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Ines Pohl of DW.com reflects on the U.S. Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. It turns out he says to be a sort of Trump Festival, with the candidate and his family everywhere, not much discussion of the platform or policy issues- he says it offered the world a spectacle never seen at such a convention- 15,000 journalists from all over the world covering 2500 delegates, all the delegates mere onlookers at this entertainment extravaganza. John McCain, Mitt Romney, former presidential candidates not present, and president Bush and family not present, all staying away because of derogatory remarks. Not the kind of display of unity to bring together different segments of the party. The lone dissenter at the convention turned out to be rival Ted Cruz who made a speech without supporting Trump, and is booed off the stage. Cruz won in some important primaries including Texas, Oklahoma, and in votes cast on voting day in Louisiana, in addition to Wisconsin, appealing to evangelical voters in a section of the South, and in western states such as Nebraska and Idaho, typical Republican territory. Ohio's John Kasich is called "petulant" by campaign manager, and stays away- Kasich won in his home state of Ohio, a state president George Bush needed to win over Kerry, especially with its evangelical voters. Pohl adds humor in his coverage by referring to the traitors Bush, Kasich and especially Cruz, who are dispensed with, as the Republican delegates rally behind Trump on the last day of the convention.  ...

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Global trade flows should slow from 9% increase in 2021 to 3.5% in 2022 as the economies of EU, US and China slowdown, according to the World Trade Organization (WTO). This should also ease supply chain bottlenecks and inflationary price increases as demand declines across the EU, US, China and other countries.

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Epic Systems of Verona, Wisconsin, is one of the companies engaged in digitizing health records. It has helped develop records for 40 million patients in hospital systems such as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Kaiser Permanente, the Cleveland Clinic, and John Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore and the Weill Cornell Physicians Organization of New York. Epic provides the software, the IT systems, the training and support. Epic is one of the pioneers in this, having been in the business for 30 years. About 40% of primary care doctors in the U.S. and 25% of hospitals use electronic patient records. The Federal government has provided $2.7 billion in funding from $27 billion of Stimulus funds assigned for the purpose of conversion to electronic medical records. This is likely to speed up the conversion. Other providers are Cerner, Allscripts, Meditech, Siemens Healthcare, G.E. Healthcare, and IBM. Epic Systems is considered the defacto standard in the industry for medical schools and some of the major hospital systems in the country. New contracts are leading to a major expansion of Epic Systems which employs 5100 people. Epic plans to hire an additional 1000 people. Revenue for the privately owned company are estimated at $1.2 billion, a 45% increase over the prior year. Epic is expected to have 127 million patients under medical records by mid 2013. To get the feedback essential for such a large conversion, CEO Faulkner relies on feedback from 250,000 doctors who use the Epic systems software, and on nurses and doctors from Epic who visit customer's sites to see first hand how it works and what needs improvement. Judith Faulkner started Epic more than 30 years ago. A project for the Psychiatry department led to other projects after she graduated in computer science from the University of Wisconsin. Epic continues to attract programmers to Wisconsin by making the Epic campus a fun environment and a great place to work. ...

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Marty Makary, John Hopkins surgeon, is the DJT nomnee for head of the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA. Here a colleague of his at John Hopkins offers her experience working with Makary.  Leanna Wen says Makary is concerned about plastics, dyes, preservatives and chemicals that are entering our bodies and causing disease. Diseases that were not so prevalent one or two generations back are widespread today, says Makary. Makary wants to know why. Why has obesity quadrupled among young people in the US?Makary is also asking questions about why rates of childhood obesity are 5 times lower in Japan. Makary tell this Post reporter that ultra processed foods that are loaded with chemicals such as preservatives, artificial dyes and thickeners , take up 60% of calories Americans consume. This and poor food habits of today can cause diabetes, cancer, heart attacks and dementia. Pesticides and microplastics can cause early onset Alzheimer's and autoimmune diseases, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders. Makary wants medicine practiced in the US to direct resources to prevention, not simply hand out medicines with increasingly risky side effects. ...

