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Scott Bessent Treasury Secretary told the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday evening that the founders knew something more enduring than what we have come up with in the last couple of decades with chips and other technologies- " "The founders understood something far more enduring: that the fortunes of a nation are shaped by the energies of its people. Those energies transformed a small republic on the edge of a continent into the most prosperous nation in the long sweep of human civilization." We should never forget this, and we should make the energies of the American people and how it affects them the core of everything we do.  America's strengths lie not just in its natural resources and the depth of its capital markets it lies in the conditions, the character, capacity of its people- "It resides most of all in the character and the capacity of our people: the entrepreneur with an idea, the worker who can master new trades and technologies, institutions with the freedom and confidence to flourish." We must remember Bessent says what Alexander Hamilton as one of the founders in the 1780's taught us about possessing within us all the essentials of national supply, so that we produce what we need- "Alexander Hamilton taught us: that every nation “ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply.” Our strength is derived from what we can build, for the nation that can’t produce what it needs isn’t truly secure. The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs isn’t truly sovereign. And the nation that reduces its economics to consumption isn’t truly prosperous." Access to cheap supplies of goods is not what the American Dream was and is about from the beginning of the settlement of this continent in 1620's and throughout the period before and after independence for 400 years.  "Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream. The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security. For too long, the designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this. International economic relations that do not work for the American people must be re-examined." ...

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Iran's Assembly of Experts (clerics) acting as an arbiter as a power struggle takes place between elected president Pezeshkian and the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Assembly of Experts made up of clerics and the Ayatollah as its head shift support to one faction then to the other. This is who US is talking to and negotiating with. To negotiate with Pezeshkian even when agreement is reached the next day IRGC can come out and take action to control Hormuz by knocking out ships. A Qatari ship carrying 2 million barrrels in Hormuz was hit by IRGC when Pezeshkian signaled he had reached an agreement with the US that would release $6 of $12 billion in Iranian funds in Qatar. IRGC plan is to control Hormuz, charge tolls, and raise $40 billion a year through tolls. IRGC believes it can disrupt the narrow 15 mile channel on the Omani side in violation of international law of navigation that the US wants to keep open. For the US the question is - Can you even negotiate with the entity that is Pezeshkian and the elected government when it is in a power struggle with IRGC? Can you negotiate in the context of the burial as martyr of Iran's current religious leader Ali Khamenei? And even if you negotiate, IRGC responds to close Hormuz, US restarts bombing, where does this get the US when Hormuz remains closed. The US has we show here has only one option not stated in the Media. That is to bypass and ignore Hormuz and get alternative supplies of oil and keep naval blockade at low cost. For the US and the world to generate alternative supplies to Hormuz the US works with China, India, Japan, Indonesia and European Union, Arab states, to take the following action. Get 5-6 million of the 20 billion of Hormuz barrels as day using existing and new Saudi and UAE pipelines outside of Hormuz channel, accelerating renewable energy and EV's hybrids, China doing without the 4 million barrels a day from Hormuz by cutting its oil use through energy efficiency, alternative sources of oil from Venezuela ramp up and new oil production in the US and other places in the world, using reserves and rebuilding reserve supplies, better management of the 80-90 million barrels a day of the 108 million barrels a day the world used in 2025. All of these action are taking place in the transition to a world without Hormuz for the last 60 days. ...

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This Swiss scientist was one of the first of many scientists who asked questions about the origins of the coronavirus. Ms. Lentzos says not because we are conspiracy theorists, but because this is our profession. She says the scientific community that has disregarded different possibilities have strong vested interests, people who feared for their careers or their grants. Lentzos points out that in the scientific community like other communities it is not all about an idealized version of science, there are conflicts of interests, agendas, it is a social activity with good players and bad players. 

The WSJ did a lot of work on this, the Washington Post also, the New York Times totally silent, she says.

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Soccer is played in only a few states in India - W. Bengal, Tripura, Mizoram, Punjab, Kerala, and Maharashtra. There is no careful youth development in India for soccer as happens in Spain, Italy, France and Britain. Cricket dominates as the most important sport. This still does not explain why Cabo Verde and Curacao succeeded and India and China did not make it. India did not make it to even the Asian cup.

