Global Paradigms

Business Times - 14 Jul 2009 Obama losing support over economic policies His popularity is falling even among independents and voters who helped him win election By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT US PRESIDENT Barack Obama returns to Washington this week from a week-long global tour that had taken him to Moscow (where he tried to repair US relationship with Russia) and to Italy (where he attended a summit of leaders of the world's major economies). Then he went to Ghana, in sub-Saharan Africa, the continent where his Kenyan father was born, and where he was welcomed by enthusiastic crowds, 'as if his arrival were a long-awaited homecoming', as The New York Times put it. But unfortunately for Mr Obama, he was not going to be greeted with the same degree of warmth on his arrival in Washington. The political honeymoon with Congress, the media and the American people that the new president seemed to be enjoying since his inauguration is clearly over. Obamania may still be a...

Ignore the chickenhawks pushing for an Iran coup By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT MUCH has been said and written in recent days about the way the demonstrators in Tehran have been utilising new kinds of 'social media' to challenge the Iranian theocratic regime. Protestors blog, post to Facebook, and most intriguing, coordinate their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. On Twitter, young Iranians and their supporters post reports and links to photos from demonstrations along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country. So will this revolution be twitted? Perhaps. But in any case, with all the attention focused on Tehran's Twitter Revolutionaries, we shouldn't forget the other impressive group of revolutionaries that has emerged in Washington just as the media started reporting on allegations about a rigged Iranian presidential election and angry protesters were gathering in Teheran. I'm referring here to the many brave US lawmakers...

Business Times - 24 Jun 2009 Obama using political wealth for health reform The President is intent on getting the healthcare legislation passed by Congress this year By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IT'S beginning to feel as though the American political system is reverting to an election campaign mode. Is President Barack Obama running for re-election? That was at least the impression of journalists who were covering Mr Obama's announcement on Monday that he was going to use all the weapons in his political arsenal to win the coming fight in Congress and around the country over his plan to reform the nation's ailing healthcare system. It was clearly one of the major opening shots in what are expected to be long and costly political and legislative battles over health care. 'Yes we can,' Mr Obama told reporters at the White House as he discussed the decision by the drug companies to put a price ceiling on prescription drug coverage for the elderly that is off...

Business Times - 20 Jun 2009 Mountain crisis, mouse reform The financial restructuring plan unveiled by Obama is high on rhetoric but low on solid proposals to prevent future catastrophes in the financial system By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT DURING the height of the current financial crisis, at a time when the perception on Wall Street and in Washington had been that the sky was falling and that, at a minimum, the American economy and the entire capitalist system were about to collapse, the hope among progressive Democratic lawmakers and activists - and the fear among bankers and hedge fund investors - was that newly elected President Barack Obama would lead a crusade to change the way business was done on Wall Street. After all, it was Mr Obama who had warned during the election campaign last October that Americans were 'living beyond their means, from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street'. In fact, pundits speculated that after the falling of financi...

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=103223# Thank God Obama favors the 'old' Mideast By Leon T. Hadar Commentary by Friday, June 19, 2009 State Condoleezza Rice travelled to Lebanon in an effort to bring an end to the war raging there between Israel and Hizbullah. At the time, she tried to market to reporters in Washington a somewhat odd spin on the violence taking place, not only in Lebanon but also in Iraq and Israel and Palestine. "What we're seeing here is, in a sense, the growing - the birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East," Rice explained. Indeed, the Bush administration's Freedom Agenda was challenging the status quo in the "old" Middle East by using US military and diplomatic power to promote democracy in Iraq (by ousting Saddam Hussein and holding free elections),...

Business Times - 19 Jun 2009 Spending like there is no tomorrow It seems in Washington's new financial universe, a trillion here and a trillion there are nothing more than small change By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT MANY years ago one of America's elder statesmen, the late Everett Dirksen, a Republican Senator from Illinois who had spoken often and passionately about the debt ceiling, federal waste and the growth of government, was reported to have made the following observation about US government spending: 'A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.' It is not difficult to imagine Mr Dirksen turning over again and again in his grave these days after finding out that Washington has approved about US$13 trillion worth of bailouts over the last year; that the US deficit this year will run nearly US$2 trillion (as a result of financial bailouts and the stimulus package); and that the current national debt exceeds US$11 trill...

