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CNN reporter Cassie Spodak provides this exceptional report into the minds of New Hampshire Democratic voters who gave Bernie Sanders a 22 percent lead in the New Hampshire Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton. In October 2016 Hillary Clinton has the support of Bernie Sanders against Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. She described it as "100 percent support" in television debate. Sanders has appeared with Clinton twice, and campaigned 4 times in New Hampshire, and continually across the country. Younger New Hampshire voters still long for Sanders as their favored candidate. Older voters and some who have been motivated by Sanders to run for local office see the shaping of the Democratic Party platform as a victory for Sanders. Key planks of Sanders, taxes on the wealthy and higher incomes to pay for student tuition, infrastructure, and helping working class families, are now key parts of the Democratic platform. These voters see this as a pragmatic step and are enthusiastic in their support for Hillary Clinton. Overall Clinton now has 87 percent of Democratic voter support in New Hampshire according to a WMUR/UNH poll in mid October 2016, and she is doing well with millenials and independents nationally, a critical bloc of voters for Clinton to show nationwide support. One member of the steering committee for Sanders in New Hampshire named Dudley Dudley, reflects the opinion that has shifted the party to emerge united during and even more so in the final months of the presidential campaign of 2016- she tells the CNN reporter Spodak that she supports Hillary because "of the way she has grown, and stretched," and the way Clinton and Sanders are now campaigning together and working together. Both Clinton and Sanders deserve credit for their extraordinary ability to grow during their campaigns and during the party's way to shape the way forward. ...

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Reited Gen Gantz appears to be the likely head of a new government after winning the most seats in parliament. Policy towards Iran is not likely to change. But a Gantz led government is likely to reduce the divisiveness in the country, and provide a more unifying effort in Israeli society. The role of religious groups in daily life would also be held back. Better relations with Jewish people in America would result and peace negotiations with Palestinians would be encouraged. The prime minister would concentrate less power in his hands. By temperament Gantz is a quiet leader who preferred not to engage in the back and forth attacks in the election campaign even when Mr. Netanyahu  did not hesitate to do so. As the head of the military from 2011 to 2015 he also has the confidence of people in Israel looking for a new start after a long period of Netanyahu rule. The current prime minister could be indicted soon after a hearing next month on charges of bribery and fraud. Mr. Trump has said that U.S. relationship is not with any leader but with the country Israel. Gantz makes it clear after Netanyahu's style of politics has rocked Israel for many years- "We will bring about a real change in priorities, and heal Israeli society in all its parts." Mr. Gantz has said that he think the Obama administration could have done more in securing a better nuclear deal with Iran. Yet at an event in 2015 when the deal was being set, Mr Gantz said he also saw "the half full part of the glass." That the deal would keep Iran 10 or 15 years from making a nuclear weapon "with the right price." At this juncture in world affairs this is important because Mr. Trump has shown flexibility in dealing with Iran following the firing of National Security Adviser Bolton. Trump held back on a response at several points during the attacks in the Straits of Hormuz and the taking of ships hostage by Iran and the UK. The attacks on Saudi oil facilities and the difficulty of protecting oil installations in the region, Iran's increasingly difficult position under tight U.S. sanctions and pressure on Asian buyers of Iranian oil to cut back purchases, the efforts of Japan and India dependent on Saudi and Iranian oil to reduce tensions, all point to a new policy in the region with a new Israeli government playing a useful role to keep policy control in the hands of Asian countries dependent on oil supplies for their economies, and in the hands of a U.S. president better informed about a policy course that is in U.S. interests of avoiding unnecessary engagements overseas when there are other pressing priorities. ...

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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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This report in the WSJ on a Gallup study with 87,000 interviews points to Trump supporters being affected more by racial isolation and cultural anxiety, health prospect anxiety,  than merely by being working class or in lower income groups affected by the shift in manufacturing jobs overseas. The report confirms previous observations that these Trump supporters are more likely to be whites without bachelors degrees. The information does'nt show that they face abnormally high degree of economic distress as those who have lost jobs in this recession, as they are shown to be less likely to be unemployed, more likely to be self-employed. The Gallup study does not show areas more adversely impacted by trade competition to have higher support for Trump. This is a critical finding.  An interesting finding is that Trump supporters are more likely to live in areas with higher mortality rates and poorer health outcomes, higher obesity rates, and lower rates of intergenerational mobility. This combines with living in much higher rates of being surrounded by whites, whiter and more racially isolated. The finding is that they have high cultural and economic anxiety from not finding their well being and prospects for children meet expectations. This may also explain the tendency not to be able to reason out possible outcomes based on policies of each candidate, less openness and more inward looking behaviours.   ...

