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The emergence of the Greens Party in Germany as a party that could govern at the federal level. In Baden-Wurttemburg, a western state with many large companies, the Greens emphasized foresight and pragmatism to win the election. Analysis by ARD broadcster suggests 145,000 voters from CDU migrated to the Greens after corruption scandals led to resignation of CDU members in the Bundestag. One of the problems The Greens face is the relative youth of leaders at the federal level. Robert Habeck is 51 years and Annalena Baerbock is 40 years.  For Angela Merkel who retires in the autumn, and the CDU with its new leader Armin Laschet, the results are a bit of a shock. The CDU gained about 24 to 28% of the vote in 2 state elections. The SPD socialist party was at about 16%. So that the 2 parties that governed Germany since 1950 are combined now at about 40%-42% of the vote.  New coalitions will be formed in the future that include The Greens as a major political party. SDP's Scolz clearly welcomed this idea saying that it is now possible to form a government without the CDU. For Germany the coronavirus years 2020-2021 mark the beginning of a new period that may no longer include the CDU or Merkel in government. Popular fatigue with the Christian Democrats and search for new alternatives for Germany now make a new Greens led coalition a distinct possibility. ...

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Galston says Hillary Clinton is right to say as she did at Roosevelt Island in her opening campaign speech, that "growth and fairness go together, for lasting prosperity, you can't have one without the other." Economic growth was at 4% for 5 of 8 years of the Clinton presidency, but in the 15 years since the economy has managed 3% only twice in the George Bush presidency, and fallen below 2.5% in the last 5 years. The high growth rate following World War II was a result of the increase in the workforce and productivity. The workforce increased by 2% annually between 1950 and 2000. Since then as female participation peaked and the baby boomers reached retirement age the workforce has increased by 0.7%, and is slowing to 0.5% annual growth for the next decade. Growth in productivity of 1.9% between 1991 and 2007, slowed to 0.4% after 2010. Galston tells the next president to go all out to increase the labor force- adopt family friendly policies similiar to Europe so more women can work, get more immigrants into the labor force, more elderly should be encouraged to work given the better health, reduce the college dropout rate to reduce incarceration and bring more young people into the labor force, get more people who qualify for disability but could work part time into the labor force, and emphasize the importance of increasing the labor force participation rate a policy being followed by the Federal Reserve's Janet Yellen....

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Bayer AG CEO Marijn Dekkers talks to the Journal's Geoffrey Rogow about the company's pharmaceuticals business and job retention. Dekkers says profits are reduced by the tight budgets of European governments and the pressure on pricing. He cites the 16% mandatory rebate in Germany on prescriptions. For Bayer diversification through the chemicals business offers a way to handle the ups and downs in the pharmaceuical business with patent expiration. He is not interested in acquisitions because of the high premium involved and the difficulty of recovering this for investors. Bayer like other drug companies has extensive operations in China. Bayer is training salespersons in top and second tier Chinese cities. It has a program to train 10,000 physicians in rural areas of China working with the local government. Dekkers makes an interesting point about jobs and job retention in the U.S. He says a lot of jobs were outsourced in the 1990's and its difficult to bring them back. Germany has done a better job with job retention with "kurzarbeit" and other programs working in partnership with industry. In his view this could have been managed better in the U.S. with active programs such as this in the last two decades....

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The cultural identity of the Nation that has existed since the founders Washington and Jefferson, and since it's second beginning Lincoln and then TR and FDR,  was seen to be at risk in 2024, yet no party has put forward the need for Cultural Literacy as a Nation as part of national classroom education, a plea by E.D.Hirsch Jr. of University of Virginia, and others, from the 1980's onwards. Kash Patel is a public defender from New York, who worked in the NSC staff in the first Trump term. He is of Gujarati East Africa origin who studied at University of Richmond for history and Pace University for his JD. He actively defended DJT in what is known as the Nunes memo for the Mueller investigation into links with Russia. He also faced opposition after Defense Secretary Esper was replaced and he served as assistant to the new Defense Secretary, in appointment to the FBI, by then Attorney General William Barr. Kash Patel actively campaigned for DJT during the 2024 campaign. In addition to cost of living crisis for middle and working class families, unease about migration and the lack of Democrats sensitivity and urgency to serious issues raised by fentanyl flows and migrants crossing the border, the pressure on Border Patrol, were major issues in western, southern and midwestern states, leading to a Republicans gaining the White House, the Senate and the House in 2024.  The cultural identity of the Nation that has existed since the founders Washington and Jefferson, and since it's second beginning Lincoln and then TR and FDR,  was seen to be at risk, yet no party has put forward the need for Cultural Literacy as a Nation as part of national classroom education, a plea by E. D. Hirsch Jr. of University of Virginia, and others, from the 1980's onwards. Other issues were transgender and the dilution of morals and religion in the national life since the European settlement of the continent, the sense of losing identity as a Nation.  ...

