two thousand and eleven any better. just live.

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virtually all terrorists today are muslim do we have the right to make such provoking of statements then do muslim schools have the right to exist in. new york city. but i won't welcome back it's hop off now i am a skater says the terrorists next door with a rise in arresting you or tongue the spotlight on each of you with find a policy of providing an exe trimix safe haven. feelings of fear of nuclear war the mosque a bunker museum giving visit is a fust time to experience the horror.

turning a divorce distress into a soul is a call for us marriages breaking down we look at why it's an opportunity to make a buck out of fadia. coming up next predictions for the economic and political map of the wealden be levels of crosstalk. and you can. follow me while going to cross talk i'm futile about what can we expect in this new year what does your crystal ball tell you and do we have any reason to believe two thousand and eleven will be any better than the past year. and you can.

start. to talk about the year that has come i'm joined by jim walsh from in boston he is a research associate at the massachusetts institute of technology in london we go to charlie beckett he's a professor at the london school of economics and in new york we cross to steve glasser he is the editor of the op ed news and another member of our cross talk team yelena hunger all right gentlemen again crosstalk rules are not in effect they'll be in effect in the next the days and of cross talk but not this one so i return to our virtual table here to talk about the new years that it has just come jam i started out the last program where the american empire stood at the end of the year where do you think it's going to stand at the end of this year at the end of two thousand and eleven some big choices coming up there again they include the usual suspects they're saying if we can still can have a stable government in iraq at the end of the year they were you know maybe all glimmer of hope afghanistan is still a quagmire with

a lot of people saying it's time to get out and and we'll bring charlie back in a week the leaks didn't do mr obama a favor or maybe it did where is he going to stand jim at the end of this year. well i think is as we start this year this is a year of political transition you have president obama who will be facing a republican house you have to wind down iraq for the progressing the question of when we will get out of afghanistan is only going to grow and grow and then around the globe political transition north korea how much longer will conjunct will live what will what will go on will we get another nuclear test from north korea this year and it's transition also in terms of and you don't want to skip ahead but often when you have elections in two thousand and twelve the process begins in two thousand and eleven and as we start this year whether it's elections in the united states in russia in egypt all around the world the process in north korea which is not an election but a process that's supposed to culminate in two thousand and twelve this is

a year of transition and it's unclear how it's going to work out i think broadly speaking it's a year of transition in that unless they've repealed the law of supply and demand the economies in the u.s. and europe should improve over the course of the year so. it's a big twixt in-between year i think jim if i can stay with you you're also an expert on iran what do you think of that ratcheting up more pressure another round of sanctions. the use of force is still on the table as it were i mean this could be a big year with there's a lot of inflation in iran there's a lot of the sanctions are taking in effect and we see. again the issue of refined petroleum goods not getting into it and i mean this could you see this is a year critical year for him around as well and its troubled relationship with the west. yes i mean this is sort of a slow moving crisis here it will probably deepen unfortunately i'm a hard wired up to most but i don't have a lot of optimism about the iranian situation we will get new

a new sanctions resolution there will be increasing pressure on president obama to use military force that will increase not decrease over time the real question for me peter is what's going to happen inside of iran one of the i think one of the main obstacles to progress here has been the internal political divisions within the conservative camp within iran between president ahmadinejad who ironically is more of an engaging right now wants to have some sort of resolution and his chief rival the head of their parliament ali larijani who in the past has been prone gage lutes but now anything ahmadinejad says his critics say the opposite so as long as a spin internal paralysis continues in iran then i think we have this slow drift to some very difficult and tough decisions later this year ok steve a lot of people there's a rule of thumb in american politics of a president doesn't do well in his first term and midterm elections he puts on the blue suit and does a lot of traveling foreign policy and what i'm getting at is what kind of year is

this going to be for obama because jim just pointed out to see you know it's going to be a year of decision when it comes to america's foreign wars iran is always on the table as a political issue there's a lot of pressure on obama and his administration to start be more open about the use of force more sticks than carrots i hate that term but it's that seems to how the almost any american administration deals with iran so in he's got a really tough foreign policy agenda. in front of him this year got a little bit of a breeze in his sail at the end of last year when it came to foreign policy will start so is that it was the good start of last year a good start for this year. i think it is i think the winds at president obama the democrats back a little bit start and don't ask don't tell were some huge legislative victories for them to achieve at the end of the year and on the other side the republican opposition is reeling a little bit you know this tax compromise was really unpopular with their tea party

