China woes: Charismatic or not, how long can Xi Jinping keep smiling?

China woes: Charismatic or not, how long can Xi Jinping keep smiling?

Sol W. Sanders   In a troubled world, the obstacles to continued growth and stability in Communist China are staggering compared to the crises of the Euro and Sequestration. Most foreign observers are either willfully blind to the growing evidence or, facing a possible period of worldwide economic decline, they still hope growth in China […]

Barack Obama, Huey Long and the totalitarian temptation

Barack Obama, Huey Long and the totalitarian temptation

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 […]

Report from Europe: For those who can afford to ignore reality, life is good

Report from Europe: For those who can afford to ignore reality, life is good

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 […]

Progress in Mumbai is held up by bureaucrats and ‘Indian Standard Time’

Progress in Mumbai is held up by bureaucrats and ‘Indian Standard Time’

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 […]

After being repeatedly lectured by Netanyahu in Washington, Obama finally visits the Holy Land

After being repeatedly lectured by Netanyahu in Washington, Obama finally visits the Holy Land

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 […]

Hustling, bustling Hong Kong still Asia’s financial leader, but its fortunes again tied to Mainland

Hustling, bustling Hong Kong still Asia’s financial leader, but its fortunes again tied to Mainland

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 […]

As U.S. ‘pivots’ to East Asia, Taiwan is drifting into Beijing’s orbit

As U.S. ‘pivots’ to East Asia, Taiwan is drifting into Beijing’s orbit

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 […]

Can the CCP govern 1.3 billion web-savvy, corruption-hating Chinese?

Can the CCP govern 1.3 billion web-savvy, corruption-hating Chinese?

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 […]

Abe’s post-tsunami comeback strategy for Japan may add nuclear and military muscle

Abe’s post-tsunami comeback strategy for Japan may add nuclear and military muscle

Sol W. Sanders   Tokyo – Japan’s new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is racing against time. His recent landslide victory was a vote against the fumbling incumbent Democratic Party of Japan, which was from its inception a collection of diametrically opposed ideological partners. It scooped up leftwing socialists and disgruntled conservatives who left Abe’s “government” […]

Obama’s security triplets: U.S. soft power may have unintended hard consequences

Obama’s security triplets: U.S. soft power may have unintended hard consequences

Sol W. Sanders   The President’s nominations for his second security cabinet – State, Defense and CIA – mark a break with America’s post-World War II strategies. Now that the first shoe has dropped, his nomination of favorites for the jobs, it remains to be seen what allies in Europe and Asia will make of […]

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