the Obama years will be impossible to guess at today. Who foresaw the rise of Hitler in 1932, or 9/11 in 2000? But the Oval Office desk is littered with grenades we can already see.

Time-bomb one one: A collapsing economy. The US economy is freezing like it’s 1929 – and you have to decide now which wing of the Democratic Party can put it right. To your right, the Robert Rubin wing will tell you to concentrate on cutting the deficit, bailing out only the biggest, and batten down for the storm. They have the backing of the super-rich and their institutions. To your left, the populist wing will tell you to spend big – on healthcare, renewables and infrastructure – in order to revive the economy. They want a new New Deal – and they have the backing of most ordinary Americans. In the first year of the Clinton administration, the wrong side won, and Rubin was unleashed to deregulate the banks. You need to make a better choice. Make yourself Franklin Roosevelt Mark II. Which leads us to…

Time-bomb Two: A collapsing climate. You have become President at a crucial moment in the planet’s history. We are close to the climatic Point of No Return: a two degree rise in temperatures, which will trigger an unravelling of all natural processes. The last two Presidents killed Kyoto. You can save its successor, which has to be negotiated before 2012. But that means you need now to bring the US – the worst per capita emitter by far – into line. The economic crisis gives you the perfect opportunity. Stimulate the economy by launching the transfer to a low-carbon economy: paint your New Deal green. Big Oil will fight back hard and dirty – but every human being needs you to fight back.

Time-bomb Three: America’s wars. Since some 70 percent of Iraqis want the US troops out now, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be happy to negotiate your departure. The bigger danger will be in Afghanistan, where you say “success is crucial.” What does success mean in a country which has never been under the central control of Kabul and has repelled invaders from Alexander the Great to the British and Soviet Empires?

You have to begin by doing something the Bush administration was incapable of: acknowledge that America’s power to reshape reality has limits. You cannot clear Talibanism out of Afghanistan by force. They are too large, the land is too impenetrable, and the harder you try with brute force, the more Afghans you drive towards them. The US commitment to destroying the country’s opium poppy crop super-charges the hate. What country would ever accept foreign forces committed to trashing 60 percent of their economy?

Here’s your path out. Buy the opium crop and use it to make painkillers, as the US does in Southern Turkey. Then you would be approaching Afghan peasants not with guns, but cash. Then you will have to do something ugly. You are going to have to negotiate with the Taliban. All Taliban are despicable women-enslaving thugs – but you can’t (alas) eliminate them now. No: you need to have a more modest goal. Virtually all intelligence experts agree there is a division between most of the Taliban, who have a local Afghan agenda, and Al Qaeda, who have a global jihadi agenda. You need to break chunks of the Taliban away from al Qaeda, so the jihadis are left isolated – and beatable. The elected Afghan President Hamid Karzai and now even General Petraeus are begging to do this.

You will be accused of appeasement by the right. They’ll say you are leaving space for al Qaeda training camps. But if you continue on their preferred path, you won’t just be negotiating with parts of the Taliban – you’ll be defeated by them as the Afghan population turns irrevocably against you. Then the space for training camps will be larger still – and jihadis will claim victory and fight all the harder everywhere.

And those, Mr President-Elect, are only the starter-issues. You just made history once. You awed the world and our eyes water with optimism. But if humanity is going to get through the swelling crises waiting for us, you are going to have to make history again and again in the next four years – and we, the worried, watching people of the world, will be here pressuring you. This – the longer, harder campaign – has only just begun.

POSTSCRIPT: If you want a sense of how this election is being seen across the world in this post-coital period, one little anecdote for me says it all. I spent yesterday trawling the shops in here in London for Stars and Stripes to decorate my apartment for my Presidential election party - and across the city they were all sold out. One shopkeeper in the East End told me: "For the past eight years we've done a big trade in American flags because people buy them to burn them. This is the first time I can remember people buying them because they actually want to wave them."

If Britain was the 51st state, we would be way out there in the blue. A YouGov poll this summer found just 14 % of us would pull their lever for John McCain - putting us beyond even San Francisco in our allergy to red-state Republicanism. Obama, by contrast, would face a landslide on the white cliffs of Dover, with 49 % of us willing him to win. We're right. If McCain wins the White House, our stormy little island will have to endure four more years of barely-trimmed Bush: a collapsing economy, an unravelling climate, and growing jihadism.

But let's start with the most altruistic reason why we wave the union flag for Obama. We think it is shocking that 45 million of our American cousins and friends have no healthcare insurance, and face bankruptcy and repossession if they develop a chronic illness. We are pro-American in the best sense: we want the American people to live long and healthy lives. John McCain, by contrast, opposed even the most minor measures to extend healthcare to poor children. Obama will oversee the biggest push towards universal healthcare since the 1960s, promising affordable coverage for every American citizen. We like that.

