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Democrats working to challenge the big cuts planned by Republicans in federal, state and local spending on everything from education to essential services.

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A leisurely Sunday in New York city for Christine Baranski, who works in theatre, film and television. With the kids grown up, she does not go back to Connecitcut. Its her girl friends day as she rehearses her lines in the park and visits the museum bookstore, has dinner at bistro, and goes to bed early.

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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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This New York Times editorial says a smaller Wall Street and growing jobs in other fields will be good for New York as well as good for the country. It says New York politicians should focus on finding new ways for New York to broaden its tax base and get new businesses and new opportunites in fields such as media, advertising, entertainment, health care and tourism. Especially welcome are initiatives such as the science and tech campus of Cornell University promoted by Mayor Bloomberg. Tighter financial rules and higher capital requirements are good for the country and for New York the editorial emphasizes, because they help control reckless banking practices that destroy capital and opportunities for growth elsewhere in the economy. It points to Kevin Rose's Nov. 21, 2011 account in the Times showing a healthy culture shift in New York and the country with the status jobs being seen not at Goldman Sachs but at Google, Apple and Facebook. Rose's account shows that in the last 3 years the number of Wall Street employees of ages 20-34 declined by 25%....

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Thomas Hoenig was Governor of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank for 20 years. Here he talks about the dangers of "too big to fail" with Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times. He is due to retire at the age of 65 in 2011. Hoeinig has stood for conservative safe financial practices for U.S. financial institutions throughout his 20 year old career, and cautioned against extending the government safety net for banks that engage in risky financial activities including derivatives trading. And essential element of safe financial practice and part of necessary market discipline, he has pointed consistently, is the fear that taking on risky activities or acting recklessly has a price- creditors can take out their funds if they see a banks as unsafe, and the financial institution may have to be broken up or closed. He joins Alan Meltzer in his criticism of Federal Reserve policies under first Greenspan and then Bernanke that take on the job of stimulating the economy and creating jobs through a very loose monetary policy after the collapse of a bubble. Hoenig sees the role of the Fed in such situations as a neutral player. The reason say Meltzer and Hoenig is that the Fed has not given enough thought and attention to the long term consequences of its policies. What were the consequences of the low rate policies in 2003 asks Hoenig? It promoted another bubble and the mortgage meltdown of 2008. What were the consequences of QE II asks Meltzer in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on August 11, 2011, "The Folly of Economic Short-Termism?" It has failed to revive the economy or reduce unemployment. Hoenig also points to questions of fairness and equity that arise when banks are treated differently and farmers, seniors and other groups are asked to make sacrifices....

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The period when Lopez Obrador was Mayor of Mexico City shows his pragmatic bent to gradually work for his goals. He increased social spending and setup an old age pension, yet governed with fiscal conservatism. The new president of Mexico is likely to do this as president, working pragmatically to achieve goals for social programs to improve living standards of workers in Mexico.

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An exceptional editorial on the steps taken since bankruptcy for reviving Detroit -with all the numbers one needs to know for how this was done and is progressing. The editorial gives credit to Michigan Governor Snyder and Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr for having the courage to guide Detroit through the bankruptcy. It sees the outcome emerging, including treatment of bondholders, pension funds, and city workers, as fair considering the problems involved. The steps are also being taken to correct the deep seated problems that caused the crisis.

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About 8% of Americans are multiracial, and 10% of 1 year olds are multiracial, a Pew research report released in 2015 shows.

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About 50% of the workforce in Los Angeles earns less than $15 an hour, by some estimates. The Los Angeles City Council voted 14-1 in May 2015 to increase the minimum wage to $15 over 5 years.

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This NYT report on Donald Trump's real estate deals with businessmen from China led to a perception on the part of Chinese partners that Trump found it too easy to file lawsuits.

