It is extraordinary to be sitting in the United States in amidst these cathartic shenanigans on Capitol Hill.

(The figures Grief and History on the Peace Monument, near the US Capitol building, Washington. Image: Getty)

They talk about it on the beach here, in the supermarket and in Moby Dick’s seafood restaurant.

For whilst it is about debt, finance and economics…it is actually about none of them. It is about America. It is also, in a strange way, about us.

The US is vastly over spent, and over spending: hundreds of billions of dollars on the longest wars in modern history; a manufacturing base that has been exported to Asia, and a tax system that enables the rich to get richer, whilst more or less everyone else gets poorer.

It has always been easy for a Brit to sneer at America. We have needed to, to offset our own decline. But now we need to grow up and recognise that our “closest ally”, from whom we remain distanced by our common tongue, is in the deepest trouble most of us alive have ever known.

When I lived and reported from here in 1980′s, I sensed America had reached its Reaganesque peak.

Today, despite being the world’s largest economy, she is in decline. A decline accentuated by China and Asia
Sure, there is growth here – better than ours – but there is a withering too.

It is a withering of hope and aspiration – the very ideals Obama came to power espousing.  To read the papers, to watch the telly, this magnificent, accomplished – if sometimes misled nation – is psychologically on the floor.

Of course if you wander down Fifth Avenue in New York, it is buzzing.

The little village store here on Cape Cod is buzzing every evening, heaving with families buying for today. The morrow is another place.

High economic crisis, low politics. The immigration officer at Logan airport told me, as he inspected my finger prints – “Those guys in Washington? Scum!”.

So you get the Tea Party that doesn’t believe in tax and much else. Life does not divide into Republicans and Democrats. Just as it has long since ceased to divide into Tory and Labour.

Political tribal loyalty is all but dead. Individuals want individual answers to individual problems. God, political or otherwise, will not provide – even if some in the Tea Party think he/she will. Communities want community answers to community problems.

We landed up with a Coalition. But we are stuck with a Westminster which hasn’t seen radical reform in more than a century. Despite its enviable Constitution, “we the People”, presents a fossilised Congress that we have seen ‘in action’ in these present days.

We worry about democracy-free China. Shall we start worrying about democracy itself?

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Be afraid. Be very afraid. No, not of Murdoch, but of the looming financial crisis from which the phone hacking vortex shields our eyes.

The serendipitous daily drip drip of revelation has so consumed our naive appetites that our eye is as far off the financial ball as it has ever been. I know very little about high finance, but I know enough to know that when the price of gold assumes a level never seen before by mankind, there is something very ugly in the woodshed. The price per ounce of the stuff – $1,600 – is some record.

On any other day, a collapse in the share price of Lloyds and Barclays by a staggering 7% would have led every news bulletin in the land. RBS shed 6%. Need I say more?

Disparate Europe cannot see a way forward in the Greek debt crisis. The catastrophic fallout from allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust in 2008 has made cowards of us all when contemplating doing the same for a national entity like Greece. In short, no one knows where it would end… Dublin? Madrid? Lisbon? Rome? Shiver our timbers… London?

And I haven’t mentioned the madness on the Hill. The unending playing of politics with the American economy on Capitol Hill. Deadlock sustains as deadline looms.

Another test I understand is that of the Swiss franc. You have guessed it – yesterday it hit a record 1.1397 against the Euro.

Do not therefore spare a thought for the mere $1 billion that Mr Murdoch’s news Corp has lost in value since the hacking rumpus exploded on 4 July. It won’t stop us watching his Parliamentary grilling today. One suspects the old boy won’t know much detail, Rebekah Brooks will try to say little, on legal advice – leaving the focus on James Murdoch.

Oh, and while you worry about your bank, and your hacked/unhacked phone, do spare a final thought for the badger. It is to be officially announced today that he and she badger are for the chop, or rather the gas and the bullet. Rustic, rural, green-field England is going for the cull… maybe…

@jonsnowC4

Fascinating strains are opening up between the US and two of its bedrock allies in the Middle East – Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

The recent visit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington was neatly described in White House photos which depicted the unsmiling faces of the President and the Prime Minister looking in opposite directions. Netanyahu’s appearance in front of a rare session of the joint Houses of Congress provided worse. To opposition Republican applause, he rejected almost everything the President had asked of him. Not least, he rejected the internationally agreed factor (UN resolution 242) that any peace settlement returns Israel to its pre-1967 borders.

