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President Obama tells Hispanic high school students he supports a bipartisan plan for immigration reform from Senators Graham, McCain, Rubio, and Schumer. A critical part of the plan and the President's plan is a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants. Obama wants to see a pathway "from the outset," senators say this should happen after stricter enforcement requirements are met. If the senators do not move ahead with this plan the White House will put forward his own plan.

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A new bipartisan plan on comprehensive immigration reform with support from Senators Graham, McCain, Schumer, sets forth principles for legislation. This includes Democratic requirements for a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants and Republican requirements for stronger enforcement. A separate bill sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch would expand the H1-B program for skilled immigrants and increase the number of green cards. Senator McCain said on a television news show: "We can't go on forever with 11 million people living in this country in the shadows in an illegal status."

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In his 2019 State of the Union speech Mr. Trump calls for unity but continued emphasis on the border wall and strict immigration. Democrats offered little approval of the speech even when it sounded conciliatory on parental leave and infrastructure. The president continued his criticism of Democratic leaders Schumer and Biden in informal remarks.  The president called immigration a "moral issue," saying "no issue more illustrates the divide between America's working class and America's political class than illegal immigration," that wealthy donors and politicians call for open borders while living behind gates, walls, and guards. This is the first time a president goes into a State of the Union Speech with 37% of Americans supporting him according to a Gallup poll. The only time a U.S. president had less support was in 1983 when Reagan faced a recession and in 2007 and 2008 when Bush faced problems with the Iraq War. Another feature of this House of Representatives in 2019 after the 2018 Congressional elections is that 131 women are now in the House. The president congratulated the women to wide applause.   ...

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A political operative for former president Bill Clinton, now an ABC anchor is described here speaking about the president in negative terms. Elements of bias lingering from the Clinton period. The extent of the WSJ, NYT, Washington Post coverage on president Biden with skepticism is only matched by the readers comments where the vast majority of readers strongly question the opinion writers and their wisdom and understanding, and their failure to understand the democratic process where the primaries and freely cast ballots not the self appointed media elect the president. The senior most senators Patrick Schumer and Patty Murray have delivered on president Biden's infrastructure, jobs, cost of living action, science and CHIPS agenda and know him well for doing the same again past 2024. The vast majority of Americans support the president and understand that they like the president are human and have a bad day or night some days and nights, it is the future that Biden is shaping for which the nation looks to to 2030 just as the Nation did in 1932 and 1936 for FDR, in 1952 for Harry Truman, and again in 1960 for JFK. People should not forget that both the south and the north voted in large numbers for FDR, Truman and JFK, including Texas. In fact Texas was Truman's strongest state in 1948 giving him 66% of the vote to Dewey's 24%, carrying 246 of 254 counties in Texas. The question then was the post war economic future of the US and the free world, today of the post pandemic economic future of the US and of climate change, not about cultural issues, and on this issue as it was then the choice is clear for the American people. ...

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Democrats Reid and Schumer say Eric Cantor is a stumbling block to an agreement on the debt ceiling and deficit reduction. Plan B suggested by Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, and supported by Senate Majority leader Reid, includes setting up a debt reduction panel of 12 members from both parties to draft a long term framework for reducing the national debt. The new debt committee would have a deadline to make recommendations, probably by the end of 2011. The recommendations would then be fast tracked through the House and the Senate without amendments. The McConnell plan is to separate the task of raising the debt ceiling from talks on deficit reduction.

