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showing. yet to report any atrocity. to stay with us if you can the pivotal events of two thousand and eleven explored by peter. program thank you for much. of the. technology innovation. if you. still. need to. follow in the welcome to cross talk computor

a little bit to mulch was the year of two thousand and eleven the world changed in ways hardly anyone could have expected we witnessed the rise of people power on a global scale the passage of some of the greatest minds of our time and the death of ruthless dictators and as the year ends the health of the geopolitical order and economy are in doubt. if you. start. to cross out the major events that took place in two thousand and eleven i'm joined by mark levine in nashville he's a senior fellow with the truman national security project and a talk radio host in milwaukee we have jeffrey summers he's an associate professor of political economy at the university of wisconsin milwaukee and in irvine we cross to mark divine he is professor of history at the university of california irvine all right gentlemen this is cross like you can jump in anytime you want but first let's have a look at some of the events that made this year's headlines. january fourteenth

a spark of the unraveling of the arab spring the tunisian government falls after a month of increasingly violent protest president ben ali flees to saudi arabia after twenty three years in power. january twenty fourth a terrorist attack at moscow domodedovo airport kills thirty seven people and hundred eighty others russia's investigative committee a leader identifies the suicide bomber as a twenty year old male from the north caucasus region. march eleventh. fifteen thousand eight hundred. and another three thousand nine hundred twenty six . emergency declared nuclear power plants. march seventeenth the united nations security council.

in the city of sirte with national transitional council. and. april twenty ninth. katherine middleton. in london the ceremony is broadcast live around the world. may first. has been assassinated. in pakistan. july twenty second norway a terrorist bombing in the government center in oslo and a shooting at a political youth camp at least seventy six people dead anders behring breivik a thirty two year old right wing extremist is arrested and charged with both attacks. october fifth steve jobs and american computer engineer inventor and businessman. recognized as

a pioneer and the visionary of the personal computer revolution after a long struggle with cancer. october eighteenth israel and the palestinian organization hamas carry out a major prisoner swap in which the captured israeli army soldier. is exchange for one thousand and twenty seven palestinian and israeli arab prisoners held in the israel. december eighth the e.u. summit that comes together to face the ever deepening crisis is so widely seen as ineffective the single currency powerhouses france and germany fail to come to terms on a strategy to stabilize and save the euro. december fifteenth the united states formally declares an end to the nearly nine year war in iraq which has claimed the lives of more than four thousand five hundred americans and more than six hundred thousand iraqis and is said to have cost up to three trillion dollars.

ok mark of our go to you in irvine as we just saw in that report there are a hell of a lot of things happened this year i can remember a year or so many things happen at such a major scale and all of the events that were just mentioned i report we could put a whole program but mark if i can ask you what is the defining moment of two thousand and eleven for you i know you're an expert on. politics in the in the arab world in general so what would be your defining moment. well for me and i think this is a very personal moment for me was being in tahrir square on february eleventh when mubarak left when he when he was forced from power that probably was the most powerful moment i've experienced in my life other than the birth of my children. it was there was a release of hope and possibility in that moment unlike anything i've ever experienced and i think it capped off what started a month earlier a month and a half earlier in december in tunisia and really heralded because of the size of

egypt heralded this wave of revolutions that then moved across the arab world and eventually landed on wall street with the birth of occupy wall street and it's continuing continuing to reverberate around the world in ways that you know few of us predicted and certainly even fewer of us understand ok that's very interesting you can use tide a number of events together if i go to you mark a national what would the defining issue for you that in two thousand and eleven is like we just all mentioned so many things happened. well i have to agree with mark and with time magazine which made the protester the man of the year all over the world it's not just the arab spring of course the arab spring is the primary part but it's tunisia it's egypt it's libya it's revolutions that are complete it's places like syria and yemen whether incomplete in fact i think syria may be the next country to fall it's iran where it happened two years ago it's russia where people are in the streets trying to defend the russian elections and make sure they're fair it's also occupy wall street the united states all over the world you

