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Hillary Clinton returns on September 15, 2016, to the campaign trail after 3 days of rest to recover from pneumonia. She chose to speak at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, with N. Carolina  now considered a state that is winnable, and with a new focus on young people on campuses where she wants to regain her once large lead in the summer. She said that the break had given her time to reflect on what it is she represents. "The campaign trail doesn't really encourage reflection and its important to sit with your thoughts every now and then. It helped me reconnect with what this campaign is all about." Adding that it was about quality health care, financial security, clean water and other critical needs of people.

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The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was a point at which the country could have made a search for peace iwth the help of foreign powers India, Pakistan, U.S. which supported the mujhadeen and Russia. The missed opportunity under Reagan led to 40 years of uninterrupted war at immense human cost to the people of Afghanistan, and financial and human cost to the U.S. with its involvement in the country's wars. A lecturer at the University of Amsterdam looks at the missed opportunities from the past for a peaceful settlement with the help of foreign powers. This happens as the Taliban meet in Moscow with other parties in the dispute.  A missed perspective relates to the origins of the problem in the India- Pakistan conflict and the history of Afghanistan in the colonial period. Afghanistan was seen as a buffer by Pakistan after the 1971 war with India that created Bangladesh from the former Eastern part of Pakistan. As a result both the Russians and the Americans were embroiled in wars and passions that had little to do with ideologies and  more with feudalism, factions and religious conflicts. Much national treasure in human life and lost opportunities for development at home on the side of foreign powers was the cost of the involvement.      ...

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Even with the growth strategies of the Abe administration in 2014, projections of the IMF show growth rate for Japan are at 1.0% for 2015, compared to 3% for the U.S., 2.5% for UK, and 1.6% for Germany. The Third Arrow in prime minister Abe's Three Arrows program now follows the implementation of the other two Arrows- monetary easing and public works spending. Abe is faced with the task of convincing foreign and domestic investors that he can implement a winning growth strategy for Japan. The plan announced in June 2014 is an effort to overcome barriers to growth with a strategy that will work. The core of the plan is to cut the corporate tax rate from 35.64% to below 30% in the next couple of years. The corporations are expected to do their part to improve corporate governance and return on equity, so that shareholders, domestic and foreign investors, have more incentives to invest in the Japanese stock market. Analysts and economists say this plan has attractive features. It asks Japanese companies to increase ROE and ROI to global levels through a Tokyo Stock Exchange corporate governance code. Companies listed on TSE and not following the code will have to come up with reasons why they are failing to do so. Some analysts say this would increase the value of companies. Companies are more likely to make investments with cash that is not being invested. The plan includes measures for bringing more women into the workforce, which is seen as a serious committment to women. In addition to increasing the number of child care centers, this plan includes tax revisions that benefit women joining the workforce. Increased representation for women at the executive level is also part of this plan. Hiroshige Seko, a top adviser to Abe, says importance was given to execution for results, so that a score of 80 with definite results was preferred to an uncertain attempt to get a 100. To do this some compromises were made. The plan for special economic zones is still in the drafting stage as discussion is just beginning. A shakeup of the Central Union of Agricultural Cooperatives and more flexible medical care will be taken up gradually. The efforts to increase ROI, ROE, and improve corporate governance were initiated from the time of the Koizumi administration, and the latest plan may bring results after over a decade of effort in this direction....

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Russia has 600 billion dollars in reserves and with oil prices above $100, with the Ukraine conflict lifting oil prices for Russian oil exports, there is little that the US and Europe have done to prepare for this situation. The Merkel years were essentially wasted in building a trade based relationship on cheap Russian gas supplies, and the wasted resources under Bush and Obama in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan only distracted the US from the major issues relating to China and Europe that it now faces. 

The need is for a new overall structure to be built- for social structure supporting all aspects of infrastructure, and stronger supply chains with local manufacturing. And international structures that include India and other nations of Asia and Latin America, Africa, that would be a framework for the future- a broader framework for peaceful relations.

 

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The Biden plan for families includes paid maternity leave of 4 weeks. It was shortened from 12 weeks in the original $3.6 trillion Biden Families and Workers Plan. This paid leave also applies to caretakers of ill family members such as elderly parents. The lack of such paid leave for mothers or ill parents care meant the US lacked one of the basic necessities of a decent state. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations paid much attention to how capital, land and labour could be combined to invest in improved quality of life, and how to build a decent society. Smith wrote this book around the time of the Industrial Revolution in England in the late eighteenth century. Capitalism taken outside this context of benefiting society in the country that started the Industrial Revolution, leads to problems that now exist in the US, China and parts of Europe.

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British MP and former minister in the Tory government resigns in a lobbying scandal for violating British parliamentary standards on lobbying. This report in The Guardian says he was found to have lobbied the government on behalf of two companies that were paying him over 100,000 pounds a year. Boris Johnson, Britain's prime minister initially supported Patterson but lacking support in parliament and with a backlash from his party's MP's decided to let parliamentary standards authority decide on Mr. Patterson's future. Lobbying in the US and Britain has resulted in a distortion of the national priorities. This is particularly true of the US where priorities in health care and providing access to reasonably priced pharmaceuticals, climate change shift away from fossil fuels, regulation of the internet companies, worker wages, and other issues critical to building a healthy nation are neglected with lobbying for support of members of Congress. ...

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The US state of Nebraska has 69,000 job openings and only a third of that in persons looking for work. After Nebraska at 1.3%, the unemployment rate is lowest in Utah at 2.2%, and in Idaho, South Dakota, Oklahoma, all with unemployment rates of below 3%. The US unemployment rate is 4.6% in October 2021.