Mr Obama is now wrestling with ways to deal with Israel in a US election year. But many inside America’s so-called ‘Jewish lobby’, are reportedly frustrated with the Israeli leadership’s failure to respond to the developing new order that is flowing from the ‘Arab Spring’.

As to Saudi Arabia, the New York Times has had rare access to one of the regime’s inaccessible Princes – Prince Waleed bin Talal al-Saud. He has laid out the Kingdom’s annoyance with Mr Obama’s embrace of the ‘Arab Spring’.

The Saudis are in the midst of negotiating a vast $60 billion weapons contract with Washington. The US depends for a third of its oil on Saudi Arabia. Some inside the regime are questioning Riyadh’s long term reliance on the US to protect its interests.

Fresh from ploughing $billions into the Egyptian economy and splashing cash and force across the region and amongst its own population to try to stem the rising pressures on the Arab dictatorships, the Saudis have set up a kind of ‘Club of Kings’ that ranges from Morocco through Jordan, to Bahrain, to try to argue that kings do not suffer from the same defects that the region’s other dictatorships manifest. Given the repression of its own opposition movements and its heavy handed, British-trained intervention in Bahrain, it may be a hard argument to pursue.

President Barack Obama comes to town tomorrow for his UK state visit (he’s in Ireland today). Boris Johnson, Mayor for London, wants him to settle his embassy’s multimillion pound unpaid congestion charge fines.

Protesters will be out too, outside Buckingham Palace where he is staying as a guest of the Queen. The focus of the noise will be the very blind eye that the UK and the US are together turning on the atrocities being perpetrated in Bahrain. Armed with US supplied weaponry, Saudi forces continue to assist local Bahraini troops and thugs in the oppression and suppression of the majority Shia population.

Despite these micro and macro problems Obama may be forgiven for sparing a thought for how much longer he’s likely to be in what once was regarded as the”‘most powerful job in the world”. If the reign of the lone superpower had peaked under George Bush, it has continued its slide under Obama. And it is economic power rather, more than diplomatic and military muscle, that is orchestrating the new world order.

And yet, listening to Obama’s assured performance with a forgivably star-struck Andrew Marr yesterday, the President presented an extraordinarily spontaneous breadth of knowledge, and certainty in the rightness of American power. It was even a refreshing contrast from Bush who frequently seemed to act as if he wasn’t entirely sure how he’d ever landed up with the job.

Today yet another Republican challenger for next year’s White House race has refused to run – the uncharismatic but fancied Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels. At the same time, the godfather of Godfather Pizzas, the all but unknown Herman Cain, has declared he IS running. Looks like the competent Mitt Romney will end up being the most credible Republican trying to unseat Obama. Last time many mused upon whether America was ready to elect an African American. This time at least as many may well query whether America is ready for a Mormon.

Still, however economically challenged, however poor the field, Obama still intends to raise and waste a whole one billion dollars to enable him to enjoy another four years of Boris Johnson’s congestion charge demands, the noisy voices of disappointed Bahrainis and the rest.

Sure, Osama seems to have been shot dead. The doubts surround the question of Pakistani complicity. Last night professor Akbar Ahmed, formerly a commissioner in Abbottabad, a former High Commissioner to the UK, and a respected authority on Pakistan and on Islam, suggested on Channel 4 News that the Pakistanis had known of Osama’s whereabouts and effectively held him as a “last throw of the dice” in the event that relations with the US deteriorated… deteriorate they did. And the attack was triggered.

It is surely not credible that “the most wanted man in the world” lived undisguised in a middle class neighbourhood 35 miles from Islamabad unknown to anyone… we now know that children came and went to play with Osama’s own children for example. His kidney doctor came and went to give Osama dialysis. The nature of the compound has been well rehearsed.

You then have the “cover” of denial by the Pakistani authorities. “We never knew he was there” said President Zardari. How convenient… so that when America struck, no mud would stick that would ignite the fires of fundamentalist hatred within the country. Suited America too, so heroic, an attack in the face of potential hostility. Save that from Pakistan itself, there was none.

So US forces were “in country” for more than an hour, airborne for some thirty minutes of that time. The US UK trained Pakistani forces failed to scramble a single military boot, let alone a plane or helicopter.

I have always been taught as a reporter never to bank on conspiracy, never to underestimate incompetence. I am trying, heaven knows, I’m trying. But a seasoned nose, tutored in all sorts of trouble spots from El Salvador to Iran, suspects this doesn’t stack up.

I know this is a more than usually speculative Snowblog, but I thought I’d share it, in case it stirs someone else’s knowledge/experience/thoughts.