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In this interview with Herndon of the NYT Bernie Sanders refutes the labels "progressive" or "left" and says it is simply about policy that benefits the workers and families that make up the vast majority of this Nation. Sanders says 60% of workers are living from paycheck to paycheck. The vast majority of people 60-70% support Medicare for All, improvements in Social Security, cutting pharmaceutical costs, and tution support to make higher education accessible to all. Why he asks do workers support Trump? He says it is because the truth is that the Democratic party has abandoned its roots. He does not go into this, yet it can be said that the rise of the Tech industry in the last two decades has led to tech billionaires and business people coopting the Democratic party for their agenda. In the last year of the Obama administration it was evident that Rural America and people who represent rural America such as Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack of Iowa felt ignored while Obama spent more time with tech and internet business people. Former president Trump simply stepped into this void as Democrats failed to turn up for rural America. President Biden has turned things around by making Tom Vilsack an important part of his administrations with the president listening to  him and others speaking for rural America. The passion with which Senator Pat Schumer talked recently on CBS Face the Nation about bringing broadband to rural America shows how Biden and Harris, Harris and Walz see Rural America. This Democratic ticket is fighting for Rural America every step of the way to bring hope and a better life to Rural America. Sanders reminds people of FDR in 1936 after four years of fighting the Depression and improving lives there was so much that needed to be done. It is the same today and Sanders is wading into this fight with Harris and Walz in the same way as FDR did in 1936. ...

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This is the biggest climate bill in history. The NYT looks at the $369 billion Biden Climate bill to show how it will cut carbon emissions by 40% by 2030 over 2005 levels.

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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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For immigration bipartisan solutions such as the one Senator Lankford and president Biden and Senator Schumer worked out are the answer, intelligent solutions are the answer, as America will need to fill the vacant positions in its factories. As baby boomers retire Minnesota is short of workers as this story in WSJ shows. It is recruiting from Florida and Puerto Rico for people willing to relocate to the north and its severe winters. Marvin, $1.5 billion maker of windows and doors, founded in this town of Warroad near the Canadian border 112 years back can move but is attached to this town and its people. It has resisted trends of outshoring and keeps trying to get new workers replacing the ones retiring of the 700 workers at this factory.  About 2.1 million manufacturing jobs will remain unfilled by 2030 according to the Manufacturing Institute. This shows the other side of the immigration story where immigrants also add to meeting the needs of the Nation as they are absorbed over time. It is not immigration but the sudden surges that need to be handled carefully that is the problem as America will continue to need new workers to replace the workers who retire from its factories. ...

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What Obama faces in Congress, Pelosi, Schumer, Miller, Waxman, Conyers, Stark and others among the Democrats.

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Bill Gates of Microsoft calls the Biden climate change bill the single most important legislation in US history. He says only America can offer the vision for climate change action, and make it happen. Gates says he has talked to corporate leaders in America and most of them say they are ready to act once the climate change bill is passed. Many of the industries that need to be created are in the early stages and the climate change bill will create the right atmosphere for sustained innovation.

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The US has 124,000 charging stations for electric vehicles. The Biden administration wants to see that go up to 500,000 by 2030. For this to happen $7.5 billion is already going to states under the $1 trillion infrastructure bill of 2021. The Biden $369 Climate bill that passed the Senate last week will give companies that build each charging station 30% tax credit for maximum of $100,000, up from $30,000 earlier, to build one charging station. It costs about $100,000 to tear up pavement and build a conduit for a charging station.

Supply chain issues will linger for 2022 and 2023 with shortage of chips after which it will move much faster says this report in WSJ. For EV's to go mainstream charging stations are a priority.

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What is in the biggest climate bill in history, the Biden $369 billion Climate Bill, also called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022? The WSJ looks at the bill that passed the US Senate and now heads for passage in the House of Representatives this weekend. 

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As president Biden signs the biggest Climate Bill in history Jim Tankersley says there is still more to be done. In addition to the work remaining for children, women and families, he mentions the Civilian Climate Corps with financing for $10 billion that is patterned on the Civilian Conservation Corps set up during the Depression by FDR, which is still to be passed. This would form "the next generation of conservation and resilience workers," says Biden. Much like the 3 million people who helped build parks, cut trails and planted trees around the US in the 1930's and 1940's under FDR.

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Legislation introduced by Senators Shelby and Schumer to investigate white collar crimes with additional staff and FBI agents to do the job.

