Why is Obama silent when disaster returns? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — From 2003 to 2008 – the years when the uncontrolled greed of a handful of speculators was sending the price of commodities to intolerable levels – this columnist was among the few who pointed to such market manipulation as the cause of price fever, rather than "market conditions."

Today it is clear that it was the greed of a few financial institutions and their managers that caused the rise in food prices that killed hundreds of thousands in Asia and Africa from starvation. Super-high food prices sucked the purchasing power out of middle- and low-income consumers by raising the prices of oil and other commodities to levels where continued economic health was unsustainable.

The 2008 market crash caused not a ripple in the consciences of this handful, who continued to award themselves generous bonuses after creating economic disaster. Speculation – forward trading where the speculator need not take delivery of the commodity – caused death and hardship across the world, and it was expected, not least perhaps by U.S. voters, that President Barack Obama would make good on his promise to deal harshly with such economic depredators.

Instead, he handed over the reins of the U.S. Treasury Department to Timothy Geithner, himself a creature of the very system that is causing a second tsunami of high prices and a collapse of consumer demand. Under Geithner, the U.S. taxpayer has underwritten nearly US$2 trillion in write-offs and advances to the very agencies that caused the speculative fever which began in 2003, after the defeat of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The China Factor in India's Nuclear Debate (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — On July 22, should India's ruling alliance win its trust vote in Parliament, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will go ahead and work out an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group. His partners for the past 51 months, the two communist parties, will use their 61 members of Parliament to oppose him – despite Singh having kowtowed continuously to them on economic policy, at the cost of economic reform.

Today, the Indian economy is in far worse shape than it was when he took office in 2004, with government spending out of control, a doubling of the tax burden and a raft of restrictions on private initiative and enterprise.

Why, despite Singh having implemented a "communist lite" program as prime minister, are the two communist parties so anxious to defeat his government and thereby block further progress on the nuclear negotiations begun with the George W. Bush- Manmohan Singh statement on U.S.-India nuclear cooperation on July 18, 2005? After all, the two parties are openly pacifist, having opposed the country's nuclear weapons program since its inception in 1985, and the agreements now being discussed would significantly limit India's freedom of action to build an arsenal capable of responding against a nuclear attack.

Contrary to the reports and commentaries now appearing in the Indian media, the change in stand of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India has little to do with nuclear weapons or energy. It is based on what is perceived – despite ritual denials by the United States and India – to be the principal reason behind the July 18, 2005 accord: the integration of India into the defense architecture of the United States, in the manner of Japan.

Killing Economic Reform in India (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Manmohan Singh, India's present prime minister, was brought back from Geneva to India as economic advisor to the government in 1990 by the commerce minister at the time, Subramanian Swamy. The long-time bureaucrat had been particular that a protege, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, be made the commerce secretary, a condition that was accepted by the minister.

A year later, Singh became finance minister in the first regular Congress government to be headed by an individual not from the Nehru family. P.V. Narasimha Rao was determined to accelerate the pace of economic reform, aware that the statist policies of the past had led India to bankruptcy, and in Manmohan Singh, found a willing instrument in the process.

Sadly for the country, by 1995, Rajiv Gandhi's widow Sonia began a political destabilization of Rao, afraid that his continuance would permanently block the Nehrus from reclaiming the Congress Party. From the beginning of that year till Rao's election defeat nearly two years later, the cautious finance minister obeyed the new signals and slowed down the reform process to a crawl.

Fortunately for Manmohan Singh, his numerous contacts in the Delhi media ensured that this phase was ignored, and that he -- rather than Rao -- got the credit for the 1992-96 reform package. It was therefore with substantial expectations that the 280-million strong Indian middle classes welcomed the takeover of formal power by Singh eight years after the 1996 election defeat of the Congress Party.

Nearly four years on, these hopes have died, together with the reforms.