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 A member of the WSJ Editorial Board, says the Republican National Convention was more consequential in the way it continued the theme of getting non- white people to see how the president is taking action on issues that affect them. Mr. Trump cited his work on prison reform legislation, on funding for black colleges and universities, rebuilding broken families, and bringing back jobs in Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee. 69% of registered voters are white in 2019 compared to 73% in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center. Getting it right now means he says not merely the defending American workers to prevent "offshoring of jobs, opening the borders, and sending sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars," but also how to defend the rights of minorities in America and of working class non-white people. In 2016 the Republican party got 8% of the black vote nationally, which was the lowest in 4 decades excluding the years Mr. Obama ran for election. The effort to highlight the work on behalf of Black people and Hispanic people was to take this number back up as far up as Republicans can to the level reached under Eisenhower. This he says will be good for Republicans and good for the country. Under Eisenhower in 1956 the Republican party gained 36% of the Black vote, the highest ever.  ...

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During the presidential debates Donald Trump was asked about his proposal for a 45% tariff on imports from China to the U.S.. Trump's response was "if they don't behave." he would use this as a negotiating tactic against China. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas responded by reminding viewers of the high tariffs under Smoot-Hawley legislation that were one of the factors that created the Great Depression in the 1930's. Economist and former Federal Reserve chairman Bernanke is a student of the Great Depression, and says "it was highly counterproductive, it lengthened and deepened the Great Depression." Economist Peter Petri of Brandeis University in his study cited in this article, says that the tit for tat that starts with such a move could eventually cost the U.S. 1 million jobs. It might fix one problem the one of imbalanced trade with China his figures show, and create another huge problem the loss of markets for U.S. goods all over the world. Overall a 45% tariff would reduce U.S. merchandise imports by $383 billion and reduce U.S. merchandise exports by $658 billion, says Petri. Gordon Hanson, economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has actually shown how trade has affected different counties in the U.S., leaving some dependent on government assistance. Hanson sees this tariff as counterproductive, it makes the U.S. more self-sufficient but hurts U.S. exporters, would significantly hurt the tech boom, and reduce America's standard of living. The problem is that everybody can get into this in a tit for tat. France did this even before the Smoot Harley Act of 1938 was passed in 1930 with 60% increase in tariff on individual items, by higher tariff legislation in 1928. Close allies Canada followed quickly after Smoot Hawley increasing its tariffs, so did Great Britain. Unemployment went up significantly after 1931, worsened by weak banks and lack of support from the Federal Reserve. Trade with Mexico would come to a halt Petri shows, and the result would be more Mexicans trying to cross the border turning a relatively non existent problem of immigration in 2015 -with Mexicans preferring to remain home and net immigration dropping significantly following the 2008 financial crisis and the strict Obama policy of deporting illegal immigrants- into a real one. Trump says its just a threat, but it is likely to lead to a tit for tat response by China, then by U.S. allies, other trading partners. Consider that president Herbert Hoover opposed the Smoot Hawley bill for raising tariffs on industrial goods, and only proposed adifferent legislation reducing tariffs on industrial goods and increasing the tariffs on agricultural goods to give relief to American farmers. Politics intervened as Smoot from Utah and Hawley from Oregon, from mountain and agricultural states with a lack of understanding of how the international trading system works but as heads of two influential commmittes, the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, let politics overrride and pushed their legislation through Congress. In 1932 Smoot and Hawley were defeated for reelection, but the damage had been done, and promises of better conditions for workers and farmers never kept. A significant reason for the U.S. standard of living is that it is a leader in the global trading system. Even in 1945 and the years following the end of the war tariffs were higher in Britain and other countries. In return for this leadership the U.S. enjoys the advantages of the dollar being the main global currency, and the advantages of a world leading technological sector that has large global markets. Hanson and Autor have pointed out how imbalanced trade has hurt some counties in the U.S. This is a very real problem for workers in the manufacturing sector, as shown by elections in the midwestern states, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and other parts of the country. The problem is compounded by the tech sector looking out for itself, the financial sector looking out for itself, and forgetting that we are all in the same boat. And that includes the Chinese who are in the same boat. China is doing a major shift in policy towards a consumer driven economy, and this needs to be accelerated for the benefit of ordinary Chinese. This makes the policy of a 45% tariff by the U.S. doubly unproductive because it hopes to add urgency to the problem of the U.S. trade deficit and manufacturing workers, but takes an approach that risks ending up damaging the global trading system by setting in motion a process that no one controls or can foresee the destination....