see the people taking back their countries and i think they're doing it because of things like social media facebook twitter it's amazing how technology has allowed ordinary individual people to fight for democracy is all over the world and even though some of these transitions are fraught with danger i think at the end of the day it's a very positive thing worldwide ok jeffrey i mean again and we were going to get a lot more weaving together than i expected it to beginning of this program what is the major event for you because i think you know when we look at the occupy movement and on a global scale and it was even mentioned here that there are protests in russia and it's a middle class it is standing up and saying you know it wants more representation and wants to be heard more just like we've heard all over the world so it's a global trend what would you how would you tie the economy to all of this because i think the economy is very closely into are connected to all of these issues. well absolutely it's quite central and in fact at the risk of perhaps sounding quite proud of the protests movements where i live in wisconsin i would argue that

the protests actually started here in february we had a governor who tried to impose austerity measures and as a consequence of that we had massive protests that were very organic in character and people just came out in huge numbers and in fact instead of having a kind of top down organization say an organization like a labor union called people to come out people actually came out in opposition to what initially was. a labor movement that was actually cautioning their members not to come up now just as you say peter of course it's economic issues which are i think at core here driving these global protests whether it be in wisconsin or whether it be and here square or whether it be in moscow i think what we have is a middle class which has been under assault for near three decades and it's really at risk of disappearing and they're finally recognizing that there's almost nothing left to lose in that kind of situation people will come out and protest you know

it's interesting to go back to back to market and of i'm. going to say something controversial it's usually when i look at the arab spring here people embrace new ideas about democracy things that they've been denied by western powers for decades and then we go to the united states here and people are using the occupy movement because they don't see their democracy actually answering their demands. well i think that's true and one of the interesting things is that you have the so-called east of the muslim world teaching us now new ways of protesting wisconsin happened less than a month after tahrir square after the removal of mubarak was certainly very inspired by it i had people calling me from wisconsin asking me to put them in touch with the protesters in tahrir square so they could figure out how they did it and then of course now tahrir square and people in egypt are learning from what's happening in occupy the occupy movement across the u.s. and in europe so the feedback loop is really the most amazing thing but i do agree

economics. behind so many of these protests certainly in egypt this goes back twenty thirty years to the initial attempts to restructure the egyptian economy in a way that would serve the global economy better but not most egyptians and there were bread riots in the late seventy's that set a pattern for the middle class but also the poor to really take to the streets whenever whenever the kind of process of privatization and liberalization done in very corrupt ways made life unbearable for them and made it impossible for them literally to get their daily bread and you see a similar thing in the occupy movement here with the foreclosures and the fact that people who are middle class are suddenly losing everything so you certainly don't want to make this just a political or cultural moment and lose sight of the economic roots in markets if i go back to you national it seems to me that this is globalization on twitter and facebook because it's really quite remarkable because traditionally we always say the developed world developing world the poor the rich the north the south but then

all of a sudden this year everything kind of crystallized where there seems to be so many commonalities from different peoples and parts of the world that we usually don't make the same connection with. i think it's all about people taking back their countries their nations their worlds wherever they are they're different certainly problems in each of these places and you know in greece there in europe there is austerity measures in the arab world in the middle east it's mostly about democracy in russia and in the united states it is mostly about economic inequality and what the occupy movement shows and i've actually spent some time in occupy d.c. is people are fighting to get to get back some share of the middle class i must say as someone who's watching political events united states very closely that another defy the moment of the year was happened just yesterday when president obama forced the republicans the opposition party to back down on the payroll tax cut part of his jobs act the republicans the opposition party had been very very strong all year round and now there's just starting to back off so i think the occupy movement united states is starting to pay some dividends but will know more in the new year

when you think about that jeffries there is this occupy. occupy the globe working it's beginning to pay off some given a lot of steam is being blown off easy but there are people getting what they want . well of course i'm not getting what they want in the immediate term. of course it's too early to tell in terms of whether or not they will get what they want i think they are beginning though to see that governments are beginning to respond more over the global discourse is beginning to change i think that's what's really most important here so whereas before we had an obligation of discourse on economic issues and those discussions were typically centered on the need for even more austerity more pain you know we're now beginning to see of course these discussions take place regarding issues such as inequality and just getting back very quickly to that issue let me let me jump in right here i want to go back to that point after a short break after that short break we'll continue our discussion on the outcomes of two thousand and one state party.

