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Clearly a company thats privately held like Chrysler now is under Cerberus and under Feinberg's direction can provide the incentives, compensation and equity that others can't match. Feinberg was talking to Jim Press since this summer, and leaves Toyota at a time when it doesn't have any respected American face. Its surprising that his new role at Toyota even as a Board member left him away from the day to day operations that he loved doing and was unhappy about his role as mainly a public affairs person. At the same time the events in the credit markets and the broader economy also point to the urgency of having the right leadership in place. This is reflected in the difficulty financing $10 billion of the remaining Chrysler debt in the credit markets with investors reluctant to invest in prevailing market conditions, thus Cerberus and Daimler each took $2 billion in debt to complete the buyout. Top priorities for Chrysler getting the same concessions that the UAW gave GM and Ford in 2005 for health benefits. Tom LaSorda will lead these negotiations as well as look after plant operations and purchasing. Jim Press will lead the effort for product strategy, marketing and shaping Chrysler's new dealer network from the oversized network of 3700 dealers that it has become over the years. As this was his passion at Toyota and he has a decent credibility with Dealers. He also brings knowledge of the Toyota way of constant improvement which he applied in marketing and at the customer level in addition to its well known application in manufacturing....

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Can the new intelligence assessment that Iran gave up the effort to make nuclear weapons three years ago affect oil prices and to what extent? At least it calms the anxiety that there is an unknown out there being the development of nuclear weapons in the backyard of Iraq where US is involved and in a major oil producing region. This should take some of the pressure off oil prices and any its significant in another way, that any developments in the middle east would be taken in a different light, not as a part of a cloud of uncertainty but taken by evaluating the new development on its own merits carefully. Interestingly this happened in the same week that another development ocurred. The President of Venezuela lost a referendum in Venezuela designed to givie him emergency powers by amending the constitution. Even by controlling most of the media and using oil money to support social programs and giveaways to the poor and working classes, Chavez lost the referendum that he initiated. It was not clear what would happen in Venezuela, and the Iran development was a surprise, so this also means that in international affairs educated people will look at a lot of different possibilities from now on before drawing any conclusions. In fact this is exactly what appears to have happened in the case of the intelligence on Iran, as mentioned here the new assessment was based on allowing different agencies and groups within the government to come up with different conclusions and then to test the facts again and again, and to question old assumptions....

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Obama vists Acrra, Ghana, July 11, 2009. It is an emotional moment for Obama, and for Ghana and the African continent as a whole. It seems the whole nation was out on the streets,on crowded rooftops, packing balconies, leaning out of windows, to get a glimpse of Obama. Particularly emotional is the moment when he stood at the Door of No Return at Cape Coast Castle, a notorious slave port perched on the ocean. He spoke about the existence of "evil" that he had seen at Buchenwald, and here again. He spoke up against the poverty of Africa that is compounded by the greed, corruption and the lack of responsibility of the elites in African countries. Obama said "Africa doesn't need strong men, it needs strong institutions." He talked about his personal experience: "I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family's story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story. Some of you know my grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him boy for much of his life." See the related story on Nigeria, which was avoided by the President on his visit. And where because of the corruption and lack of responsible government, influential Nigerian voices themselves feel this was the right thing to do. This is one area in which Obama picks up from a strong effort by President Bush. Bush tried to frame policy by rewarding good government and building institutions through programs like the Millenium CHallenge Corporation, an antipoverty effort that gave Ghana $547 million in 2006. Both Bush and Clinton visited here....

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The collapse of the will of people around Yanukovych, including a deputy interior minister, as fighting units moved with weapons taken from an armory in Lviv towards Kiev, may have been the decisive event that decided the fate of the Yakunovych government. The deputy interior minister then negotiated with a protest leader Levus realizing that other than the front line of police the rest of the police were ready to abandon the fight. Levus then negotiated a safe corridor for the police to withdraw. As the Polish diplomat Sikorski came out to the square he found to his complete astonishment the police simply disappearing from the Square in Kiev. Hours earlier he had warned protesters that a crackdown was coming and they would all be wiped out, according to a report in the WSJ by Benoit, Norman and Fidler, 2/22/2014, so that they should accept a deal which would set a date for new elections but not lead to the immediate resignation of Yakunovych. That deal it also appears came after a Putin call to Yakunovych and not simply from diplomatic pressures, and it is probable that Putin had realized earlier than the diplomats that most of the police were not going to fight. Bringing in the army would have had dangerous consequences for relations between Germany and Russia in particular- as German public and chancellor Merkel felt strongly about the situation in Ukraine- and relations with the European Union and the U.S. Putin, Yakunovych, and even the EU diplomats may have missed the depth of feeling in Ukraine and the organization of the protest movement. Germany and chancellor Merkel, with her determination to make things come out right in Europe after a flawed history, gave hope to the protest movement. ...