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The amazing story of Katalin Kariko who came to the US from Budapest, Hungary, in 1989 taking a position as research assistant professor at the UPenn Medical School.The work of Katalin Kariko in mRNA vaccine research that led to the discovery of mRNA vaccines was derided at first at Penn leading her work to be shunted to a lab on the outskirts of town and having her pay cut in a demotion, says this WSJ report. It won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2023. Universities are not places where new ideas can get a boost when there is much skepticism and constant pressure for research funding on more conventional lines. Less opportunity for experimentation that can lead to new discoveries that revolutionize science and medicine.  Kariko and others working as research assistant professors were shunned at Penn and referred to as "aliens" because inthe interests of research they took lower paid positions. As it turns out Kariko felt liberated during the period of her being demoted, to work even more patiently on the mRNA molecule, one that was more difficult than the DNA molecule most researchers had focused on. This report in WSJ shows a picture of a Budapest street with a large mural of Kariko. Unfortunately few people in her adopted country know about the work of this remarkable scientist to whom is owed so many millions of people's protection with mRNA vaccines. ...

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RFK Jr. Report on nutrition, pesticides, overmedicalization, other threats to children's health. Critics cited in the NYT about action raises the question why the critics never made this their top priority all these years, and raising public awareness of the issue has been already accomplished, with the next steps to follow requiring the efforts of all of us. 

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Rachel Ensign's WSJ report shows huge disparity in incomes and spending that has happened in the US even with the best efforts and intentions of the Biden administration in 2020-2024. US cumulative excess savings by income for the bottom 90% are a mere $291 billion compared to $1.2 trillion for the top 10%, 4 times as large. As a result about half of consumer spending comes from the top 10% in incomes says the WSJ. (Moody's Analytics). It provides clues on why Biden and even less so Harris failed to convince Americans, the middle class, blue collar workers, and others that large social gaps, income disparities and wealth disparities gap were being bridged under Democrats. And makes it harder for Republicans and Democrats alike to address such huge gaps built up over time by outshoring jobs and manufacturing, the 2009 financial crisis from banks speculation, the pandemic and supply shock cost of living crisis. As the $2.6 trillion in pandemic assistance from Biden faded people in the bottom 80% dipped into savings to pay for rising cost of living as supply chain bottlenecks and price gouging sent prices of groceries, housing, apartment rentals, cars up significantly. This has'nt happened to the top 10% or even the top 20% who continue to spend in the same way as before prices went up. Something like this is also happening in Europe and in China, India fueling and anti-incumbency mood, and dissatisfaction with governments. The Net Worth of the top 20% has grown by 45% or $35 trillion since 2019 compared to $14 trillion for the bottom 80%. (Moody's Analytics) ...

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The US is facing a new pattern of demographic changes and their impact on Medicare and Social Security programs. The number of people on Medicare will grow in 2 decades, 2010- 2030, from 47 million to 80 million for Medicare, and from 44 million to 73 million for Social Security, according to this estimate. The workforce will grow more slowly and the tax base wiill shrink accordingly during this period. This pending worker-pensioner imbalance and the jump in the cost of the bill for Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the federal health benefit for poor people, create a major problem for the US. At the same time the group of people over 65 will rise in these 2 decades from 17% of the voting age population to 26%. This group and the people who expect to soon join this group will resist any changes to Medicare or Social Security programs, making it that much harder for the political process to tackle these issues to make the programs sustainable in the long run.

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With the strong jobs growth report in September the US Federal Reserve, America's central bank, is expected to increase interest rates by 0.75% at its meeting on Nov. 1-2. That will be the fourth interest rate increase in 4 consecutive meetings of the Fed. It is designed to tackle inflation yet it also reverses the period of low interest rates for savers that extended from 2000 to 2020. This period covered two crises one created by irresponsible behaviour of banks in the financial crisis of 2000 and the second a natural health disaster from the pandemic when interest rates were brought down to zero as a policy response. During that period savers who suffered decline in savings with little interest income and lower income groups were hit by both the financial crises, employment gaps that hurt income and savings, and the shift of jobs overseas as jobs were shifted to China and American manufacturing declined. Economic policy was determined in that period by economists who failed to grasp the dangers to American manufacturing, to American communities with loss of jobs from offshoring, rising inequality that fragmented society.   This has changed under the Fed run by Mr. Powell first appointed by Mr. Trump and now renominated by Mr. Trump, who is not an economist and brings a very different mindset to central banking, going with common sense about what works for average Americans. a sense of humility, and down to earth about American workers and American manufacturing and its place in America. ...