Business Times - 16 Jun 2009 Is Obama ditching his challenge to Wall St? He and his aides may be embracing a more gentle approach to financial system reforms By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AGAINST the backdrop of economic crisis and Washington's decision to bail out some of Wall Street's leading financial institutions earlier this year, there were expectations that the Obama administration would respond to rising populist sentiments with ambitious proposals to enforce tough federal government regulations on the financial system. Some even thought that this would include direct intervention in corporate pay decisions and the creation of a powerful government regulatory agency. President Barack Obama is expected to announce this week his plan to overhaul regulation of America's chaotic financial system. The conventional wisdom in Washington and Wall Street now is that the administration and Congress will probably adopt measures that would allow the government to liqui...

Business Times - 11 Jun 2009 Obama is the realist, not neocon critics By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN THE aftermath of his Cairo address to Muslims last week, neoconservative critics of US President Barack Obama's foreign policy are portraying him as a spacey idealist who, in the tradition of president Woodrow Wilson, is trying to recreate the international system based on a wild fantasy that, as Robert Kagan puts it, 'nations will act on the basis of what they perceive to be the goodwill, good intentions or moral purity of other nations, in particular the United States'. In particular, out-of-job neocons are blasting the supposedly naive approach of the current White House occupant towards the Middle East with his emphasis on the need to open a diplomatic dialogue with Iran and Syria and promote a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they warn that a region where players operate based on crude Realpolitik principles would be resistant to Mr Obama...

Business Times - 09 Jun 2009 Lower job loss rate does not equal a recovery By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT US President Barack Obama returned to Washington, after his trip to the Middle East and Europe, where he will presumably try to boost efforts towards what some officials and pundits are describing now as 'economic recovery'. Economic recovery you said? But the US Labor Department reported on Friday that 345,000 Americans lost their jobs last month - adding to the six million already out of work since this recession began - as US unemployment rose to 9.4 per cent, which is the highest rate since 1983. And if one recalls the so-called 'bank stress tests', the unemployment rate applied in their worst case scenario was 8.9 per cent. So a 9.4 unemployment rate does not sound like great economic news. Yet, both officials in Washington and investors in Wall Street seemed to be in a cheerful mood after the report was issued on Friday and digested over the weekend. T...

Business Times - 03 Jun 2009 The 'New GM' will find it tough driving out of trouble By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AFTER buying more than 60 per cent of General Motors (GM), America Inc and the millions of American shareholders (aka taxpayers) are probably not very cheerful owners of a company going through the fourth largest bankruptcy in US history. In fact, America Inc's CEO and President Barack Obama told reporters on Monday that the federal government was a 'reluctant shareholder' in GM, he had 'no interest in running GM' and 'the federal government will refrain from exercising its rights as shareholders on all but the most fundamental decisions'. In any case, no one has been surprised that after years of losses and the recent collapse in sales, GM would file for bankruptcy protection or by the fact that the federal government ended up with ownership in the company that during its heyday in the 1950s was regarded as an integral component...

Business Times - 28 May 2009 Nothing much can be done about North Korea US should get its allies to work on managing Pyongyang's emergence as a nuclear power By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT NORTH Korea's defiant nuclear test has been condemned by the US and several other governments, including Russia, Japan, the European Union, as well as by China, Pyongyang's closest ally. And it has also prompted calls for more economic sanctions against the regime led by Kim Jong Il. An emergency session of the 15-member United Nations Security Council, including the US and China, unanimously condemned the nuclear test on Monday. Experts have concluded that the North Korean programme's first nuclear test was a partial failure. But Monday's explosion was comparable to the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II, suggesting that North Korea has a workable nuclear device and in on its way to joining the exclusive club of nuclear powers. That development and...

Business Times - 28 May 2009 Nothing much can be done about North Korea US should get its allies to work on managing Pyongyang's emergence as a nuclear power By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT NORTH Korea's defiant nuclear test has been condemned by the US and several other governments, including Russia, Japan, the European Union, as well as by China, Pyongyang's closest ally. And it has also prompted calls for more economic sanctions against the regime led by Kim Jong Il. An emergency session of the 15-member United Nations Security Council, including the US and China, unanimously condemned the nuclear test on Monday. Experts have concluded that the North Korean programme's first nuclear test was a partial failure. But Monday's explosion was comparable to the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II, suggesting that North Korea has a workable nuclear device and in on its way to joining the exclusive club of nuclear powers. That development and...

Business Times - 26 May 2009 There is such a thing as a middle ground By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IF YOU'VE been following American 24/7 television and radio talk shows or reading the op-ed columns in the country's newspapers (or the few that haven't been closed down yet), you've probably concluded that the people here are deeply divided over policies and legislation regarding national security and social-cultural issues. You would think that half the population - the so-called Conservatives and Right-Wingers - think that the government has the right to torture suspected terrorists, that abortion should be criminalised and that gay couples shouldn't be permitted to get married; and that the other half - the so-called Liberals and Left-Wingers - believe that suspected members of Al Qaeda should be treated just like other criminals, that society shouldn't be in the business of trying to prevent abortion, and that the US should legalise gay marriages ASA...

