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About 1.5 million mothers of school age children in March 2021 are missing from the US workforce as mothers are slow to return to the workforce. Both men and women had lower labor force participation, but as men's is rebounding the mothers are still slow to rebound. One mother in Brooklyn, New York, with 3 school age children is typical. She decided to hastily quit work to take care of children at home during 2020 at a stressful time, and has found it difficult to return to work in 2021. It has brought men and women closer to their children but also made it harder to pursue their careers.

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GM says it will end traditional pension contributions and instead use a 401 (K) plan. GM's pension plan was underfunded by $8.7 billion as of Sept 30, 2011. GM will also freeze salaries for 26,000 salaried workers. Salaried workers will get an extra week of vacation. GM's 48,500 UAW union represented hourly workers will receive bonuses under a formula dependent on profitability and quality. Salaried employees will receive smaller bonuses because other metrics such as free cash flow and earnings before interest and taxes, and not just profit, are used to determine bonuses. GM's management sees GM as not having enough margins to reduce risk to the level it should be. The pension shortfall and the losses in Europe are also on their minds. Margins at GM lag behind compettitors. GM's margins are at about 6%, compared to Hyundai and BMW having margins of 10% in 2011. These changes come as GM plans to show a record profit of $8 billion in 2011. Management sees no room for complacency after the missteps in the last decade leading to the government bailout. A strategic decision made by GM in 2011 was to reduce the overhang of high inventory by reducing production, changing the way GM operates now compared to the years before bankruptcy....

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The probe into corruption at Petrobras, is known as "Operation Car Wash," because some of the payments were routed through a car wash company in Curitiba, Brazil, which caught the attention of a young federal prosecutor in that city. The investigation took a new turn with the arrest by Brazilian police of the heads of two large construction companies, Marcelo Odebrecht of Odebrecht SA, and the CEO of Andrade Gutierrez, on June 18, 2015. Investigators say construction executives in collusion with Petrobras officials inflated the price of contracts and made payments to politicians and political parties including the ruling Workers Party. The alleged amount is about $2 billion. The construction companies are active in shipbuilding, defense contracting, oil and exploration related work, and building the stadiums for the World Cup Soccer and the Olympics. This has damaged the credibility of the ruling Workers Party, former president Da Silva, and current president Dilma Rousseff, in power during the last decade. The companies and the Workers' Party denied any involvement. Federal prosecutor Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima told a news conference in Curitiba- "We have no doubt that Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez headed the cartel scheme within Petrobras." Adding that the two companies "cannot pass themselves off as innocent given how much evidence we have."...

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The French system what works and what does not work compared to the Anglo-Saxon systems of Britain and the USA. Health care works, public transport and high speed rail works, nuclear energy and the energy industry works, education works for small elite universities but fails in the larger system. The large public projects are executed well, and France has done well with its long tradition of the state building infrastructure projects. But when it comes to individual initiative and starting up new companies such as in computers and high tech of that kind, France does not do so well. And the state collects a larger proportion of taxes than in other countries to finance these benefits. France is also good at rule making, which serves it well in controlling the kinds of bubbles that regularly hit the Anglo-Saxon countries. And with 21% of jobs of all workers in France in the public sector and government, with 49% when one includes related sectors protected from economic downturns, the French workers are much better protected than workers in Britain, USA and other countries from economic downturns. Unemployment stays high in upturns and at 8%, and in downturns does not go too far above 8%....

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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. ...

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Front line experience gained by management by working alongside workers is critical for getting a good understanding of the business. It helps build employee morale and customer service by giving management an insight into what happens in the field.