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The US president DJT said today Feb. 13, 2025, as he introduced the new Health Secretary of the US-  "There's something wrong, and I think it's it's something that can be found out. In 2022, more than 40% of children had at least one chronic health condition, and today, nearly 80% of young adults do not qualify for military service in large part for health reasons. We're, ah, think of that 80%. Something is wrong and that's why immediately after Bobby is sworn in, I will be signing an Executive Order establishing the President's Commission To Make America Healthy Again. We have some great people on that commission chaired by our new secretary. This groundbreaking breaking commission will be charged with investigating what is causing The decades long increase in chronic illness, reporting its findings and delivering an action plan to the American people, and it's going to be a plan that people are really waiting to hear. Bobby, ah, I want to thank you. You've gone through a lot. It's taken great courage. You've been amazing actually. I'd call him and say, You're gonna be OK. And he said, I know, I really do. "Perhaps most importantly though, Bobby created a nationwide movement made up of millions and millions of mothers and fathers and young people and concerned citizens of every background who want to end this horrible chronic disease crisis that exists, exists in America. He's absolutely committed to getting dangerous chemicals out of our environment and out of our food supply and getting the American people the facts and the answers that we deserve after years in which our public health system has squandered the trust of our citizens, and they really have, they didn't, they don't trust us. They don't trust anybody, frankly they've gone through hell. There's no better person to lead our campaign of historic reforms and restore faith in American health care, and Bobby's going to do it. The United States spends more money in health than any other country on Earth, but we're growing sicker every year. We're not as healthy as countries that spend just a fraction of what we spend, so there's something wrong. He's going to figure it out. In recent decades we've seen staggering increases in cancer rates across all age demographics, including more than 40% increase in childhood cancer since 1975. Who can believe that? And an explosion in other chronic childhood illnesses not long ago, 1 in 10,000 people, children had autism. Now it's 1 in 36. Think of that 1 in 10,000, 1 in 10,000. Now it's 1 in 36. Who can believe that there's something wrong. There's something wrong, and I think it's it's something that can be found out. In 2022, more than 40% of children had at least one chronic health condition, and today, nearly 80% of young adults do not qualify for military service in large part for health reasons. We're, ah, think of that 80%. Something is wrong and that's why immediately after Bobby is sworn in, I will be signing an executive order establishing the president's commission to make America healthy again. We have some great people on that commission chaired by our new secretary. This groundbreaking breaking commission will be charged with investigating what is causing The decades long increase in chronic illness, reporting its findings and delivering an action plan to the American people, and it's going to be a plan that people are really waiting to hear. Bobby, ah, I want to thank you. You've gone through a lot. It's taken great courage. You've been amazing actually. I'd call him and say, You're gonna be OK. And he said, I know, I really do. He's really, ah, been supported amazingly by Cheryl and his family. And it was a very tough. It was a very nasty group of people that were after him, but he was tougher and he was smarter than they are, and that's why he's here today. There are very few people that could have withstood the, ah, the assault, but he was able to." ...

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This editorial page opinion in The Economist says the increasing concentration in business is a real problem today. It says tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon are entrenching through acquisitions of smaller companies and startups leading to an unhealthy level of concentration, and control of entire markets. More competition is needed so that startups and smaller companies can grow, and new ideas or ways of doing things get a chance. A big problem is tax avoidance with individuals paying taxes like everybody else, and large tech companies like Google and Apple having the option to not have to pay just like everybody else. It calls for a "tough-but-considered" approach to tax avoidance. Its not that the money saved in taxes goes back to support millions of people hired by the industry through workers wages and future investment that builds a future for workers and the company. It cites figures showing 1.2 million employed in the top 3 carmakers in the U.S. auto industry in 1990, and only 137,000 employed by the top 3 companies in Silicon Valley including Apple and Google with capitalization of about $1 trillion.This contributes to a sense of unfairness that is being expressed in voter sentiment in the 2016 elections, especially with the wide divergence in the way that the top 45 percent has done in net worth of over $400,000 in 2013, after the 5% which is in the millions, and the bottom 50 percent at average overall net worth of $25,000 in 2013. A huge disparity that  U.S. Federal Reserve chairwoman Yellen, who cited these figures at a Boston Fed conference in Oct. 2014, says is "near their highest levels in the last one hundred years and probably much higher than for much of American history before then."  ...

