On the brief occasions when the President now appears in the Rose Garden to "comfort" or "reassure" a shock-and-awed nation, you can almost hear those legions of ducks quacking lamely in the background. Once upon a time, George W. Bush, along with his top officials and advisors, hoped to preside over a global Pax Americana and a
India’s two mighty, internationally-backed minorities are displaying renewed zeal to respectively dominate the physical polity and the cultural-civilisational landscape. The saving grace in the current situation is that the respective crusades against Hindu civilization are separate and distinct - Muslims quietly withdrew support from Ch
America’s de facto Finance Czar, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has reached for the panic button and made a dramatic 180-degree reversal of his financial bailout plan passed only days before. On 23 September in testimony before the US Congress, Paulson, former CEO of the politically influential Wall Street investment firm, Goldman Sachs,
The “world’s most powerful democracy” has a higher percentage of its population behind bars than any other country in the world: more than China, more than Russia, more than any backwater dictatorship. Two million plus people, roughly 1 out of every 142 US residents are behind bars in the USA. No one is bailing these prisoner
Sri Lanka, which gave the twentieth century its first elected woman Prime Minister, may now be taking the lead in asserting the primacy of the civilisational ethos of its native majority. It is a lesson of special significance for India, whose Hindu majority has been struggling for legitimacy in the public domain since the tragic betrayal at indepe
In the first week of October 2008, NRI steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal lost £ 16.6 billion in the global credit crunch as stock markets took a beating. NRI metals entrepreneur Anil Agarwal lost £ 2.7 billion. Previously, as the Wall Street financial crisis began spreading its long shadow over India, the ICICI Bank stock crashed 10 percent i
The UN vote to refer Kosovo's legitimacy to the ICJ reveals a new political constellation taking shape.Last week Serbia's neighbours Montenegro and Macedonia recognised Kosovo, the world's newest country - leaving aside South Ossetia and Abkhazia, bringing the number of its official friends to 48. However, after expelling Macedonia's ambassador in
“The Jewel of Medina,” a controversial work of historical fiction by American author Sherry Jones, was supposed to have gone on sale 15 October in the United Kingdom. A series of events, however, have delayed its British release indefinitely. The book, which went on sale in the United States on 6 October, describes the life of Aisha, th
Following the successful completion of India’s agreement with the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in September, and the subsequent signing of the US-India nuclear deal, New Delhi has moved quickly to seal a similar agreement with France. In the coming months it is almost certain that India will reach agreements with Russia, and perhaps with Jap
Do empires end with a bang, a whimper, or the sibilant hiss of financial deflation? We may be about to find out. Right now, in the midst of the financial whirlwind, it's been hard in the United States to see much past the moment. Yet the ongoing economic meltdown has raised a range of non-financial issues of great importance for our future. Uncerta
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US President George W. Bush met 18 October to discuss the possibility of a global financial summit. The meeting ended with an American offer to host a global summit in December modelled on the 1944 Bretton Woods system that founded the modern economic system.The Bretton Woods framework is one of the more misunde
San Francisco Peaks, visible from many parts of the Southwest’s Four Corners, have been sacred to at least 13 recognized Native American tribes for at least as long as Europeans have been in the country. Northern Arizona University Professor Miguel Vasquez described the argument that only a part of the Peaks are affected by the planned sprayi
On 4 October 2008, in the Porter Ranch section of Los Angeles, Karthik Rajaram, beset by financial troubles, shot his wife, mother-in-law, and three sons before turning the gun on himself. In one of his two suicide notes, Rajaram wrote that he was "broke," having incurred massive financial losses in the economic meltdown. "I understa
