Russia Is Second World

Russia is Second World, India is Third World, soon to be the third largest economy is Third World, because it is about per capita income.

Russia lost the Cold War. It is an economy the size of Italy.

Syria is where Russia has decided to take its last stand before the world comes to realize Russia really, truly did lose the Cold War.

China was the biggest beneficiary of the end of the Cold War. It allowed China to ditch an economics that was obviously not working.

Putin is happy playing second fiddle to China. China does not think Russia is a superior military power. The two economies don't even compare. And it has been only a generation.

The irony is, in seeking power parity with America Russia is going down a path that takes it further and further away from true greatness. True greatness comes from growing the Russian economy.

Democracy and the market economy are it. Sooner or later Russia will have to come around to it for its own good.

It can also be said America did not manage the end of the Cold War as well as it could have. But then how much room to play was there?

The Russian people and leadership have to decide on their own to do right by Russia's future.

The tragedy is Syria. Innocents are getting killed in large numbers. That will be a drag on Russian stature in the long term.

Do Your Homework

“I said forget debate prep. I mean, give me a break,” Trump said at one point. “Do you really think that Hillary Clinton is debate-prepping for three or four days. Hillary Clinton is resting, okay?”

“This has nothing to do with Sunday,” Trump insisted of his New Hampshire stop. “It’s like they make you into a child.”

Trump’s Microphone Complaint: Legit

During the debate when Trump spoke I kept hearing sentence fragments, a disjointed phrase here, a random phrase there, and I was like, what's going on? Why can't I hear this guy straight?

Finally he helped me understand. The microphone was broken.

The Paul Ryan Plan Lacks Heart

No heart.

Unfinished Business

How has a country that has benefited—perhaps more than any other—from immigration, trade and technological innovation suddenly developed a strain of anti-immigrant, anti-innovation protectionism? Why have some on the far left and even more on the far right embraced a crude populism that promises a return to a past that is not possible to restore—and that, for most Americans, never existed at all? 

Over the past 25 years, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from nearly 40% to under 10%. Last year, American households enjoyed the largest income gains on record and the poverty rate fell faster than at any point since the 1960s. Wages have risen faster in real terms during this business cycle than in any since the 1970s. These gains would have been impossible without the globalisation and technological transformation that drives some of the anxiety behind our current political debate.

 A world in which 1% of humanity controls as much wealth as the other 99% will never be stable. Gaps between rich and poor are not new but just as the child in a slum can see the skyscraper nearby, technology allows anyone with a smartphone to see how the most privileged live. 

Over the past decade, America has enjoyed the fastest productivity growth in the G7, but it has slowed across nearly all advanced economies

American firms that export pay their workers up to 18% more on average than companies that do not

Research shows that growth is more fragile and recessions more frequent in countries with greater inequality. Concentrated wealth at the top means less of the broad-based consumer spending that drives market economies.

Under my administration, we will have boosted incomes for families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution by 18% by 2017

a free market only thrives when there are rules to guard against systemic failure and ensure fair competition.

fiscal policy must play a bigger role in combating future downturns; monetary policy should not bear the full burden of stabilising our economy. Unfortunately, good economics can be overridden by bad politics.

America’s political system can be frustrating. Believe me, I know. But it has been the source of more than two centuries of economic and social progress. The progress of the past eight years should also give the world some measure of hope. Despite all manner of division and discord, a second Great Depression was prevented. The financial system was stabilised without costing taxpayers a dime and the auto industry rescued. I enacted a larger and more front-loaded fiscal stimulus than even President Roosevelt’s New Deal and oversaw the most comprehensive rewriting of the rules of the financial system since the 1930s, as well as reforming health care and introducing new rules cutting emissions from vehicles and power plants.

20m more Americans with health insurance, while health-care costs grow at the slowest rate in 50 years

Trump: Disaster

Donald J. Trump, who might be the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.

His affect is that of an infomercial huckster; he traffics in conspiracy theories and racist invective; he is appallingly sexist; he is erratic, secretive, and xenophobic; he expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself. He is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.

Trump is not a man of ideas. He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar. He is spectacularly unfit for office

Trump Wins Big Among People Who Never Moved Away - The Atlantic

Pakistan

In Washington DC, unlike Islamabad, there is clarity. You cannot have your left hand tinker with the HQN, LeT, JuD, JeM, and have your right hand shake Ash Carter’s or Susan Rice’s or anyone else’s. 