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Republican voter sentiment in Springfield, Ohio. Warren Davidson is running for former House Speaker Boehner's seat in this Congressional district in Ohio with the support of Tea Party activists. The median income in the city is $31,635, $15,000 less than the Ohio median. The population has declined from 80,000 in the sixties to less than 60,000, according to Census Bureau. Only about 15% of the Springfield population has a college degree compared to 30% in the U.S. Speaker Boehner had a small group of loyalists and tight control of the Republican party in his district, leading to charges that he was too close to the establishment and business. Trump has support from Republican voters who feel the party has drifted away from them.

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Elizabeth Warren's Medicare for All plan in the U.S. draws support from about 60% of people polled for the New York Times. Over 66% support Warren's 2% wealth tax on people with wealth over $50 million. The support is consistent among all groups, gender and race. Only a group of Republican men with college degrees which is likely to include the bulk of the people with wealth over $50 million oppose the wealth tax and Medicare for All. Over the past year wealth tax and Medicare for All support has grown with about 60% of people supporting Medicare for All, a plan similar to government plans in most of Europe and in Canada which have worked over many years.

Warren's plan wins support by showing how it will be paid for and why most people will pay no more than they are paying today, and overall much less because of unnecessary costs taken out of the system.

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The difficult situation facing a six term Congressman from New York who is the new Minority Leader in the US House of Representatives. Mr Hakim Jeffries faces a difficult debt ceiling vote in the US Congress during his first year as Leader for the Democratic party in the House. All 213 Democrats have signed a special petition that would force a vote in the House if the debt ceiling negotiations fail. This is 5 votes short. The vote would then require 5 moderate House Republican members to support it for it to pass. The idea is that only if push comes to shove and no agreement is reached leading to financially disastrous results for Americans in which they would be blamed by their constituents for not acting, moderates from states like New York might join the Democrats.

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The efforts by the Republican Senator Lankford of Oklahoma with the help of Senator Graham of South Carolina, Senator Tillis of North Carolina, and other Republican senior senators, to get a immigration bill through the US Congress that president Biden supports to close the border with Mexico immediately after its passing, is the subject of this video in the WSJ. It says this is the only solution for the immigration crisis not waiting another 12 months to take action. The problem is the parole and asylum policies of the US which need fixing, says Senator Lindsay Graham, the senior Republican in the Senate. The bill would do just that, yet faces opposition from Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana in the House of Representatives who says the bill would be dead on arrival in the House, making it inexplicable.

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Vance calls for hearing different voices in Europe to be heard. The anti-migration parties and voices were excluded by the conference chair Christoph Heusgen, who advised Merkel on foreign policy, and did little to prevent the mass migration into Germany and other countries. Vance called for the all voices to be heard even those which one disagreed. He said European countries are not as brittle as they think they are that all voices could not be heard and all views debated. Vance expressed his own view that people in Europe and the US were feeling endangered  after a decade of mass migration supported by politicians and parties in Europe. These politicians had not received support for their action at the ballot box said Vance, including with Brexit and in US with the election of DJT.

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News literacy programs that teach young people to read critically and help develop skills that encourage critical thinking. The focus is on school programs for middle and high school students. The News Literacy Project (NLP) has staff that includes 22 news organizations and 200 journalists who donate time to work with students. The Center for News Literacy (CNL) is a project at Stony Brook University, which sees news as "the oxygen of democracy." The projects teach young people how to find the truth behind the hype, propaganda, entertainment, and exaggeration in the daily news inside the the U.S. and from around the world. Pulitzer's words can be seen at the entrance to Columbia University's School of Journalism and on a U.S. postage stamp: "Our Republic and its press will rise and fall together." A sophisticated reader is critical for developing an insightful coverage of news and Pulitzer reminds us that the future of democracy and America depends on this.

