Global Paradigms

Business Times - 16 Sep 2008 It is a dangerous mixture of ignorance and arrogance, inexperience and religious fervour By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AT first I thought that the guys at Fox News Television, the Republican Party's unofficial propaganda outlet, were pulling my leg. A few hours after Republican presidential candidate John McCain stunned the country by announcing that he had chosen Alaska's governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, Steve Doocy, one of Fox's anchormen, told viewers that the Republican vice-presidential candidate was a foreign policy expert of sorts. She was, he assured his viewers, very much like the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Joe Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a veteran member of Washington's foreign policy establishment, who has travelled around the globe and has met many world leaders. 'But the other thing about her, she does know about international relations because...

Business Times - 12 Sep 2008 By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT A FRIEND of mine who lives in New York City told me that she and her husband were planning to vote for independent party presidential candidate Ralph Nader this year. 'He is the only one who is ready to tax all these millionaires in Manhattan,' she said. The only problem is that these two Naderite voters make a living making expensive jewellery for a rich clientele on the East Side of Manhattan. And a Nader administration that would end-up squeezing her customers for more taxes could eventually hurt my friend's business. 'Don't you get it?' I asked. 'Well, I didn't think about it,' she responded. 'I didn't take economics in college.' Indeed, as George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan explains in The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton University Press, 2008), the average American voter holds mistaken views about econ...

Business Times - 09 Sep 2008 Democrats and Republicans are wooing US voters with vastly different, strident messages. Whose will prevail? By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IT SEEMED appropriate that just a day after the Republican Party ended its presidential nomination convention, following on the heels of a similar gathering of Democrats, the US government reported that the unemployment rate in the economy jumped to 6.1 per cent last month, its highest level in five years. At the same time, the Bush administration placed the two giant mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the control of the federal government in what could amount to the largest taxpayer- backed bailout of US companies. And according to the report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last Friday, more than 600,000 US jobs have been lost since January with unemployment rising to a level that reflects the dawning of a full-blown economic recession. Another sign of mounting economic problems was a ...

Business Times - 05 Sep 2008 By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT A FEW years ago, I was hired as a part-time 'contract worker' by an agency of the US federal government. No, it wasn't the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or, for that matter, any other national security government agency. Although I am an American citizen and have no criminal record, my boss insisted that since my parents were not born in the US, I had to go through a security examination. What followed were several months of rigorous investigation by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, who among other things interviewed my family members and friends, former employers, university professors, etc, and studied a very long questionnaire I had to fill and on which I had to list all my places of residences going back to high school. I mention one of the least important chapters in my life in order to contrast this experience with that of the person who could in a few months not only have access to t...

check-out my my posts on the topic on @TAC.

Business Times - 02 Sep 2008 Will Obama come across as more 'American' - and thus more electable - or will it be McCain? By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT S OMETIMES even cliches can sound profound. Like when politicians and pundits were referring to last week's Democratic National Convention as 'historic', as a 'defining moment' and as a 'day to remember'. Or when one of the young delegates to the gathering that nominated Senator Barack Obama as the party's presidential candidate told a television reporter that she felt as though 'history was being made tonight, and I was part of it'. Her tearful mother, sitting next to her in the huge outdoor stadium added: 'I wanted my daughter to be a witness to something that I had never believed will be taking place in my lifetime.' Exactly 45 years after civil rights leader Martin Luther King delivered his historic 'I have a dream' speech, his dream of doing away with the scour...

Suggesting that movie director Woody Allen, who has abandoned the Big Apple and is residing in Europe now, has been transformed from a New York Liberal into a Continental Conservative would certainly sound like a stretch. But after watching his 2005 Match Point, in which the main character is a professional tennis player by the name of Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who cheats and murders his way to the top of British High Society, I did consider the possibility that the aging Allen may have become a Social Darwinist of sorts late in his life (in fact, one of that movie’s producers was someone named Lucy Darwin). (read the rest)

Business Times - 29 Aug 2008 What to watch for in the US election Hillary voters, white, young voters, swing states and Hispanics will be key to who wins By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT SO WHO is going to win this year's US presidential race? By now, the average consumer of political news junkie, has probably absorbed so much 'reliable' information about Barack Obama and John McCain - as well as a lot of pure junk in online 'rumours' - not to mention the never-ending pontificating by the pundits, that he or she can finally figure out who will be elected on the next US President on Nov 8. Yeah. Right. Well, in order to simplify things and save you a lot a time here is a brief guide to assist you in your quest: What to watch for in the next two months, or the factors that will determine, or at least explain the outcome of this race: The Hillary Clinton voters: Depending on the pollster, between 10 and 25 per cent of those voters who had cast their ballots for S...

Business Times - 26 Aug 2008 More Americans perceive him as an 'elitist' while MrMcCain is seen as an 'average guy' By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT ANOTHER important chapter in the story of the Great American Dream will be written during the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week, when Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the next president. For the first time in America's history - a black person will be elected by one of its leading parties to run for the highest political office in the country. That an African-American who belongs to an ethnic minority whose members arrived in chains and in slave-ships and who have suffered more than two centuries of official and unofficial discrimination, has a real chance to spend four years in the same White House occupied in the past by Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy, and Reagan, is in itself an indication that notwithstanding many of the problems that American is f...

Business Times - 19 Aug 2008 When seceding gets ugly, half pregnancy may be best By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT RUSSIAN Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has complained that while the United States and its Nato allies have demanded that the province of Kosovo be allowed to declare its independence from Serbia and be recognised by the United Nations as an independent state, they have rejected Russian demands that the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia be permitted to secede from Georgia and either become independent or join the Russian Federation. So, in a way, the fate of Kosovo depends very much on the future of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. For the US and its allies, it makes a lot of sense that Kosovo be split from Serbia and that the Albanian-Muslim majority in the province enjoy the 'right' of self-determination. To the Russians, who have traditionally regarded the Serbs as historical and cultural allies, the decision to divide Serbia (and before that Yugoslavia) wa...