base they've been saying for two years if if you guys in the tea party get us into power again we'll be fiscally responsible we'll cut the deficit and the first thing that they did with the new political capital was engaged in this compromised agreement on the on taxes that will increase the deficit by a trillion dollars over the next couple of years their base is very upset about that but let's face it they do they do gain the house back in two thousand and eleven and the first thing that they're going to try to do is kill the health care reform bill and the wall street reform bill by not funding them that is going to be a recurring battle throughout two thousand and eleven and two thousand and twelve i don't want to look forward too far forward but that's going to be a major battle darrell i so who is going to be the new head of the house oversight committee is going to be investigating and investigating and investigating this matter fact i'll bet you that the republicans overplayed their hand a little bit on that i i am like jim i'm a little bit of an optimist i don't see obama resorting to the use of force in iran

unless something much more drastic happens in that situation first of all i don't think we have the money to do it and second of all i don't think it gains us anything by gauging in the use of force with iran they've got enough problems on their own as you mentioned with inflation i think they're thinking about engaging in acting some curfews or having the military take to the streets because of. forecasted protests as a result of gas prices raising i think they've got enough of their own problems i don't think they're going to be causing their neighbors any problems any time soon so i don't see iran as a big problem i think i think north korea though potentially could be more of a problem we've seen in the past as their leaders get older and it. looks like there's going to be a transition coming to the newer generation they like to sort of flex their muscle and show how macho they are so to speak and i think north korea could really present a little bit more of a problem but i think i think there's actually a good working relationship with china in terms of. dealing with the north koreans

and it's one thing that wiki leaks showed us is that the chinese are already pretty sick of the north koreans and if i'm not mistaken said that they would be happy to see the korean peninsula reunited under the seoul government you know charlie and you know again weekly leaks and this program comes up and i think it's kind of interesting that we could maybe turn it upside down and you know maybe some of these governments can just say who will help us out there they actually let us say what we really think you know and it does but we didn't say that officially this is leaked information but there's a lot of things i've read in these cables that you know make me laugh because i think yeah we all knew that just too bad they didn't have the guts to say it in public and then they do it so i mean that again we talked in the last program at the end of last year you know what is this phenomenon because i'm still trying to get my head around and i think a lot of it's are and i think you look to people like you i mean do you think this is going to continue other organizations like we can be leaks that will that will make the public sphere more transparent it will be painful until we can maybe get

to a new paradigm and how governments deal with publics and how publics deal with governments because i think all of us have this deep rooted feeling governments doing something but we don't know about it is this huge this spin and now we really actually have a good idea of what they're doing and in this in their way maybe government can look to society in reverse and i don't really know what that really should mean but there seems to be this new phenomenon this new layer out there that we've never seen before. well that's right and you could remember of course that you know wiki leaks is is one example of this and i think it's going to spread and it's representative of the great a sort of openness if you like of potential openness of the of the internet and yes of course governments are very worried about it i'm in a couple of time i'm going to going to the world economic forum in davos and i know this is what they're going to be talking about because they don't want to surrender

knowledge they want to surrender power but i think you're quite right that we're living in an incredibly complex difficult globalized environment where actually people citizens knowing a bit more about things might be of help and there's even a conspiracy theory which i don't believe particularly believe that the americans actually want we queue leaks to to spread some of this information because it gets out some very useful messages now i travel around the world a lot and wherever you go just the stories from wiki leaks they're all seeing differently go to the middle east people are talking about the iran bit go to spain they're talking about a whole different set of issues so you've got to remember that information is globalized people see the same bit of information differently and use it differently but it is going to be out there if you like it's going to be the kind of more open competition perhaps you'd call it open warfare around information for this year jim what do you think about that i mean is this so if we look at this

year of greater force transparency as it were governments here it does this help the united states to dilute maybe give it a different form of soft power because it can admit it makes mistakes it shows that . it does have a mission there it has to it has to. it has to engage governments in so many different complex ways of course there's embarrassment right there but this is something obama said he wanted to do when he came into office in the first place ok and. in many ways he's saying you know this is what my former administration did we have to remember that as well i mean does this give because obama is a disappointment let's say like in the muslim arab world i mean this point in time the great cairo speech never really panned out is this can we look at this kind of embarrassment as a as a new line in this new year for governments like the united states and great britain i mean we have to remember a lot of other governments a bit embarrassed by these cables. yeah i think if we ask hillary clinton whether

in retrospect the wiki leaks thing was a good thing i'm almost one hundred percent sure she'll say no that well you know of course there are pluses and minuses if you are sitting as the secretary of state but i think you're thinking there are more minuses. sure a couple of things came out that make you look good other things not so much and then you have this whole problem of trying to. you know put band-aids on and reassure and you know all the sort of cleanup work that comes after it let me offer by the way a somewhat. more ok so what let's not just. hold that thought we're going to go to a break and i'll come back to you after that after a short break we'll continue our discussion on predictions for two thousand and eleven stay with us.