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This WSJ article provides a detailed account of the positions of Clinton and Trump on Wall Street, the financial industry, banks, Dodd-Frank, regulatory reform, 6 weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

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Coral Davenport of the NYT provides some of the basics of the Paris climate change agreement. This includes an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half to avoid a situation in which atmospheric temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degree Fahrenheit.  The earlier effort to negotiate an accord failed in 2009 in Copenhagen. This time all 186 countries were asked to signup with the USA and China, the No. 1 and No. 2 polluters and India leading the way. Germany is well on its way to self sufficiency through development of solar and wind energy with the German government leading the way, and France leads in the use of nuclear energy. How did this happen now? As Davenport points out there are scientific studies. But this is not the primary reason China is shifting.Davenport fails to emphasize the health concerns and pollution concerns that motivated China to shift away from coal. China's industrial revolution of the last 3 decades has come at a huge cost in pollution of air and water, and president Xi Jinping has decided to make the shift away from coal a top priority. It is estimated that mortality rates for areas of high coal use north of the Yangzte river have higher mortality rates than areas of lower use of coal south of the Yangzte river. The other big polluter India is shifting because it is learning from China's experience. Davenport mentions the resistance to the scientific evidence in the Republican party. As a result it is already clear that it lacks support in Congress and under a future Republican administration. In a fashion similar to healthcare, president Obama failed to create a consensus before proceeding in the hope that this would be better than waiting. However American industry is already moving away from coal as documented in Links- "The Trump executive order on coal and the continuing shift to natural gas." Utilities in the U.S. are making the shift away from coal because of the economics and planning ahead as governments can change every four years. ...

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Jenna Wortham asks the question do tech companies have undue influence in Washington especially when they are pursuing their own ecosystem expansion, citing an example from Facebook app Free Basics. There is another question that comes with the election campaigns of Sanders, Trump and Clinton, and issues of upward mobility. With this issue raised also by Janet Yellen of the U.S. Federal Reserve of the loss of intergenerational mobility in the U.S. at a conference in Oct. 2014. This question is whether the tech world in California can be sensitive to the problems of cities depending on manufacturing in the midwest and the eastern U.S. that are recovering from deep recession, because the environments are so different. Working in the tech world in California is so different from the rest of the country, almost a different way of life. It also has deep political implications, because the priorities are different. Sometimes as with the TPP trade agreement they may conflict- this includes an industry such as the auto industry that also is incorporating technology at an accelerating pace and which has employed many times more people than does the tech industry in California, and in many states. This leads to president Obama's support for the TPP trade agreement, an agreement which analysis by some experts shows is more beneficial to the tech industry in California than to the auto industry in the midwestern states. The NYT's Krugman says overall for the U.S. it is marginally helpful as most of the gains in free trade are already behind us. See Lyrarc using search terms-Trans Pacific Trade Agreement, Trans Pacific Partnership. Yet it remains a mystery why president Obama has made it a part of his legacy, when Hillary Clinton realizing the issues in this election has clearly stated she will not support it. It has other implications as well, as it has given rise to demagogic rhetoric in this election, where other issues far more significant such as the condition of western democracy are at stake. ...

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Investors put in $136 billion into startup companies in 2018, and $141 billion in 2019, as reported in this WSJ article on startups. Before this it peaked at $75 billion in 2000 and did not recover after the 2009 financial crisis till 2014 when it reached about 75 billion dollars.  Much of the increase in money that did not go into infrastructure at low interest rates below zero appears to have been wasted as the ideas for startups declined in quality in the years 2014-2019. Softbank put up a Vision Fund which has run up billions of dollars in losses including a disastrous investment in WeWork. The resistance to shifting all the money at low interest rates to infrastructure has faded with the election of president Trump supported by a Republican party that puts the American worker first for job retention and expansion, and America first in world trade. The pandemic has changed the environment for startup companies as most startup companies are not likely to survive the environment they are in. The big ones such as Uber have built up losses, and ones such as Airbnb are borrowing $2 billion at 10 percent interest in emergency funding. Experience and sound thinking for investments were left behind as capital was wasted in many projects. The time has come to return to investments that have built the basis of the twentieth and twenty first century's advances in quality of life, in infrastructure and strong public services. ...