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What Handan Iron and Steel in Hebei Province 300 miles south of Beijing and ThyssenKrupp in Dortmund, Germany, have in common. The transplanting of Germany's aging defunct iron and steel furnaces and plant to Handan, boxed and crated away- its unreal that in 1998 Handan Iron and Steel bought and transferred an aging polluting plant to a city where the steel works are located in China which has 8.5 million residents. When years later the steel works were debated to be moved to a distance away from the city with Baoshan Steel, the decision was made to instead put a new plant there instead. The solution was to make pollution payments to residents of Handan. It was Mao's dream to build a steel industry in Hebei province ,which has large deposits of iron ore and coal and a rail line. Couple of questions come up to mind- one why did the first steel works go up right in Handan, and same is true of Dortmund, labor supply perhaps but couldn't homes be built nearby instead and these plants located away from cities. Second the deal for bringing the ThyssenKrupp plants was as recent as 1998, by this time China was already a big steel producer (producing more than the US by one estimate) and in a few years Chinese steel production was to exceed the US, Europe and Japan combined. With steel production already on the rise why didn't China move more carefully. Some of the Thyssen Krupp assets were built only a few years before 2000 and met stringent environmental control. China bought these.. Why didn't China pick out the best assets instead of old aging blast furnaces. The possible answers are that they were available at cut rate prices, but were they worth it. The second is that Hebei must be competing with other parts of China, and there wasn't a rational allocation of capital as would happen if a sophiticated company like a Mittal or a Tata Steel is involved. Is China operating on a outmoded concept- nationalism, competition between provinces with local government officials running the show? The other question is that in the case of the automobile industry a different pattern is seen, the most modern technology was selected , and in the case of Cherry, the most recent technology was selected for manufacturing cars, then why was this same pattern not adopted in the case of steel. In the end China has a surplus of steel mills, which makes this rush into steel production without carefully thinking through this appear to have been a mistake. The visual picture if one flies into Dortmund of manmade lakes, green park areas and residential housing and shopping from the $22 billion the EU and Germany are investing to turn the Ruhr valley region of Dortmund into a centre of education, technology and tourism now contrasts sharply with Handan in Hebei province. Can emerging countries do better, build manufacturing for jobs but keep living conditions in mind, be patient and work to achieve the best overall results, and build education, technology, appropriate for their own situation. ...

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This NYT editorial points to the dangers lurking behid the jobless numbers. The House bill that passed recently for $154 billion to extend unemployment benefits- set to expire in Feb 2010- to June 2010, and increases aid to local and state governments. It also includes infrastructure spending and help for small business. But it does not do enough for young people whose joblesness is at all time high. For instance only 4 in 100 low income black students found work in Fall 2009 This according to a study by the Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies. According to the analysis done by this Center the employment rates among teenagers has risen four times faster than the rate among adults since 2000, and todayme over 65 are more likely to find jobs than youth of 16-19 years.

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Foreign investment in the auto industry is having a significant impact in the growth of Mexico's middle class. VW has plants in Puebla, General Motors in Silao, Chrysler in Toluca, Nissan in Aguascalientes. Production increased by 24% in February 2012 over the prior year. The growth is likely to continue. Facilities in Mexico have high productivity and are technologically equiped comparable to plants in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Nissan plans a $2 billion investment in a plant in Aguascalientes. Because of the lower cost of living, with food, transportation and health care costing less, even though household appliances cost more, workers at a Mexican plant earning $4 an hour in pay and benefits or $130 a week can still have a decent standard of living. Foreign investment is likely to grow with Mexico's emphasis on technical education - about 130,000 engineers graduating each year according to Mexico's president Calderon- the work ethic of young Mexicans joining manufacturing plants, the productivity of these lower cost plants, and a growing market in Latin America. Nissan plans to produce 1 million cars in Mexico with an investment of $2 billion in Aguascalientes. Nissan has succeeded in taking over from VW as the preeminent manufacturer in Mexico, and has 32,000 workers in the Aguascalientes area, once a small town but now a thriving city of 700,000. Drug cartels have no interest in places like Aguasalientes, which is why foreign investment continues to come into Mexico. The lack of economical credit- interest rate on car loans is about 10%- and the flow of about 600,000 used cars each year into Mexico from the U.S. has restricted growth in Mexico's automobile market. Jose Munoz, Nissan's senior executive for Latin America sees this changing as more credit including Nissan's new financing center in Aguascalientes make lower cost credit easily available to a growing middle class....