I was standing on a lawn at Nasa Space Centre in Houston in January 1986, soon after the Challenger space disaster in which the Shuttle had exploded on take off, killing the seven person crew including the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe. Ronald Reagan, as President, was coaxing the nation’s grief. The explosion was a morale breaking body blow to this pioneer nation. Nothing so drastic had afflicted the space programme of this pioneer nation eternally bent on reaching the next horizon.

I was watching in Oklahoma City as Bill Clinton did much the same after the domestic bombing by a white supremacist in which 168 people died. By that year, 1995, the President was using terms like “purge ourselves of the dark forces” to speak of what had afflicted America.

Today, Barack Obama sets forth on yet another mission by an American President to heal his nation. How much more divided, more vitriolic, poisonous an atmosphere he confronts now than those who went before him. Add to the horror of Tucson’s killings and maiming, whose victims he will be there to remember, the state of America and this represents another dark milestone for the US.

For America, mired in a failing warfare abroad, emotionally and economically in fear of China, this is a country rapidly talking itself into decline. A rash of books is appearing questioning whether the once lone global Super Power has peaked.

Even Fox News’ boss, Roger Ailes has told his anchors to tone down the “bombast”.

If Obama is himself the master of awe inspiring rhetoric that we believed during his run for the White House, his verbal skills have never been needed more than now. This is a landmark day in America’s immediate struggle for identity.

We may ourselves have suffered the loss of a senior politician as recently as 1979 to an assassins’ hand (Airey Neave MP). But though it in no way excuses it, that was in the context of the dramatic civil strife then gripping Northern Ireland (Neave was the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary).

For America, Congresswoman Giffords’ shooting, the Federal judge’s murder, represent the crazed action of a man with a legal semi-automatic pistol. The context is not actual civil war, but bitter political strife amid violent rhetoric in which the constitutional legality of the gun is itself part of the argument.

Yes, make no mistake this is a vastly challenging day both for Obama himself and his nation. Ultimately for us too. For if, in the long term, America pitches for decline, it will affect all of us more than we can hazard.

How will we ever find the UN translator, Jean Rodriguez who led us to his ruined community – his then pregnant wife… did her baby live?

I’m on a plane from Washington DC via Miami to Porto Prince, Haiti. At least this time we shall be able to fly straight into the airport. That last time in the aftermath of the earthquake we drove from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. We slept in tents on the airport runway.

What this time? We are riding the edge of a tropical storm upgrading to a potential hurricane. We’ll just get in before the the tropical rains decend upon 1.3 million souls living in UN provided tents. Tropical rains and canvas… it doesn’t bear thinking. And for the rest, what will we find?

This is the moment in flight when my spirits sag and I wonder whether I will be able to report what I find as I want to, or will the words run away from me, dispatched on the wind by the shear enormity of the human misery that will confront me. I reach for my iPod. On goes the St John Passion – stirring brass and strings-opening pursued by a choral section.

I think of what I have left behind, of home, and then of America and deflated, defeated Obama and the punishment of power. That news conference – the academic, low key confessional about what had gone wrong in the elections.

I think too of how he waited no instant to mobilise the Southern fleet to go to the rescue of Haiti’s largely African American community in their earthquake hour of need.

With guilt I think ahead to our hire car waiting by the terminal building; a hotel booking too. And then again of the 1.3 million. How privileged I am to be dispatched on others’ behalves to come and find out their plight and what more we could do.

Bed in the terminal hotel in Miami airport. I have stayed here fifty times en route to El Salvador, Guatemala, or Nicaragua in times past. Used Bach for mental buoyancy here too. These hotel rooms must have the highest density of throughput in the world. Don’t start thinking who else has slept in this bed, bathed in this bath. So I don’t. I sleep the sleep of the dead. Four hours is up and Haiti beckons. Now where’s that upgraded potential hurricane got to?

I was making my way to my hotel here near Capitol Hill in Washington DC, when unexpectedly I ran into my old friend Jake from Baghdad in the foyer. Jake, still toiling for the UN in Iraq after four long years there, was in town with a UN Deputy Secretary General trying to drum up funding for the shrivelling civic programmes that have flowed from the Iraq war. Jake did not appear suffused with any sense of fund raising success.

No wonder: America’s two wars are costing the country several billion a week. They are still costing the UK many tens of millions a month – a poignant element that binds us to the outcome of today’s vote here.

As I write this, the polling stations are opening across America. The guy at the top won’t change. The USA will still be there when we all go to bed tonight, so what?