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With so much coverage of other aspects of China,  to really understand China and Xi Jinping one has to understand the rural urban situation in China. Xi's long experience as a teenager in the cultural revolution of Mao was in rural areas, the 8 years he spent there till the age of 22, as this report by James Areddy with help of Yijun, Cheng and Qi aptly shows. It traces the shift and mass migration to cities starting with Deng's modernization drive in 1979. This shift of labor to city and town factories as the U.S. and Europe shifted factories and production to China is the story of our times. How it has both helped and hurt China and how it has become the dominant issue of our times, and a lesson for India in the middle of its own modernization and shift of labor to cities. It has helped China modernize with the shift during 1979 to 2016 and run into a road block with president Trump leading a movement in the U.S. of people most hurt by the outsourcing of factories and production to China. It was not meant to be this way. Yet the shift also led to ripping up the fabric of communities and towns with loss of factories across America over three decades. Because China is a large country the impact was huge decade after decade, leading to a backlash against lost jobs in the U.S. and in Europe.  Xi Jinping has romantic view of rural China as he spent 7 years in Shanxi province rural areas during the cultural revolution under Mao. During this period he toiled as part of farm labor alongside villagers which allowed him to get to know villagers and farmers in the countryside well, and formed his view of the world around him. As it is described in a description of the man in Chinese sources- "He arrived at the village as a slightly lost teenager and left as a 22 year old man determined to do something for the people."  China's system separated migrants from city dwellers not  giving same rights to better education, to schools and housing, and official documents separating the two, city dwellers and migrant populations from rural areas. As a result as China modernized and population shifted -shown here in excellent graphic charts over four decades- in 1979 from about 80% in rural areas and 20% in urban the shift goes to 50-50 by 2001. Today it is 40-60 with 60% in rural areas but a population of 40% suffering from severe inequalities and  low incomes. So that GDP per capita of $10,000 for China is deceiving. The real incomes in average disposable income is about $4300 in urban and $1700 in rural area, according to National Bureau of Statistics. High school education is hard enough to get in rural areas, medical care is very basic and the $1700 would hardly get a room in low income housing in a large town in China, says premier Li Keqiang. Keqiang did his masters thesis on urbanization and has studied this shift from his college days. Just as in Gandhi's India, Mao's China is the story of the villages, with 128,000 villages for 600 million people in Mr. Xi Jinping's anti-poverty drive. Hong Kong other issues have to be understood in the context of these concerns of China's leadership today- the sense that strong central leadership alone can keep the country together and bring a decent life to the people in the villages and in the countryside outside the cities.  Modernization of cities still set in the context of China's vast rural population and essential to its full uplift and progress. Xi has allocated $80 billion each year to bring roads, schools, medical facilities, and other amenities including electricity and modern heating. The idea now is to shift people back to the villages, find opportunities for jobs and livelihoods in farming, tourism with guesthouse facilities, and other occupations in the villages. The villages are being turned into attractive places to live one by one in this party drive and providing new enthusiasm and support for the party's efforts. India can learn from this experience in China. The western nations of the U.S. and Europe can no longer and will no longer undertake the wholesale shift of factories with loss of jobs to China or India to offer the prospect of bringing these countries to the kind of urbanization and overall prosperity of small nations like Japan and South Korea, which are a tiny fraction of the population of China and India+ Pakistan + Bangladesh. As a result China is changing strategy now with a return to some aspects of the informal economy in Chengdu with street peddlers and tiny retail, and return of migrants back to better built and improved villages in the countryside. A better life than in cities is possible this view says for people from these rural areas, if the rural areas are given modern facilities and construction and resources are allocated, job creation locally tackled. The villages can offer better air quality, better quality of life where villagers who earlier migrated to cities with ownership of land, when they are modernized with better roads and have better facilities for education, housing and healthcare, better amenities. The new approach is to strike a good balance for urbanization, by modernizing and investing in villages and small towns, so that cities can cope and overall life can be better than with mass migration and wholesale urbanization. It is also a balance that works well for the U.S. and Europe which can redirect manufacturing to their home regions as part of a better distributed and balanced supply chain than the one that was unwittingly built over the last three decades.    ...