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A car the early postwar Fiat model 500 which sold 4 million cars for this one mode alone, sold 57000 cars in its new version 50 years later motly on national sentiment in Italy. This is happening in the backdrop of new small cars that are coming up at really low prices in countries like India where the Tata model is expected soon. However this Fiat is being marketed in mature markets like Europe and soon in North America. Is Fiat overlooking the huge Asian market? Interestingly costs are lowered by sharing a Polish factory that makes this car and the Fiat Panda to also make Ford's Ka model.

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Former U.S. president Bill Clinton's address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N. Carolina. He endorsed President Obama for reelection in an impassioned speech.

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Nikki Haley is doing what has happened before, fighting for principles in her party and showing that a fully significant 40 percentage points of her party believe in the old conservative ideas, of the Republican party. That of the country club type, the everyman who happens to be conservative the core of the party, small and large business owners. The situation is analogous to the intraparty struggles that beset the Democratic party after the abrupt end after 1000 days of the John F. Kennedy presidency and administration. Since the 1920's and two periods of rising inequality accompanied by technological change from the 1870's that ended with the Great Depression, the US had experienced a great revival under Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Eisenhower. In 1960 a new future was articulated by Kennedy of the new world that lay ahead, one he had seen upfront in Asia before, during and after the war. How would we bring the post colonial world of billions of people into the modern world. Since then both a modern China and now modern India are part of this change. "Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do." Acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for President, July 15, 1960. It was interrupted after the intraparty disputes that began in 1968, Robert Kennedy challenging LBJ, leading to Richard Nixon, and Edward Kennedy challenging Jimmy Carter leading to Ronald Reagan. John F. Kennedy had articulated a vision that still is alive today based on an understanding of how America's needs fit into all humanity's needs.  In some ways the situation after 2024 or 2028 still goes back to the vision of a new order of the world with emerging nations in Asia with 3 billion people, and additional billions of people in Africa, Latin America. The Arms buildup promised by Reagan in 1980 has yielded little about 50 years later, not even the fall of the Berlin Wall which today has been replaced by another struggle in Eastern Europe in 2024. Truman tackled the Berlin Blockade,  Eisenhower had faced upto Soviet tanks in Budapest, Kennedy had faced the Berlin crisis in 1963 his ich bin ein Berliner (I am Berliner). What purpose would an orbital weapons program serve- and could the US ever be or even want to be  "only one superpower in a safe world," with an orbital weapons program as Reagan and Weinberger went out to do and failed completely. America faces a situation analogous to 1920's with increasing inequality and weakness in the social fabric, as a result of four decades of rising inequality accompanied by technological changes, and misguided Reagan programs that diverted from John Kennedy's vision that the "old era is ending, the old ways will not do."  The vision put forward by John F. Kennedy has more relevance today for the future. That vision he articulated in the First Inaugural Address in which he also said that this work may not be accomplished "in our lifetime on the planet." It is important to remember that John F. Kennedy connected his vision to FDR when he said in his State of the Union Address to Congress in Jan. 1961- In the name of a great President whose birthday we honor today, closing his final State of the Union Message sixteen years ago. "We pray that we may be worthy of the unlimited opportunities that God has given us." This is the vision that stands before America even today in 2024.   ...

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A biography of Steve Jobs that Jobs asked Walter Isaacson to write about his life. Isaacson is the author of biographies of Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein. After being diagnosed with cancer in late 2003, Jobs called Isaacson and asked him whether he would write Jobs's biography. He told Isaacson he wanted his kids to know him as Jobs wasn't always there for them. Jobs told Isaacson to write freely and sought no control over the content. The book delves into the effect on Jobs of his adoption, his search for meaning in life, the women in his life, his extreme behaviour and a sense even among his friends that he could be mean. He fathers a daughter at age 23, and does not have much to do with her till she is 10, and he coud treat his adoptive parent sometimes with callousness. His adoption affects Jobs early on as he describes it- at age 6 a girl living across the street asks Jobs if his adoption really expressed that his "real parents did not want you." His adoptive parents who did not have a college education, were very supportive and caring of Jobs. The effect of his adoption led Jobs on a search for meaning in life, on a seven month visit to India, into Zen Buddhist readings, extreme diets and primal scream therapy. Jobs was not interested in mechanical things and "did not want to get his hands dirty," says his adoptive father. It was the excitement of the surroundings in the early eighties in the area around Palo Alto and San Francisco that affected Jobs. The book describes his relationships with Joan Baez, a folk singer, computer consultant, Tina Redse and former Goldman Sachs trader, Laurene Powell. Right down to his last days Jobs met with Isaacson, reflecting on the meaning of death and what survives after it. Maybe its just an an on-off switch he says....