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Can it happen? Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas? Will we witness it in less than 48 hours? Whisper it: yes we can. At the midnight hour tomorrow night – unless opinion polls are wrong; more wrong than they have ever been – the era of President Barack Obama will begin.

It’s hard to see what this will mean for the world yet. Obama himself has written: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” But we can already map out the four tectonic shifts rumbling beneath this election. They all began before Obama – but his cool stride has brought them into history sooner than many of us thought possible.

Transformation One: The Transcending of Race. Just forty years after Martin Luther King had a dream of a post-racial America, a coalition of white workers in Pennsylvania, retired Jews in Florida, and bilingual Hispanics in New Mexico is poised to put a black man in the White House. If the polls are right, Obama will be the first Democrat to win a majority of white votes since 1964.

This hints at one of the reasons why so many of us love the US, even as we hate some of its actions. The country is capable of many crimes – but it is also open and free enough to produce the antibodies that begin to put them right. It gives us Dick Cheney, but also Noam Chomsky. It gives us Jim Crow, but also Barack Obama. Is there any better symbol of how the American Revolution can correct itself than the realisation that the first 26 Presidents of the US could have owned the 44th President as a piece of property?

This shift will only accelerate. By 2040, white people will be a minority in America, part of a patchwork of ethnic minorities. The US will look more and more like a universal nation of peoples from everywhere, united behind the constitution. Young Americans are strikingly relaxed about this: for under-30s, Obama has a 47 percent lead. Not a 47 percent vote – a 47 percent lead.

Yet the US state is still riddled with racist outcomes. To give just one example: the American Civil Liberties Union found in 2006 that although the races use drugs at the same rate, black Americans - who comprise 12 percent of the population - make up 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Obama could very easily have slipped into this vortex when, as a young man, he occasionally snorted coke. If he had been arrested and jailed for it like one in five black men, he wouldn’t be President; he wouldn’t even be able to vote. This election shows a desire by American people to move beyond the sterile stupidities of racism, but it is the middle of the story, not the end.

Transformation Two: The Death of Reaganism. For a generation, American Presidents have pledged to roll back the state and let the market rip. Even Democrats bowed to this orthodoxy: it was Bill Clinton was said “the era of big government is over” and began deregulating the banks. The result was the financial collapse and the worst inequality since the 1920s. Today, the top one percent of Americans own 21 percent of all income – while the bottom 50 percent own just 13 percent. Obama, by contrast, ran mocking “the idea we can give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down,” and argued for the state to “spread the wealth around”. The era of limp, passive government is over – at precisely the moment when we need athletic government to prevent a depression and stop global warming.

Transformation Three: The Palin’ of the Culture War. For decades now, the American right has successfully disguised its help-the-rich, slap-the-rest ideology by presenting Democrats as out-of-touch elitists on the social issues: God, guns and gays. This election, the trick stopped working. Sarah Palin made the base gurgle, but her cultural wedgies repelled everyone else. The real elite have been laid bare on Wall Street; shrieks of “elitism!” from their deregulators and defenders now sound absurd. We have been here before: the 1920s was a culture war decade, with bitter moral crusades for Prohibition and against Catholics. In the 1930s, it all died off in the dust bowl.

Transformation Four: The End of the Unipolar Fantasy. The Bush administration believed that, as the last remaining super-power, it could impose its will on the world with force. It made little effort to compromise with – or even listen to – a world it wanted to bring to heel. It boasted of the need to maintain “full spectrum dominance” over the planet, and to have more firepower than all their potential rivals combined. It trashed treaties, scorned the UN, and refused to talk to anybody they disagreed with. It was always doomed to failure, because very few international problems can be handled with force. You can’t fire cruise missiles at an unravelling climate or a tricky peace process or bird flu.

But what now? A man with a background among the colonized has never before become the head of the world’s largest empire. Obama’s grandfather was detained in a British Guantanomo for six months during the bloody occupation of Kenya. As a child, Obama watched helpless as the CIA armed and funded the crazed dictator Suharto to commit mass murder of civilians. Yet how much has this informed Obama’s policies, as a pragmatic politician working within a system riddled with undemocratic pressures?

He certainly disagrees with many of the vicious extremes of Bush, from Iraq to torture. His plans for a massive investment in renewable energy to wean the US slowly off its addiction to oil will have transform the country’s foreign policy, ending its need for the Saudi tyranny and bursts of war in Mesopotamia.

But in the medium-term, it seems Obama will be a conventional Democratic multilateralist leaving in place many of the ugly aspects of US foreign policy – from the crowbar-policies of the International Monetary Fund to unwavering support for the thuggish governments of Egypt, Colombia and Israel. The democratic antibodies of opposition aren’t strong enough to overturn the Big Money or hard geopolitics that demand these policies. So there will still be plenty to oppose in Obama’s foreign policy – but when a giant shuffles just a few steps to the left, the ants below feel a great pressure lifting from them.