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The cash for clunkers program in turning in excellent results bothy in terms of promoting sales and in terms of the mileage improvement for the new cars put on the road. For Motor saw sales up 2.4% over same month 2008 and Hyundai 11% increase. In the light of this and the speed with wihich the initial $1 billion was used up and the $2 billion that was aded by Congress, and the success of the program in Europe, its hard to understand so little money has been allocated to this program as a part of stimulus spending. Senators Feinstein, Collins and Schumer are encouraged by the customer reaction to choose higher mileage vehicles. According to the Transportation Department, the average fuel efficiency of trade ins was 15.8 mpg, and the average fuel efficiency of vehicles traded in 25.4 mpg. Equally significant was that 83% of the trade-ins were trucks and 60% of new purchases were cars. The Ford Focus was the top selling vehicle. Dealers estimate they sold 250,000 cars with the rebate money....

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These 2 pieces in the form of Letters to the Editor show that Congress and the WSJ readers remain unconvinced by arguments for the status quo in relation to the yuan-dollar exchange rate. Clearly Senator Schumer looks like he is pushing for a bipartisan effort that would as they see it promote free trade and WTO rules.

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Senators in the US Congress, Rubio and Schumer, have asked the US government to look into Apple's plans to work with Chinese semiconductor company YMTC. As a result the Commerce Department has placed export restrictions on YMTC. This NYT report looks at the two decade long rise of China and of Apple after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and shifted manufacturing to China. When Jobs returned to Apple he found major quality issues at Apple's manufacturing facilities, a demoralized workforce, and financial losses, with CEO Michael Spindler running the company into the ground. Jobs had to start with afresh model for Apple and decided to shift manufacturing to China under the engineering leadership of Tim Cook. Alabama native Cook went to Auburn University for his engineering degree and Duke for his business degree. Cook joined Jobs in 1998 at Apple and for ten years till 2007 the two cut costs, shifted to contract manufacturers and rebuilt Apple with new products, iPod, iPad and the iphone. By not manufacturing Apple avoided quality control issues, and the costs of maintaining inventory. It was Tim Cook who ran operations worldwide, and he gradually built up the manufacturing relationships in China with Foxconn, which makes most of Apple's products in sprawling Chinese factories that employ 20 years later about 3 million Chinese workers. Foxconn was chosen by Apple in 2000 to manufacture the Apple Mac laptop. Before that it was a parts supplier to Apple. Increasingly Apple relied on Foxconn to make its new products including the iPhone. Both companies growth relied on the manufacturing of Foxconn to the point where Apple was dependent on Foxconn and had intertwined its operations with Foxconn in China. Today the whole relationship is being called into question after two decades in which American workers suffered the effects of the outshoring of manufacturing jobs. It should be noted that though Mr. Trump raised the issue of manufacturing exclusively in China with Apple, the Trump administration did little to change the practices of the company that pioneered this type of massive manufacturing role for China. That surrendered the entire supply chain to foreign suppliers in the interest of cutting costs and maintaining huge profit margins, with which it financed an array of new products and reached $1 trillion in sales from $10 billion, hundredfold increase over 2 decades. American workers and families for the first time in American history got very little from this Cook-Jobs project. American infrastructure in communities that would have been supported by American factories including the services and infrastructure in communities financed through local taxes, a practice throughout the Industrial Revolution in the US, was sharply disrupted over 2 decades. It caused a rupture in social relations and increased inequality in the US, and defunded infrastructure that comes with manufacturing.  It is the task of the Biden administration to now correct what Mr. Trump simply talked about but never induced or required Apple to do- lead the resurgence of American manufacturing, and make its major investments in the US, invest in its workers and families, invest in America. ...

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

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New legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress by Senators Orrin Hatch and Ron Wyden giving fast track and trade promotion authority to president Obama faces intense opposition from Democratic Party members of Congress. Only about a dozen House Democrats are considered to be supporting the legislation. Senator Schumer says "I don't believe in these agreements anymore, I've changed." Senator Warren on the left opposes the legislation. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania says the legislation "as paving the way for another Nafta style deal that costs jobs." The deal if it passes the Senate, would face Republican opposition in the House where 50 or more Republicans are reported to be against the fast track approach and giving too much authority to president Obama without Congressional input. Fast track legislation would allow free trade pacts such as TPP to pass Congress without amendments or procedural delays. Labor groups and auto, other manufacturing companies, oppose the legislation because of the impact on manufacturing, West Coast groups in IT industries favor the legislation. Projections made by Petri, Plummer and Zhao at the Peterson Institute of International Economics, show the impact of Trans Pacific Pact (TPP) free trade pact would be $109 billion in added manufacturing imports to the U.S. to 2025 and $ 53 billion in exports, a net U.S. unfavorable of $56 billion. For IT and services sector the added U.S. exports to 2025 are projected at $42 billion and imports at $8 billion, for net $34 billion. U.S. favorable. Because of the dominant position of the U.S. in IT how much of this $42 billion might still happen without TPP. Other societal impacts also figure in the discussion, such as which sector needs the largest help and impacts the largest number of Americans for a sustained economic recovery in the future. ...