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Sindhi sentiment in Pakistan. Behind the calls for democracy and elections sentiment is gathering in the Sindh that supports looking after Sindhi interests. Because the Punjabi majority in Pakistan has dominated the bureaucracy and the military and looked after the interests of the Punjab. The nature of the Pakistani state not providing safeguards and devolution of power to the provinces, there is some basic underlying tension even without the problems that have been piled on it by the migration of Pashtuns and Punjabis into Hyderabad and Karanchi, and the killings of 2 popular Sindhi politicians in the Bhutto clan, and the army's suppression of a Sindhi revolt in 1983 with harsh treatment of Sindhis. Now the aftermath of the new Bhutto killing is taking a new turn with calls for Sindh and its 38 million people to go its own way. The Bhuttos have not supported it but the sentiment is now appearing to take a life of its own, disregarding Zardari and Bilwal, spouse and son of Benazir, who are said to be of Baluchi descent. The large dam on the upper reaches of the Indus river benefits military officers who own land there but shrinks water supply to the Sindh which is on the lower reaches of the Indus river. This further aggravates tensions. The province is now run by Punjabi associates of Musharraf and this does not help matters as Sindhi interests may have been ignored. If there is sentiment for a separate state, the state of Pakistan that was built in 1947 and how it has shaped itself with Punjabi military running things is not designed to handle that kind of upheaval very well. It lacks the checks and balances, devolution of powers to provinces enough to keep local representation strong, and the avenues of expressing sentiment being kept open for local ethnic communities. The Pakistan military is strong and there are nuclear weapons, but how effective is that if the goodwill and sentiment of the Sindhis is lost. In the long term the only hope may be for an economic union much like that of the EU in South Asia in which the Punjab, Baluchistan, and the Sindh could coexist with India and among themselves in whatever form the political aspect of states takes shape, making the politcal shape of states less relevant, and like the EU putting the years of internecine strife behind them. Looking towards a better economic future, open trade, investment, communication and infrastructure links in Southern Asia and parts of Central Asia and Iran. ...

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Problems facing the energy industry in India include lack of coal supplies to use all of the existing electricity generation plants. Lack of investment and modernization in the coal industry is holding back tapping of large coal reserves. India is expected to see a huge surge in energy demand in the next twenty years, with the International Energy Agency saying India will need $1.6 trillion in investment in power generation, transmission and distribution through 2035, and $550 million investment in coal, oil and gas sectors.

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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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IBM is using Peace Corps type programs to give managers and other employees exposure to foreign countries and cultures. They do small projects in groups to help people in Asian and other developing countries to gain exposure and learn how to work in other cultures and languages. Its anew way to do management training in alive setting for a business like IBM's that is now truly internationalized with a majority of sales coming from foreign countries. In 2009 500 people will participate and it will do small projects in 9 countries including Brazil, India, Malaysia and South Africa. The group spends 3 months before going overseas reading about their host countries, studying the problems they are assigned to work on, and getting to know their group members. Once in the host country they work with local governments, universities and business groups to do projects from upgrading water quality in alocal area to upgrading technology for a government agency. ays Kevin Thompson who conceived of this Corporate Service Corps and manges it. He says the goal is to create a transformative experience in a foreign culture. One IT manager says she has learned to work closely with tam members in India and China as aresult of this experience. Before this she would tend to assign something and leave it to them....