But then the fear comes: what if the American people are too addled by the race-fear, and turn to McCain at the last moment? At the Democratic convention, Obama said to his fellow Americans: “We are better people than the last eight years.” The ghosts of the drowned children of New Orleans and the burned children of Baghdad may have stared down sceptically – but I believe he was right. The tidal force of these four transformations is too great. And yet, and yet… I won’t be sure until I watch Obama’s acceptance speech through salty tears – and I hear the Statue of Liberty let out a slow sigh of relief.

When John McCain loses next week, what will be left of the Republican Party? The answer lies in the sands of Florida, where the sunshine-state Republicans have nominated an unrepentant torturer as their candidate for Congress. They view his readiness to torture an innocent Iraqi not as a source of shame, but as his prime qualification for office. This is American conservatism in the dying days of Bush – and it points out the direction Sarah Palin would like to take it in 2012.

In August 2003, Colonel Allen West – commanding a US unit in Baghdad – heard a rumour that one of the Iraqi policeman he was working with was a secret insurgent. He ordered his officers to go and seize Yehiya Hamoodi, a thin, bespectacled 31 year-old, from his home. They dragged him into a Humvee, beat him, and then handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded him. In a dank interrogation room, they told him he had better start talking. Perplexed and terrified, Yehiya explained he didn’t know what they were talking about: why was he here? So West was called in. He told Yehiya he was going to be killed. While his men beat him again, he explained he had one last chance to save his life – by talking.

Yehiya protested: I am innocent! What are you talking about? So West took him outside, had him pinned down, and began to shoot. First he fired into the air. Then he ordered his men to ram Yehiya’s head into a barrel used for cleaning weapons – and fired right next to his head. Then he began to count down from five. Finally Yehiya began to scream out names – any name he could think of, just to make it stop.

The men he named were seized and roughed up in turn. No evidence was found of any plot, and after another 45 days of terror, Yehiya was released. Today, he is severely traumatised, and collapses when he sees a Humvee approaching. The story only came to light after one of West’s soldiers began to protest against these practices. West was fined $5000, and now concedes grudgingly: “It’s possible I was wrong about Mr Hamoodi.” But he says he would do it again, and again, and again.

West has even taken to joking about it, gaining applause for telling Republican audiences: “It wasn’t torture. Seeing Rosie O’Donnell naked would be torture.” But the 1994 Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, is explicit: “threat of imminent death” is the third form of torture it outlaws. There are reams of studies showing it can traumatise a person for life.

Yet the Republican Party has rallied to the defence of this torturer, and of torture in general. The Bush administration has oredered the simulated drowning of “high value” suspects, and set up secret black ops sites across the world where it is practiced. After Afghan detainees were hanged from the ceiling and beaten to death, the officers responsible were merely given a “letter of reprimand.” West’s “toughness” is fawned over; one leading conservative magazine has even named him its Man of the Year. And Sarah Palin, the Party’s darling, mocks Barack Obama’s opposition to torture. She complains: “Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America [and] he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.” Palin is fond of saying she “won’t blink when it comes to terror”, but if you don’t blink, your corneas dry out, and you go blind.

At first, the rise of John McCain looked like a repudiation of torture. McCain was tortured by the Viet Cong for three years, and the beatings were so vicious that even today he can’t raise his arms to brush his own hair. For a time, he was a loud, proud opponent of torture – but then he caved. In February 2008, he voted to allow the CIA to be excluded from the ban on torture – when he knows the CIA who are the prime American torturers today. Then, when the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanomo detainees have basic habeas corpus rights, McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of the country.” If McCain will compromise on this, he will compromise on anything. He has tried to flip-flop back, saying he would ban torture after all, but if he tried now, he would face mass rebellion from his own party and Vice-President.

The advocates of torture love to wheel out the ticking bomb scenario served up every week on ‘24’. But there’s one problem – it’s a fiction. Think about what it requires. You have to (a) be certain you have captured a bomber in the very brief window between him planting a bomb and it blowing up, yet (b) have no idea where the bomb is. This has never happened, anywhere in the world, ever.

No: what happens in reality is Yehiya Hamoodi. You get a man you kinda-sorta suspect; you torture him; and you get junk intelligence leading you up wrong paths. What would you confess to if I put a gun to your head and started counting down from five? Once you start to torture it doesn’t just stay in the neat mind-experiments favoured by philosophers. After the Israeli supreme court approved torture in very limited circumstances, soldiers were soon torturing two thirds of the Palestinians they held captive. Professor David Luban explains: “Escalation is the rule, not the aberration. Abu Ghraib is the fully predictable image of what a torture culture looks like.”