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The Republican party has split shows the New Hampshire and Iowa Republican  primaries says WSJ in this video that is essential to understand 2024. Demographic expert that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) talked to in this video say Donald Trump has brought in working class voters into the Republican party, no question about that. Yet in doing so and with his style he has alienated what are suburban Republican voters, higher educated with college degrees, the country club type that was long been associated with the Republican party since 1900. Taking the Iowa and New Hampshire voters the WSJ shows in visual dynamic graphs that half of voters in both states did not vote for Trump. There are no differences between Republican voters who voted for Trump and who voted against Trump when it comes to gender, age, they are evenly divided for gender and age. Difference is in education and suburban. Higher educated, suburban Republican voters acted to vote against Trump. This means says WSJ is that the Republican party has now effectively split up. Immigration is not as important to these Republicans who voted against Trump, foreign policy is also important which is not so for Trump voters. Ukraine matters for these voters who voted against Trump. Abortion also matters and the economy matters for these Republican voters who did not vote for Trump. In the backdrop of all this is the advisers who surround the president, the chief of whom may be Jake Sullivan, not just for foreign policy but also on issues such as immigration. Where Michael Shear of the NYT who has covered the White House for 30 years shows Jake Sullivan actively pushing to close down the asylum and parole avenues that are surging migrant flows, and to get Biden to close the US Mexico border under a bipartisan deal worked out by Lindsay Graham and Chuck Schumer in the US Senate. Sullivan, Michael Burns and other thoughtful, careful advisers are helping the Biden administration navigate the Israel Palestinian conflict and the Ukraine Russian conflict. The Middle East is what tripped Jimmy Carter with the Iran hostage crisis, leading to the Reagan period and Reagan economic culture that is unwinding today with huge gaps in incomes and educational opportunities that never existed before in the US. What also tripped Jimmy Carter was the split with the party that John Kennedy and LBJ built on the foundations of the FDR Truman period, and his handling of the Kennedys that effectively split the Democratic party. This is the situation that is now happening in the Republican party as the Reagan era and its culture of extremes comes to a close. Of extremes not seen since the Great Depression of a working family struggling to live on wages near the poverty level in a automobile factory in Michigan before the UAW settlement that Biden was on the picket lines for, and the $55.8 billion pay package that was put forward for Mr. Musk at Tesla. ...

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A former Jharkhand state governor nominated for president of India. She will be the first tribal woman elected president of India if elected. She was born in a district in Odisha in 1958 and is from the Santhal community. She was a teacher at the Aurobindo Integral Education Center before running for the state legislature. 

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Sharp drop in reading ability at American schools by 2026.

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The extraordinary story of Nadhim Zahawi who came to the UK as a child fleeing Iraq in the seventies with his parents. His grandfather was the governor of the Central Bank of Iraq. He says he survived by coming to Britain as he might have been killed in the Iran- Iraq war of the 1980's. He started life in Sussex and studied at the University College of London. In 2018 he was made Education minister by Theresa May. He continued under Boris Johnson as Education Minister, and in 2020 took the position of Vaccine Rollout minister.In July 2022 he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer to replace Rishi Sunak.