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Mario Monti says he had to do things quickly after his financial emergency government took office in 2011. There was less consultation and most of the initial reforms were done under pressure from the EU and a crisis situation in financial markets. Change takes some time to accomplish, says Monti, his period in offfice was too brief to tackle the entrenched interests and bureucracy. He and many of the cabinet had never been part of any government, yet had to act quickly. The oath of office on Nov. 16, "Save Italy" decree on Dec. 4. His government simply told the unions this is the pernsion reform, did not consult with them. As the crisis receded the pressure receded, and with 2013 elections approaching the political parties were back to electoral politics. Monti's view is that for decades the interest and corporatist groups have taken over government. Under the right, the inital mood of change gave way to takeover by entrenched interests leading to no changes under Berlusconi. The left feared pension reform would hurt them politically. If he had five years, Monti says, he would have tackled the bureaucracy the first day. In the end, Monti views his coming to Rome as landing from Mars, someone from the outside tackling deepseated problems in a short time frame. An assessment of Monti's contribution should take this into account. He was unpopular for the austerity measures which may have deepened the recession. Yet his contribution was in bringing a new seriousness to Italy's problems after decades of neglect by both the right and the left in Italian politics and government, and by corporatist interests in government. The beginning made by Monti, now gives Matteo Renzi a chance to make the tougher changes needed for Italy to return to growth....

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Barry Schwartz, a Psychology Professor at Swarthmore College, and author of Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, points out that the 35 years of research shows that you get exactly what you pay for, but it turns out to be the opposite of what you want, and there are a lot of ways that incentive based compensation can go wrong. In theory choosing a parameter like share price and creating incentives to promote shareholder interests through higher share price as a measure of executive performance is reasonable, but it assumes that there is no manipulation of share price, or other external factors do not distort the measure of performance. In reality you get a situation like Merrill Lynch and other financial firms that gave out huge bonuses and executive pay even while bad decisions- that were later to sink the firms- were being incentivized. Schwartz points to research worldwide by Bruno Frey, Oberhozer-Gee, Uri Gneezy, James Heyman and Dan Ariely, that shows that incentives tend to remove the moral dimension from decisionmaking. Heyman's reaearch showed that when people offer passers by a token payment for help lifting a couch from a van, they are less likely to lend a hand when they are offered nothing. The question people ask themselves he says when money isn't part of the equation is very different he says: what are my responsibilities, what should I do that will fulfill these responsibilities to other people and to my country? In his view even though we put a lot of faith in incentives as a society to influence behaviour in a positive way, they actually do the reverse. Even if they work for some time, after a while some people who have fewer scruples learn ways to game the system and gradually distort the way it functions, leading to perverse results endangering all....

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Paul Bremer the American in charge on the ground in Iraq issued a decree on May 22, 2003 disbanding the Iraqi army, to extirpate all forms of Saddamism and dismantle the intelligence and command centres of the Iraqi military. This was not part of the original invasion plan according to some reports. Bremer's decision sent many of these officers to fight against the Americans as insurgents, cost American lives and lives of the insurgents effectively turning the invasion into a years long war with hit and run insurgents formerly of the Saddam army. Also effectively destroying or weakening the former elements of Saddam's army. In the process it gave Shiites the first hope of living free of Sunni control and Sunnis who wanted no part of Baathist politics and repression their freedom to exercize their rights, it also brought in the turmoil and lack of security, the bombing of Shiite holy sites by politically motivated Sunni elements and Shiite reprisals, that led to effective partition of the country something a long history of ethnic conflicts and colonialism may have already exacerbated long before the arrival of Americans. The documents of the war planning may suggest that keeping the Iraqi army intact was part of the plan but Bremer could not have issued the decree and had Bush back him up unless Bush and Rumsfeld felt the same way about extirpating Saddamism, seeing it in the way Americans treated Nazis and Nazi instituitons after invading Germany and seeing it the way the Americans saw the Japanese militarists and their institutions after the invasion of Japan. The Baathist treatment of the Kurds, the gas attacks on the Kurds, the destruction of Shia in the marshes after the first American invasion, the repression of Sunni and Shiite, were reminiscent of Nazism and Japanese militarism....