Forty years ago, Richard Nixon made a remarkable marketing discovery. By exploiting America's divisions - divisions over Vietnam, divisions over cultural change and, above all, racial divisions - he was able to reinvent the Republican brand. The party of plutocrats was repackaged as the party of the "silent majority," the regular guys - w
Mr. Paulson¹s bailout speech on Monday, October 13 poses some fundamental economic questions: What is the impact on the economy at large of this autumn¹s unprecedented creation and giveaway of financial wealth to the wealthiest layer of the population? How long can the Treasury¹s bailout of Wall Street (but not the rest of the econom
"Admit it, mes amis, the rugged individualism and cutthroat capitalism that made America the land of unlimited opportunity has been shrink-wrapped by half a dozen short sellers in Greenwich, Conn., and FedExed to Washington, D.C., to be spoon-fed back to life by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. We’re now no
The Dow is surging! No, it's plunging! No, it's surging! No, it's ... Never mind. While the manic-depressive stock market is dominating the headlines, the more important story is the grim news coming in about the real economy. It's now clear that rescuing the banks is just the beginning: the non-financial economy is also in desperate need of help.&
The post-modern world, characterized so far by the predominance of a “unipolar” power is increasingly taking on a multi-polar character, primarily due to the rise of China as the “world’s factory” (what USA was with regard to the declining British Empire until the aftermath of the Second World War) and by the expansion
“Officially, the central bank holds $ 8.14 billion (£ 4.65 billion) of foreign currency, but if forward liabilities are included, the real reserves may be only $ 3 billion - enough to buy about 30 days of imports like oil and food,” wrote the Daily Telegraph of London about Pakistan in its issue of 6 October 2008.US observers on P
A few days ago the 2008 Man Booker Prize was announced for the best original full-length novel in English by a Commonwealth or Irish citizen. The winner, beating such seasoned novelists as Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie, was India-born first-time author Aravind Adiga for his novel “The White Tiger;” at 33 he is perhaps the youngest-eve
Over the last year or so, a lot of debate has arisen over the physical strength of al Qaeda. Some experts and government officials believe that the al Qaeda organization is now stronger than at any time since the 9/11 attacks, while others believe the core organization has lost much of its leadership and operational capability over the past seven y
One day after 9/11, US President George W. Bush declared a global “war on terror.” Al Qaeda had first reared its head years before in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 US Embassy attacks in East Africa and the 2000 USS Cole bombing, but it was not until the World Trade Center towers came crashing down that the global interna
German Chancellor Angela Merkel went to St. Petersburg [2 October] for meetings with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. The central question on the table was Germany’s position on NATO expansion, particularly with regard to Ukraine and Georgia. Merkel made it clear at a joint press conference that Germany would oppose NATO membership for both
In a move widely acclaimed in both Washington and Beijing, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, removed the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief, Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, and appointed Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shujaa Pasha as his replacement, on 29 September, along with 13 other appointments. Pasha, as Director-General of Mili
A bit past midnight on a balmy night in late August, Hedayatullah awoke to a deafening blast. He stumbled out of bed and heard angry voices drawing closer. Suddenly, his bedroom doors banged open and dozens of silhouetted figures burst in, some shouting in a strange language. The intruders blindfolded Hedayatullah and, screaming with fury, forced h
What’s clear from the behaviour of European financial markets over the past two weeks is that the dramatic stories of financial meltdown and panic are deliberately being used by certain influential factions in and outside the EU to shape the future face of global banking in the wake of the US sub-prime and Asset-Backed Security (ABS) debacle.