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Robert Kaiser, former managing editor of The Washington Post, reviewed this book on Joe McCathy in The Washington Post on August 7, 2020. It shows the link with today of Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, the then 27 year old lawyer chief counsel of the senate subcommittee on investigation when Joe McCarthy became chairman in Jan. 1953. The book is-  Demagogue The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye. Roy Cohn passed on some of the methods used at that time to Mr. Trump. Kaiser points out that the senator Joe McCarthy assembled "a coalition of the aggrieved." Tye shows that it started with the junior senator from Wisconsin making a speech in West Virginia for Lincon Day dinner to the Republican ladies of Wheeling, W. Va. The senator used it to talk about threat of communists working in the State Department. He claimed there were 205 Communists. Today we know that this was just made up by McCarthy, at a time when Winston Churchill made the speech about the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and a sense of shock in America at the People's Republic of China being formed in 1949 under CCP chairman Mao tse tung. McCarthy saw this as an opportunity to gain prominence and a Senate career. What is seen from this carefully researched book is that for a while it succeeded in putting many of the Nation's best leaders on the defense. This includes Harry Truman, Eisenhower himself who disdained McCarthy's and Cohn's methods, Gen George Marshall who was a mentor to Dwight EIsenhower, Joe Stilwell, and other military leaders who ran the 1940's war effort under Marshall in Europe against the Nazis and in China against the Japanese imperialists. On the domestic side it included the head of TVA and the new Atomic Agency setup by president Truman. Gallup said at that time of McCarthy's 38% support in the US following his censure in US Senate by 67-22  -even if it was known that McCarthy killed five innocent children they would still go along with him. Tye writes that in that atmosphere similar to the sense of shock at China's rise and America's loss of manufacturing and falling behind in infrastructure by 2016, in that atmosphere if one told a small lie or big lie it made not much difference in public's penalty or censure, then why not tell a whopper of a lie. This became the ethic for a while in 2016-2024 similar to the period till the collapse of McCarthyism in America by 1957 with McCarthy's death in 1957 and in 1960 the election of John F. Kennedy. What is forgotten is that Richard Nixon a young senator from California was part of the group in Congress, so that in some shape or form it existed and remained part of the Reagan efforts to push back against the Soviets that led to wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq sapping the Nation's energies and resources and with faulty economic theory allowed China to dominate key industries and outspend America in infrastructure investment, creating the kind of shock that led to the second McCarthyist decade under Mr. Trump. ...

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Jensen Huang founded Nvidia to develop chips for videogames in 3D graphics in 1993. Sega videogame maker in Japan had Nvidia develop the chips for its Dreamcast player. At the time Shoichiro Iramijiri was the engineer -who started Honda's first manufacturing plant in the US in 1984- heading Sega. Iramijiri liked Huang and wanted him to succeed. When the technical error of developing the chips using a wrong shape was made by Huang Nvidia was dropped by Sega for Dreamcast in 1997. Nvidia ran out of money and if it persisted with its poor design would have ended in 6 months. Instead Huang decided to switch to a new chip design with no money to do this. Iramijiri stepped in to get Huang a $5 million loan from Sega.

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The other title of this article in the NYT was "California's fading Political Machines and volatile race for Governor." Gone are the days when Pat Brown was able to put his son Jerry Brown in the race for governor, there are 9 persons running for governor of California in 2026. The current governor Gavin Newsom is said to be promoting his book in Nashville, Tennessee, where many Californians are moving with the inflated cost of housing in the state. Gavin Newsom's grand father gave a $5000 check to Pat Brown in 1943 to run for District Attorney, this report says citing the book. From that time Pat Brown became Attorney General and then governor of California in 1958, defeating Richard Nixon in 1962. In 1962 Pat Brown seemed vulnerable as his signature accomplishment setting up the UC system of college campuses and the water reservoir, tax increases to pay for this, were in their beginning stages and their lasting value not recognized at the time. Nixon from Whittier, California, was a former Vice President and was seen as likely winner. This toughly fought election created the Pat Brown myth and so called machine that helped his son Jerry Brown to two terms as governor 1975 to 1983, and again after serving as Mayor of Oakland and Attorney General to come back to governors race again in 2011 (because term limits came after 2011) and be governor again 2011-2018. Another way of looking at it is that in his last two terms it was also Jerry Brown's careful balancing of the budget and finances of the state, his environmental support, that made him a reliable figure for the public interest not just the political machine backing him.  California to be sure has had popular governors on both sides Reagan won in 1966 as governor of California to succeed Pat Brown. The Kennedys and Pat Brown are matched by the Reagan supporters in the state. In today's situation where China's dominance in industry and manufacturing has affected all parts of deindustrialized America, California is no exception, where much of the middle class has seen their savings eroded, the issues are different and the challenges are different. ...