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The Obama administration denied approval for the TransCanada Keystone pipeline. President Obama made it clear that the decision was made because of the "arbitrary" February approval deadline imposed by Republicans in Congress, and said this "is not a judgement on the merits of the pipeline." The administration suggested that TransCanada reapply. TransCanada CEO Russ Girling says the company is "fully committed to the construction of Keystone XL, and that it "will reapply for a presidential permit and expect a new application would be processed in an expedited manner to allow for an in-service date of late 2014." Experts say the U.S. could reuse some of the studies and analyses and that the process would take 18-24 months. Alberta's premier, Alison Redford, says she believes the project will get approved.

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Xi's speech at the 20th CCP party congress is strikingly similar to the speech he gave at the 100th anniversary of the CCP on July 23, 2021. Xi sees the CCP, the Communist party of China, as carrying the mission of the May 14, 1919 Movement for modernization of China that spans the period of semicolonialism with China not much different from British India, and split into spheres of foreign influence, particularly British and Japanese, the May 14, 1919 Movement after the revolution of 1912 that ended the royal dynasty, the Japanese invasion and loss of tens of millions of lives, the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 under Mao, and the reforms of market economy under socialist rule under Deng. This is the larger context in which Xi sees the CCP.

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This WSJ report says Chris Christie's role has been reduced in the transition. Mike Spence, the Vice President, is at the top of the organization, Vince Preibus, who led the Republican National Committee, will be chief of staff at the White House, and Steve Bannon will be the strategist. Trump is the only person to be elected president without holding a government or military position. This makes it imperative for Republicans to put in key people with experience into the adminsitration. Others who are playing a critical role are Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who supported Trump from the early days of his candidacy. Bannon is seen as strategist for his focus on midwestern industrial states and the working class, traditionally Democratic constituencies, which gave Trump the small margin of 110,000 votes to win in 2016. 

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This important WSJ report shows how the CDC labs failed to come with the test after contamination of a component and failure of the third part of the three part test components. In the absence of a working test from CDC where delays cost three weeks of February the private labs all over the country and state labs could have developed their own test, yet HHS and FDA required approval for these labs to develop their own test and use it. From Feb. 8 when state and city public health labs detected problems with the CDC test to Feb 29 when solutions were developed including simply excluding the third part of the three component test, and letting labs around the country do their own test, were 3 crucial weeks that let the virus spread out of control. The CDC, HHHS, and the FDA and their managers and heads of departments bear responsibility for these errors. Week after week the delays continued, instead the two component test which detects if the genetic material in the sample is coronavirus material, could simply have been approved at the outset instead of the approval for this given weeks later. The third component of the test checks if the virus mutated, according to this report. There is no explanation why the labs all over the U.S. were not allowed to go ahead on February 9 itself or within a few days after that to develop their own tests once it was clear the CDC test did not work on that day. CDC officials failed to recognize that there was a possibility that they may not be able to fix the faulty third component of the test and the risks if they gave false reassurances. There is also no explanation of why a German designed test was not used once the CDC test failed on Feb. 9, which would be a proper way for action considering that this pandemic had already shutdown parts of China by this time. Alarming also is the mention in this report that on Feb. 22 a FDA official in charge of lab diagnostics  flies to Atlanta where the CDC Respiratory Diagnostic lab which developed the test is located. His boss FDA medical device center director is cited from later information as describing the lab as "filthy" meaning the lab had the potential to contaminate, and going so far as saying that if it had been any other lab it would have been shut down. Considering that investment in public health has deteriorated over the last two decades and that there has been a massive misallocation of capital in the country away from public infrastructure this is appalling. The thought of critical labs for emergency health needs as not being up to high quality standards in the U.S. as a result of two decades of misspending, that this shows, is very disturbing.  This WSJ report is based on interviews with people who know about the testing crisis, and undisclosed emails, correspondence on the issues involved. Community transmission began in January 2020 in the U.S. These delays were costly in February and could have been prevented either by going with the German design on Feb 10 or asking labs across the U.S. to develop their own test, and letting other labs immediately use the modified 2 component test of CDC that worked instead of doing this action weeks later. Mardi Gras on Feb 25 and other places where large crowds gathered in sports stadiums could have been stopped had testing gone forward and shown the true extent of the community transmission in these critical weeks.  First China delayed a U.S. team of experts coming into the country for weeks, and then the CDC, FDA, HHS, failed to get testing started, creating  a false sense of complacency. Two crucial errors outside and inside the country that caused so much damage to America and the world.   ...

