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Speaking at the annual meeting of Italy's banking association on July 11, 2012, prime minister Mario Monti calls the struggle he is leading to change the economic performance of Italy, and especially against structural vices in the economy, "a very tough war." He added that the plan to reduce Italy's borrowing rates with the agreement to use the ESM or EFSF, the EU's rescue fund, "must be consolidated both in its substance and the way it is communicated." Bank of Italy governor, Ignazio Visco, said the spread between Italian and German bonds and the borrowing rates approaching 7% for Italy compared to about zero for Germany and France, were "far above what would be justified by the fundamentals of our economy." Deputy finance minister, Vittorio Grilli, is taking over the role of finance minister which Monti had assumed earlier. Monti will lead a new economic and financial policy committee which includes Mr. Grilli and development minister Corrado Passera.

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Van Dam says its not that great being a worker in the U.S. because it is hard for the unemployed resulting from competing with workers in other countries with lower wages, and for those who are unemployed harder because worker collective bargaining is weakened over 3 decades. He cites a 296 page OECD report showing very little government support for unemployed and at risk American workers. It says this has contributed to higher income inequality and larger share of lower income people than almost any other advanced a nation. Only Spain and Greece are shown as having more households earning less than half the median income- showing large numbers of people are poor or close to being poor. In the U.S. an average of 1 in 5 lose their jobs each year, and 23% of workers 15 to 64 are in their job less than a year in 2016. The job churn hurts workers because of firing and layoffs being frequent, more than is healthy for a economy. The U.S. and Mexico are the only two countries not requiring advance notice before firings. And fewer than half of workers find a job within a year in the U.S. Two in three families with a displaced worker fall in poverty for some time. Unemployed workers with typically 26 weeks support get less support than any other country in the study. Only 12% of workers in U.S. are covered by collective bargaining. ...

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Kessler in the WP corrects Obama's claim that he created 800,000 jobs. He says this is clever arithmetic as it takes a low point in Feb. 2010 following the financial crisis. Kessler points out that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. manufacturing jobs were 12.56 million in Jan. 2009 when Obama became president. In Nov. 2016, early estimates show there were 12.26 million manufacturing jobs, a loss of 300,000. This loss does not reflect the problems in the U.S. auto industry and older industries in the midwestern states as a result of trade and globalization that speeded up with the rapid industrialization of China. And led as Greg Ip pointed out in a recent WSJ report to a rapid acceleration of job losses in a decade that did not happen in the same scale during Japan's industrialization and urbanization in the sixties. This aggravated the situation in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, and was met with a feeble response from Democrats. Even a economist like Krugman favoring the Obama administration's efforts came to the conclusion that TPP did not add much to gains from trade as most of the gains had already been realized. More of the gains went to tech and IT in California, at the expense of the auto industry based in the midwest. A report in WP show a president too close to IT in California and failing to grasp the situation in the midwest. Voters punish whoever is in power, regardless of being Conservative or Liberal, in Canada the hollowing out of manufacturing under Harper in Ontario and Quebec led to the win by Trudeau's Liberals.  ...

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Defense Secretary Gates does not see Russia as the threat it was in the Cold War, first because Russia's conventional forces are a "shadow" of what they were during the Cold War, and Russia has adverse demographic trends that will diminish Russia's ability in conventional forces. He sees the Georgian war in the context of Russia's seeking to exorcize, as he puts it, past humiliations. And Gates sees opportunities in the relationship with Russia. Such things as Russia's willingness to work with the US on Afghanistan. Evidence of this is Russia supporting the renwal of the UN resolution on Afghanistan. Another indication is that Russia he says is very worried about the drugs coming out of Afghanistan, and has been supportive to provide alternative routes for Europeans to get equipment and supplies into Afghanistan. These views come across in an interview on December 17, with Charlie Rose, a five time elected Congressman, for the PBS Charlie Rose show. They are also reflected in an article in Foreign Affairs journal's current issue. Gates was a CIA analyst and has some insightful observations. Gates told Charlie Rose that he does not see the Islamic radicals and violent Islamic extremists as a threat in the same way as the threat in the Cold War years. This threat is not as big as the threat to freedom during the Cold War. He says the failure in strategic communications was huge as agencies of the US government engaged in activities in other countries, like the Agency for International Development and the US Information Agency, were neglected starting in the in the 1990's. Communications in other countries of what the US represented and stands for was left to the Pentagon, a role the Pentagon was ill-suited for. He sees the Islamic terrorism as more of an ideological conflict. Speaking at a town hall meeting at the Balad Air Force base in Iraq, in December, Gates pointed to these communications failures as a real challenge for the new administration. But he now sees a huge opportunity in this past failure, and ways of addressing it creatively, in addition to commiting resources and people to this effort. Walter Pincus wrote this article, and its part of the fineprint analysis effort at the Washington Post in which speeches, reports, and other documents are examined by people like Pincus, to catch the really important things, uncovering the fine print that really makes the headlines. Another aspect of this fineprint effort is that there are a huge number of reports, and speeches and documents that had a tone reminiscent of the Cold War during the Georgia war and yet they do not correctly reflect the real situation about Russia, as Gates sees it from his analysis of what is actually happening. Gates has used Foreign Affairs, the Dec 17 Charlie Rose Show on PBS in which he was interviewed, and the speech at the Balad Air Force base in Iraq, to communicate his views and analysis. They are important to underline and emphasize precisely because they show that all that cold war hysteria reporting and speeches may be misleading and lead to improper conclusions and mistakes in policy, wasted effort, wasted resources, and lost lives. And just as the US strategic communications was starved of resources and effort, so also this necessary work to retrieve and give emphasis to the important things is neglected. One additional link to this is the speech, discussion, and QA session in Washington DC at the time of the G20 summit in which President Medvedev and the new administration's elder statesman and diplomat Marilyn Albright, former secretary of state, expressed their hopes and plans for a new era in Russian-American relations. ...

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Michael Getler describes the missed opportunity under President Obama for using one of America's most talented diplomats to engineer a peace agreement between the warring factions in Afghanistan- the U.S., the Pakistan army, the ISI and its support in the army, the Taliban, and the other parties such as the Haqqani faction and the Afghan government of Karzai. Holbrooke had used his experience for another President, with the same force of his larger than life personality, when he helped bring about the Dayton Accords in a similiar area of stubborn ethnic strife. Could Obama have tapped Holbrooke's skills and set aside the distractions of his personality as coming from an American with unique gifts, talent and achievement, is the question Getler asks. And is this a comment on the nature of the Obama Presidency and America's poorly invested hopes.