Global Paradigms

Business Times - 04 Oct 2011 Tea Party tax rant a case of barking up wrong tree Accusing Mr Obama of being a Marxist means putting Mr Buffett in the same boat By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT REPUBLICAN lawmakers and the party's presidential candidates are bashing President Barack Obama's proposal to increase the tax rate on America's millionaires as a form of 'class welfare'. Speaking to conservative radio host Michael Berry, Tea Party Representative Allen West, a Republican from Florida and a Tea-Party icon, insisted that by calling to raise the tax burden on the wealthy, Mr Obama was intentionally harming the US economy because he was a 'Marxist' and a 'socialist'. And so apparently is Warren Buffett, the second-wealthiest person in America. After all, as Mr Obama explained, his proposal to make Americans such as Mr Buffett pay more of their income to the federal government was based on the advice he had received from that infamous Marxist, ...

Business Times - 28 Sep 2011 IMF meeting makes little difference in current crisis The main obstacles to resolving the economic woes are political in nature By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT WHAT happens if a tree falls in the forest and everyone does hear it - but then no one cares? Assessing the outcome of the weekend's meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington - a lot of important attendees, including finance minister and central bankers and a lot of media hype - the answer is: Not much happens. The global economy may be on the verge of another devastating financial crisis that could be precipitated by Europe's government debt problems. That is the main reason why the financial markets have been trembling in recent days. But after days of meetings in Washington where leading financial officials from around the world convened for the IMF-World Bank fall meeting, it was obvious that notwithstanding another statement in which the 187 members of the IM...

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/pax-americana-is-over-1.386383 Home Opinion Published 20:16 23.09.11 Latest update 20:16 23.09.11 Pax Americana is over By Leon Hadar For several decades, the world’s leading superpower has been trying to help Jews and Arabs reach an agreement over a disputed territory in the Middle East, and to secure its own hegemonic status in that region. But another diplomatic effort to make peace in the Holy Land reached a deadlock, because it was becoming too costly for the superpower to maintain its military presence and diplomatic influence in Egypt, the Levant, the Persian Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean and South Asia, at a time of growing financial constraints and challenges from new international players. On Friday afternoon, February 21, 1947, the British ambassador to Washington, Lord Inverchapel, showed up at the State Department and informed Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson that his country could no longer continue providing financial and military ...

Business Times - 23 Sep 2011 Fed takes action despite Republican opposition By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT ALL signs are suggesting the recovery of the United States economy has been slowing and may be even coming to a halt: the unemployment rate is hovering around 9 per cent; consumer and business confidence is continuing to fall; a political stalemate over fiscal policy in Washington has already brought about a US credit downgrade; and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe is making things worse. All these problems have put pressure on the US Federal Reserve to do something about the American economy and prevent it from experiencing the dreaded double-dip recession. Indeed, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that the US could slip back into recession without further fiscal and monetary stimulation. So the Fed will try once again to stimulate the weak economy - that grew at an annual rate of less than one per cent over the first half of the year - by using another mone...

Business Times - 21 Sep 2011 Obama's class warfare or just plain fairness? With his debt-reduction plan, he hopes to change the terms of the debate over fiscal policy By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AFTER months of urging Congress again and again to start doing something about America's ballooning federal deficit, US President Barack Obama decided that it was time for him to set the agenda and provide some leadership on the issue. US lawmakers may not be ready to come up with a concrete plan to put America's fiscal house in order. But Mr Obama made it clear on Monday that he had a debt-reduction plan. He challenged Republicans on Capitol Hill and those who are hoping to get him out of the White House next year to a fight over the nation's social and economic priorities. He framed the debate thus: Who would have to carry the main burden of balancing the budget? The struggling middle class and the poor or the country's millionaires and billionaires? The plan th...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/turkish-foreign-policy-israel_b_967100.html Leon T. Hadar Journalist and foreign affairs analyst Turkish Foreign Policy: What Would Ataturk Do? Posted: 9/16/11 09:02 PM ET ween Israel and Turkey over the raid on the Gaza "Peace Flotilla" had erupted last December, right-wing Israelis and American neoconservatives were promoting a new Grand Narrative: Turkey was joining forces with Iran and Syria in an anti-American and anti-Israeli Islamofascist Axis of Evil, seeking to destroy the Jewish State as part of a long-term strategy of re-establishing the Ottoman Empire and a Global Caliphate. Turkey was becoming the New Iran. Indeed, according to a report in Haaretz, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet last January that Turkey was "consistently gravitating eastward to Syria and Iran rather than westward over the last two years" and that "the trend certainly has to worry Israel." Moreover, Netanyah...