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This editorial page opinion in The Economist says the increasing concentration in business is a real problem today. It says tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon are entrenching through acquisitions of smaller companies and startups leading to an unhealthy level of concentration, and control of entire markets. More competition is needed so that startups and smaller companies can grow, and new ideas or ways of doing things get a chance. A big problem is tax avoidance with individuals paying taxes like everybody else, and large tech companies like Google and Apple having the option to not have to pay just like everybody else. It calls for a "tough-but-considered" approach to tax avoidance. Its not that the money saved in taxes goes back to support millions of people hired by the industry through workers wages and future investment that builds a future for workers and the company. It cites figures showing 1.2 million employed in the top 3 carmakers in the U.S. auto industry in 1990, and only 137,000 employed by the top 3 companies in Silicon Valley including Apple and Google with capitalization of about $1 trillion.This contributes to a sense of unfairness that is being expressed in voter sentiment in the 2016 elections, especially with the wide divergence in the way that the top 45 percent has done in net worth of over $400,000 in 2013, after the 5% which is in the millions, and the bottom 50 percent at average overall net worth of $25,000 in 2013. A huge disparity that  U.S. Federal Reserve chairwoman Yellen, who cited these figures at a Boston Fed conference in Oct. 2014, says is "near their highest levels in the last one hundred years and probably much higher than for much of American history before then."  ...

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Douglas Wilson was born in Annapolis, Maryland, before his father, a Baptist pastor, moved the family to Idaho in the American West.  Wilson started a Christian revival movement from Christ Church, Idaho, which is based on his views of Calvinism and the original teachings of Christianity dating back to the Mayflower Compact of 1602 set in Geneva, which outlined the vision of the early colonists to America of the relations between the church and the government, setting forth their vision. This is America going back to the earliest days in 1600, of Britain and Northern Europe, and the settlement of a vast continent 185 years before the drafting at a convention for the new Republic, of the United States of America the 13 original colonies in 1787. The original roots of the Nation in the Geneva Compact of 1602 can still be seen in Geneva, Switzerland, near the Calvinist cathedral in the center of the French Swiss town of Geneva, that acted as a crossroads for the prominent ideas on Christian thought at the time. From it's earliest days for the colonists since 1602, the Tynsdale Bible of the 16th century that brought it into the English language from Latin and Greek, and its offshoot the Authorized King James Version of the Bible of 1611 formed the basis of civilized life in the American colonies, and helped the colonists seek a new world in the wilderness that was the North American continent in the years 1600 to 1780. In the early years of the 13 colonies on the Atlantic seaboard, and further west into Ohio and Michigan- vast untamed forests, mountains, lakes and rivers. From 1780 to the 1880 this wilderness extended into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming upto the Pacific. Ideas of Common Prayer in schools and in everyday life informed the society of the time and was integrated in all parts of life. Only after 1780 were the ideas of separation of church and state developed by Madison and Jefferson for the constitutional framework of orderly government and respect for rights of citizens to practice their faith. At no point was it intended to take the Common Prayer out of schools, which is essentially a new idea from the 19th century. There is mention of Asian religions Buddhism and the religion of the Upanishads in India in the argument against prayer in schools,  yet it is a fact that this is only a theory as immigration from China, Japan, and India was actively discouraged, and also banned in many ways, till the Irish Kennedy administration in 1960. And it is also a fact that Mohandas Gandhi the leader of India drew great inspiration from the King James 1611 version of the Bible, and it helped him deepen his religious beliefs in the Upanishads to create the modern Indian state for 1.4 billion people in Asia. Most of the hymns of the Christian faith were known to Gandhi and formed part of his beliefs, when the Common Prayer itself started disappearing from American schools in a post war reaction to colonialism, imperialism and racial discrimination, such that it depleted the very reserves of civilization, of wisdom and thought, of science and technology, that helped create America out of the wilderness. ...

