Obama stays in the centre ground

What he calls the slow death of the left in America is the subject of Alexander Cockburn's article in the First Post this morning.

In it Cockburn argues that Barack Obama's watch is continuing a decline which started during the Carter administration.

The Bush years saw near extinction of the left's capacity for realistic political analysis.

but under Obama he says who

stepped into the Oval Office confident that the left would present no danger as he methodically pursues roughly the same agenda as Bush, catering to the requirements of the banks, the arms companies and the national security establishment in Washington, most notably the Israel lobby.

its influence in American politics is minimal

New chance for Chrysler

Yesterday's news that one of the big three American car making giants is being forced into federal bankruptcy doesn't appear to have generated the dark headlines that might have been expected.

Chrysler was effectively pushed into the move by President Obama whose administration believes that it can now be forced into an industry saving alliance with the Fiat motor company.

Chrysler became the first major American automaker to seek bankruptcy protection since Studebaker did so in 1933.

According to Obama the move will protect 35,000 at what he described as “a pillar of the industrial economy."

The company will now stop production for at least the next 30 days to reduce its inventories.

The risk will be that during this time,customers will go elsewhere and the company will struggle to get those customers to return

As the Washington Post says this morning

Moreover, there is no guarantee that a slimmed-down, Fiat-managed company would fare significantly better than Chrysler has in the past against foreign competition such as Toyota and Honda, which essentially dethroned the American automakers years ago.

The hope is that the company will come out of bankruptcy by the end of June.Next up is General Motors which has 30 days to present its plan to the government

On Thursday the spirit of George Orwell visited America, three times

I haven't posted about the torture revelations coming out of the United States and the release of various memos by Barack Obama.

Much has been writen but I would refer to this piece in Harper's magazine which came out over the weekend.

On Thursday the spirit of George Orwell visited America, three times.

The visits were

1.The four memoranda prepared by Bush Administration lawyers which gave the actual go-ahead for the use of specific torture techniques on specific individuals, thus demolishing forever the absurd contention that the torture lawyers were ever only engaged in some abstract exercise without any direct application to incidents of torture.

2.a statement issued by Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair in which he drew a stomach-turning comparison between Americans who sacrifice for their country in uniform and those who perpetrated war crimes under orders from higher ups in the Bush Administration. But perhaps the first lines of Blair’s statement were intended to send a signal of the deceit that lay within. “We will absolutely defend those who relied on these memos and those guidelines,” he says, because they acted in the wake of 9/11, whereas “read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, [the memoranda] appear graphic and disturbing.” Blair’s name echoes Orwell’s actual name, Eric Blair; his words remind one of 1984: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

3.straight from Miniluv, whose never-resting eye keeps watch over every enemy of the state, foreign or domestic, real or, far more often, the creation of paranoid delusion combined with political convenience.

Signs of a shift in economic power

You wonder whether the warning by the Chinese to the Americans ovrer their debt levels may be the shape of things to come.

The Chinese demanded that the Obama administration "guarantee the safety" of its $1 trillion in American bonds worried about the spiralling US debt.

China is now the largest holder of American treasury bonds as has enormous leverage over the US economy whilst holding them.If it sold the cost of borrowing would rocket,hardly something that the Obama administration could deal with in the middle of a financial stimulus package.

However does this episode offer a taster of a seismic shift to the Far East and maybe a shot across the bows for the West ahead of G20?

America in the World

I have just had a look at Tim Montgomerie's new site America in the World.

Its brazen pro Americanism has and will continue to get much criticism.The blog is

an attempt by a few London-based friends of America to make the case that the USA is a fundamentally good nation. We believe that a world without America would be considerably poorer, less healthy and more dangerous and we consequently reject American isolationism as much as we reject anti-Americanism.

They have just put this video on You Tube which asks what what happen to the world without the American soldier.

Why the Senator won't sparkle from Day 1

Now that the Obamamania has left these shores it is worth reflecting on the amazing effect that the visit has made.

With both polititians and people clambering to be seen in his presence,are we placing a little too much faithi in his ability to turn around the state of the world?

Anybody but Bush is the cry that is heard in most of the West's capitals.Nick Cohen writing in this morning's Observer reminds us that come January the problems willnot go away.

In January, Bush will be history, leaving liberals all alone in a frightening world. Little else will change. Radical Islam will still authorise murder without limit, Iran will still want the bomb and the autocracies of China and Russia will still be growing in wealth and confidence. All those who argued that the 'root cause' of the Bush administration lay behind the terror will find that the terror still flourishes when the root cause has retired.