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Instead of "ring fencing" bad loans one bank at a time, which is what is being done for Bank of America and Citigroup by the government , Bair, Bernanke and others favor something like the Resolution Trust Corporation, which would contain all bad assets of banks. Bair in an interview said she would like to see them priced at what they would get in today's market, meaning that the steep discounts issue would be faced squarely. What this will need is a lot of government money to restore confidence so that investors are willing to put their private money in the banks. And Senator Schumer says he is hearing the number of $1 trillion or more. This would let banks take these bad assets off their balance sheets, like they did with the Brady bonds for bad Latin American assets and with the Resolution Trust Corporation for bad assets in the savings and loan crisis. It was the original intent of TARP but two things happened, first the pricing of these assets was in limbo, with nobody willing to say how steep the discount should be. The auction process proposed was a vague and shaky one. Second, things deteriorated so quickly that it became urgent to instead do bank recapitalizations for $250 billion. Now the same issue has to be addressed directly by another administration with control of Congress, so that the big bucks funding of $1 trillion can be possible to do. Something like a separate institution that holds all bad bank assets. And the government taking on a big part of the burden, and with it some ownership of the banks that hopefully could payback some of this $ 1 trillion....

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This story in the WSJ on the Biden White House says it always operated with a tight inner circle. During the Covid pandemic it limited contacts for the president, yet after the pandemic eased this protective layer was not taken down says WSJ. As the president's age advanced the tight inner circe remained sheltering the president form the outside. The debate with DJT was one point that this became evident. Biden in his last year in office is 82 years- the oldest president. He had accomplished much in passing the series of bills that funded infrastructure, chips, science and protecting workers using his skills with Congress acquired over span of 50 years. Limiting Biden's one on one's and to certain parts of the day had an unexpected result. The head of Armed Services Democrat Rep. Adam Smith says this happened during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. He could not reach Biden so he could caution him about an overly optimistic view of the withdrawal. As the withdrawal led to loss of 13 armed forces men the disarray was a topic for Republicans. Only after the withdrawal issues Biden called Smith. In 4 years Smith says he had this one call with the president when he had spoken to Obama several times. Simtih's view is that Biden White House was "more insulated than most." Senator Manchin says he had less contact with Biden than his closest advisers.  This WSJ report also says the contacts of cabinet members with Biden were limited and tightly controlled. This report says Yellen at Treasury had few one one's with the president and dealt with adviers. Austin at Defense in the last 2 years during the Ukraine and Gaza crisis had only rare direct contact with Biden. During the campaign this story says close adviser Donilon kept access limited for polling experts to the president to the point where Senator Schumer and others felt Biden was falling behind but the president was not aware of this. ...