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Fed Governor Waller, a research director of the St Louis Fed argued that in the post pandemic situation fighting inflation would not increase unemployment. The actual decisions were made by Fed chairman Jerome Powell who also grasped the situation and gave priority to winning the fight against inflation. In his arguments Powell pointed out the disturbing effects of inflation on workers. Powell's determined effort and careful policy management also made it possible to bring inflation down- the manner and way this was achieved and Powell showing a sensitivity to workers and their interests. Powell also communicated this effectively and the Biden administration made this possible through its efforts to rebuild American manufacturing, its investments in infrastructure and getting bipartisan deals through Congress. Without this combined effort by Biden and Powell this may not have worked out the way it did. 

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Desmond Tutu who died yesterday, was one of the three leaders with Nelson Mandela, and De Klerk who shaped a new South Africa with an attitude of rebuilding through reconciliation that stands out in the recent history of Africa and the world. South Africa's potential and the lives of the South African people are better under a framework that brings all communities together for unity and cooperation. After years of fighting Apartheid policies Tutu headed the Reconciliation Commission when De Klerk and Mandela crafted a way out for South Africa from segregation and international isolation. After failures of the ANC under Jacob Zuma, Desmond Tutu called for changes. He also was the first to point out the failings of African countries that descended into misrule and oppression. Tutu was as important to South Africa as Mandela and Klerk in the way he made democracy work by calling it out when it failed to live up to the ideals. Born in 1931 he witnessed the transition of African countries into free nations, with some failing to achieve the aspirations that drove the freedom struggle. The son of a teacher he followed in his father's footsteps after graduating from the University of South Africa at a time when black schools suffered from crippling lack of resources.  He went to King's College, University of London on a scholarship, and earned a bachelor's and master's degree there. Living in England helped free him from the self-contempt that results from racism, he says in his 2006 biography. Like Gandhi the years spent in England gave him a sense of what could be learned from this experience in shaping the future. He returned in 1975 and fought Apartheid using Gandhi's methods of non-violent non-cooperation. In 2025 South Africa will have completed 50 years since that time and can look back at how far it has come even with the shortcomings. And the steps that can now be taken for modernization as India and other nations move forward to show democracy can effectively deliver on good governance and economic progress to fulfill the aspirations of the people for a better life. ...

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Friedman reviews Acemoglu and Robinson's new book, "Why Nations Fail." Acemoglu says that nations fail when wealth and opportunities are concentrated in the hands of few people, that a condition for societies to succeed is to create opportunities for more people. For this to happen it is important to create inclusive political and economic institutions. This is an important insight, but for Western society this is an insight as old as Adam Smith when he pointed out the importance of this aspect of western societies after the feudal period in his "Wealth of Nations." For Smith it was the failure to create inclusive societies that led to the gradual unravelling of societies in the river valleys of the Yangste and the Ganges, in China and India, of increasing poverty and the gradual disappearance of what constituted the middle class in India and China. Chapter 8 titled "Of Wages and Labor" in the "Wealth of Nations" makes specific reference to this.

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Chinese flights near Taiwan or in Taiwan airspace have stopped for 10 days in March- to prepare for the visit by US president DJT to Beijing March 31-April 2, 2026. After US relations with Russian president Putin have improved, China may be seeking a similar kind of improvement in relations with the US.

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3 million people affected as Medicare Advantage Plans pull out of some counties in the US by March 2026.

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Kharg Island near Hormuz and Jask Island on Gulf of Oman two of Iran's main oil export terminals. Oil is pumped by underwater sea pipelines to storage tanks that hold 30 million barrels on Kharg Island then loaded onto oil tankers that make their way through the Hormuz Straits. The oil is shipped to teapot refineries in China- smaller independent oil refineries in China that have not faced sanctions. This oil is shipped at a discount. How does China pay for this oil? China gets 2.1 million barrels a day from this source. It is paid for with a $400 billion Chinese investment in Iran under a 25 year Comprehensive Partnership Agreement signed in 2021 during the Biden Administration in the US. The investment covers energy, infrastructure and technology in Iran. At $60 a barrel before the Iran War China would have an import oil bill of $46 billion for 1 years supply of oil from Iran. This was paid for in yuan based transactions and barter systems which involved Iranian construction projects performed by China and exchange of other products, raw materials. ...