Clinton Up

Poll: Clinton up 10 on Trump nationally | TheHill

UN makes power play against Trump | TheHill

 a summer study concluding that Trump would be the only head of state in the world to doubt the science behind climate change. 

Momentum shifts in battle for Senate | TheHill 

Single Payer System?

market-based solutions would not solve the country's problems with insurance costs and coverage

Bill Clinton calls Obamacare 'the craziest thing in the world' - CNNPolitics.com

The media likes drama. They want a fight. So they focus on just the phrase.

Bill Clinton could not have taken the Republican position that the whole thing needs to be dismantled, should never have happened.

Perhaps the ACA was an expensive way to educate the country to tell them what you really need is single payer.

Bill Clinton goes way off message on ObamaCare | TheHill

Hillary Clinton and the White House struggled on Tuesday to explain Bill Clinton’s blistering critique of ­ObamaCare, which exposed divisions in the Democratic Party over the healthcare law.

The blunt criticism of ­ObamaCare comes in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s careful embrace of the law throughout the campaign. She describedthe Affordable Care Act earlier this year as “one of the greatest accomplishments” in the nation’s history, and frequently touts the law’s coverage gains in her stump speeches.

Bill Clinton’s calls for Medicare for all, also known as a “single-payer” system, echo some of the former first lady’s own comments, after she stepped to the left on healthcare during this year’s Democratic primaries. 

She has proposed big changes like a government-run public option as well as the power for Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. Democrats in Congress have also signaled a new push for the public option, with 33 senators signing on to legislation to create one.

“The change we need is not to wreck this thing and repeal it. It’s done too much good,” Clinton said. “The change we need is to create an affordable option for the small-business people and the working people who are not covered — that’s what the public option is about.”

Bill Clinton: 'I strongly supported' ObamaCare | TheHill

Trump And American Journalists

 “I wonder how I would have behaved if I had been a correspondent in Germany during the early rise to power of Adolf Hitler. Would I first have tried to report his side of the story? How long would it have taken me to realize that he was all bad and that any sympathy or even-handedness would have been misplaced? The short answer is I don’t know.”

Trump Brand Anti Semitism

“This feels like the closest thing to the type of anti-Semitism that my grandparents talk about experiencing in Poland.”

Kushner’s extended family fired back, launching an internecine war of words: “Please don't invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night,” seethed one Kushner cousin. “It is self-serving and disgusting.”

“When you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law,” she wrote to her boss, “you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.”

“Donald Trump,” Reizes says, “has put the Jewish community in a turmoil that I don’t really think we’ve experienced in a long time.”

31-year-old Andrew Aglin, founder of the Daily Stormer—a bigot and racist who refers to his presidential candidate by nom de guerre, “Glorious Leader.” College undergraduates from California, leisurely attending white nationalist conferences, have also shown up; and 25-year-old Matthew Heimbach, dubbed the “next David Duke.” (“Hail, Emperor Trump and hail victory.”) Trump has opted to wink and nod at such “deplorables” (as Hillary Clinton has called them) when given the chance.

“What’s most shocking is...how silent the Jewish establishment has been in calling out Trump’s behavior,” Kaplan said. She later added, “The same people who told me that anti-Semitism was everywhere are now conspicuously silent on Trump. In some cases, they’re supporting Trump.”

“Donald Trump is not a distraction. He is the thing our tradition teaches us to resist,” Beinart wrote. “In this season of national decision and Jewish self-reflection, please reflect on your silence.”

“It’s a moment when both you and your grandma get to be right about this,” Harpo Jaeger, 25, tells me, an experienced campus activist in Jewish politics and a faith-based organizer. “She gets to be right that anti-Semitism is alive and well, and Jews should be worried about it,” he adds. “And the left gets to be correct, in that the anti-Israel or anti-Zionist left doesn’t have a monopoly on anti-Semitism. These people really are everywhere.”

“Why the Jews? I don’t know,” says Zach Reizes. “It’s a very scary thought, that maybe all those horror stories we’ve been told about Jewish persecution are right.” The nineteen-year-old adds, “Maybe they’re still foreshadowing a future that we thought had died.”