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Democrats continue to believe they lost in 2024 because they did not attack DJT enough. This fails to cite issues such as cost of living- surge in the third year of the Biden administration with 20% increase in prices and Biden failing to take notice and address this quickly. A wave of illegal immigration- the failure of Mayorkas, himself a Cuban immigrant in 1960, put in charge of Homeland Security and ICE, and Harris who was an attorney helping indigents in inner city San Francisco, to grasp the fears of border states and southern states. The failure to understand that the border was open and inviting waves of illegal immigrants, some with questionable backgrounds. This issue created a sense of unease in the fabric of society and American people. Other issues simply showed how Harris could not relate to the conservative people and average people in the country in the cultural aspect such as transgender, rural America. Biden pulling out suddenly, loss of rural vote- failure of Democrats since Obama to pay attention to rural voters, Harris not appealing to the white male vote in the US, are other factors that hurt Democrats. DJT gained with the shooting incident in Pennsylvania in which he survived, and the perception raised during a garbage truck and DJT photo that the Democrats derided, seen by the public as looking down on working class people. Democrats never really grasped how the political system had gone in reverse- the Republicans had put cultural aspect first and conservative now meant working class voters and white voters in rural areas/small towns, big cities, ( the Archie Bunker type of an earlier era who was now a Democrat, not the college educated and Ivy league Harvard type that had taken over the Democratic party). This continues to this day with some paradox as the business class and the billionaire class sit alongside the working class person in the Republican party DJT created. DJT did this in 2016 by pulling together workers hurt by Bush and Obama's policies favoring the educated classes and affluent, ignoring rural areas and farmers, and committing US to wars in the Middle East that squandered the Nations' resources and human lives. This was aggravated in the Biden/Harris/Mayorkas years by letting in migrants across the border by the millions that created a great deal of unease in the working classes. In this way labor unions or their rank and file left the Democratic party- a problem that plagues Democrats to this day, that Biden tried but failed to fix. The border issues had become complex by the latter part of the Biden administration because of the complete collapse of Venezuelan economy and the drug cartels in Mexico smuggling people and drugs across the border, for which the Biden administration or Harris had no answer.  It was the failure of administrations to continue the Monroe Doctrine in the form given by FDR as "Good Neigbor Policy," and JFK as the Alliance for Progress, allowing drug cartels and foreign European powers to intervene in the western hemisphere, desorying good governance in Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba and other nations in Latin America. By the second year of the DJT administration Venezuela, and the border were brought under control, and the situation in Mexico put in a new direction. ...

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Liz Goodwin and Riley Beggin report from Hillard Ohio where Amazon is building a large data center using land adjoining a school and a park for children. Parents are collecting signatures for a ban. About 70% of Americans are opposed to the data centers building in their local area, after an aggressive push with tax breaks and incentives provided by some states. Virginia, Georgia, Texas, and Ohio most aggressive data center builders in the US by 2026- construction jobs, and investment, as pros, electricity usage and use of farmland cons. Ohio's governor DeWine paused tax breaks after realizing that it cost the state $1 billion in lost revenue. Amazon says it has invested $70 billion in the state since 2016. Democrat politicians are not taking up the bans because of some unions supporting the data centers for jobs created in construction. Another reason is that politicians in general face attacks from the tech companies donating to campaigns against them if they call for a ban. Sherrod Brown Democrat in Ohio asks data centers to pay for their electricity but has not supported a ban-  “With data centers, we make sure the investors pay for electricity. Not the people who live in Zanesville or Coshocton or in Cambridge.” The big reason to support it from the jobs perspective is stated by the unions. Tim Burga of the AFL-CIO in Ohio says-  “These are creating good union jobs, both in the construction, but also in the keeping them secure and maintaining them."  Now you have a public frustrated particularly in quiet suburbs of America who see this as an intrusion into their lives, which means Republican and Democrat, Red State and Blue State, makes little difference. Construction workers and unions excited about the prospects for decent jobs after the Obama and Bush elites shipped 5 million jobs (Lighthizer USTR estimate) to China over 2000-2016, and transferred $20 trillion in American wealth to foreign countries by blindly accepting unfair trade with China, EU, Canada, Mexico. And see this as part of the MAGA effort to bring back the supply chains to America for all manufactured products in the interests of reliable supply, national security, and the promise of good paying jobs for the communities across America that depended on these jobs since the industrial revolution inthe US at the turn of the century in 1900. It took only 2 decades to wipe them out under what Lighthizer and Jamieson call "shortsighted leadership" of  Republican Bush and Democrat Obama and their corresponding elites. These communities were hit more than once, twice, thrice, four times in fact- in 2009 by the banker's aided and abetted financial crisis, by Bush starting and Obama continuing the Afghan Iraq wars on different pretexts (diverting trillions of dollars that otherwise go to job creation and manufacturing, new technologies), and then by Covid in 2019. This is the America in which the data center building spree is taking place- a plus if done right and with some carefully thought out plan for water/electricity usage costs and for AI guardrails, protection for farmland and areas near parks and schools, and residential suburbs.   ...