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more than sixty square. here. not saying. what's going on here. concrete. keep. talking about the major events of two thousand and eleven.

ok jeff i'd like to go back to you in milwaukee something you mentioned in the first part of the program what is the state of global capitalism because i think this is again another thread that ties everything together that we've talked about far in this program is the is the economic order that has been established. in the west and controls the rest of the world economy is this we seeing a catalyst something that is really fundamentally changing. and i don't know if it's for the better or the worse well it's terribly just. think it is for the worst and i think that's why we're seeing so many protests and i think that you know what we see is a situation that is somewhat analogous or similar to what we saw in the soviet union in the late one nine hundred eighty s. where we had a system which had created a much larger middle class and yet frustrated its ambitions when it was no longer able to produce for it so let's say in the united states we have a middle class which now sees that standards of living

a roading we have young people who are saddled with student debt what happens they begin to file a protest or if we take a look at the middle east with many of the countries in which we see these protests and we actually have a substantial well educated middle class now what happens when all of a sudden the costs of fuel because of bread rise dramatically and there are not that many professional opportunities for this very very large young group relatively well educated people well you get protests you know so again it just reminds me very much of what we saw in the mid to late one nine hundred eighty s. in the soviet union a replication of that same kind of phenomenon where you had protests arising from frustration out of people's inability to see progress in their lives and i think that's what the west has done is it's it's it's been about twenty years behind the soviet union. of producing that kind of i think that's a separate program of by itself and i tend to agree with it i go back to market to revive i mean you know if you go back to egypt and look at what happened in tunisia

and in libya also to i mean you could decapitation the regime some ways more peaceful than others and if we can talk about nato as adventures in the in the region and maybe another time but i mean where do we go from here because two thousand and eleven obviously is a watershed year for the region you can get rid of a dictator but can you change the system ok maybe tunisia is a little bit of optimism right there but if things are coming to a head now in egypt with the elections. on all that are we going to see the fulfillment of a lot of the hopes that you saw occur when mubarak actually fell because like i said you can take the snake's head off but what about the rest of the body will just rot at the expense of everyone else. that's the question i mean i just got back from another trip to egypt and spent about ten days most of the time in tahrir square and also in other places around egypt and i can tell you it's a lot easier to decapitate the snake than to actually kill it you know the system

is in fact more entrenched and more dangerous and more vicious now than it was even under mubarak in during the time when the protests actually started the system is very good it generated itself regenerating itself and the core issues in egypt which ultimately are not just about democracy it is about bread it is about economics it is about a growing inequality in a country that already suffered from maybe thirty to forty percent of the people living on two dollars a day or less it's about how do you reallocate resources nationally and reorient an economy to provide wealth some level of wealth an opportunity for the mass of people in that sense what's happening in egypt is just a more intense version of what's happened in the united states where you have the same question so really what this is is i think people for whom global capitalism was supposed to benefit which is the majority of poor middle class people who are realizing that the kind of capitalism we have now is not benefiting them and that

if they don't get out in the streets and force the leadership who is so tied to corporate elites and others that who have been or who have been the greatest beneficiaries of the system if they're not out there pushing back very very hard and if need be violently and let's face it these revolutions have not been as nonviolent as people you know like to portray them in the media if the people are not on the streets pushing back with all their might and consistently for a very long period of time the system will throw them a couple of bones to go. them off the streets and then very very quickly cycle back to the status quo and that's why you know what we're seeing this year is not a victory it's the beginning of a very very long process which is probably going to take a decade or even a generation to work itself out ok mark and then national i'm going to talk about another issue that came to an end this year it was the american war in iraq i mean what's the u.s. standing there i mean obama tried to put a very brave face on it but the united states is very much on the defensive now in the region i mean if you look nine years back the united states had

a lot of allies now those allies are not secure. well i don't know about that i think that the iraq war was very much split the united states the opinion there i opposed it many americans supported it and now that we've gone home i think we can all sort of come together and agree that well we did what we could and it's least it's time to leave some republicans still want us to stay there but if the other day i don't think it's american troops that are causing hardly anything in the region in libya we certainly helped the revolution occur along with europe and then the rest of the world but the end of the day it's the people themselves i mean that's what's so magical here you have a fruit vendor in tunisia at that great cross-section of politics and economics which is corruption he wasn't protesting against the dictator of tunisia he wasn't even so much protesting a bit about the economic situation there he was protesting because some government bureaucrat didn't allow him to put his fruit cart where he wanted to and that's why he set himself on fire and that's the whole region ablaze so i think all across the world it's about people taking back their countries and whether she died states or