There are no recorded instances of getting useable intelligence from torture – but even if in some freak instance after you have tortured a thousand Yahiyas you finally did, would it outweigh the damage of handing al Qaeda a thousand new recruits, vindicating Bin Laden’s hate-talk, and breaching the most basic moral prohibition?

The gap between the Republican and Democratic Parties is too narrow, but on this issue it is hefty. The Republicans have now curdled into the Party of Torture, bullying their torture-victim nominee into backing their barbarism, and proudly picking a torturer as their candidate for Congress. That sound of screaming from inside the Palin-drome isn’t just from fawning Republicans – it’s from men like Yehiya, begging for it to stop.

The presidential debates are ending with Barack Obama rollercoastering up the opinion polls as the old economic scenery collapses behind him. Here in the middle of 1929, it's tempting to write this off as a race between the first black man to run for President and the first corpse. Yet even now, John McCain is poking his head out of the rubble only six points behind. This isn't over. Yet the insipid soundbytes of a Presidential campaign give little guide to how a candidate will govern: remember George W. Bush promising a "more humble foreign policy" at every debate in 2000?

The clues to the real man are often scribbled in the margins. Perhaps the best hint we have lies in a strange place: McCain and Obama have recently named the thinkers who have most shaped their political thought. Their reasons are revealing -- and shocking.

John McCain chose Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States. This isn't pick-a-name boilerplate: in two books, McCain has written long adoring chapters saying he is the most powerful influence on his life "except for the navy." So in the story of this past President, we may find the gut instincts of the next. "Teddy" Roosevelt was a feeble, sickly child born in 1858 into American aristocracy, a family of New York bankers and military men. He became obsessed in childhood with Strength and Willpower, determined to prove that despite his failing lungs and ailing chest he was A Man. He began to obsessively exercise and read war stories. He worked his way up through New York politics, eventually landing up as an improbable Vice-President, elevated to the Oval Office by a bullet.

All his life, Roosevelt saw war as spiritually uplifting, a way of "toughening" American men and allowing them to "prove themselves." In 1897, he wrote: "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." McCain cites this approvingly, sighing: "Roosevelt believed fighting was essential to a happy life. I know what he meant." So Roosevelt set out to trick and provoke the US into a series of invasions. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt personally commandeered a cavalcade of men to charge into Cuba to drive out the Spanish Empire and claim the island for the US. McCain writes approvingly: "He surveyed the awful carnage, the torn earth, the trenches filled with enemy dead, and pronounced himself delighted with the day."

He then lobbied hard for the US to seize the Philippines from the retreating Spanish. The islands were rich with resources, and stood at the golden gateway to Asia. But the Filipinos wanted to rule themselves - so Roosevelt called for them to be crushed. The leading US general was asked what age they should start massacring Filipinos, and he said: "Anything over ten," adding: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn: the more you kill and burn, the better it will please me." Three million people - overwhelmingly civilians - were slaughtered by soldiers who included McCain's grandfather. Roosevelt called it "the most glorious war in our nation's history."

And he went even further. He wanted to take over Panama and build a canal for US goods right through it, but the Colombian government refused to surrender its territory. So he spent a fortune trying to stir rebellion in Panama, and as soon as there was a hint of it, he sent in the US navy to grab the land. McCain calls this "energetic and forward-looking." The Attorney General called it "illegal." McCain says now that Roosevelt's foreign policy is his model. "He sought to preserve peace and order," he claims, "by confronting potential adversaries with America's resolve and readiness to fight if necessary to protect its interests."

There was a more appealing domestic side to Roosevelt. He was disgusted by corruption the moment he encountered it in the New York Assembly, and spent much of his career crushing it. McCain, by contrast, reacted to discovering corruption in Congress by gobbling it up. He took money from the fraudster Charles Keating and in return lobbied to stop the government from investigating him, making it possible for him to steal hundreds of millions more. Only when this was exposed did McCain "discover" Roosevelt's reformism, and demand a (very small) dose of it. It is the aggression that he loves in his Teddy, not the reform.

Barack Obama's intellectual hero is a less well-remembered man - and seems, at first glance, a strange choice. The apostle of Yes-We-Can has picked Reinhold Niebuhr, a downbeat, bleak Protestant theologian who referred to his co-believers as "the children of darkness." But as you probe into Neibuhr's thought, you see that his contradictions and complexities mirror Obama's in intriguing ways.

Niebuhr was born to German immigrant parents in 1892, and became a church minister. He made his name in the 1920s defending the local workers for the Ford Motor Company in Michigan against gross exploitation, and standing up to the Ku Klux Klan. His political thought veered wildly: he shifted from pacifism to advocating violent revolution to becoming an establishment Cold Warrior given medals by Lyndon Johnson. He has been dubbed "A Man For All Reasons," quotable to support any cause, any time.