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An extraordinary moment in history took place at Rajghat Gandhiji Memorial in New Delhi on September 10, 2023. The leaders of 20 largest nations from all over the world observed a moment of silence after devotional hymns at the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi. Click on original article to pull up the larger picture and take our On the Spot Quiz on which countries were paired together on either side. On either side of Modi are Widodo (Indonesia) and Lula (Brazil), next to them either side Macron and Biden, Albanese and Sunak, EU's Michel and Leyen , Erdogan and Yeong, Fernandez and Meloni, Qiang and Kishida, Lavrov and Scholz, Sissi and Ramaphosa, Rutte and Trudeau. Can you tell which countries each pair of leaders are from? Answer below for our first On the Spot Quiz. Answer: France and US, Australia and UK, EU's pair, Turkey and South Korea, Argentina and Italy, China and Japan, Russia and Germany, Egypt and South Africa. It is an exceptionally well thought out arrangement. With Indonesia and Brazil on either side of India, you have the core of the aspiring population of 1.7 billion people more than anywhere else on the planet Earth, who think alike, act alike. And next to them are leaders of France and US, Australia and Britain, and the European Union, who are resolutely backing the shift in agenda- debt assistance, tripling renewable energy, and a new infrastructure building effort for ease of living.   ...

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Rappaport of the NYT asks how it is possible that the U.S. Treasury is critical of the EU Commission's ruling that Apple pay back $13 billion in taxes because of its low tax rate of .005% in Europe, when Treasury is strongly critical of tax avoidance. The negligible tax by Ireland, base of Apple operations, is seen as a state subsidy not available to competitors. It also, as the EU Commission says, does not correspond to economic reality because the revenues are mostly made outside Ireland. An arrangement that is basically a strategy of tax avoidance. Today the leading candidates for president, Trump and Clinton, the major parties, and Congress, all are critical of tax avoidance strategies which deprive Treasury of much needed revenues. Restoring upward mobility is a priority today and programs to provide tution free access to public colleges, healthcare access, and infrastructure development, require public funding. Then why is the U.S.Treasury critical of the EU ruling? It is because Treasury sees this as money that should be coming to Treasury not the EU. However Treasury has failed to make this clear. The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition's Clark Gascoigne, calls it very ironic. And other experts say the money would not be coming to the U.S. anyway unless a low tax rate induces Apple to repatriate profits to the U.S. One expert calls it hypocritical. Senator Schumer says he agrees with Paul Ryan that tax legislation for a low tax rate for repatriation of profits back to the U.S. should be the next step, so that an infrastructure fund can be setup. Senator Levin and transparency advocates sees the EU action as normal and to be expected, as the anti-establishment sentiment today comes from such dealings that create the impression that the system is rigged in favor of some corporations. ...

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At the G-7 meetings in Alberta, Canada DJT said the 2014 exclusion of Russian president Vladimir Putin, from the G8 after Moscow's unilateral annexation of Crimea, was a serious mistake leading to the war in Ukraine. "He [Putin] was insulted (...) Barack Obama and a person named [Justin] Trudeau didn't want to have Russia in. And I would say that was a mistake because you wouldn’t have a war right now" in Ukraine, Trump said in a discussion with journalists on the sidelines of the G-7 meeting with the Canadian PM Carney. This is a significant observation by DJT who understood better than Bush and Obama, Trudeau, what has preserved the peace in the world and the importance of US-Russia relations even after the end of the Cold War. This is true for DJT interaction with China also because DJT also maintains that despite China's assertion of rights in Hong Kong, despite the outsourcing of industry to China and Make In America, US-China relations are important for peace in the world. ...

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Before taking up the job of enforcement chief at the SEC, Robert Khuzami spent five years running the U.S. legal division of Deutsche Bank. In that job he worked with lawyers who advised on the collaterized debt obligations issued by the bank, and the details to be disclosed to investors. Like Goldman, Deutsche Bank has faced alllegations of not disclosing the proper information for its CDO's. Before joining Deutsche Bank, Khuzami was a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan for 11 years.

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In all the coverage on the Indian election the impossible having been accomplished that of going beyond the 244 million voters in the US, beyond the 373 million voters in the European Union. The eligible voters in India 2024 are 640 million and all the counting done on one day was accomplished by the Electoral Commission and tackled under leadership of the team by Rajiv Kumar, a civil servant who earlier served as the Finance Secretary of India. The results show that the elections were free and fair as the results speak for themselves that the opposition parties did better than they expected. What was not told in media coverage in the US and EU/UK was that the Opposition and the current government are at odds on one fundamental issue that a continental country suffering from centuries of colonialism can only create a modern nation with the infrastructure enjoyed by the US, EU, China, if it creates a large enough pool of investment in the trillions of dollars, has a master plan of proven execution, with no leakages from this pool of investment. Leakages from the pool of investment only stopped after 2014, and actions of direct deposits to 400 million bank accounts or rural households was essential. For modernization to succeed another condition that had to be fulfilled was to create even through a pandemic a core of about 500 million of 1.4 billion people of the middle and lower classes who would approach the conditions o the US, EU, China consumer base for industry. This the Modi government has done with all its projects and hard work by adding the 250 million people to the consumer base pulled out of poverty. The task ahead is doing what the US, EU, China as continental nations have done to modernize and industrialize 2024-2035 to build the third largest economy ahead of the EU by 2035 and every state and city in India aspires to this transformation, from the south and northeast to the north and the west.   ...