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China's assembly work accounts for just $3.70 of the Apple I Pod's value, The display module costs$20 made by Toshiba-Matsushita and of the $224 wholesale price $80 consisted of Apple's gross profit. This is from a study by 3 economists of the University of California at Berkeley and Irvine, Linden Dedrick and Kraemer. Out of electronic and IT exports of $300 billion China's value added was about 15% or $45 billion according to Leo Branstetter of Carnegie Mellon University. Foreign firms account for the largest share of exports and all of the top ten are overseas firms. In India mostly the IT business is a services business and it has not made the breakthrough to create original software products that are marketed worldwide.. In this sense there are a lot of missing pieces in both countries efforts and a lot remains to be done.

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Chinese companies are executing plans to put them at the forefront of new technologies and innovation in many fields. Example of BYD which plans to make a hybrid by the end of 2008. It is already the second largest battery producer and started up less than 10 years before. And BYD has built a 16 million square feet assembly plant in Shenzen to make the hybrid on a large scale. And Hasee a computer maker is focussing on innovative computers and laptops that now sell for just $370 , and hopes to become the top computer maker in the next 10 years . It is already selling 100,000 laptops a month in China and is now the second biggest computer maker in China. It is Chinese government policy to support innovative technology companies to take leadership positions in worldwide industries and products. Speaking at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in June President Hu said : "we are ready for a fight to control the scientific high ground and earn a seat on the world's high technology board. We will make some serious efforts to strengthen our nation's competence."...

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DJT considers De Santis for Defense to replace Hegseth. Lori Chavez-Deremer Republican Congresswoman from Oregon is considered to be pro-worker as Labor Secretary.

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Apple and protests over working conditions at factories of suppliers like Foxconn which make the iPads and iPhones. Issues related to Apple's large profit margins and the low wages paid to workers at supplier factories in China and other countries.

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45,000 dock workers of the Longshoreman's Union go on strike for a 77% wage increase over 6 years. The dock operators offered 40% wage increase. This follows negotiations by other unions for wage increases to meet the cost of living increases of recent years and depressed wages arising from a period of weakness for unions. Biden- Harris want to see fair wages and want to see the strike settled.

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Congestion pricing has cut vehicles in central Manhattan (NY) district by 11% in 2025. One benefit it has made finding parking space easier. Peopel avoid taking the car if they can. Fee is $9 below 60th Street. It means safer quieter streets, easier walks, less traffic, and revenue for public transportation projects. 27 million fewer car trips say NY authorites were made compared to before the pricing was introduced. Traffic moves at speeds faster by about 4-5%, yet in the tunnels and bridges in NYC the morning commute traffic moves from 15% to 30% faster so it eases up a lot of traffic movement.  $550 million from revenue generated from the pricing can now be invested in the rail and subway transit with additional investments to upgrade it to make life easier for transit riders. This is improving quality of life for New Yorkers not just in the city district but in the outlying areas of NY state and NJ where 73,000 fewer cars leave every day for the commute into NY City. ...

