Sol W. Sanders We live in dangerous times. Not so much that the world economy threatens to crash, that our carefully nuanced political system in the U.S. is momentarily checkmated, or even that while the U.S. is running the highest unemployment rates in recent memory the European Community has not resolved its disintegrating common […]
Sol W. Sanders ZURICH – Europeans seem determined to ignore the depth of an approaching economic and political crisis which will end its longest period of prosperity and peace in history and threatens the very foundations of post-World War II democratic progression. In the fleshpots of Vienna and Zurich I have just visited, for […]
John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — It’s long been an economic truism that the United States pays the lions share of the UN budget. Moreover the European Union (EU) countries contribute the largest bloc of dues of the 193 member organization. Well, there’s good and bad news. The USA’s budget assessment is no longer as […]
Sol W. Sanders MUMBAI (BOMBAY), India — Is the Indian economy retreating back into “the Hindu rate of growth” which characterized the stagnation of four decades when New Delhi ran the economy with its imitation of Soviet planning? A returning former resident finds more than a touch of Calcutta’s notorious chaos and poverty in […]
Sol W. Sanders JERUSALEM — One of the most quoted of Maynard Milord many clever aphorisms is: “You can’t push on a string”. Keynes was referring to extending credit to an unreceptive investment market. [Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke are you listening?] The quip comes to mind this morning on the eve of President Barack […]
Wesley Pruden Barack Obama says he’s not a Muslim, but a Christian. That’s his business, between the president and God. The president clearly has a soft spot in his heart for Islam. He once described the call to evening prayer, which he first heard as a child in a Muslim school in Indonesia, as “one […]
Sol W. Sanders An old saw has it that only the British would build a city on a small, mountainous, rocky, waterless island and only the Chinese would live in it. Something of a backwater until 1949 when the miseries and violence of Mao Tse-tung and the Communists inflicted on the Mainland of China […]
Sol W. Sanders TAIPEI – The U.S.’ 50-year-old alliance with [Formosa] Taiwan is eroding slowly but surely in the face of Beijing’s siren call and growing indifference of the Obama administration. Yet at a moment when U.S. strategy ostensibly calls for a “pivot” toward Asia, the de facto alliance could never have been more […]
Sol W. Sanders BEIJING – Only a few hours in this capital of a country with 1.3 billion people are enough to pose the question of whether the control of the Communist Party may not be cracking under the growing strains accompanying the exposure of its economy to the outside world. Stalin perhaps had […]
John J. Metzler UNITED NATIONS — Shortly after the Security Council unanimously condemned the recent North Korean missile launch and demanded that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea abandon nuclear testing, Pyongyang’s rulers decided to up the political ante. They announced that they are on the verge of a third nuclear test and for good […]