But there was one consistent core to his thought. Niebuhr believed that all human beings were fallen, and "even the best men and nations" are merely "compounds of good and evil." Even when you believe you are doing good, you can do evil. Nobody is immune; nobody has "a halo of moral sanctity"; nobody is innocent. Obama says he took from Niebuhr his conviction that "there's serious evil in the world, and hardship... and we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things." It's possible to see hints of how Niebuhr shaped his thought. In one debate, Obama said: "The danger of using good versus evil in the context of war is it may lead us to not be as critical as we should be of our own actions." Where Roosevelt saw history as a long martial victory parade, Niebuhr saw it as a drive through darkness in a creaky car.

Here, then, is the best clue to Obama's Presidency. He is drawn to Neibuhr's later writings, when he offered a theology of working within the system, and trying to nudge it very slowly and cautiously leftwards - while feeling bad about your caution. He said that to be "realistic", you have to understand "the structure of nations and empires", and squeeze your modest hopes of improvement into that framework. Noam Chomsky called Niebuhr "the theologian of the establishment," because "he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do.'" There's some truth in this: Niebuhr offers a recipe for compromise with the unacceptable. It is centrism with a guilty conscience.

Imagine a Presidential debate between Theodore Roosevelt and Reinhold Niebuhr. It would look remarkably like McCain vs Obama but with the underlying philosophies laid bare. So does the US want as President a war-hungry aggressor who believes in the USA's right do anything - or a self-doubting centrist, aware of his country's flaws but willing to correct them only in part, and with sceptical slowness?

It was slower. It was quieter. It looked for a moment only like a stream of suited men carrying cardboard boxes. But the news this month – the Great Crash of 2008 – is going to change your life, as surely as the last time we all stared at footage from Lower Manhattan and Washington DC and asked: how did this happen?

The world is going to look different now. Even if the bail-out finally goes ahead, credit is drying up; unemployment is sure to swell, along with all the rage and resentment it brings; and – crucially – the dogma-dream that drove Western politics for thirty years is dead. So why am I feeling – tentatively, terribly – optimistic? Because great crises can spur great changes. As we slough off the deadening delusions that have dominated our thought for so long, new and better worlds become possible.

But before we figure out what the world will look like when the rubble is cleared away, we need to understand how this happened. What brought us to this thud? Who put the Dow into downturn? For thirty years, conservative politicians have – often with good intentions – conducted an experiment. They believed markets work best when government monitors them least. So they steadily stripped away the restraints on corporations that were put in place after the Great Crash of 1929. Regulations? Rules forbidding dodgy mortgages? Trade unions? Progressive taxation? These simply got in the way of generating wealth, damaging us all. Once you removed all these “distortions”, the market would create equilibrium and growth for all.

But now we know. The ideology was given free rein – and it has come to this. If you recreate the economic conditions of 1928, 1929 soon follows. Franklin Roosevelt introduced rules watching big businesses closely for fraud or gambles that could bring the whole system crashing down. Politicians Greenspanning across the 1980s and 90s – both Republican and Democrat – rolled it all back, so businesses could suddenly behave in risky and bizarre ways again.

Corporations were now allowed to sell houses to people with terrible credit ratings at astronomical interest rates – while risking virtually no capital of their own. They could then repackage these lousy bonds as loans, and scatter them throughout the global banking system like landmines. The result? Government had to step in with a far heavier hand than before, to prevent the whole system collapsing and the cash machines running dry.

By allowing market fundamentalist ideas to become dominant – even in supposedly centre-left parties like Labour, the German SPD and the Democrats – we have deregulated ourselves to the brink of a depression. It turns out markets are like yeast. Without yeast, your bread won't rise. But if you leave out all the other ingredients, then you will be left with nothing but an inedible fungus.

But this is also why the talk of “the end of capitalism” isn’t quite right – and actually gives the people responsible for this crash a glib get-out. “Capitalism” isn’t a monolithic block. There are many ways of using markets as a wealth-generating tool without turning them into a Golden Calf. In Scandinavia, they have married markets to a state that takes more than 50 percent of GDP to lift up everyone left out by the market and green the economy – and it has produced the happiest, most productive societies on earth. It’s called social democracy. It’s a form of tethered capitalism protected by a strong state from its own destructive impulses – and it works.

So what has died this week is not capitalism, but its most fanatical Gordon Gekko wing: the one that has dominated debate for decades now. The belief that markets are self-correcting, or naturally produce equilibrium, turns out once more to be a piece of pure theology. Without a steel cage built of state regulation and trade unionism, markets will cannibalistically feed upon their own flesh.

Yet the right has slammed into denial. In Britain, the Conservatives’ finance spokesman George Osborne – with credit crunching beneath his feet – surreally blamed the Crash on “the failures of the left.” In the US, John McCain was saying only a week ago that “the fundamentals of the economy are sound”, and prominent conservative commentators have blamed… Jimmy Carter, and black people. This doesn’t require political analysis; it requires psychoanalysis.