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economy is a report on our t.v. . welcome back to your lapel remind you we're discussing what we can expect in the new year. but before let's see what russian saying about their country's position in two thousand and eleven well come two thousand and eleven after the changes the world faced in two thousand and ten what can we expect this year will the new year be better than the one past the so-called paradigm shift is gearing up bringing even more changes to people's lives public opinion research ages syllabus and asked

russians what will be their country's position on the international arena sixty three percent think it will not change significantly twenty percent believe it will improve and only seven percent see it weakening back to peter ok jim if i went to the break you were. going to point go right ahead. i think all the positive aspects that we've talked about so far are true but they also have to be weighed against dangers and and downsides what the spreading information does as we've seen over this past decade it one thing it does is it creates intense issue publics people who are able to connect with each other who were never able to connect before and then sort of join forces that can be a good thing but you know there was a time in america if you were an extremist or a pedophile and you lived in some small town you were able to connect with other people in other towns and sort of organized activities let's change now so the bad guys they're able to stay in touch with one another and you get these very intense

groupings where people only talk to themselves and their feelings grow more intensely and are harder edge another aspect of sort of this political bubble these things that sort of arise out of nowhere you don't know if the information that they're based on is accurate or not and they create political crises or suddenly you know extension sees that every government has to start paying attention to sometimes they're there that's deserved and sometimes it's not sometimes it's just sort of made up stuff the public becomes seized upon and then begins to dominate policy in a way that would have never been true before so again it is it's a broad based change that will have both negative and positive consequences but one thing that's happening is things are happening faster and they're happening with more intensity and with more shocks to the system i think those are three of the consequences of this well as usual everything leads to charlie and i going to charlie first and then this steve charlie will what has to corrected for that because i've noticed that as well i mean it's the amount the amount of hate on the

internet is extraordinary i mean in the end it's obvious that a lot of people spend a lot of time on it i mean just go to cross talk on you tube and the amount of hate spewed at certain people not myself are usually hope thankfully and i just you know it does happen but i mean i mean the issues like anti-semitism that have. it's always been out there but it's just amplified it's amplified to the nth degree and it's really odious ok what is the what is the corrective that we have to that because jim it describes it really quite well i mean lunatics you know but you know twenty twenty years ago did you know they were lunatics in their garage ok now they go yeah they go cyber and you know is there a corrective in this you know after we've seen with the leaks and now in this new year is there are people on the internet and in the cybersphere thinking about these things and as a corrective because i think some of the issues that we brought up in this program

clearly the majority of us think are wrong. yeah well obviously you'd be careful not to blame the media or blame the message lots of unspeakable horrible things happened with old media hitler for example was particularly brilliant using cinema and newspapers in the most despicable of courses so there's nothing about the internet itself that necessarily means you're going to get more extremist politics what i think it does do it reveals the depths of ignorance the depths of frustration anger and as you say bitterness and hatred out there amongst people especially because i think people are particularly fearful of a world that's changing so fast and the point is they are now able to express that and as was mentioned that they can get together with other people of course it's a bit of a balancing act i can find you

a cause of wonderful stuff on the internet you have to look at social networks themselves and see the way that people are connecting with each other they're building social capital they're communicating across distance to bring people if you like closer together but overall i think you have to bear in mind the limitations it is just media in that sense what you put in is what you get out it's what people do with this and vats to answer your question that is i think where governments come in civil society comes in we need if we want this inform society in the internet age we need to help people to understand how to use this stuff what does it mean how can they filter out the good stuff from the bad stuff how can they learn how can an etiquette and how to be more creative because here's another really important thing about the internet for this year and for the years ahead it's going to be a major engine of economic growth the creative industries the internet could be part of a serious part of the recovery for the world economy ok steve i'm going to you i'm