Business Times - 22 May 2009 Balancing act for new US envoy to China Republican Jon Huntsman, who speaks fluent Mandarin, is clearly qualified for the job By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT TO say that US President Barack Obama's selection of Governor Jon Huntsman as the next American ambassador to Beijing came as a surprise to Washington's politicos and media types would be an understatement. Not only is Mr Huntsman a leading Republican figure. In fact, he is the governor of Utah, a state that is considered by political experts as very, very 'red'. Not the kind of red that Chairman Mao Zedong would have been keen on, but more like the colour associated with the Republican Party that has dominated the politics of this state where members of the conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormons constitute the majority of the population. Utah has not voted for a Democrat for president since 1964 and, historically, Republican presidential nominees hav...

Business Times - 19 May 2009 Financial industry may not accept new rules willingly By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THEY have been described as 'exotic financial instruments' and for years most of us were embarrassed to admit that we really did not understand what these Big Shots in Wall Street were talking about. Indeed, while the financial instruments known as derivatives were created as a way of managing risk, they had grown over the last decade into a gigantic market. More importantly, the whiz-kids who invented derivatives used so much jargon that it made it seem like these financial products were a theoretical sub-field of the science of quantum mechanics. Of course, by now it is safe to say that most of those Americans who have seen their retirement money invested in the stock market evaporate into thin air and who are in danger of losing their homes have become familiar with the risky trade derivatives. They know now that derivatives have grown in a largely unregu...

Misreading the Map The Road to Jerusalem Does Not Lead Through Tehran Leon Hadar LEON HADAR is a Research Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu comes to Washington for a meeting with President Barack Obama, U.S. policymakers are being urged to place the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the back burner and spend their time and energy addressing the true menace supposedly confronting Arabs and Jews in the Middle East -- Iran. Deal with that threat, the sirens sing, and the other pieces of peace in the Holy Land will fall into place. Netanyahu framed the issue in a speech he made in Washington earlier this month. "There is something happening today in the Middle East, and I can say that for the first time in my lifetime I believe that Arabs and Jews see the common danger," he told supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "This wasn't always the case," he added. Or was it? In fact, ther...

Pundits in Washington and elsewhere have yet to outline US President Barack Obama's Grand Strategy, or to provide an account of an Obama Doctrine of foreign policy akin to the more dramatic changes he has made in American economic policy. All they can point to is a series of "pseudo events," the term that historian Daniel Boorstin coined to depict activity that exists for the purpose of the media publicity and has no immediate effect on real life. From that perspective, Obama's recent trip to Europe, in which he addressed the G-20 and NATO summits and the Turkish Parliament, as well as his participation in the Summit of the Americas, have been regarded by most of the American media as foreign policy "successes." He has won praise for meeting with top world leaders and for his television appearances aimed at audiences in the Middle East, including the Iranian people. But in reality, Obama can claim no concrete diplomatic accomplishments. Europe's public a...

Business Times - 07 May 2009 COMMENTARY Stressing to the finish line But Bernanke seems to have reassured markets that US bank stress test results won't have big surprises By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE 19 big US banks' stress test results are set to be finally made public by the Treasury Department after the financial markets close today in New York (early tomorrow morning, Singapore time). And Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, addressing Congress on Tuesday, tried to calm the markets by downplaying the possibility that the government would ask Congress for a new infusion of taxpayer money into ailing banks. In fact, the Treasury Department and the Fed began releasing information about their stress test on major banks by providing the banks with the preliminary results 12 days ago. The Fed also released its methodology ahead of a public announcement of the results. It indicated that the banks had to run their portfolios against assumptions about the potential ...

Business Times - 05 May 2009 Obama should now work on his trade agenda The fact that he's avoided to push his protectionist agenda can be considered good news By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN most of the commentaries marking US President Barack Obama's first 100 days in office there has been almost no mention of the new president's global trade agenda. That was not very surprising since Mr Obama has said very little on the issue since entering office; and he certainly has not made any important decision that affected US trade policy. And that is the good news - and the bad news. Indeed, through his presidential election campaign candidate Obama pledged to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), hinted that he would discard the Colombian Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and threatened to punish China for manipulating its currency to increase exports. Hence the fact that Mr Obama has refrained from coming through on his campaign's protectionist tra...