Please read my recent commentary on Georgia-Russia in the new issues of The American Conservative and my recent post on the subject on @TAC.

Business Times - 06 Aug 2008 His internationalist vision and strategy to restore respect for the US will face big obstacles in a 'post-American world' By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WITH the exception of about 10 per cent of voters, Americans know by now that if elected as the next occupant of the White House, Barack Obama - who was born to a Kenyan-Muslim father but is now a practising Christian - will not become the first Muslim US president. But is it possible that a future President Obama could end up selecting the first Muslim US secretary of state? That is a speculation that has been raised by The New York magazine. That respected weekly suggested that columnist and author Fareed Zakaria - who was born to a prominent Muslim family in Mumbai - 'has the perfect intellectual pedigree (Indian-born, educated at Harvard, conservative) for a fast-changing world, and the kinds of friends in high places' that could help him land the job that had once been held by t...

Business Times - 08 Aug 2008 His only hope of winning the White House is if voters ignore their economic situation By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT FORMER Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan recalls in his memoirs, The Age of Turbulence, that one of his four bosses, president George HW Bush blamed him for his re-election loss in 1992 against Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. In fact, as Mr Greenspan noted in a recent interview on US Public television (PBS), the first president Bush blamed him 'fully' for his failure to get re-elected for a second term. Why was Mr Bush so upset about the policies of Mr Greenspan's Fed? 'We started to ease interest rates after the credit crunch in the late-80s and he felt that we were not lowering them sufficiently rapidly to re-galvanise the economy,' Mr Greenspan told PBS, adding that 'the Federal Reserve essentially, in a unanimous voice, disagreed with him'. Mr Greenspan insisted that the Fed's monetary pol...

Business Times - 01 Aug 2008 By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT THE country was in a bad mood. America had suffered major diplomatic and military setbacks in the Middle East. Oil prices were rising to ever new heights. A nasty mix of economic slowdown and inflationary pressures were creating a sense of economic anxiety among the American people, a majority of whom were telling pollsters that they are very worried about the future of their nation. And a relatively unknown politician - but one with a lot of charm and charisma - was running for the White House against a former naval officer with more experience in national politics and foreign policy. It all sounds very much like the political and economic reality of Summer 2008 - a sense of gloom and doom among the American people against the backdrop of a military quagmire in the Persian Gulf, skyrocketing energy prices, and a recession coupled with inflation, not to mention the crises in the financial and housing crises. But it als...

posted on PRA Right Web rightweb.irc-online.org Peace Not Near on Middle East’s “Time Horizon” By Leon Hadar | July 30, 2008 Members of Washington’s band of foreign policy realists are high-fiving each other these days. First there was the news that the Bush administration decided to have Undersecretary of State William Burns sit in the same room in Geneva with Iranian nuclear envoy Saeed Jalili and high-ranking diplomats from five other countries and try to negotiate a deal to suspend Tehran’s plan to continue with uranium enrichment. And then came reports that Bush agreed to set a general “time horizon” for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as part of a long-term security accord that Washington is trying to negotiate with Baghdad. If these moves seem odd, it’s probably because they came from the administration of President George W. Bush, the man who just recently compared those who would engage Iran to the “appeasers” who talked to Adolf Hitle...

Business Times - 25 Jul 2008 Their upward pressure on prices drives down demand; falling demand leads to lower prices By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT DEMOCRATIC and Republican lawmakers in Washington, led by the two presumptive presidential candidates, have been blaming 'speculators' for some of America's current economic problems. They indict these people for rising energy prices and the housing market mess. And they want the government to take action against energy traders, short-sellers and other evil-doers. Senator Barack Obama has promised voters that as president he would strengthen government oversight of energy traders. He has blamed them for the skyrocketing oil prices. Senator John McCain has called for a 'thorough and complete investigation of speculators' to see if they have been driving up energy prices. At the same time, responding to pressure from Capitol Hill where lawmakers have placed the responsibility for some of the turmoil in financial s...

Please read my article Losing Afghanistan in the new issue of The American Conservative (July 28, 2008)which provides a critique of the bipartisan-backed plan for doing nation building in Afghanistan. It's not yet online but if you click on the pics below you could read it.

Also check-out my posts on @TAC here and here Business Times - 17 Jul 2008 Bernanke says growth could be slower, inflationary pressures could continue mounting By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT US FEDERAL Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was a bearer of bad economic news during his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, suggesting that the problems facing the American economy were actually more severe than they have been for several years. Economic growth would probably be slower than expected while inflationary pressures could continue mounting. And the notion that inflation is up while growth is down isn't going to improve the mood of officials and lawmakers in Washington. American consumers and investors may have already concluded that the Fed, believing inflation could get higher than expected in the coming months, is not going to lower interest rates anytime soon. 'Over the remainder of this year, output is likely to expand at a pace appreciably below...

Business Times - 15 Jul 2008 America is now witness to a major shake-up that will affect more than just the 'mental' faculties of its businesses By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT FOR a while it seemed as though there were some signs of light at the end of the long economic tunnel. In Washington and on Wall Street, one could sense that both officials and investors were contemplating the possibility that the worst of the financial meltdown was perhaps behind us, that we were going to see indications of economic rebound around the corner, and that from now on, the Fed would have to focus on dealing with the expectations of inflation. In fact, former Senator Phil Gramm, who is serving now as the top economic advisor to presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain, explained to reporters last week that the American economy was basically doing quite well. He said that the US country was not in a true recession but in a 'mental recession', adding that America...