not going to stay off the negative side of a. that's because the tea party and i have to admit you know as they take their seats this month and congress and i again i'll show my cards i'm quite i appreciate when mayor bloomberg had to say can these people even read do they have passports i mean what are they going to do what are they going to do is power going to tame them are the republicans going to teach him how to do things right or is it going to be the tea partiers are going to intimidate the rest of the republican party what do you see here because it's really a rip into republican party thing right now and the reason i bring this up is that they've mastered these social networks the internet raising money tea party i mean that they may not be the most literate people but they certainly know how to politic. well i think i think the key to what's going to happen with the tea party is some of the criticism that they're leveling at republicans right now and i think the thing we can't forget is that the tea party was created by these big republican think tanks like freedom works and americans for prosperity whose vice president i

debated on about a month ago and the fact of the matter is if they become too much of a problem for the republican party it's a very simple matter for freedom works and americans for prosperity to simple turn simply turn off their funding spigot turn off their websites and whatever else the tea party folks try to say that they're grassroots or whatever and they would die a very quick death if if these two think tanks in particular decide to pull the plug that is my prediction as a matter of fact as to what's going to happen with the tea party in two thousand and eleven i think in a few years they're going to be a jeopardy question do you remember what that. caused so much problems for the democrats in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten i think they're going to go away they've served their purpose the only thing that they could do now is hurt the republicans in two thousand and eleven i don't see the republicans funding them and then allowing that to happen jim if i go to you again you know it's this it's early days literally quite early days in this year how much do you think that you know everyone knows what to or thinks they know what the tea party stands on

taxes and other cultural war issues but what about foreign policy i mean that for me i guess that's the big wildcard here i mean i had someone that was a supporter of the tea party movement and before we went on the program i asked them i said you know we don't know what it much about foreign policy and i said what do you think they said o'neill kahn and i just said oh wonderful ok here we go through that again what do you think i mean we do way you look at it as a foreign policy expert is this tea party thing just an intra party thing for domestic politics that are going to pretty much go with with republicans have been doing that with foreign policy i mean there's enough on the domestic agenda. in the main i think that's right and let's face it their core issues are domestic in nature and they they do not have a defined foreign policy and i and i would not automatically assume that they are neo conservatives you know a big part of the neo conservative ideology was to project american power and to get involved in foreign wars i sort of sense from them more of an isolationist bent

you know don't spend this money you know taxpayers' money on foreign wars that don't get us anywhere so i could see that being a point of divisiveness within that group and maybe that's why the they don't talk about it let me add that part of the extreme feelings that people have and the extreme politics in the us i think has a little bit to do with the fact that we have ten percent unemployment and i think if the economy grows and the other employment rate comes down the level of vitriol and sort of level of agitation will commensurately decline so i think that could have a positive effect on the political dialogue in the u.s. and then finally peter i got to stick this in because we're talking about the upcoming year and we've talked about how the internet and other things sort of bubbles and and crises i just want to point to the physical as well as the political one of the processes we're continued to be involved in is climate change and i expect that the pace of unexpected climactic events earthquakes floods things

that really dominate the lives in pakistan and and particularly in the developing world we're going to get plenty of those stories this year as well charlie one thing that's getting more and more on the agenda is who will control the internet and we look at murdoch and other media moguls saying no we're like we're going to go premium you have to start paying for it could you see two thousand and eleven really show a possibility of an apartheid system for information on the internet where if you have the means you can pay for what would people come quality information and then everybody else is left with this yellow junk where you would create an apartheid system in the glow in this our globalized. world where you get hearsay rumors just unprofessional people and this is what journalists tell me that they're very worried about what is it where are we going in that direction and if we are how can we stop it to stop an apartheid system of information available to the world.

not only is the apartheid system but i think there is definitely we're witnessing a kind of tendency for the internet as it matures to kind of divide you getting massive massive companies like google one level or news corp for example who are going to become increasingly influential on the global stage and then at the lower level you can have millions and millions and millions of smaller local specialist personal type internet activity but i think and there will be in terms of the infrastructure is deafening to be a move away from so-called net neutrality there's definitely be people looking to if you like charge or control traffic but i think that in the end though the even the commercial self-interest is to keep the internet relatively open to keep it as a relatively accessible market if you start putting up walls and we're seeing this experiment here in london with the london times where the putting up pay walls yes

that might work but we're going to create a much smaller business with much less access to a much more narrow market all right also i think we're going to have you in just a minute how to fish jump in here and i'm sure all of you will be on the program later this year many thanks to my guest today in new york boston and london and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember across time. to take you. to. the official r.t.m. placation to your i phone i pod touch from the i q zaps to. life on the go.