The last Wall Street Crash produced the New Deal in the US – a cocktail of tight regulation and active government that brought markets back to life and slashed into inequality and poverty for decades. But after this Wall Street Crash, any reaction confined to just one nation state will fail. Markets are now global, even as their regulators remain stuck at national borders forlornly clutching their passports. If we are really going to check and balance markets properly, we need a global New Deal.

Of course the most obvious forms of fraud and folly that precipitated the crash must be stopped first. The sinews of progressive tax and trade unions will have to be slowly reconstructed. But this is a moment not just to send in the fire engines, but to think big. The proposals for new global financial regulators are good – but they should only be the beginning.

Here’s how a global New Deal could work. Start by shutting down the world’s tax havens, so the super-rich who caused this crisis can no longer wriggle out of contributing to the societies in which they live. Some $23 trillion is stored away in them. Of course the tax haven-lovers will squeal that it’s impossible – but after the 9/11 massacres, every single one blocked al Qaeda’s accounts in the face of US demands. Where there’s the political will, tax havens swiftly slam shut. At the same time, introduce the Tobin Tax – a 0.1 percent surcharge on all international currency speculation. And start severely fining corporations that commit crimes abroad, instead of coddling them. The spare change from these three measures would be enough to pay for the current bailout, and any more in the months to come.

But the bulk of the proceeds should be used to stimulate the economy amidst collapsing markets – and there is a way to do this that simultaneously deals with the other even greater meltdown: man-made global warming. In the first New Deal, Roosevelt employed three million people to work in America’s great parks and to clean the environment. Today, a Global New Deal could generate tens of millions of good jobs securing the transition away from an ecocidal economy to a sustainable one. It is a huge and urgent job. This would be state action saving the market from itself twice over: there wouldn’t be much market activity on a planet that is melting and sweltering.

None of this will come easily. The only global financial institutions today – such as the International Monetary Fund – promote the very market fundamentalism that caused this disaster. Nor will a new US President and Congress be enough. The New Deal wasn’t simply handed down by Franklin Roosevelt: it was demanded by millions of angry people furious that their government had sold them out for so long. They chose Roosevelt because he would be easier to pressure than the Republicans – and then they had to pressure him relentlessly.

None of this will come easily. The New Deal wasn’t simply handed down by Franklin Roosevelt: it was demanded by millions of angry people furious that their government had sold them out for so long. The entrenched interests fought hard to maintain their world, their way; they’ll do it again. But a global New Deal can happen – because it must. The old dogmas – that state action suffocates the economy – will still be mouthed, but an ever-more sceptical public will remember this week, when Wall Street came begging for state action to prevent economic collapse. In the darkness, a sea of shimmering opportunities just opened up. Market fundamentalism is dead. Long live the New Deal – and active, regulating, redistributing government.

Tempoet var langsommere, og forløbet mindre dramatisk, ja man så egentlig bare en strøm af mænd i jakkesæt, der bar nogle papkasser ud. Men tag ikke fejl: Det store krak i 2008 vil ændre vores liv i lige så høj grad som forrige gang hele verden stirrede på tv-billeder fra Manhattan og spurgte: Hvordan kunne det ske?

Verden ser anderledes ud i dag. Selv om hjælpepakken kommer i hus, er kreditten tørret ud og ledigheden vil med sikkerhed stige. Den dogme-drøm, der i 30 år tegnede Vestens politik er død.

Hvorfor føler jeg mig så ikke mismodig, men snarere forsigtigt optimistisk? Fordi store kriser kan anspore store forandringer og gøre en bedre verden mulig.

Men før vi giver et bud på, hvordan en bedre verden kunne se ud, når røgen har lagt sig, må vi først forstå hvad der skete og hvorfor.

I 30 år har borgerlige regeringer, ofte ud fra de bedste hensigter, gennemført et omfattende samfundseksperiment med afsæt i den tro, at et marked fungerer bedst, når statsmagten blander sig så lidt som muligt. Følgelig satte de sig for at skrælle alle de restriktioner væk, der var blevet sat for erhvervsliv og finanser siden Det Store Krak i 1929. Reguleringer? Regler, der forbyder usikre lån? Fagforeninger? Progressiv beskatning? Alt dette blev set som alle disse 'forvridninger' af markedsmekanismerne, der måtte ryddes af vejen for at skabe balance og vækst for alle.
Markeder er som gær

Nu har vi så set vi de ultimative følger af dette ideologiske dogme.Efter 1929 var der ikke megen pointe i at genskabe de økonomiske vilkår fra 1928. Præsident Roosevelt indførte da også regulativer og oprettede tilsynsmyndigheder, der skulle overvåge big business for at undgå forsøg på svig eller gambling, som kunne få hele systemet til at gå ned.