Bush, Bernanke, Paulson and the incoming President would do well to avoid the mistakes of the Hoover-Roosevelt interregnum, a stand-off that made it even more arduous to climb out of the Great Depression once Roosevelt finally took office.The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum
The market is heavily manipulated. The driving force behind the meltdown is speculative trade. The system of “private regulation” serves the interests of the speculators. While most individual investors loose when the market falls, the institutional speculator makes money when there is a financial collapse. In fact, triggering market co
“Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.” – Honorable Lou
[This article was originally written on 18 April 2001. As the subject of abuse is a burning issue world-wide, and is not being redressed adequately, it is being reprinted in the public interest - Editor]VATICAN CITY - The Vatican’s acknowledgment that Catholic priests sexually abused nuns in several countries has spar
A 24-feet-tall Hanuman statue, installed at Sunset Point, Kanyakumari, on 21 September 2008, was surreptitiously removed by the Tamil Nadu administration in the wee hours of 30 September after alleged complaints from local fishermen. The task was directed by Kanyakumari district collector Jyothi Nirmala, who claimed: “the trust which ins
Terrorism poses a great threat to human civilization. The world may have woken up to this grave threat after Nine Eleven, but we in India have been battling this menace for the past few decades. As one who has dealt with this problem in its different dimensions for a long time, I would share my experiences and thinking on the subject.I will first c
A brief progress of the case, the theories of punishment, and clemency: The demand for executing the Supreme Court judgment awarding death sentence to Mohammed Afzal Guru, prime accused in the terrorist attack on Parliament House in 2001, has been a persistent one. It becomes shriller on the anniversary of the at
The periodic provocative remarks of “Maratha champion” Raj Thackeray against North Indian, particularly Bihari and Uttar Pradeshi migrants in Mumbai, have rekindled the so-called “sons of the soil” controversy. Usually, the phrase “sons of the soil” is considered a pejorative term because it implies “s
The US Congress’ passage of a slightly modified form of the Bush Administration’s financial bailout plan on the week of 3 October has opened up the spectre for the first time of a 1931-style domino wave of worldwide bank failures. That process is already underway across the US banking sector with the failure, nationalization or forced l
The decline of the US economic system which began quite a few years ago has accelerated dramatically since the summer of 2007 to reach a seismic climax in September/October of 2008, inevitably affecting all other countries with varying intensity. As a result of the loss of confidence in the international financial and political structures supported
In response to BJP President Rajnath Singh’s idea of an enclave for internally displaced Kashmiri Pandits and nationalization of the Amarnath route - floated during the BJP conclave in Bangalore recently - the PDP chairperson reacted frantically and threatened a mass uprising in the valley. Handing out unbridled, albeit meaningless, threats a
In case you cannot tell, I will be very clear about it all. The same Ideology that brought carnage on Iraq and Palestine is the same ideology that makes you lose your home tomorrow.The Wolfowitz DoctrineBack in 1992 Dick Cheney appointed Paul Wolfowitz (Under-secretary for Defence Policy) and his deputy Lewis Scooter Libby to draft the USA Defense
[American economists are certain the Wall Street bail-out will not help ordinary people. So what made Paulson, Bernanke, Obama, Pelosi, McCain et al push the deal with such determination? What is it that they really want, which the deal will accomplish?]The ongoing collapse of the stock market and the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars m
Sometimes the bulk of population and the size of geography of a state work differently from the policies and manners it follows. India’s large size and economic and military potential has created misgivings in the minds of some of its neighbours from the very beginning. The former President of Sri Lanka, J. Jayewardene, was quite vocal i
Although our Founding Fathers would have comprehended and endorsed Ahmadinejad’s speech to the United Nations, present-day Americans would find it strange should they happen to hear about it. Unlike their forbears, Americans today live a material life, not a spiritual one. Americans are far too likely to dismiss Ahmadinejad’s words abou
Some days ago, most Americans had never heard of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Now, following her Vice Presidential acceptance speech, viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favourably by 58% of American voters according to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey. The self-described ‘hockey mom’s poll ratings, if they ar
As the United States steps up border raids into Pakistan, troops from both countries have commenced a deadly game of brinksmanship. Although aimed at asserting each other's military presence along the Pakistan-Afghan border, the skirmishes risk outright hostilities.US strikes in Pakistan are nothing new. Washington has conducted unilateral missile
The secession of Bolivia’s eastern provinces is part of a US sponsored covert operation, coordinated out of the US State Department, in liaison with US intelligence. The death squads armed with automatic weapons responsible for killing supporters of Evo Morales in El Porvenir are supported covertly by the US. According to one report, &ld