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Living with Uncertainty and knowing one will not know what lies ahead, one will be ignorant much of the time, acceptance of death as inevitable, is part of living. 

Physicist Feynmann says-

“I’m smart enough to know I’m dumb”, Feynmann, saying: “I can live with doubt, uncertainty and not knowing.” He accepted a lack of understanding a certain level of ignorance about what the future will bring. In 1910 no one thought there would be a world war and pandemic in 2 years, we did not know that the pandemic was a year away in 2018.

The Bible and Bhagavad Gita have admonitions about this. Wisdom is knowing that we lack the understanding and knowledge of the universe, that there is something else we call Spirit that guides the world and what is called the Imperishable Brahman that is within us and pervades all.

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Already Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan are negotiating. India will join South Korea. Britain will follow. Only Canada and China are holding back because of the imbalance in trade heavily in their favor and a failure to see that it is about fairness. In the EU only Germany has a surplus many nations have a deficit, it seeks to start negotiating at the first opportunity. Contrary to what most of the American and British media says Lighhizer and Jamieson have thought this thing through for many years before arriving at the Tariffs advice they gave the US president as his 2 USTR. It is these two not the president acting on his own whim as the media like to show. And Lighthizer has done this before- as Deputy USTR in the 1980 with Japan on the opposite side and come out of it with winning solutions for the US and for the world.

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Negotiations between European leaders, especially Germany's Merkel and the Obama administration on climate change at G8 meeting. The U.S. and Europe try to work out differences. The U.S. is vague about some language such as the starting year against which emissions reductions will be measured, and has resisted the European pressure to set strong goals over the next 10 years. Europe wants 1990, while the USA, Australia and Japan prefer 2005. Europe wants to see language in aformal document that is being developed for the G-8 meeting, which also includes developing countries, for limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels.

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U.S. President Richard Nixon adopted Keynesian policies to boost the economy after tightening monetary policy failed in 1970. In 1971 Nixon turned to higher fiscal spending to get the economy closer to full employment. He also adopted wage and price controls. By 1972 the economy had recovered, inflation was at 5.7% and unemployment at 4.9%, and Nixon won re-election. This was the only recovery in an election year since World War II. In international affairs Nixon's policy was to leave the Bretton Woods system and floating the dollar. With a new administration in 1974 inflation surged to 11% and unemployment to 5.6%, because wage and price controls worked only for a short period.

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Romney picks seven term Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate for the 2012 U.S. presidential election. It is a daring pick because Ryan has clear ideas about reducing the U.S. deficit which are in sharp contrast to the approach taken by Obama and Biden, offering American voters a clear choice. This is similiar to the contrasting choices between Reagan-Bush and Carter-Mondale during a period of high unemployment and inflation in the 1980 presidential election. The contrast was also made clear by the release of the Shultz memo to President Reagan and the comparisons with the Reagan election by Romney economic advisor Glenn Hubbard, both recently published in WSJ.

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A former Wall Street trader says banning bonuses for investment bankers would take out much of the risk in the financial system. The current system is different from the one he joined as an intern in the 1980's, he says. At that time banking was a bland business, where the head of a financial firm made about the same as a junior trader makes nowadays. Large bonuses of today were rare at the time. What large incentives to take risk in the form of bonuses do is to encourage extreme risk taking, especially when the downside or pain as a consequence of these decisions is passed on to other individuals or institutions, or the government.