Men fra 1980'erne og frem blev alle disse reguleringer rullet tilbage af både republikanske og demokratiske regeringer, så nu kunne virksomhederne pludselig igen forfalde til hasarderet og uansvarlig adfærd. Kreditselskaber fik lov til at yde huslån til mennesker med meget ringe kreditværdighed. Renterne var astronomiske, og selskaberne satte næsten intet af deres egen kapital på spil, men kunne herefter relancere disse håbløse realkreditlån som pantebreve og sprede dem ud over hele det globale banksystem som lige så mange landminer.

Markeder er som gær. Uden gær vil brødet ikke hæve. Men udelader du alle de andre ingredienser, står du tilbage med intet andet end en uspiselig omgang. Dette er også grunden til, at det ikke giver mening at tale om 'kapitalismens endeligt'.

'Kapitalismen' er ikke en monolitisk blok. Der er mange måder, hvorpå markedet kan anvendes til at skabe velstand. I Skandinavien har man parret markedet med en stat, der indkræver over 50 procent af BNP for at sikre ordentlige forhold for dem, som markedet lader i stikken, og for at gøre økonomien grønnere. Det har resulteret i nogle af klodens lykkeligste og mest produktive samfund. Socialdemokratisme kaldes denne form for tæmmet kapitalisme, hvor en stærk stat beskytter borgerne imod markedsmekanismernes destruktive følger. Opskriften har før vist sig at virke.
Modtræk mislykkes

Så hvad er afgået ved døden i denne uge er ikke kapitalismen som sådan, men kun dens markedsfundamentalistiske variant. Troen på, at markeder er selvkorrigerende og naturligt søger imod ligevægt har (endnu engang) vist sig som et rent stykke teologi. Uden et stålbur af statslig regulering og en stærk fagbevægelse - vil markederne på kannibalistisk vis fortære deres eget kød.

Forrige Wall Street-krak banede vej for New Deal i USA, men denne gang vil ethvert modtræk, der begrænser sig til en nation, mislykkes. For markederne er i dag globale, skønt deres tilsynsmyndigheders beføjelser stopper ved nationsgrænserne. Hvis vi for alvor skal få kontrol med - og skabt balance i markederne - behøver vi en global New Deal. Selvfølgelig må de mest oplagte former for svig og tåbeligheder, der førte til dette krak, først stoppes, men institutionaliserede, nye finansielle tilsynsmyndigheder med global rækkevidde bør kun være begyndelsen.
Tre foranstaltninger

En global New Deal kunne fungere på følgende måde: Luk verdens skattely, så de superrige, der skabte denne krise ikke længere kan slippe for at bidrage til de samfund, som de lever af. Omkring 23 milliarder dollar er gemt væk i disse ly. Naturligvis vil skattely-elskere indvende, at forslaget er uigennemførligt, men efter 11. september-massakren kunne det på to uger og efter amerikansk krav sagtens lade sig gøre at spærre alle al-Qaedas konti. Indfør samtidig Tobin-skatten, der pålægger al international valutaspekulation et gebyr på 0,1 procent. Og straf selskaber, der begår forbrydelser i udlandet, med alvorlige bøder i stedet for at forkæle dem.

Gennemføres disse tre foranstaltninger, vil det ikke alene rejse tilstrækkelige midler til at finansiere den nuværende hjælpepakke og andre, der måtte følge. Størstedelen af provenuet vil kunne bruges til at stimulere økonomien i de sammenbrudte markeder. Tilmed kan dette gøres på en sådan måde, at vi samtidig sætter ind mod tidens anden store nedsmeltning: den menneskeskabte globale opvarmning.
Afværge sammenbrud

I den første New Deal ansatte Roosevelts regering tre millioner mennesker til at arbejde i Amerikas store parker og sikre et rent miljø. I dag ville en global New Deal kunne skabe millioner af gode job i det store og presserende nødvendige arbejde, der forestår med at sikre en overgang fra en økonomi, der smadrer økologien, til én, der er økologisk bæredygtig. I virkeligheden vil der være tale om, at et evt. statsindgreb redder markedet fra det selv i to omgange, for på en planet, der er nedsmeltet, vil der ikke være megen markedsaktivitet tilbage.

At gennemføre dette bliver ikke let. Men ej heller New Deal kom let. Roosevelt fik først mulighed for at gennemføre sin økonomisk politik, da millioner af mennesker, der var rasende over at være blevet svigtet, krævede dette. Også dengang kæmpede magtfulde interesser hårdt for at fastholde deres verden. Det vil de gøre igen. Men i dag findes der intet alternativ til en global New Deal. Det gamle dogme om at staten kvæler økonomien vil stadig blive forfægtet, men for et stedse mere skeptisk publikum, som vil have svært ved at glemme, hvordan Wall Streets pengemænd i denne uge tryglede om et statsindgreb for at afværge et økonomisk sammenbrud.

