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Misgivings among Egyptians not connected with the Muslim Brotherhood about the coup in Egypt. Tamer El-Ghobashy covers this part of Egyptian opinion which sees the best approach to poor performance by Morsi would be to vote him out of office or hold a referendum.

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Mark Landler's interview with Hussain Haqqani in Oct. 2013 provides insights into the misperceptions on both sides of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship since 1947. Particularly the way Pakistan cannot shake free from seeing everything through the prism of India. He points out that Ambassador Holbrooke had a forward looking approach to the South Asian region, but failed to get the support of president Obama and the weak leadership of president Zardari, resulting in a squandered opportunity for the region to look beyond the twentieth century's conflicts towards a brighter future.

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Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama both excelled at Harvard Law School, one as managing editor of the Law Review and the other as President of the Law Review. One raised in suburban Indiana, and going to small Catholic boarding school started 5 years earlier by Chicago and Indiana businessmen like his father, a steel company executive. The other fatherless trying to construct his own identity at a school in Hawaii founded in 1841 to educate the children of white missionaries. Roberts adminstered the oath of office to Obama in January 2009.

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The House bill on health care cleared the House Committee on Energy and Commerce with a vote of 31 to 28. Five Democrats joined all 23 Republicans. Compromises were reached with Blue Dog Democrats, centrist Democrats who had concerns about the cost of the health care overhaul. The bill will be taken up again in September after the August recess, when Congress will be faced with the task of recociling the House and Senate versions and reaching common ground on a number of proposals. Some common ground has already been achieved between centris and Blue Dog Democrats and Democratic members who support Obama's proposals. Among the changes on which consensus was reached in the House version: 1. Access Insurers will have to accept all applicants and will not be able to charge higher premiums because of medical history or current illness. All insurers will have to offer a minimum package of benefits, to be defined by the federal government, and nearly all Americans will be required to have insurance. Insurers will have to get prior approval from the government before increasing premiums over a certain amount. About 95% of Americans will be covered this time. The cost will still be approaching $ 1trillion over 10 years. Federal subsidies will be given to those who cannot afford health insurance and Medicaid coverage will be expanded. And the insurance will be made more affordable for the uninsured. Democrats also reached a consensus on creating some sort of government insurance plan or nonprofit cooperative to compete with private insurers. 2. Mobility And under this new plan it will be easier to change jobs as one would retains one's health insurance. This should actually help the job market, and help promote the mobility that is needed, now that jobs are shifting out of sectors like autos to sectors like energy. 3. Cost The Energy and Commerce Committee voted 47 to 11 to set aprocedure for the government to give federal approval of generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs. By one estimate this saves $9 billion over 10 years. The Democratic proposals from the Energy and Commerce Committee would authorize the Health and Human Services Secretary to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare benificiaries. The agreement and consensus among the conservative, liberal and centrist Democrats, and Democrats with ties and connections to the health care industry was reached after intensive negotiations, and adoption of a package of amendments that helped bridge the differences they had. ...

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David Brooks says one of the good things about the ugly election campaign of 2016 and its depletion of moral capital, is the way people are responding to it by finding their voice for something better and uplifting. He cites Michelle Obama as one example of someone who acts not as a politician but as a mother in her behaviour and talk. He praises Hillary Clinton for adopting this Michelle tone and giving 3 answers he calls great in the final debate with Trump. The answers came on the questions about Trump and denigration of women,  on the contrast between the experience gained on a television show "Apprentice," and the experience of Clinton as senator and secretary of state. Brooks says they were given in a gradual understated manner, showing moral sentiment and a quiet contempt, similar to how a mother or parent would respond and not a politician. Another way to look at it is that the contrast was so great between her and her opponent's experience and respect for parenthood, and the campaign so long with so many people who had shown indifference when they should have known and done better, that Hillary Clinton simply stood her own ground based on her own Protestant Methodist faith and conviction.  ...

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John Lewis, is the last surviving speaker of the March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King gave his historic speech. Here he describes how Martin Luther King would see today's America. Foremost he points out is that MLK would want to see justice not just as racial justice, but justice in a broader sense that says something about the dignity and value of human beings. And this means, says Lewis, the president getting away from advisers and polls, and talking to ordinary people. It means focussing on jobs, the unemployed and people facing foreclosure, and seniors struggling on limited incomes. He calls for a "freedom budget" that would pool resources for infrastructure and investments that would create a better environment for people to live in.

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David Leonhardt on the policy errors of the Obama administration in managing the economy. Why he asks did the Obama administration not take the risks it took for "undeserving" recipients in the auto industry to provide significant help to GM and Chrysler and at the same not provide large scale and situation changing help to millions of mortgage holders who were under water? The housing crisis with millons of foreclosures depressing home prices has played a significant part in the lagging economic recovery. He points out that Obama economic advisors had read Rogoff and Reinhart's book "This Time Its Different," about the longer times it takes for a economic recovery after a housing bubble, and still made the mistake of believing economists who suggested that the stimulus by itself would be sufficient and that recovery was underway in 2010. Others in the Democratic party had pointed to the lack of focus on unemployment by the Obama administration. Why were such voices not heard?