Business Times - 15 Sep 2011 The changing narratives of US president campaigns By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT AMERICANS will have to wait for 14 more months before having the opportunity to decide who will occupy the White House for four more years. Yet it is starting to feel as though the country is already in the midst of a heated presidential election campaign, providing a lot of business for pollsters, consultants, pundits, and making it all seem like paradise on earth for your average political junkie. The Republican presidential candidates have been holding televised debates almost every other week, and much of the discussion on cable television news shows and the blogosphere has been focused on who was 'up' and who was 'down' in the Republican race, which will open officially only early next year when the party's first presidential primaries take place in Iowa and New Hampshire. Already it seems that the members of Washington's political punditry ...

Business Times - 13 Sep 2011 Will Obama's plan save US jobs - and his own? If the Republicans try to torpedo plan, that could ironically help Obama in the 2012 poll By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT US PRESIDENT Barack Obama is hoping that the US$447 billion mix of tax cuts and spending that he proposed during a televised address to the politically divided Congress and the economically distressed American people last week would 'restart' the slow economic recovery and avert a double-dip recession. No doubt, he must also be hoping that it will revitalise his limping presidency, regain the support of the electorate and ensure that he get to serve a second term in the White House. Indeed, as Mr Obama delivered his 30-minute-long speech - challenging lawmakers to pass his job plan as soon as possible - both the American economy and the Obama presidency seemed to be heading into dangerous territories. With the unemployment rate stuck at 9.1 per cent while consumer confidenc...

Business Times - 06 Sep 2011 No more Mr Nice Guy against Republicans Obama should blame them for the political and economic mess in Washington By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IT HAS been common practice in Washington for more than two centuries: The US president sends a letter to the leaders of Congress in which he asks to be allowed to address the two legislative chambers on matters of national importance. There has never been an instance in which Congress denied the White House's request. But there is always a first time for everything in Washington. And in a year dominated by nasty political and legislative fights, it was not surprising that even the tradition of an American president addressing a joint session of Congress - reflecting bipartisanship and a sense of national unity and political civility - was going to be challenged. After Congress had shut down for the summer recess - following the nasty battle over raising the debt limit (and the ensuing downgrading of US...

Business Times - 31 Aug 2011 Troubled economy in search of a solution Despite what was said at Jackson Hole, markets are still waiting for reassuring messages By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN THE aftermath of the decision by Standard & Poor's (S&P) to downgrade the US credit rating, Wall Street has been waiting for Washington - whether it's the White House or Congress or the Federal Reserve - to do something, or at least say something that would reassure the markets that the economy was getting better. At the very least, they wanted to be told the economy would be getting better in the not-so-distant future. So it was not surprising that Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's speech delivered last Friday at the policy conference held at Jackson Hole, Wyoming was described by pundits as one of those 'much-anticipated' events. Against the backdrop of the political and legislative stalemate in Washington that has made it close to impossi...

Business Times - 25 Aug 2011 Obama's right in 'leading from behind' in Libya By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT REPUBLICAN lawmakers and neoconservative pundits have been very critical of President Barack Obama for failing to assert US leadership in the foreign policy arena. In particular, they have blasted his somewhat muddled response to the insurgency in Libya. For example, Republican Senator John McCain from Arizona who ran for the White House in 2008 seemed to suggest that the US should have led a more muscular military effort in Libya aimed at deposing Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Indeed, Obama bashers on the political right have been quoting ad nauseam from a New Yorker magazine article authored by Ryan Lizza in which an administration official described Mr Obama's action is Libya as 'leading from behind'. America should lead from the front - not from behind, argue the critics. But the administration official was trying to co...

Leon T. HadarJournalist and foreign affairs analyst GET UPDATES FROM LEON T. HADAR Like 4 Deposing Gaddafi 'From Behind'? Posted: 8/22/11 05:44 PM ET Neoconservative critics have blasted President Barack Obama for failing to assert U.S. leadership in the foreign policy arena, with his somewhat muddled response to the anti-Gaddafi insurgency in Libya serving as a case in point. Indeed, the neocons have being quoting ad nauseam from a New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, in which an indentified administration official described Obama's actions in Libya as "leading from behind." The official was trying to contrast Obama's efforts to depose dictator Muammar Gaddafi in Libya with former President George W. Bush's strategy in Iraq, the argument being that while Obama's predecessor embraced a unilateral, U.S.-led and very costly (money-wise and in American and Iraqi lives) military action in Iraq that, among other things, helped ignite a civil war i...