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The $787 million settlement is for defamation damages for Dominion Voting Systems and its owner State Street Capital. On the fundamental issue of free and fair elections and freely elected governments, the settlement does not ask for an explicit statement by Fox News of misconduct. To understand what happened one has to look at the origins of the FNN in the Melbourne Herald of 1920-1950 under Keith Murdoch and the political controversy pursued to increase readership in that period. NYT says it has an implicit plea of "no contest" to several pre trial findings by the presiding judge Eric Davis- "The evidence does not support that Fox News Network television carried good faith disinterested reporting." NYT explains this as the judge saying that spreading a conspiracy theory does not fall under legally protected "news gathering." The presiding judge also decided that - "Evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that it is CRYSTAL clear none of the statements related to Dominion (by Fox News) are true." As the case is not going to trial readers may ask what happened not just in this case but in Fox News and Trump over the last decade that caused risks to the framework of democracy, of elections and transfer of power setup by the founding fathers. Fox News Network has its origins in the Melbourne Herald of the 1920-1950 period when Keith Murdoch setup the business in Australia that was expanded a generation later by Rupert Murdoch. Keith Murdoch was heavily influenced in his newspaper career by Lord Northcliffe, and by Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian from New Brunswick, who both created a form of journalism that used political controversy to increase readership between the two world wars and in the period after that to 1957. The readership of these papers ran to 3-4 million which in that period in Britain or Australia was huge. Beaverbook took controversial positions that were built on his idea that the bloc Britain should represent was Canada, Australia and Britain with the British Empire, to have little to do with Europe or even the US. For this reason he did not support Britain's entry into the Second World War, or Britain joining in the Cold War against the Soviets till the Berlin Blockade. British prime minister Macmillan held back announcing Britain joining the European Economic Community (predecessor to the EU), because of the power of the Beaverbrook newspapers who were not interested in Europe. And British prime minister Clement Attlee faced the bitter opposition of Churchill and Beaverbrook/Northcliffe papers in sending Mountbatten to negotiate a transfer of power to India in 1947. The win of Labour's Clement Attlee in the 1951 election was opposed by Beaverbrook using the most sensational language. One can see the origins of what happened in the Trump period in the newspaper origins from the 1900-1957 period of Australian and British television networks. Of Keith Murdoch, National Biography of the Australian National University says- he supported the conservative stances of his time, was a remarkable entrepreneur and organizer of industry. Yet it also says his judgement was faulty. That he had "no real social philosophy"and lacked the originality to make useful contributions to public policy. Of Rupert Murdoch it can be said that he was also a remarkable entrepreneur and organizer of industry who built the newspaper business in Australia from one Adelaide paper left to him by Keith Murdoch. Yet his judgement proved faulty and there was no real concept of public policy or "real social philosophy." There is also the fact that like Beaverbrook from New Brunswick, Murdoch from western Australia was raised in the period of the British Empire and Commonwealth, had no real experience or grasp of the idea that is America set by the founding fathers and renewed by Lincoln, then FDR. An awareness of the origins of Murdoch's FNN is useful because it helps the American public close this chapter in the way democracies functioned in the past, and write better chapters for the future before us, keeping alive the idea that is America.     ...