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Samuelson points out that the golden age of bipartisan harmony never existed. Yet it is true to say that with the constant chatter on cable television and stridently expressed views, the activism of the more extreme wings of both American parties, and the role of money in politics, the partisan nature of politics in America has increased. And this is happening even when the Gallup polls from 1992 and 2010 show similiar numbers for the people who describe themselves as Conservative, Liberal or Moderate, showing that the people themselves haven't changed (42-43% Conservative, 35-36% Moderate, 17-20% Liberal), but activism at the edges of both parties has. In this condition, only 7% of americans have a "very positive view" of the Republican party, only 11% of Americans have a "very positive view" of the Democratic party and only 12% of Americans have a "very positive view" of the Tea party (even though the Tea party is at the height of its mometum). The net impact says Samuelson is that the nation's important problems get neglected. There is little discussion about the expenditure of blood and treasure in Afghanistan, says Tom Brokaw, see his article. There is little discussion of the need to rebuild America's deteriorating infrastructure. Or a serious discussion on deficits or energy. All this is lost in the dysfunctional politics of the moment. This is a significant observation....

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Roben Farzad of Bloomberg BW meets with Goldman Sach's Harvey M. Schwartz, co-head of the global securities division, to get Goldman's account of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, the AIG rescue, and John Paulson.

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The business model where hedge funds take in short term money from investors for a 2% fee and a fifth of profits, and invest it in longer term bets and sometimes illiquid situations, is breaking down. This happened to the investment banks and ended with the collapse of Lehman and Bear Stearns. With losses approaching 20%, many illiquid investments, and investors asking for their money, this model may lead to a rapid shrinking of the hedge fund industry, which now has about $2 trillion of investor money.

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The Financial Times interview with the PM of India as posted on the PM's site. It makes no mention of the efforts for Clean India Swacch Bharat, cooking gas for tens of millions of women, tap water for every household in India, access to the internet and 4G and transition to 5G at data rates that bring access to all, and the modernization of Indian Rail with new technology making transport fast and with comfort. It shows gaps in understanding that are mind boggling. The PM talks in language that the financial community understands- startups, economic achievements, and leaves out the material above that he talks to in every speech in parliament about the transformative effects in the life of India's 1.4 billion people that the financial community does not see as its first concern.  The financial community today is shortsighted and lacks a sense of history and transformations that have already happened. Japan's from the Meiji period and its phases of modernization by 1900, 1900 to 1930's, and 1950 to 1960's. China's after 1990 and between 2000-2019. And India's now underway with Indonesia following India is the largest such change in history for upwards of 1.7 billion people. It is the third phase of Asia's transformation and India is in the early phase of a massive transformation to give standards of living similar or better than the other advanced economies. It is hard for anyone to imagine what this means for upwards of a billion people in Asia. The first phase was to address the centuries old neglect of the vast base of the population at the bottom that was neglected and without hope and at the same time invigorating the drivers of industrialization in the middle class. The financial community today also lacks an understanding of the importance of not letting the infrastructure of the US and European economies deteriorate. This plays the same role as the infrastructure of India that is being built from scratch around the major cities and the second tier group of cities under a Master Plan or Gati Shakti. The financial communtiy has allowed the infrastructure of the US and EU to deteriorate when it plays a role similar to what it does in India and Indonesia. There is not even a mention of infrastructure in this interview. Gati Shakti  India's Infrastructure Plan is a main driver of India's transformation, yet it barely got mentioned in this interview of the Financial Times. At a time when president Biden with bipartisan support in Congress built from years of his hard work in the Senate has launched the biggest infrastructure building effort since the 1960's with investment in trillions of dollars in the US, it is the same effort in India that is beginning to accelerate, that is the biggest reason for hope for the people of the American continent and for the people of Asia.   ...

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The new Dutch Health system that went into effect on Jan1, 2006, and is based on Stanford university prof Eindhoven's idea of "managed competition." What the Dutch experience holds for the USA as states like massachusetts look at mandatory universal health coverage on a private basis and for the US as a whole as the present system appears to be coming to a close.

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WSJ's Trofimov talks to some of the 2.5 million refugees and displaced people in the sectarian conflict in Iraq in 2015. He finds a mood of despair and resignation to a permanent partition of the country following sectarian conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. The situation is being dictated by the facts on the ground as the refugees see little prospect of returning to their homes, and the different regions controlled by Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish forces with borders.

