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India and Vietnam are key countries for reinvention of the supply chain to cover home production in the US with supplies from friendly nations. After the G20 meetings in New Delhi president Biden will go to Hanoi, Vietnam. Vietnam also maintains trade relationship with China as it depends on China for its manufacturing exports. China and Vietnam are both socialist nations, yet after a border war in 1979 Vietnam is building a stronger relationship with the US. It also has a trade relationship with Japan and Vietnamese workers help meet worker shortages in Japan.

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The US and Saudi Arabia are working on a partnership in which the Saudi Public Investment Fund will invest $15 billion to secure mining stakes for metals such as cobalt needed in electric car batteries. The US would buy the supplies from the Saudi owned companies. US is a copartner with India on a new economic corridor infrastructure project that will connect India with the European Union and the US through Saudi Arabia. Saudis will invest $20 billion said MBS, Prince Salman of Saudi Arabia, at the meeting of the G20 in New Delhi alongside Modi, Biden, Scholz, Macron and the heads of the EU. This is a major new project for which the seeds are being put in for future generations.

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Autoworkers want a raise of 40% from depressed levels with two tiers one for entry level workers set really low during a crisis when auto companies were near or entering bankruptcy. Automobile companies want to use high profits for EV vehicles.  Autoworkers have worked hard through the pandemic and have suffered low wages for a decade, now face a cost of living crisis- the 40% should be seen in the context of starting a depressed level trying to meet costs of living that have surged in 2021-2022. If both conditions are removed the increase might be a modest closer to 10% over a hypothetical higher wage and lower cost of living.

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The difficulties posed by the absence of Xi Jinping at New Delhi G20 Summit are discussed here in the WSJ. Today September 9 the G20 leaders from 20 nations meet, absent will be Mexico's Obrador, China's Xi, and Russia's Putin. China's premier will attend the meeting. China's Xi met with India's Modi at the BRICS meeting in Johannesburg, last month. China's premier is a close associate of Xi's and his chief of staff for decades, so that any suggestion that Xi is reducing contact with other world leaders in 2023 is incorrect. Xi will meet Biden at the APEC meeting US is hosting San Francisco Nov. 12-18 that will focus on Asia Pacific nations.

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Social and economic changes in American society have come down to an alarming statistic. There are three young women for every two young men in American colleges. At Tulane the freshman class has two thirds women students. At liberal arts colleges the class is usually 60% women. As noted in this report by Susan Dominus in NYT there is a devaluing of college education because men have choices that are higher paying, conservatives have not emphasized college education, and "male drift" is a serious problem leading to male enrolment declining. And once in college men are dropping out at afaster rate. All this adds up to a serious problem in America, one that the Biden administration has to take seriously as it looks at rebuilding not just the economy, but also the education system that supports the US economy in the world.

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This WSJ report looks at the staggering waste that come from expiration dates on food. A 2019 Harvard-Hopkins study shows over 80% of people occasionally throw out food with expired date and close to 40% do so usually. About 54% think it is unsafe if expired. Where do these dates come from? Contrary to first impressions it is not mandated and it does not mean unsafe if expired. It matters because it means waste, and also adds to climate change and disposal. Over 6 billion pounds are wasted each year from expiration and another 6 billion from leaving it out too long out of about 80 billion pounds wasted each year. Keep the refrigerator at 37  degrees and store food in the refrigerator, suggests WSJ.

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Apple gets 19% of its sales in China with a manufacturing base that includes 1 million people employed in one Chinese city. In an effort to promote Make in China China is giving Huawei more room to compete with Apple. Huawei is bringing out a new 5G phone as an alternative and has banned use of Aplle iphones in government agencies. This means about 56 million people will have to turn to locally made products. China presents this move as an effort to protect data and cybersecurity. Yet Apple has a share price increase of 46% this year even in an environment in which US and China are restricting the export of key technologies (by US) or critical materials for electric cars (by China). Apple's responses to this have been slow preferring to keep its supply chain the way it is in a strategy based on the short run, with some minor shift to India and Vietnam.