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President Trump outlines a plan for Afghanistan that increases the U.S. troop presence from about 8500 with an addition of 4000 more troops and advisors, in addition to a counter terrorism force. To war weary public in the U.S. he says: "I share your frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money- and most importantly, lives- trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our security interests above all other considerations." About his criticism of the war when president Obama was in office as a huge costly waste of resources Trump said: My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like to follow my instincts... I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk at the Oval Office." After resisting the advice of his own advisers Trump decided to fire Bannon who had supported use of American private security contractors for the war in Afghanistan, and used parts of the media to question national security advisor McMaster's views on this. Gen. Mattis, completed a strategy review that showed the mistake of creating a vacuum would repeat the situation of Iraq where president Obama withdrew forces in 2011, leading to a sequence of negative events- with Russia, Iran and Islamic State moving into the vacuum, making American intervention in the war necessary, increase in terrorist incidents worldwide, and a flood of refugees into Europe. Ironically clearing the path for an outsider's bid for the White House, with Brexit in which refugee fears and uncontrolled immigration played a part, and the news of terrorism and the war in Syria-Iraq creating a sense of insecurity. A key difference in the Trump approach with Obama's approach is that "conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables will guide our actions from now on," in line with Trump's criticism of Obama's approach. The military in the U.S. has long maintained that the best approach would have been to insist on U.S. presence in negotiations with the Iraqi government under the sectarian prime minister Nouri Maliki. Gen. Mattis was head of Central Command under the Obama administration and must have pushed the view of the military to president Obama to no avail. Failure to do so led to the growth of Shiite militias and the alienation of Sunnis in Mosul, leading to the fall of Mosul to Islamic State thus creating the current crisis. Gen. Mattis and Lt. Gen McMaster are intimately aware of the problem and must have convinced Trump that this is what really happened, that a repeat would waste the sacrifices of American soldiers in the twin wars. Trump gave this as his reason when he said in his televised speech to the nation- essentially a criticism of Bush that he expanded the conflict too quickly, and Obama exiting too quickly to create a void. Trump call his policy "principled realism."  The roots of the crisis are in the India-Pakistan conflict. Like the conflict in South East Asia the conflict in South Asia extending from Iran to India and Pakistan, may take a generation to overcome. A rapprochement between India and Pakistan, beginning with trade and economic relations, is not only in America's interest, it also provides the basis for a realistic American withdrawal. ...

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Transcripts released for the U.S. Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) 2006 meetings show Fed chairman Bernanke and then New York Fed president Geithner ignored the risks of a hard landing from the mortgage and housing bubble. Geithner even went so far as to say about retiring chairman Greenspan, who also ignored the risks from the bubble and set the tone during his long period as chairman at the Fed: "I'd like the record to show that I think you're pretty terrific, too...And thinking about the probabilities, I think the risk that we decide in the future that you're even better than we think is higher than the alternative." In evaluating the risks facing the U.S. economy in December 2006, at the height of the bubble, Geithner stated: "The current weakness in the economy still seems principally to stem from the direct effects of the slowdown in housing on construction activity... The softer than expected recent numbers don't argue in our view, for a substantial reassessment of the risks in the outlook." The Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, said at the first meeting in March 2006: " Strong fundamentals support a relatively soft landing in housing... I think we are unlikely to see growth being derailed by the housing market." When a Fed economist gave a presentation in March 2006 on the risks in Iceland, Bernanke said- "We'd like a full report on the Icelandic," at which point the rest of the group erupted with laughter. Iceland defaulted on its debts in 2008. Warnings about housing by Fed Governor Susan Bies were ignored by Bernanke and Geithner. Two highly leveraged Wall Street investment banks collapsed in 2008- Bear Stearns in March and Lehman in September- from the impact of the bursting of the bubble in housing and mortgages. When they collapsed these banks were leveraged at about 30 to 1, as most of the warning signs had been ignored by regulators including the Federal Reserve....