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Allan Meltzer says a Fed QE III woud be bad monetary policy. He puts several questions to Bernanke- how the Fed and Ben Bernanke can know now what is the right interest rate policy in mid 2013, and what reason can the Fed give for adding excess reserves when U.S. banks have $1.6 trillion in idle reserves at the Fed. Meltzer cautions the Fed and other policymakers not to pay attention only to short term forecasts, which can be susceptible to large errors. And calls for attention to the long term consequences of their actions. One point he emphasizes is that the unemployment problem cannot be resolved with short term policy actions nor can it be resolved in a short time. It will take population growth, falling housing prices and rising rents to create opportunities for new construction. Another change is the transition to a less consumption driven and more export oriented economy. This transition which has started will also take time. He urges the Congress and the administration to focus on: reducing corporate tax rates by closing loopholes, long-term reductions in entitlement spending, a 5 year moratatorium on new regulations, and the Fed adopting an explicit inflation target between 0% and 2%....

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U.S. President Obama's speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations, Sept. 25, 2012, in which he praised the work of Ambassador Stevens in Libya. He defended First Amendment rights in the U.S. of free speech to an audience that was not fully convinced that the "anti-Muslim video" designed from the start as a provocation, produced as a violation of probation rulings by the individual, and being given the distribution channel of a vast internet audience by Google owned YouTube, falls neatly into free speech. The German government is reported to be looking into banning the video from distribution in Germany, and Germany also protects free speech under its constitution. He cited the "voices that rally against bigotry and blasphemy," as the way a First Amendment democracy protects against this type of abuse; which would suggest that Google as one of these voices has the responsibility to treat such content similiar to other extreme content of a pornographic nature or other such provocative material inducing violence, which it routinely excludes from distribution. The ultimate protection of First Amendment rights comes not from the U.S. constitution itself, but from the responsible exericize of wisdom, vigilance and common sense. During the long years of drafting of the Constitution when Madison, Jefferson and others who drafted the document took pains to include every protection so that basic rights would be preserved, George Washington pointed out that one could do this only upto a point, because it was upto the wisdom of future generations to preserve these rights, and this could never be done completely....

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February 1, 2011, the day when a million demonstrators were expected to come out on Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Washington Post makes a call for a democratic transition in Egypt. The Post says unfortunately the debate has been affected by considerable misinformation and mistaken ideas. It singles out three for correction. The protestors have no platform, that the radical Islamists are likely to assume power, and that the US has little power to influence the change. The April 6 Movement is a principal organizer of the protests and is run by young people. The party of Mohamed El-Baradei and the Muslim Brotherhood have joined together with the young protestors movement to have a common platform. And in a country where an estimated two thirds of the population is under 30 years, the older leaders in the El-Baradei party and the Muslim Brotherhood are deferring to the younger leaders. The movement is middle class, centrist, and its main grievance is the yearning for liberty. Eliott Abrams, the deputy national security advisor to former President George W. Bush, and Mr Bush on C-SPAN, have come out in favor of the Egyptian people's struggle for freedom. See Abrams column in the Post. The Muslim Brotherhood is unlikely to win anything more than a minority of seats in any elections, because the overwhelming influence in the protests is secular, middle class, and seeks the democratization and modernization of Egypt. For the American people this is an opportunity to support the aspirations to freedom and a modernized economy for the Egyptian people....

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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....

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Regional rivals in each of China's 31 provinces make it difficult for foreign retailers, such as Tesco, Carrefour, Metro AG, Home Depot, to scale up and increase market share. Metro AG says it will pull out of China after testing electronics stores for 2 years. After years of losses Home Depot shut down its 7 large stores in China in 2012. Profit margins can be as low as 2%, making it unprofitable without the scale needed. Tesco's market share in China declined to 2.4% of China megastore sales in 2012 from 2.9% in 2008, and Carrefour sales declined to 6.9% from 8.6% in the same period, according to Euromonitor. Tesco now plans to partner with China Resources Holdings to merge its stores with the larger domestic Chinese chain's 4100 stores under 10 retail brands, with Tesco holding 20% of the joint venture. The CR Vanguard brand of China Resources 3000 stores would be merged wih Tesco's 131 stores.

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Polls by Renato Mannheimer show popular support for the People of Freedom party of Mr. Berlusconi, which won 37% of the vote in 2008, is now down to 17% This comes after a series of corruption scandals. The most recent involves embezzlement of 1.7 million dollars by a politician from the Rome-Lazio regional government. New parties are being formed which are drawing increasing support. The Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, a former comedian, which opposes being in the eurozone and calls it a "noose" for Italy shows 18% support, according to a poll by the SWG agency. In that poll the Italy of Values party had 6% support, and the Left Ecology party 6%. Mannheimer says only one third of Italian voters are now in favor of the large established parties, indicating a big change is underway in Italian politics. The new parties are also critical of prime minister Monti's policies. This happens just as political and business leaders in Italy are calling for Monti to run for office to continue policy changes he has made to improve Italy's competitiveness and lead to economic recovery. Monti, a former EU Commissioner, was appointed as prime minister after pressure from German chancellor Merkel and the EU led to a loss of parliamentary support for Mr Berlusconi with key members of his own party defecting. After passing legislation for changes to Italian labor laws and making other shanges to improve Italy's competitiveness since taking office in November 2011, Monti is now seen in Italy, and outside Italy in EU circles, as the only person who can lead Italy out of the economic crisis; even though his reforms and austerity measures have not proved popular....