Business Times - 23 Aug 2011 What's wrong with the US Fatca tax law Apart from violating financial privacy laws, the new rules will prove costly for FFIs By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN RESPONSE to protests from American businesses, the federal government decided to repeal earlier this year a complex and intrusive tax scheme aka '1090' that would have required companies to collect tax identification numbers for any of their suppliers whenever they did more than US$600 of business - that included, for example, out-of-town hotels the company's salesman were staying in - and then send the required paperwork to the Income Revenue Service (IRS). Demonstrating some common sense, officials and lawmakers in Washington decided to eliminate the '1090' after arriving at the conclusion that the tax rule amounted to the kind of bureaucratic and financial nightmare that would impose unnecessary burdens on American businesses at a time when the...

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o . i l עודכן ב- 07:21 19/08/2011 לי-און הדר | אידיאולוגיה ביקום חלופי מאת לי-און הדר | וושינגטון תארו לעצמכם יקום חלופי, שבו ראש הממשלה בנימין נתניהו ומנהיג הרפובליקאים בקונגרס אריק קנטור מחליפים תפקידים. נתניהו ייהפך לאחד ממנהיגי הרפובליקאים, מחויב לתפישת השוק החופשי ולמדיניות חוץ נצית, שתתמקד בברית ישראלית-אמריקאית, ותומך בשותפות עם הימין הדתי והתנועות הפופוליסטיות, המסתייגות מהאליטות הישנות של השמאל, ומ"האחר", הזר. קנטור, אחרי שיעלה לישראל ויצטרף להנהגת הליכוד, יעשה בירושלים כמעט בדיוק את מה שיעשה נתניהו האמריקאי בוושינגטון. את תמיכת חברי "מסיבת התה", נוצרים אוונגליסטים ומצביעים לבנים מהשוליים, יחליף קנטור בתמיכת מתנחלי הגדה המערבית, פוליטיקאים חרדים ומצביעים רוסים מנוכרים. אלא ששני הפוליטיקאים האלה אינם צריכים להחליף מקומות. השניים, החולקים פילוסופיות פוליטיות וכלכליות דומות, מתמודדים במקביל, בשתי המדינות, עם התנגדות חריפה לניסיונותיהם להפוך את האידיאולוגיה שלהם למדיניות. נתניהו וקנטור, המשקפים את התחושות בק...

Business Times - 17 Aug 2011 Reagan-like win unlikely in 2012 Most voters favour Obama's approach to dealing with deficit By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN 1964, Barry Goldwater, a Republican senator from Arizona - charismatic, highly intelligent, a World War II air force pilot and an ultra-conservative politician calling for the dismantling of the welfare state and defeating the Soviet Union - won his party's presidential nomination after beating the head of its liberal wing (Nelson Rockefeller). Mr Goldwater went on to lose the general election to Democratic president Lyndon Johnson by a huge landslide, with Mr Goldwater carrying only Arizona and five southern states and the Republicans losing many seats in the House of Representatives and Senate. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, a former Republican governor of California and a former Hollywood movie star - charismatic, telegenic, and an ultra-conservative politician calling for the dismantling of the...

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org) Source URL (retrieved on Aug 15, 2011): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-middle-east-needs-asean-5755 The Middle East Needs an ASEAN August 11, 2011 Leon Hadar [2] During the roaring globalization years of the 1990’s when “Friedmanism”—Tom, not Milton—was all the rage, Israel’s elder statesman was putting fantasy to paper in The New Middle East (Henry Holt, 1992). Peres, the chief architect of the Oslo Agreement with Yasser Arafat, imagined the birth of a democratic and free-market-oriented region. Israelis and Palestinians would be integrated into a reconstructed Middle East, a regional economic and political superstructure, along the lines of the European Union, providing enduring security and lasting prosperity for “all the nations of the Middle East.” To borrow Friedman’s favorite metaphors, the “Lexus” was destined to crush the “olive tree” with young Israelis and Arabs surfing the Intern...