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As she runs for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton faces a difficult challenge- to give Democrats a third term in the White House. Presidents elected for a third term such as Truman who followed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and president George H.W. Bush who followed Ronald Reagan, were helped by the popularity of the president from their party who preceded them. Reagan's popularity rating was 57%, in the month preceding the election of George H.W. Bush, according to Gallop poll. Truman continued the popular policies of FDR, and took a strong foreign policy direction with the help of a capable team led by Marshall and Acheson in responding to the Soviets in the Cold War, before the 1948 election. In that election Truman upset political pundit predictions. He also brought an extraordinary tenacity in the rail tour across the U.S. and on the campaign trail. Hillary Clinton faces the 2016 election with president Obama's popularity rating at 46%, with only 32% saying the country is on the right track, in the WSJ poll. This means Clinton will have to distance herself from Obama to some degree. Other issues include her age 67 years, and the sense that she is somehow from the past in U.S. politics, offset by the experience she now brings. Hillary's popularity rating show 44% having a positive image in a WSJ-NBC poll of March 2015, down from 56% when she gave up her position as Secretary of State in the Obama administration. Her main Republican challenger, Jeb Bush, has only a 23% favorable rating in the same WSJ/NBC poll. Hillary's strategy for 2015 is to avoid large gatherings and try to meet people in small groups in this election campaign, so that she can bring a personal touch and come alive as a candidate relating to the everyday aspirations of working people. Hillary's election will depend on whether she can mount the kind of campaign Truman fought and relate directly to ordinary voters....

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The FDIC acknowledges that it has not been able to get banks interested in a pilot program called the Legacy Loans Program. That program was designed to give the banks an opportunity to sell off $1 billion of troubled mortgages. Since November with the efforts of the Troubled Asset Program under Secretary Paulson to have the banks sell off these assets in an auction or some other way, the whole issue of getting the toxic or troubled assets off the books of the banks has been effectively shelved. The Obama administration's version of this was the Geithner Public Private Partnership program, but this like Paulson's TARP never really got off the ground. Instead several things have happened that have enabled banks to show higher profits and improve stock prices. The period from March 2009 to June 2009, a period of several months has seen bank stock prices recover and banks are now able to raise capital on their own from investors. The government's "stress tests" gave the banks credibility with investors and they were designed not to be so stringent as to affect confidence. The mark to market rule has also been relaxed so that banks are no longer required to show these toxic assets at prices that reflect large losses. Bank executives also are wary of the new executive compensation rules of the government. All of these things have combined to create asituation where some confidence has been restored, but at the same time experts are pointing out that the underlying problems of an estimated $1 trillion in troubled assets remains. Banks are even less likely to want to part with these assets at lower prices now that some semblence of confidence is returning, as they would then have to show large losses. What this implies is that if the economy suffered a setback, these problems would return and be just as intractable as ever....

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TransCanada says it will reapply for the permit to build the Keystone pipeline from Alberta oil sands region to the Gulf Coast refineries.

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Craig Smith, the head of Surgery at Columbia University's hospital in New York, and Craig Smith the writer using language that provides solace to many people at a difficult time. He is also poetic at times quoting from John Wooden, as well as Emily Dickinson. He is in the middle of this public health crisis that is New York City today. When he gave the presidential address to the American Association for Thoracic Surgery he opened and closed his lecture with meditations on a Yeats poem. Here he is as a human talking to humans caught in a most perplexing time for medicine.

He quotes Emily Dickinson in one note saying- 

"Not opening when the dawn will come/ I open every door." Doors are opening all over the place.