© The Independent og InformationOversat af Niels Ivar Larsen

In five weeks, I hope to look back on this column with a wry chuckle at my paranoia. If the system works, Barack Obama will take the White House. The two issues John McCain is most closely associated with – invading Iraq, and deregulating the economy – have produced history-snatching catastrophes in the eyes of 80 per cent of Americans. In the first debate, McCain revealed he had nothing to say except more of the same: aggression abroad, market fundamentalist ideology at home. So why am I worried?

Obama is only a few jittery points ahead in the polls, and he has yet to face an October Surprise. This is an old term in US politics, invented when, on the eve of the 1968 election, Lyndon Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of Vietnam. It was a desperate attempt to push the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, over the finish line – and it failed. But October Surprises need not come from the opposing party. They can come from anywhere.

The first and worst would be the reappearance of Osama Bin Laden. Just five days before the 2004 election, he released a video effectively endorsing John Kerry. He told Americans to imagine corpses crying: "Call to task those who have caused our death!" and said they should "return to what is right," rather than reward "the liar in the White House".

Why would he do this? Bin Laden's long-term strategy is to "provoke and bait". He explains to his supporters: "We conducted a war of attrition against Russia with jihad fighters for 10 years until they went bankrupt. We are continuing in the same policy – to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy." To achieve this, "all we have to do is send two mujahideen [to a remote, irrelevant area] and raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qa'ida' in order to make the [US] generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses."

This is his goal, in his own words – to bleed America through irrational, wildly expensive wars that will tilt thousands more fanatical young men from Islamism to full-blown jihadism. So who would you want in the White House? The guy who will wean the US off Middle Eastern oil and the wars and tyrannies it supports to get it – or his opponent? Bin Laden is a monster, but he is not an imbecile. He knows that his endorsement is a kiss of death. The man he publicly praises is the man he wants to lose. Kerry failed to expose Bin Laden's trick; Obama must do it as soon as the tape hits the air.

Beyond this, there could be a 4 November surprise: the Republicans may try to steal the election. Again. They loudly claim to be concerned about voter fraud, even though a New York University study recently found that it "is more likely an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls". But in the name of this paltry risk, they are effectively stripping millions of people – overwhelmingly black and Democrats – of their vote.

Their first vote-stripping tactic is to require elaborate voter identification that black people disproportionately lack. For example, in Indiana – a crucial swing state – Republicans have passed a law requiring voters to bring an official government document bearing their photograph to the polling station. But a study by the University of Wisconsin found that 53 per cent of black adults didn't have a passport or driving licence, compared to 15 per cent of white people. So they can't vote unless they travel for hours (often without a car) to a sparse government registry and queue for half a day to get the correct documentation. The former political director of the Texas Republican Party, Royal Masset, explains: "Requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a drop-off in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 per cent to the Republican vote." Their second tactic is to strip the electoral rolls of black names. In almost all US states, criminals lose their vote for life. This is shocking in itself – it disenfranchises a quarter of all black men in Kentucky, for one. But many states have a sloppy process where they simply scrub anyone with the same name as a criminal off the list. So if there is a criminal called "Chris Wayne" in a county, every black man called "Chris Wayne" loses their vote. That's a lot of Democrats. In Florida in 2000, black voters made up 13 per cent of the electorate yet they were 26 per cent of the people wrongly disenfranchised.

When a judge ordered the release of the paperwork, he found out why. The team under Florida governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered that black criminal names had to go – but Hispanic names were not to be touched. Black Floridians overwhelmingly vote Democrat, while Hispanics lean towards the Republicans. The Bush team said this was "absolutely unintentional" and "a coincidence".

This time, the Republicans have added another group to strip from the rolls. James Carabelli, a Republican Party chairman in Michigan, says: "We have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren't voting from those addresses." These voters are supposed to register from their new addresses – but many are out of time, or too stressed to do it. So the Republicans have launched a national "voter challenge campaign" against honest people who have lost their homes. They know that 60 per cent of sub-prime mortgages went to black voters, and virtually everyone who lost their home is angry with the Republicans.

If these acts of electoral sabotage go ahead on November 4 and tilt the election to McCain, Obama needs to learn from Al Gore's mistake. As the recent HBO film Recount shows, Gore was consensual and statesmanlike – in the middle of a knife fight. He sent urbane professors to make his case, while the Republicans drummed up mobs that physically stopped the vote-counts in Palm Beach County while the clock ticked. If the need comes, Obama needs to call fraud by its real name – and fight.

I hope I'm being too cynical. I hope I'm wrong. But it would be wise to fasten your seatbelts: it's going to be a bumpy month.