any other power there's only so much that foreign troops can do at the end of the day it's up to the people themselves ok jeffrey i saw you nodding there but i want to go to a different topic here what about the eurozone i mean people were we've been i've been watching you've been we've been on the program talking about it and just how much has been changed in the eurozone by this years and not much progress there's still kicking the can down the road. and it did this could raise a lot of questions about how democratic the european union is within the eurozone i mean you have these very small elites and bankers making these amazing decisions that will affect effect people's lives today and will for who knows the generations to come i mean with which going on there because this whole issue of representation is still being played out in the european union particularly the eurozone. well it's kind of ironic isn't it peter that as the rest of the world is experiencing these significant protests and these increasing moves towards democratization in one sense the european union is moving away from democratization on the ground

where people actually make real decisions regarding how their economy has to be organized and i think the operative phrase that you used was that they continue to kick the can down the road i mean i think what we've seen way back to the one nine hundred eighty s. and going beyond the european union is this problem whereby we decided to resolve the crisis of the one nine hundred seventy s. by essentially just kicking the can or balancing the ping pong ball between public and private so private deadwood balloon would get transferred into the public sector where the public sector then saw its debt expand it would move back to the private sector and there was this attempt at generating demand in the economy to keep the economy moving along by using credit whether it be from the public or the private sector and now we've reached an impasse where both sides both the public and the private sector are fully bloated now with debt they can't figure out

how to reduce it while at the same time standing or maintaining demand within their economies and as you've said within the european union we have technocrats who are trying to essentially maintain a more abundant system a system that just cannot last and consequently people are losing faith in the european union market and go back to you know i think quite a dangerous situation we probably have more nationalism more right wing movements in europe at any time since the one nine hundred thirty s. and we'll see how that plays out next year just sorry mark i was going to go to you go here only that. you know i mean not only that you what the bankers are doing are trying to you know impose these kind of austerity measures across europe which is precisely what people are revolting against everywhere because you know what you got. hermance and systems which have basically served to funnel trillions of dollars of wealth from people to a few corporate sector is especially banking and without any kind of regulation

without any kind of regeneration of even greater wealth in response in fact it's probably by far the greatest that of public resources and human capital in the history of humanity what's happened with these banking and mortgage scandals around the globe and how much wealth has shifted because of them and now instead of holding the people who are responsible for this accountable and really rebooting the system in a way that keeps this from happening they want to allow those people who essentially stole this money to keep it while the rest of us and certainly there's a lot of responsibility on individuals who took on that they shouldn't have but a lot of people i've been meeting especially people who are having homes foreclosed you know a lot of people took on this step because they had no choice because they had to pay for health care or college or other things and now they're being asked to put tighten their belts you know to the point where they're choking themselves or can't breathe while the corporations that did this are getting off scot free and their

bonuses are back up again and you know i'm not surprised to see that in the u.s. but to see this in europe you know it is really surprising and i can say for sure that the italians and the greeks and the spaniards are not going to sit there and put up with this that people are going to hit the streets they have much more robust protest traditions and there are in the u.s. and you know if there's not a response in this from the e.u. it is going to fail and this is this is shocking and it's going to be a global disaster because if the e.u. fails and the u.s. is going you know is suffering more and more and is incapable of writing itself then the major global economy in the major global force in the world's going to be china and china you know it has absolutely is the most amoral force economic force the world has seen since the british empire in the height of its you know in the height of its power. our this is not going to be good for the world this is going to be a disaster and it's going to going to lead to a lot more suffering a lot more violence and you know even in china the more powerful china gets the worse it's going to be for most chinese workers who are you know revolting against

this system weekly with hundreds if not thousands of strikes that no one ever hears about because it's just not news so the e.u. is really the lynchpin for creating a kind of system of sane capitalism that we all hope that those of us you know who are just socialist or you know rival capitalists want to see some kind of hybrid system that can serve the needs of most people with the e.u. sinks we're all in a lot of trouble i know you are going to find out in our next. next program if he who think i want to thank my guests today a national hockey and in irvine and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. happy new year and remember cross country.

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