 

 

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Italian born Canadian Sergio Marchionne, a former tax consultant turned auto executive who joined Fiat in 2004, planned the acquisition of Fiat in 2009. GM's payout to Chrysler following a decision not to acquire Fiat, and the U.S. government's need to merge Chrysler with another auto company after a bailout, gave Marchionne the opportunity to acquire Chrysler on favorable terms. Hard bargaining with the government led to acquiring Chrysler for free, using the $2 billion from GM to show the government that it would make the needed investments to bring Chrysler back from bankruptcy. This decision, the bringing in of outside talent, and the revival of the auto industry following the bailout, has led to the success of Fiat Chrysler.  Sergio Marchionne had the right instincts to persuade the government that Fiat with its small cars including the Fiat 500 was the right company to run Chrysler, and supporting president Obama's fuel efficiency goals gave him the right credentials with the Obama administration. A chain smoker of cigarettes who also gulped down espressos, her was a workaholic sometimes carrying 5 smartphones. He passed away at the age of 66 from health complications. Ironically the Dodge Dart was presented as the car that would get 40 miles per gallon. Other efforts at fuel efficient automobiles have not happened in the way it was envisioned by the Obama administration. The Dart did not become popular. Only the redesigned Fiat made it as a hit in Europe. The plan to import small Fiats to the U.S. remained only on paper. As the auto industry revived Marchionne canceled plans to make nearly all of the Chrysler cars and shifted production to more popular Jeeps and Dodge Ram, a move followed by Ford and GM. Fuel efficiency issues from the bankruptcy period are still alive today with the decision to leave small car manufacturing to Japanese and German carmakers, and the efforts of the Trump administration to turn back the Obama administration fuel efficiency targets.  ...

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The Times of India looks at four decades of the BJP party's presence in India's largest state Uttar Pradesh. The first BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is from this Hindi speaking region.

In the 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections the BJP party increased its vote percentage from 39% to 42%. The BJP plans for rapid economic development in the state were affected by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021, as resources were diverted to tackle vaccination and healthcare priorities. Uttar Pradesh is India's largest state with a population of 250 million. Much of India's development agenda is being shaped by the state's leadership and the federal government with the Master Plan of Gati Shakti and development from the grassroots to new airports, logistics for export markets and Made in India, new highways and modernized rail networks, infrastructure development, and industry.

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The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a U.S. administration request staying the effect of a lower court ruling, giving the government the $3.6 billion in U.S. Defense Department funds to build a border wall. This money goes towards the goal of building 500 miles of the wall by the end of 2020. In a 2-1 decision the court majority cited a Supreme Court order from July 2019 that gave the Trump administration the go ahead to use military funds for border wall construction.

The $3.6 billion is part of a $6.7 billion plan of spending under an emergency declaration by president Trump on grounds of border security. So far 100 miles of border wall have replaced flimsier construction barriers that existed. The government now needs to convince private land owners along large stretches of the border along the Rio Grande and other areas to give up their land for the wall. 

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China's tariffs on US products could be called self-respect tariffs as US exports to China are small compared to China's $1 trillion surplus a year. $143 billion mainly oilseeds and grains! US business not willing to rely on US labor created the outshoring that built Chinese industrial growth, shipping out technology in the process, that created this situation. Consultants to Apple at the time such as myself bringing Total Quality of Management from Japan to the US, could see the failure of production quality at the Colorado Springs plant just before Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1998. About 20-25% of PC product was defective on the production lines seen with my own eyes. Looking back I believe it was not just the workers but the managers and engineering that needed to guide and motivate the workers with new ways to build in quality control. These were the days when Apple's Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook to revamp production and ship it to China. American workers got blamed. Yet as Jim Carlton shows in "Apple the Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders," by 1996 a new German CEO Michael Spindler 1993-1996 had driven the company to the ground. The struggle with Microsoft gave Jobs an idea- by shifting production to a low cost location he could make the high margins to outinvest all competitors with new products-ipods, iphones, ipads. There is nothing wrong with American workers and their craftsmanship. Timeline- Steve Jobs returns to Apple 1997-1998 Tim Cook is hired from Compaq to revamp manufacturing in 1998 1999-2000 - the strategy is made to shift all of the production to China. Jobs could generate the margins and quality to challenge Microsoft, and profits to invest in new products 2020 -   the weakness of the strategy is apparent with supply side shock for chips and computers with the pandemic stopping shipping 2024 - after taking small steps to shift production to India does little to shift back to America 2025- Apple facing serious tariffs and the country's mood shifting to Make in the USA tells the new US president DJT it will invest $500 billion to shift production back to America. ...