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Angie's List provides information on home improvement contractors and on health care companies. It was started by Angie Hicks after she graduated from Depauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. It has 400 employees and is based in Indianapolis. Sales reached $60 million in 2010, with revenues from membership fees and select advertising by highly rated service providers. It started with Mr Oesterle, a former boss of Angie's in a college internship, and his moving to Columbus, Ohio. Oestlerle had difficulty finding good contractors to renovate a 1920's home, and suggested they work together on this idea of a list of reliable contractors based on personal interviews. The company still relies only on personally obtained information.

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It may come as a bit of a shock to learn, that the entire country of Nigeria produces about as much electricity at electricity generating facilities, as the electricity used around Japan's Narita airport. Most people in this country of 150 million people, get electricity only for a few hours a day. As a result two thirds of all electricity consumed in Nigeria is produced using small scale generators. President Jonathan's plan to raise $3.5 billion to increase electricity supply 13 fold. Since the 1990's the capacity increased by half, but distribution is extremely poor, so that the actual supply has remained flat. One result is a very small manufacturing sector, of about 4% of GDP.

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Wages in emerging markets such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia are rising following an increase in wages in China. Malaysia's government announced a minimum wage for the first time. China increased its minimum wage by 8.6% to 1260 yuan ($199) in January 2012. Shenzen region minimum wage was raised 14% to 1500 yuan, and Tianjin region's by 13% to 1310 yuan, according to Xinhua news agency. Rise in minimum wage has ranged from 40% in Thailand to 20% in Indonesia. The new minimum wage proposed by Malaysia's government is about 900 ringgit ($264-$297). In Thailand the new minimum wage is set at 300 baht ($9.78) a day, an increase of about 40%.

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G.E. reported profits of $5.1 billion from operations in the U.S. in 2010. Its American tax bill? G.E. paid no taxes, claiming a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. G.E. does this by lobbying for tax breaks, aggressive strategies for reducing taxes including concentrating its profits offshore, and innovative accounting. G.E. has a large tax department, which some call the nation's largest tax law firm. Other firms are following the same practices The corporate share of the U.S. tax receipts has fallen steeply over the years- down to 6.6% in 2009 from 30% in the 1950's. This raises all sorts of questions in the current budget deficit situation facing federal and local governments.

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Jessica Todd, a USDA economist, says in a report that about 20% of the improvement in the diets of people surveyed comes from Americans eating out less at fast food places or restaurants. And this particular improvement she says is from an increased awareness on nutrition in picking out food, more choices available, and more nutritional information available to buyers. About one third of U.S. adults or 36% were obese in 2009-2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is a large increase from 15% in 1980. Studies show this is now declining gradually with increased public awareness of the risks of poor eating habits, including risks of diabetes.

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Similiarities with Japan are in the exploding monetary base growth by the Fed, just as bank lending is dropping. And as in post bubble Japan of the 1990's, all of the behaviour says Wood invites legitimate comparisons with Japan. The government has lent, spent or guaranteed about $11 trillion to the financial sector broadly defined, because of letting financial institutions remain "too big to fail," whether Fannie Mae, AIG or Citigroup. None of them have been broken up. And this is similiar to the lack of bank cleanup in Japan with regulatory forbearance for years after the bubble. He thinks there is evidence that America is already in a Japanese style "liquidity trap."

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Gisele Freund's photographic account of how a world changes, the world of her childhood at the turn of the century Berlin (she was born in 1908) and then after her return to Berlin in 1957 before the wall went up. This was an unfamiliar world to her. Her pictures are at the Willy Brandt Haus exhibition in Berlin, and at the Ephraim Palais for the pictures from 1957 and 1962. In the subsequent 50 years the Berlin Wall was to go up and come down, bringing more change and a new Berlin different from that in the late fifties, and a even more different Germany. A story of change told in photographs of Berlin.

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Interesting insight on the election of December 2007, why it was held, and the differences between warring factions from the FSB, the military and other parts of the government and business leading to conflicts just before the elections. The election and the vote for putin was Putins way of reasserting his authority in Russia even as he nears th expiry of his term and names a successor. It shows how fragile the situation politically is in Russia even as the country has made economic proress from the Yeltsin years and a succession is not to be taken lightly to continue the work of economic progress and further development of democratic processes without the chaos of the 1990's.