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WSJ's Solomon and Feng look at Chinese developer Country Garden's $100 billion real estate project Forest City located only a short drive from Singapore in Johore State of Malaysia. It owns 60% and the rest is owned by the Sultan and a government agency. It is now abandoned as a failed project with Country Garden failing to make debt payments. This is the kind of project Malaysia did not need, as it diverts precious capital from industrial projects and infrastructure that improve the lives of the Malaysian people. Malaysian development has stalled with governance issues and misallocation of capital for such projects, and no tangible strategy for development.

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Covid vaccines to target new variants should be available by mid September, says this report in NYT.

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Efforts for community building in Britain and the US that help people interact with other people in everyday settings, countering the trend  towards isolation that have build up in society over the last two decades. The physical infrastructure that does this and how it can be used.

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The ten week trial begins Tuesday in the US government's efforts to rein in Big Tech companies such as Google who have unfairly profited from a monopoly of the internet.

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Thodex cryptoexchange in Turkey lost $2 billion for users who could not withdraw funds. It imploded in 2021. The founder of this cryptoexchange was sentenced for a lengthy period by Turkey's prosecutors. WSJ compares sentences in Turkey to the sentences in the US for fraud and money laundering.

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Mysteriously Catherine Ojha, a European anthropologist, is cited here for what the word Bharat means to Indians. One only looks to the movement for freedom of hundreds of millions in southern Asia under Gandhiji to realize that it was for the freedom of Bharat that they were fighting for against the British Empire not the entity that was British India. It was the people of British India that financed Britain's defense in the Napoleonic Wars around 1800. Juan Mascaro the Cambridge historian who completed the translation of the Penguin Classics Bhagavad Gita had better grasp of India than an obscure except for French and other European language readers such as Ojha. 

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During the debate on the name of the country in the Constituent Assembly in 1948 the wording was to be changed from "India, that is Bharat, is a Union of States" to "Bharat, that is India, is a Union of States." This was suggested by Kamalapathi Tripathi and Kamath. At some point in history the Union can only be "Bharat." Why? Because for the hundreds of millions that Gandhiji led in the Independence Movement it was for the idea of Bharat and freedom that they were fighting for. Freedom could only be defined in the word Bharat. It can be argued that Gandhiji and Sardar Patel, Nehru left it as "India, that is Bharat" so that at some point it would be changed once the country had taken Gandhiji's movement of "We, the People" to the next step lifting up the hundreds of millions of people from poverty and illiteracy, a process that is Gandhi 2.0 happening today.

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The debate in the Constituent Assembly 1948 which let the draft words remain for the name of the country in Article 1 of the Constitution- "India, that is Bharat, shall be a union of states." Members expressed their thoughts on the inappropriateness of "India" and called for it to be clearly stated as Bharat, referring to India as the English name, or foreigner given name for the country. The movement of Gandhi that fought for and secured independence was based in the minds of the hundreds of millions of people as a movement for Bharat. 

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Prime minister Modi of India says India has take a step forward for bringing in the people of the Global South into G20 discussions. India, he says, has set a path for getting development to the last mile, the last person in the public who in previous years was left out. This was done through digital infrastructure for bank accounts for hundreds of millions of people, cooking gas stoves for women in rural areas, housing, tap water for every one of India's households, sanitation including toilets, road infrastructure. Much of this was done at low cost with technologies that can be transferred to  a billion people in Africa and 700 million in other parts of Asia such as the Philippines and Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia. This is the lasting achievement of the G20 first in Jakarta, Indonesia, and now in New Delhi, 24 months of leadership of Modi and Widodo of Indonesia as partners. It is also why Mr. Modi was in Jakarta just one day before the G20 Summit for ASEAN meeting that brings India into close relations with ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations).  ...