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O'Malley, Sanders, and Clinton emphasize the issue of wages, income disparities, rising inequality, and a shrinking middle class in the first Democratic debate of the U.S. 2016 presidential election. Clinton points out that "at the center of my campaign is how we're going to raise wages." Sanders says that "the middle class of this country for the last 40 years has been disappearing." Clinton points out her opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement because it does not help raise American wages. Clinton calls herself a progressive, but "a progressive who gets things done," and a moderate when it comes to getting things done. Sanders points to the "deep injustice, an economic injustice that threatens to tear our country apart, and it will not solve itself." Sanders points to the wealth concentration in the U.S. "with the top one tenth of 1 percent owning about as much as the bottom 90 percent, and 57% of all new income going to the top 1 percent." Clinton comes to Sanders defense on the issue saying "it's our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn't run amok and doesn't cause the kind of inequities we're seeing in our economic system."...

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Audi faced similiar problems of unintended acceleration incidents that Toyota faces today. A "60 Minutes" segment by Ed Bradley in November 1986 showed Audi owners of the Audi 5000 sedan who said the cars suddenly accelerated. That show even showed an Audi 5000 moving on its own which later was shown to be due to an altered transmission for that shot. Even when it was shown in a 1989 government study that blamed driver errors especially because of the close placement of gas and brake pedals. This led to the report's recommendations to move the pedals apart, and install ashift lock mechanism which required a foot on the brake to shift the car into drive. Audi ran newspaper ads showing these findings but consumer fear had set in. It took Audi many years to recover, From 1985 to 1991 Audi U.S. sales dropped 84%, hitting a low of 12,000 annually and not reaching levels from before the crisis till 2000. Audi, a division of Volkswagen, is now expanding in the U.S. but the story has lessons for Toyota. This may explain why Toyota was quick to refute a story in ABC News on the acceleration issue. ...

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Under the law overturned by the US Supreme Court it was illegal to carry a gun openly and a permit was needed in New York to carry it concealed. Three Supreme Court Justices appointed by president Trump were of a disposition that opposed gun control laws- Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The requirement under the New York law was that you had to show "good moral character" and "cause" to carry a concealed weapon or carry a gun openly. Many other states have such laws in California, Hawaii and urban states in the north east. Republican states are loosening gun control laws. This comes as many random shooting incidents are taking place in the US some in schools and grocery stores, the most recent being a shooting in Buffalo, NY. The vote was 6-3 after the Supreme Court for years had avoided hearing such cases based on Second Amendment rights from the Constitution that some had interpreted to include freely carrying guns without any common sense restrictions. This issue is second only to abortion as a cultural issue in the US on which sides are taken by the public including the Supreme Court Justices selected by Mr. Trump. Though not directly apparent these and issues of immigration, other cultural issues surrounding gay rights are putting those who would normally come together on issues of national interest on opposite sides when it comes to common sense support for everyday issues of feeding families, keeping workers employed in good factories at home, child care, education, health care, fair wages, restoring America's manufacturing leadership and bringing back manufacturing to the US. The emergence of Tech and tech companies, Silicon Valley, the finance sector in New York, has reinforced the prejudice in these opposing sides as Tech and the finance sector have largely embedded themselves into the Democratic side. Tech and finance sector employees with higher incomes have largely insulated themselves from the interests of ordinary workers and families creating a split Democratic party when it comes to supporting workers and families who form the vast majority of the American people. In a sense today the national interest is separate from these cultural issues and supporters of national interests can be found in both parties who can look beyond and above these cultural issues. It is also where many of these cultural issues can be resolved to some degree using common sense on which most informed members of Congress can agree. This is true for gun control as a group of bipartisan Senators from both parties are preparing gun control around common sense principles that today are even beyond the capacity of the Supreme Court of the US that itself now reflects a raucous public sphere. ...