Before the “secularists” stepped in, the incident was correctly reported. On 27 February 2002 morning, the Sabarmati Express coming from Ayodhya reached Godhra, a small town of Gujarat. Just after the train left Godhra Station, it was forcibly stopped and attacked at Signal Falia neighborhood by a Muslim mob. One of the coaches (S-6) wa
In 1932, in the midst of a disastrous economic meltdown, Franklin D. Roosevelt made “the forgotten man” the centerpiece of his presidential election campaign. Far more than we suspect, this year’s election may turn not on a forgotten man, but on a forgotten war in a forgotten country. Even before the present financial meltdow
[Excerpts from the annual Vijayadashami speech of RSS Sarsanghachalak] Economy Today our country is standing at the crossroads unable to decide as to which path it should tread. On one hand there is the hangover of the western developmental path which we had been treading for last 61 years. Today when the West itself is very much concern
India is becoming increasingly unstable and is under attack from various terrorist networks working from inside, with adequate help from outside. While this has become obvious to many, both within India and abroad, the ruling coalition United Progressive Alliance (UPA), led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, took a three-year policy-holiday from dea
Television viewing - particularly in those countries that seek to export their ‘civilisation’ to other lands - is a dispiriting and irritating experience. There is rough tripartite division that can be applied to scheduled programming: it is either governmental propaganda, repeated material or just plain trash.One item of fake indignati
[On 1 October 2008] the Senate passed the $700 billion Wall Street bailout bill by a vote of 74-25. This follows the rejection of the bill by the House on Monday. In an MSNBC poll, 62 percent of Americans oppose the giveaway, but the lobbyists are doing everything possible to assure the rejection is overturned. According to Bob Borosage, co-directo
Pay scales are important to soldiers, and this term includes all personnel of India’s army, navy and air force, but status (izzat) is far more important. The first is important to satisfy the corporeal and temporal needs of the fighting man and his family; the second is what motivates him to fight for his country and if need be, to sacrifice
Nine Muslim organizations held a protest in the capital recently, slamming Congress for victimizing Muslims who they claim are innocent. The protest was evoked by Delhi police investigations into this month’s Delhi bomb blasts.The phenomenon of protesting against security forces and police conducting enquiries in the light of clues obtained t
There has been much moaning, air-sucking, and outrage about the $700 billion that the US government is thinking of throwing away on rich New York bankers who have been ripping us off for the past few years and then letting greed drive their businesses into a variety of ditches. In fact, we dole out similar amounts of money every year in the form of
Archbishop of Bangalore, Rev. Bernard Moras, is “ready to shed blood and give his life for Christ” (Economic Times, 23 September 2008). A similar readiness is also demonstrated by the Indian Mujahidin for the sake of Allah in their widely reported emails to the media at the time of the recent bomb blasts in Ahmedabad and New Delhi.
[A viewpoint favouring US government bailout, written before the bailout was finally managed – Editor]Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo referred to their discipline as “political economy.” Smith’s great work, “The Wealth of Nations,” was written by the man who held the chair in moral philosop
The US House of Representatives has passed a bill (H.R. 7081) that approves the 123 Agreement, but which is contradictory to the assurance given by the Prime Minister to the nation. An identical version is before the US Senate for voting. Even as late as 26 September 2008, the Prime Minster was seeking an agreement that would ‘satisfy India.&
In the supposedly Free World, huge public protests on Wall Street to protest the $700 billion bailout plan to benefit the renegade bankers, financiers and companies who caused the crisis, has not even been mentioned by the mainstream media! This indicates the pathetic state of American media; it is also the True Face of American democracy. A few be
As a student, I was much impressed by the short biographical textbook we had in the tenth grade on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It was so well written that it left an indelible mark on my mind about the courage and honesty of Mahatma Gandhi. Later, I had the opportunity to work with many stalwarts of the Gandhi era. I know Arun Gandhi (his gran
Following the carnage that took place in Godhra on the fateful morning of 27 February 2002, and the subsequent sectarian violence, Chief Minister Narendra Modi set up the Justice Nanavati Commission of inquiry.Set up in March 2002, the Gujarat Government had made a three point reference for inquiry:? The facts, circumstances and course of even
McCain’s past collides with the present Wall Street debacle.Once upon a time, a politician took campaign contributions and favors from a friendly constituent who happened to run a savings and loan association. The contributions were generous: They came to about $200,000 in today’s dollars, and on top of that there were several free vaca