LyrArc Article Gist
This article by General James Jones is the second from the highest ranks of the Obama administration, saying the entire Middle East policy of U.S. president Obama was flawed and could lead to dangerous consequences. Gen. Jones, former National Security Advisor to Obama 2009-2010, says the situation today is worse than in 1991 when the U.S. launched Operation Provide Comfort to protect Kurdish refugees in Northern Iraq from Saddam Hussein, with an engagement of about 5 years and 25,000 Allied troops. Jones says the crisis in Iraq and Syria is of an order several times worse than 1991 and at any time since the 2003 invasion, as it involves the setup of a terrorist ISIS state in the heart of the Middle East. What went wrong? Jones says all the warnings from other Middle East nations about Maliki's corrupt policy and sectarianism used to stay in power turned to be true. Even Maliki's own advisors and colleagues say in a separate report by Matt Bradley that Maliki battled not for the Iraqi state but only to preserve his own power. Jones calls the U.S. president's decision not to act in Syria when the "red line" of use of chemical weapons was crossed, the failure to maintain a limited military training presence in Iraq after 2011, and not insisting that Mr. Maliki arm the Kurds, as having gravely aggravated the problem in 2014. Jones calls for arming the Kurds directly with sufficient weaponry for defending their region and providing immediate expanded aid to the Abadi government, appointment of a special envoy to ensure direct and immediate communications with Baghdad and with Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite leaders. He calls also for close air support of Iraqi and Kurdish operations, and an aggressive diplomatic effort to unify the Middle Eastern nations to remove ISIS from the region. Jones says this is the right thing to do in the name of all the Iraqi people yearning for peace, for the U.S. service personnel who made sacrifices in Iraq for 23 years, and for U.S. national security....

LyrArc Article Gist
Researchers David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, and David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Fiscal Studies in Madrid, in independent research, studied the impact of trade on 722 clusters of interrelated counties in the U.S. They focussed on the surge in Chinese imports and found a pattern. Counties with higher exposure to Chinese import growth showed higher unemployment and higher expenditures by the government for unemployment benefits, food stamps and disability benefits. Their calculations show the increased government payments amount to one to two thirds of the gains from trade with China. This does not include the losses suffered by people losing jobs who deplete savings as they look for new jobs. Hanson studied the effects of trade and Chinese imports in the 1990's and found the effects were relatively small. This time the effects are large and show counties that lacked local investments in industrial machinery and technologies in which China was still playing catchup such as Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois, and Boeing in Everett, Washington, were most susceptible to higher jobless rates and in need of government support payments. Autor and Hanson found that from 2000-2007, communities in the 75th percentile- ones with greater exposure to Chinese import growth than 75% of all communities- saw a manufacturing jobless rate of about one-third more than communities in the 25th percentile. The government payments mean higher taxes or larger deficits are needed to support these communities, and long periods of unemployment reduce the incentive to work. Michael Spence, a Nobel prize winning economist from New York University, says the world has never seen such a rapid pace of growth as China experienced between 2000-2011, with rates approaching 12% in some years, making past experience and prevailing theories on trade an insufficient guide to what is happening....

LyrArc Article Gist
This article by Gerald Seib in the WSJ says not enough was done to attract white working class voters- critical for Trump in industrial swing states- at the Democratic National Convention. He says only on the last night of the convention did a factory worker, a home care provider and a laid off restaurant worker, appear on the stage. These are the voters who have drifted away from the Democratic Party. The convention draws ironically on Republican themes, defense foreign policy as in the speeches by Leon Panetta and retired General Allen, and in efforts to portray Hillary as more human with frailties but a 40 year public service record that includes exceptional work for children. Actually the appeal to traditional Democratic white working class voters was there always in the background with most of the speakers, as it colored most speakers comments including Biden and Kane, who have the colloquial language and style to appeal to this group. The appeal to traditionally white working class voters is in the party platform with the $15 minimum wage for service industry workers, and in the promise to provide college free tution for people making less than $125,000. The Democrats simply painted this with a different brush. Contrasting the callous attitude to the poor and struggling of billionaires like Trump with those who have fought for pushing people up the ladder since FDR- with the lapses in recent years from the tech boom which left some workers short now being addressed. This was expressed by Hillary Clinton saying to Bernie Sanders voters- "your cause is our cause." For Democrats it was more effective to tackle the traditionally Democratic working class voters first, before shifting to working class voters who are border line Republican because of social issues or those who are so disaffected so as to be beyond reach. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The WSJ's Alessandra Galloni speaks with Mario Monti, the Italian premier, for in-depth interviews. Here Galloni and Walker provide an account of what happened during and after the June 28, 2012 summit of European leaders. Monti described the comments of ECB president Draghi in early August- about ECB buying of bonds of Italy and Spain being within the mandate of the ECB if monetary transmission channels were not working properly to reduce yields- as a bold effort following the agreement made at the June 28 summit to support Italy and Spain. Monti expressed the idea that Draghi should feel morally and politically justified if and when he makes the bold moves to rescue the euro. The only problem he says is whether one has to wait till the night before the euro is about to disintegrate for this to happen. This is the first time Monti has publicly expressed the possibility of this happening.