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Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviews Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas and asks him direct questions about the border with Mexico, published Feb 2, 2024 in NYT. Why the surge in migrants asks Navarro. Mayorkas is himself a Cuban born immigrant. Republicans in the House are impeaching Mayorkas. Navarro asks can you clearly say what has gotten us to this place and what went wrong? Clearly something had happened in Latin America. Central America drove migrants north after conflicts in Salvador, in Nicaragua and drought affecting Guatemala's agriculture for over 2 decades under different administrations. Mayorkas says in response to the question that the world is experiencing the largest level of human displacement that it has seen since World War II. He says the entire hemisphere is experiencing the enormous displacement in Venezuela as its economy collapsed. During the nineteenth century after president Monroe put forward the Monroe Doctrine that created a uniquely American sphere that asked European powers to stay away from the Americas north and south, any attempt by European powers was seen as an hostile act. It was American opposition to European colonialism. By the time of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations this policy was not followed with the intervention of the Soviet Union in Cuba leading to a a wave of refugees from Cuba in the sixties. In the last decade the situation in Venezuela has worsened to the point that 8 million people have left Venezuela for neighboring nations, 2 million to Colombia alone, destabilizing the southern hemisphere. Venezuelans many from the educated middle class form the bulk of the surge in migrants across the US border with Mexico in 2022 and 2023. The problems were actually exacerbated under the Republican administration as the Venezuelan inflation spiralled after 2016 skyrocketing into hyper inflation by 2018 leading to the flow of immigrants outward that reached 8 million. This kind of hyperinflation the worst in the history of Latin America need not have happened with better managing of the crisis at that time. Mayorkas says the problem is that America's system of asylum is broken and both parties need to fix it. This is proposed by Tillis-Graham and Lankford all Republicans in the US Senate with president Biden's support. When he joined the Department of Homeland Security in 2009 Mayorkas says, US Border Patrol chief told him the real problem was that from the moment a migrant claims asylum at the border under US law and the adjudication of that claim it takes several years. This is the root of the problem the law can be fixed with the will of enlightened persons in both parties by simply passing a new law. Immigrants from Latin America are just as likely to vote Republican as Democratic and this may be particularly true for Venezuela's middle class that left the country as the economy collapsed with policies that led to inflation not seen in this hemisphere.  The other alternative is for the US and both parties to agree to what would be today's version of the Monroe doctrine- then opposing European colonialism, now opposing the breakup from within of Democratic countries in Latin America leading to waves of migration north of the border and causing upheavals all over the western hemisphere. Much less a policy of such resolution both parties have failed to fix basic policies of asylum and parole that today are being addressed by legislation being put together by Senator Lankford of Oklahoma, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, Senator Tillis of North Carolina, three core states that are Republican since the Civil War, with the help of the White House and Senator Schumer. Yet in the House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson calls it dead on arrival simply refusing to break the status quo. ...

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The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade pact led by Japan and the U.S. moves to the next stage with legislation introduced by Orrin Hatch and Ron Wyden in the U.S. Congress for granting trade promotion authority to the U.S. president. This would facilitate the negotiation of an agreement leading to concessions by different countries. Talks between Japan and the U.S. intensified with the U.S. president Obama saying in his 2015 State of the Union message that China wanted to write the rules for trade in Asia, and asking why the U.S. should not work to write its own rules. Defense Secretary, Aston Carter, called it more important than another aircraft carrier. Support from Europe, India and other countries for the China sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, as a rival to the U.S. dominated World Bank and IMF, also give urgency to the TPP. The TPP countries, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Peru and Chile, make up over $400 billion of about $4 trillion in U.S. trade, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The TPP is now seen not just a free trade pact, but also as away to counter China's influence in Asia. Experts see the Obama administration as having bungled its handling of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank which the U.S. did not join, and its allies in Europe, other Asian countries including India, decided to join as founding members. Democrats in Congress led by Senator Schumer, Warren, oppose the legislation granting fast track for free trade pacts citing the loss of jobs and lowering of wages for workers in manufacturing in the U.S., with only about a dozen Democrats favoring the legislation, leading to a split in the party. Projections by Peter Petri, Michael Plummer, Fan Zhai, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, show a net negative impact on depressed wage sectors such as U.S. manufacturing with additional $45 billion in U.S. imports and $35 billion in exports for heavy manufacturing from the TPP free trade pact, and additional $33 billion of U.S. imports and $10 billion exports in light manufacturing by 2025. Higher wage sectors such as U.S. Services including IT get a boost with additional $42 billion in exports and $ 8 billion imports. Agriculture shows insignificant gains with additional exports of $2 billion and imports of 0.5 billion. The auto and transport sector disproportionately favors Japan with $33 billion in additional U.S. imports and $8 billion in exports. ...