Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday: is it really surprising? It is of the interest of the liberal sides of our capitalist world to encourage things that work, especially in extremely difficult circumstances, as the financial upheavals of last year are only harbingers of much greater dangers, by which dangers I mean the risks attending the re-distribution of labor inputs, profits and zones of influence on a massive scale over the world, with anything but stasis having been achieved. We are entering uncharted territory (uncharted if we don’t read the history of empires), and a nudge towards peace making to the president of the only superpower in the world, a tottering one at that, perhaps is not wasted. To encourage hope cannot hurt, especially in an environment where the negotiation by a number of actors of access to resources may take more than the US’ often hypocritical and muscular appeal to “sharing”.