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Typical of so much of what is written about the World Health Organization and its role in the pandemic, this podcast in the WSJ fails to quickly convey the critical function of the WHO as an early warning system the world has depended on, including China. The H1N1 epidemic originated in Mexico. Asian countries including China and India depended on very quick response from the country where the epidemic originated  in allowing entry into the affected area for experts from advanced countries such as the U.S. The global response was then coordinated across countries quickly with complete transparency. The head of China's CDC himself faced a problem with transparency with the provincial authorites in Wuhan. 1.    Fundamentally this quick entry was denied the U.S. Request by U.S. to China was made on Jan. 6 for U.S. team to go to Wuhan, quick permission was denied and given only about 6 weeks later on Feb 16. This delay is the crux of the problem for the U.S.. Taiwan confirmed human to human transmission on Jan. 1, the WHO was saying this was not clear as late as Jan. 14. These costly delays are what the U.S.  letter is about.  The head of the CDC China Gao Fu called Dr. Redfield head of CDC in the U.S. on the next day after he suspected Wuhan provincial authorites were vague about what was happening. Gao Fu was alarmed when scanning the internet on December 30, 2019, about rumors of a vaguely worded lung disease in internal memos of Wuhan. He called Wuhan authorites and was not getting clear answers on that day, then deciding on December 31 to send his own team to Wuhan, as reported in German magazine Der Spiegel- Hackenbroch, Zand, 05/20/2020.  Der Spiegel says in its special report on the early period in Wuhan that Gao Fu was so alarmed about what was happening enough to be in tears in his series of calls with Dr. Redfield in the immediate days that followed. The date was shortly after the GAO Fu sent the team to Wuhan, December 31 and New Years Day 2020, as reported in Der Spiegel. See the link to Lyrarc gist of Der Spiegel's "A Failed Deception: The Early Days of the Coronavirus in Wuhan."  2.  President Trump points out the standards of the WHO- in the concluding point of his letter to WHO- when a three time prime minister of Norway, Gro Brundtland was head of the WHO during the SARS crisis of 2003. She acted quickly and decisively and no time was lost. It is this failure of the early warning system under the new president of the WHO after 2017 Dr. Tedros that alarms the U.S.  with about 100,000 deaths.  3.  This failure it can now be said was partly a result of a election in 2017 for the position of WHO president which was flawed. This was the first time a WHO head, an important position was put up for an election. The Executive Board was responsible for this appointment since the founding of the WHO as part of the UN, based in Geneva, Switzerland, after World War II. This system worked. The election was clearly a bad process for appointing the president of the WHO which should be done entirely on the capabilities of the person holding this position not on a flawed voting process. It is flawed because India and Bangladesh hit by a cyclone during the coronavirus have suffered greatly, as have other countries, but had only 2 votes for 1.5 billion people, when Barbados (385,000 population) and Laos (7 million) which had less than one  hundredth the population had the same number of votes. The U.S. had one vote. The election resulted in lobbying and a process in which many candidates stayed away because they simply would not go through such a process. The position was too important to the world- most of the advanced countries had forgotten about the danger of epidemics to let this happen by 2017, as shown in the way the austerity years led to cancellation of the preparations for pandemic in France and Britain. The austerity years and neglect of public health during these tech boom years in the western world made it possible for this to happen. 3.   Along with the 1 month ultimatum action is already being taken to restore the effectiveness of the importance of the Executive Board. The head of the health ministry in India, Dr. Harsh Vardhan, has been appointed the new chairman of the Executive Board on May 22. This restores the voice of billions of people in Asia in the process, and brings the major countries with the greatest risk in a pandemic into the decision process for tackling the pandemic, this includes the rest of the world.     ...

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The demand for ships went up so steeply that shipping rates hit the roof, and the prices of ships went up accordingly. Between the end of 2006 and July 2008 , shipyards received enough commissions, says the Economist, that this would double the world's fleet. Just as demand has collapsed and international trade has gone down, about 9000 ships are coming onstream. Now 11% of fleet capacity justs sits on the water, in the seas outside the harbors of Singapore, Hong Kong and other southeast Asian ports. A 150 tonne cape class ship that sold in 2003 for $18.5 million in the used market, when rates for charter were $15,000 a day, had risen by summer 2008, to $85 million with rates of $175,000 a day. These rates went up even more to $300,000 a day, which is 20 times what it was in 2003. And rates today are back down to $15,000 a day, where they were in 2003. This ship, cited by a broker, to give some idea of the extent of this boom and its collapse, was sold for scrap at $7 million. And South Korean shipyards are taking this into account, in their pricing and collection of payment, with 20% demanded upfront, 60% during construction, and 20% upon delivery. The backlog in shipyards is estimated by Clarkson Research, a maritime research firm, at $526 billion, even as banks are leery of lending and concerned about the value of the collateral in the event of default. Some smaller Korean shipyards are closing. Steve Mann, analyst at HSBC, says that half of the orders for delivery in 2010 will be delayed, so that there is work for 2011 and inventory or excess capacity does not pile up on the oceans. Even in this situation China, India and Vietnam continue to support the expansion of their own shipyards. This suggests additional losses for shipbuilders, shipping lines and the banks that lend to shipyards. All this also goes to show that the rush to industrialize, once it gets a firm footing- like it has in the Chinese model of increasing investment and local governments pushing infrastructure, industry and export factories with officials judged on GNP growth numbers- can exacerbate a boom-bust cycle. This is one industry, others include machinery manufacturers, commodity producers, and manufacturers of parts that go into finished products assembled in China for export. This means it would take the world economy down with it, if some external factor like the drop in export demand suddenly slows everything down. Machinery manufacturers in Germany, commodity producers in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Australia, and manufacturers of the high tech parts in Japan and Taiwan that are shipped to China for assembly, all go down in this boom-bust cycle, in a dramatic manner. ...