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How Iceland got into the dire mess that is in from a fisheries nation of 400,000 to an international banking centre with its banks assets ballooning to 100 billion euros. This after a ten year boom since 1990 when growth of 2.2 % ayear depending on fisheries shifted to 7-9% growth annually in the shift to international banking in a world of easy credit. Just think of this tiny Iceland with 2 billlion euros in foreign exchange reserves trying to deal with a banking system with 100 billion euros in assets, Iceland is way over its head. Banking is finished in Iceland and the country's people are back to fisheries like their fathers before them.

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Peter Coy, Economics editor of Business Week, agrees with Paul Krugman's point made in a recent NYT op-ed column favoring staying on the course the Bernanke Fed has set, which is to continue its policy of monetary expansion as long as credit is tight and the economy is weak. The Fed has expanded monetary reserves Coy says by 114% over this year through May. The biggest increase since 1960 has been 16%. Coy says there is good reason for this. As other experts have pointed out, see links, most of the extra money the Fed has introduced into the economy has piled up in the reserves of banks. Consumers who who have debt at about 100% of USA GDP are not borrowing, businesses are not borrowing to invest, banks are not lending as before, and consumers are in a long period of debt reduction that will take years. This is why it is not inflationary. Consumer frugality, see links, is another factor that makes this situation a long term change in consumer behaviour, and a force for deflation. All this is happening in the background of a huge slack in the system as manufacturing capacity utilization is low at 68% and unemployment is increasing. Which is why informed experts looking at the situation on the ground see staying the course as the right action plan....

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Ruth Igielnik of the NYT says judicial elections in Wisconsin have always been non partisan. The politicization is recent since 2011. In 1990 there was little correlation between court picks and partisan races, today the correlation is almost exactly, as she shows on a graph. State Supreme Court election results in Wisconsin and US presidential election results have become increasingly correlated from 0.3 in 1990 to 0.95 in 2023.

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Jaishankar was asked at the 2021 GLOBSEC conference in Bratislava in 2021 why he thinks anyone will help India in case of a problem with China after it did not help others for Ukraine. Chancellor Scholz of Germany cites Indian Foreign Minister Jasihankar's remarks in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2021. Jaishankar said- "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems. That is if it is you it's yours, if it is me it is ours. I see reflections of that. There is a linkage today which is being made. A linkage betwen China and India and what's happening in Ukraine. Chia and India happened way before anything happened in Ukraine. The Chinese do not need a precedent somewhere else on how to engage us or not to engage us or be difficult with us or not to be difficult with us." These are Scholz's remarks at the Munich Security Conference. Scholz says Jaishankar has "a point."  "This quote from the Indian Foreign Minister is included in this year's Munich Security Report and he has a point it would't be Europe's problem alone if the law of the strong were to assert itself in international relations." To be credible European or North American in New Delhi or Jakarta, it is not enough to emphasize shared values. "We generally have to address the interests and concerns of these countries as a basic prerequisite for joint action. And that's why it was so important to me to not merely have representatives of Asia, Africa and Latin America at the negotiating table during the G-7 Summit last June. I really wanted to work with these regions to find solutions to the main challenges they face growing poverty and hunger, partly as a consequence of Rusia's war, as well as the impact of climate change or COVID-19. There is another side to this -Scholz and Germany's president Frank Walter-Steinmeier are from the social Democrats party which has sought closer cooperation with Russia, and also carry a great deal of ambivalence for the war. America is not fighting this indirect war in its neighborhood, Germany is. And some of the roots of this conflict go back to the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in the 1800's period and the German invasion in the 1940's. Macron is even more ambivalent in his position and he has remained this way from the beginning- not committed to humiliating Russia. In a way it is the position of the Social Democrats from the historical context of Germany's invasion of Russia, and Christian Democrats eagerness to create a German recovery with low cost Russian energy that created the dependence that Russia sought to use. In what it sees as the unfairness of NATO being allowed to expand right next to its borders. Because of a sense of righteousness on both sides- Russia of the Soviet period failing to see the feelings of a Budapest in 1956, East Berlin in 1953, and Prague in 1968, sees little wrong in an invasion of Kviv. And with it all the biography of Brezhnev the last leader of the Soviet Union, describes that very struggle in the Great Patriotic War the soviets fought against Nazi Germany which was fought by Ukrainians including Leonid Brezhnev with great will and purpose against all odds.  Cambridge historian has written the history of Europe that Scholz is cited to be reading in 2021- Europe The Struggle for Supremacy 1453 to the Present.  It shows Europe since 1453 engaging in balance of power of European powers, Sweden Denmark, Russia, Austria, Germany, France, Britain, Turkey, continually for 500 years. Europe simply forgot its own history. Asia including Japan, China, Indonesia and India, simply emerging from the situation of falling behind in science, technology, and the industrial revolution and building their economies with the help of the US since the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868. The Balance of Power Simms says was maintained for 500 years is simply based on no country allowed to act with impunity, no country allowed to do whatever it wanted because of its position of strength at that moment or period of time. In that situation all other powers regrouped to keep the balance from being upset. The war in Ukraine is also likely to end in a way that is consistent with that which Brendan Simms writes about because this has not changed now for over 500 years. Biden knows this and it has fallen on America to shoulder the burden for this in the last 150 years, Scholz is aware of this, Modi in India sees this, and Jinping in China realizes this even with its concerns about Taiwan.   ...