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Friedman says the fairly obvious that Democrats in the US and Social Democrats in Europe readily grasp. That unrestricted immigration on the southern border in the US or in the southern border of Europe actually does little to improve the situation for people in the US and Europe or the people in the countries migrants are leaving because of unsettled conditions. Germany has shifted to a policy of becoming involved in development in Africa. Japan's International Cooperation Agency has worked for many years in African countries. The US has its own efforts to assist Mexico through trade and manufacturing. It is working with Central American countries that are a major source of migrants on the southern border at different times. Mette Frederiksen, head of the Danish Social Democrats government, has put it very well when she said that the only people who are getting hurt by open border policies are the working class families in Denmark. This is true also of other parts of the EU and the US. Simply by letting in migrants, a policy that is harmful to workers and families. Conservatives are looking to make political gains and further their own interests, indifferent to social divisions and increasing lack of upward mobility in society. Immigration has become the tool for many of the conservative parties that have used it in ways harmful to interests of workers and families, in Britain, in the US, and in the EU. One has only to see the large delegation that Mette Frederiksen led to India for discussions with prime minister Modi, the economic ministries, and business, to see how she did the right thing on a huge scale. Denmark is the world leader in logistics with Maersk, and in renewable energy. Denmark and the Nordic countries are working closely with a country of 1.4 billion people to improve the logistics to make India comparable to China in manufacturing for export. And similarly in renewable energy technologies. The Nordic countries and the EU have simply by these actions done more to uplift hundreds of millions of people in Asia than anything that ever happened in the history of the world. And the US is also working with India in the same way. India acts as a stable source of growth and model for a whole stretch of Asia from Indonesia to Vietnam. The population lifted out of poverty - 2 billion people. ...

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The new data security law that went into effect Sept 1, 2021, limits the amount of sensitive information China will share with foreign companies, and investors. All data related activities are subject to government oversight says this report in WSJ, including collection, storage, use and transmission. Companies in China now are reluctant to share information.  Because the law is ambiguous about what is sensitive information this makes companies more reluctant. The result is a China that is more opaque than before. It is driven by antagonism in the US over the effect on American workers of manufacturing and supply chains shifted to China. The response of the Chinese government is to turn the country inward, looking to self sufficiency, data security, and an environment that looks at foreigners with suspicion, says this report in WSJ. The pandemic has increased this view of foreigners in China, after China's experience with a deteriorating trade relationship with the US. Xi Jinping has not left the country since the pandemic started in January 2020. China has also seen an alarming drop in passengers going overseas or coming into China from 50 million in the first 8 months of 2019, to 1 million in the first 8 months of 2021, a drop of 49 million passengers, according to data from the Civil Aviation Administration. Government directives are to minimize foreign travel as a result of the pandemic. People in the US see the operations in China of companies such as Apple and now Tesla as a sign of how well the system of international cooperation is functioning without realizing that these companies never had the understanding of the history and culture of the country after two centuries of struggle against colonialism. When the situation takes a different turn as it has after Mr. Trump raised the issue of American workers and loss of manufacturing, and after the pandemic created unexpected distrust, there is very little these companies have to offer to keep the relationship between two of the world's population blocs, between North America and the closely related population of South America, with the people of China, a billion people on each side. This shows that the relationship cannot be left only to the business and private sector driven by profit and business interests, that all sections of the population in China and in the US need to be involved for a stable relationship with ongoing human and cultural contacts at all levels. ...