Factors deterring people from looking for work in the US are fear of coronavirus, child care responsibilities especially for mothers, a desire for work-life balance, desire for stable employment with decent incomes, retiring early, and people moving away from restaurant, hotel, travel and entertainment industries that are hard hit during this pandemic. A sign of how this mismatch between demand for workers and the supply is happening is the national "quits rate,"  a measure of workers leaving jobs as a share of total employment, which is at a record rate of 3%. 

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The mysterious activities and losses of a South Korean/Japanese venture capital company Softbank which has been part of the massive misallocation of capital away from infrastructure and health care services during the decades before the pandemic. It has emerged recently as the mystery investor in options on tech shares that led to shares losses of 7 billion pounds for Softbank.

It lost half of its value in an earlier dotcom crash. A few investments in China during the early period of its development based on gut feel of the founder, including Alibaba an e-commerce company based on Amazon's success in the U.S. and other investments in China, is the basis of its business model. This model puts huge amounts of U.S. and foreign capital with estimated pool of capital at $100 billion into ventures that set the wrong priorities for investment- leading to misallocation of capital at this time of the pandemic. 

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An initial deposit to rebuild the broken American water, transportation and other infrastructure, including building broadband, is agreed to by a group of Republican senators with president Biden. Democrats including president Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders see this as part of a bigger effort to rebuild the nation's infrastructure after decades of neglect. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, says three essentials were covered- the cost, the scope and how to pay for it. 

Simultaneously the Senate will move forward with a larger bill. Not in this $1 trillion package are Mr. Biden's original $2.3 billion infrastructure package with hundreds of billions in funding for home care, housing and workforce development, and a separate $1.8 trillion plan for childcare and education. A process called reconciliation will be adopted in the Senate for these broader parts of the Biden plan to be passed.

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US president Biden announces a plan that makes it mandatory for all employers with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be vaccinated. The Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration will issue an emergency temporary standard for implementing the new rule. This will cover 80 million private sector employees. Businesses that fail to meet the standard will face fines of up to $14,000 per violation. Employers must also give workers paid time off to get vaccinated or recover from any side effects.

Federal government workers and contractors also must meet the new requirement or face regular testing. In all 100 million workers or two thirds of American workers will be covered. 

To meet testing needs the Biden administration is procuring $2 billion in rapid point of care and over the counter at home Covid tests, using the Defense Production Act for accelerated production.

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This is the 103rd anniversary of the Battle of Haifa which led to the liberation of Haifa from Ottoman rule. The battle was fought by the British with the help of the Mysore, Hyderabad and Jodhpur Lancers who played a critical role in the battle. Little is known about this role even though it is an important contribution to the India-Israel relationship as it evolved over the last 200 years. The battle to liberate the port city of Haifa was fought during the British efforts to free people under Ottoman rule in 1940-1945.

This is only one aspect of the Indian army's role in two world wars in which it played a significant role stretching from North Africa to Asia. This is also significant as part of India's relationship with the democratic countries of the world and the Indian effort to fight Nazi and Japanese imperialist expansion under American and British leadership.

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See the president respond in this video in the WSJ. He says look what we have done in getting all the legislation passed to rebuild the economy. It took all the wisdom, intelligence and experience to do what no president has been able to accomplish in the decades since the 1960's- to have the courage and wisdom to disengage from wars in remote parts of the world that started from the Reagan-Bush period that were carried on through the Bush-Obama-Trump administrations. And to use the contacts in the Senate developed over decades for bipartisan efforts to rebuild America with trillions of dollars in capital investment, the kind of rebuilding that took place in the Truman-Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in the 1950's and 1960's following the war. After the pandemic similar to after the War in 1945, the whole world needs the leadership of America to set a new path, to faith in a better future.

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French president Macron meets president Putin of Russia for a deescalation of tensions on NATO and Ukraine. Macron for the first time offers an approach that he calls the "Finlandization" of Ukraine. Finland maintained its independence as a neutral country in tensions between US and Russia.  President Biden says the US and Germany are united in their approach, and Nordstream 2 pipeline just completed to supply Germany with Russian gas will be shut down if Russia invades Ukraine. German chancellor Olaf Scholz says little during the crisis and is described as not "audible." Germany has fought two world wars with Russia and seeks a solution that recognizes Russian concerns about NATO yet one that is consistent with the alliance it has with America and concerns of its Polish and Baltic neighbors such as Finland, Sweden, and Lithuania. Meetings are planned for Olaf Scholz of Germany with president Putin of Russia in coming weeks, and with Ukraine in Kiev. ...

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Achievements of Elvira Nabiullina as central bank chief in Russia since 2013 are the reducing of US dollar reserves from 40% to 11%of $600 billion in Russian reserves shifting to hold most of its reserves in euros, gold or renminbi Chinese currency. She also implemented the alternative to SWIFT the global bank messaging system, and changed the payments infrastructure to process credit card transactions in the country so departure of Visa and Mastercard had minimal effect.

In this way this highly respected banker has protected Russia's economy from western sanctions, says NYT. She is trusted by president Putin and was adviser to Putin in 2012, minister of economic development before that when Putin was prime minister. When Russia suffered an economic crisis in 2014 as oil prices fell sharply and Saudis increased oil production, the ruble fell. Nabiullina increased rates to 17%, and the economy shrank till it stabilized with inflation down to 4% by 2017.