From war to climate change, from the state of the dollar to domestic “quantitative easing (mark 2)”, our fate is still bound to this vast all-consuming entity, which guzzles 25 per cent of the world’s energy and emits 25 per cent of global Co2 pollutants.

There will be significant numbers of politicians elected this day in this place for whom there is no place for combating climate change. There will be others who advocate trade protectionism, and still others who reject any move to further stimulate this economy – still, in GDP, some 21 times the size of China. Did I mention that the dollar has sunk to a fifteen year low against the Japanese yen, today? Fears of the cost to the greenback, of printing more money to fuel the next fiscal stimulus.

No, make no mistake; this midterm election matters both to the US, and to us. That’s why I relish being here; relish the pumpkin farm in Virginia on Halloween, talking to ordinary Americans bemused by our mutual mispronunciations of our common tongue. Relish taking to students on the campus of the black citadel of learning, Howard University in the Washington suburbs, with whom I spent Obama’s historic election night two years ago this Thursday.

Today is serious Judgement Day for the first phase of the Obama presidency. A presidency that has so far eschewed the fawning “Special Relationship nonsense”. We may be bound by that common tongue, but we are divided by it too.

Our influence on events here is waning fast – in direct ratio to the gaining of influence of many dispossessed people who barely know of our existence, let alone care.

Can’t explain it – but maybe its going to be a better year, a better decade than we might have expected.

Yes all the bad news is still there to be harvested. Iraq looks like getting little better, Afghanistan not much improvement there either.

It may be that this will lead to a new era of disengagement and a recognition that what the West regards as “terrorism” can be dealt with more effectively by other means.

The deaths of the seven CIA men in Afghanistan over the holiday period, and the collapse of the Blackwater trial of US security mercenaries in regard to the massacre of civilians in Iraq, are a timely reminder of the West’s own ambiguities about who is allowed to kill whom under what circumstances. So far, so bad.

The re-arrest of Mordechai Vanunu (the man who spilled the beans on Israel’s nuclear bombs) this time for what his lawyer said was a meeting with his Norwegian girlfriend – is the usual depressing stuff, and no good looking elsewhere in the Middle East for a new wave of happiness.

America is reverting to America again after the Obama bubble, but the bubble isn’t yet entirely burst.

And China is China still – her human rights record is creeping to the surface again as the world begins to wonder whether it would be better to relate to a China with whom we are robust and honest, or weak and dishonest. I believe the former will come into fashion and we could see some refreshing pressure building upon the Chinese Communist Party, both from within and without.

Iran may go better than we fear. The man to watch is the Spiritual Leader. Ayatollah Khamenei‘s wagon wheels look decidedly loose.

At home the biggest question of all is the extent to which the electorate will punish all politicians for failing to recognise that the so called expenses scandal (small beer by most other parliamentary systems’ standards) was never about corruption but about the need for wholesale democratic reform in Britain. I believe the UK political classes are in for a severe shock in 2010.

The arts and music and sport will boom and the calls for serious green commitment will surge.

That’s quite enough. Snowblog is back. I look forward to another adventurous blog year!

Woah! 30,000 people in Copenhagen especially for the UN climate change summit. 10,000 in the summit centre. 2,000 more at the gate. I’ve been to some summits, but this one takes the carbon emitting biscuit!

Rather ominously, this last group are lining up along a chain link fence as if inside a jail. Five metres above them, red lights wink on lampposts, denoting the point to which sea levels will rise by 2050 if the scientists are right and we do nothing.

An amazing cross section of humanity, from Butan, from Djibouti, from Mali, Mauritania, India, New York, the TUC in the UK (he came by train – one of the few!).

Exhilarating too, though, because the thing seems more high-minded than many international sessions one slogs through as a hack.

No country that hadn’t staged an annexe-strewn EU summit could have staged this. Denmark’s meticulous planning has paid off, save that the numbers seeking to attend have swollen even beyond those who booked to come. The media accreditation had to be shut down through sheer weight of numbers.

Everyone is talking about Obama’s change of heart – or is it to plan? He was to have come here on Wednesday en route from picking up his Nobel prize in nearby Oslo, but has thought better of it. He’s now coming on the final day.

Either he expects such a weak a deal that he’ll be able to sign it, or in some magical way he will come with something rather better than what he has promised thus far.

Either way the UN summit chair, Yvo de Boer, tells me in an interview for Channel 4 News tonight that there must be a legally binding treaty on carbon emission targets, and a deadline for signing it must be no later than June – otherwise the summit will have failed.

Tough stuff at last?