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Putin was born in St Petersburg, then called Leningrad, where his father worked in a factory making railway cars. He studied law at Leningrad State University, graduated in 1975 and went through KGB training before going to Dresden in 1985, where he remained with the KGB till 1990 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. By 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed and from 1990 to 1996, Putin worked in St. Petersburg first as assistant and then as Deputy Mayor with Anatoly Sobchak, a law professor at Leningrad State University, and Mayor of St. Petersburg. After Sobchak narrowly lost the election, Putin left for a position in the property department in the Kremlin, joining other Sobchak associates who worked in the Kremlin. From 1996 to 1999, Putin moved up quickly in the chaotic Yeltsin years. In 1998 he was promoted to head the FSB, the successor to the KGB. And in August 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin Prime Minister. In December 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin acting president. Putin named Medvedev, deputy chief of staff in 2000. The five years in the St. Petersburg city administration and the years in Moscow in the Kremlin under Yeltsin were chaotic years for Russia and for Putin, as he observed first hand the lawlessness and general breakdown in Russia. This may have influenced the early Yeltsin years enthusiasm for democracy, to an appreciation of the problems for democracy in the actual environment that he was facing in Russia. He developed a distrust of the innocent enthusiasm of Americans for a wholesale transfer of American and British political institutions to the Russian environment. This was a period of great shock in Russia, as even the lifespan of Russians was declining rapidly in this period, and there was a lot of poverty. The struggles between the Mayor and the city council in St Petersburg, even as the city was facing food shortages and economic collapse, and the latter Yeltsin years may have convinced Putin of the need to combine democratic society and elections with a strong central administration, with authority concentrated in a Presidential system and not a parliamentary democracy. In bringing central direction he brought in his KGB connections, but in choosing his successor he turned to a law student at Leningrad State University of Sobchak's, who is quite different from Putin's KGB associates. Medvedev is a softspoken thoughtful administrator and intellectual compared to Putin, and his experience covers the 10 years both Putin and Medvedev spent together both in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 1990-2000, and the period from 2000 to the present day- when Medvedev served both as Putin's head of staff and as head of Gazprom. See the link to the St Petersburg Times, November 6, 2007 on Medvedev. From his St. Petersburg days Putin clearly understood the need for foreign investment and the need to create a climate for attracting foreign investment. This seems to be happening as Russia draws more foreign investment for industry and infrastructure. His background with the KGB shows up in the centralization of authority in the light of the chaotic years and economic collapse preceding it. And his days as part of Sobchak's efforts to bring democracy to St Petersburg shows up in his continuing respect for democratic elections and the Russian constitution. One compromise was made in the process- a consolidation of the media so that opposition's access to the media may not be what it could be, and at the same time it does reflect the tide of popular opinion in Russia that credits the economic recovery and progress and optimism for the future to the Putin administration. ...