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Republicans have supported less regulation. After the 2009 financial crisis with faulty mortgages and excessive leveraging one would expect that there would be a shift among Republicans favoring necessary regulation of banks. This did not happen after the Obama administration failed to articulate a new culture after 2009 and lost control of Congress in 2010 by as much as 64 seats in the House 6 in the Senate, and in all demographic and income groups. The result was that the 2009 crisis changed some laws but not the culture of laissez faire that less regulation was better for the economy. It is left to president Biden to tackle this problem of culture and the Silicon Valley Bank clearly shows that the parts of the Republican and Democratic parties that support less regulation even where the regulation is essential for a good economy for workers and families, are self serving. No where is this culture of laissez fairre in its other manifestation in not planning for the US manufacturing base to be strengthened by government action more evident than in the way it has prevailed to turn a blind eye to not just sending manufacturing overseas, but over concentrating it in one country China with additional supply base from Japan into China. This is the challenge that the country faces- only if the culture or mindset changes will laws have the needed impact.  This report in the NYT shows that when president Trump appointed Randall Quarles to vice chair of banking supervision in 2017, Congressmen both Republicans and Democrats believed that less supervision was better for the economy. Democrats such as Congressmen Barney Frank were themselves part of the new culture when Frank joined Signature Bank's board in 2015, one of the banks that along with SVB bank caused the banking crisis of 2023. Its association with risky crypto assets is considered by the WSJ as being one reason the government decided to close it. Frank did not see this aspect of its risk insisting that the bank was in sound condition.  This culture is also manifested in its approach to the cost of living crisis and support for workers and families. The Biden administration sees the problem of culture and of clearly making the changes that create a new culture, and a new understanding of what is right for America, for its economy and for its role in the world, and best for its people.   ...

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Working part-time during retirement years is important for health- staying active, using ones mind and brain, social engagement, and getting satisfaction in the workplace. A Study in 2017 by the Rand Corporation finds about 40% of workers over 65 who had previously retired back to the workplace. People are lengthening careers, and returning to work not just for financial reasons. Many of these people are looking for ways to remain active after realizing that staying active was important and if this could be combined with having extra time off in part time jobs for other hobbies and interests- this would better fit today's lifestyle and choices with people living longer and having more productive lives than ever before. A recent Pew Research analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the proportion of people over age 65 who are employed part time or full time has gone up in 2016 from about 13% to 19% with about half these people working full time. This trend to work following retirement has a word for it- people call it "unretirement." Where work is less taxing as for graduates and people with higher education this is happening more.  From a health perspective this can be important, as people can become more reclusive and more internal looking, less socially engaged as they retire without even realizing it. Some level of social engagement is planned by people retiring, and many retirees do volunteer work, yet this may not be enough. For those people who retired early because of burnout in the workplace, strains with other workers, poor culture in the workplace, the retirement for a few years after 60 can serve as a way to replenish one's resources, recover and resume working again in a place that is better suited for them. The restorative break can then serve as a way to get back to the workplace in a positive way. Work that is meaningful, offering opportunities for contributing one's skills, adds a new dimension to people's lives, and is also a contributor to living healthy lives, at a time when people live longer. Retirement at 65 may not make sense in this new environment, opportunities for part-time work bring the knowledge and skills of experienced people to the workplace and offer a win-win solution for both. More needs to be done to create these opportunities in a planned and organized way in business and government, in all workplaces. ...

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Senior diplomat Song Tao, who heads the external affairs department of the Chinese Communist Party, will visit Pyongyang to brief the Korean Workers Party on the recently concluded 19th Party Congress. This visit will reopen a channel for discussion between North Korea and China after the deterioration in relations between the two countries over nuclear tests. The Director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center, Paul Haenle, says the contacts are intended to not let things get too bad. China provides the crude oil lifeline for North Korea, and is pushing for negotiations.

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The changes in Saudi Arabia being made by 30 year old Prince Mohammed bin Salman amount to a large cultural change for Saudis. It means Saudi Arabia is now seeing a new generation of Saudis taking over, and making economic and social shifts as the Saudi young population surges and change becomes inevitable. Younger women are entering the workforce and foreign workers are leaving the country. Changes include having retail locations close by 9 pm instead of later so that people can spend time with their families. New jobs are being created in unlikely places such as renovating architectural monuments in Riyadh.

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For the last 4 quarters Tesla has average profit of about $70 million each quarter yet in May Tesla awarded shares worth $800 million in May to Mr. Elon Musk, CEO, as part of the pay package, says this report in the WSJ.  These stock options need to be expensed as stock based compensation expense. These expenses put Tesla's meager profits based on GAAP in jeopardy says the WSJ. A third quarter net loss of just $226 million would put Tesla in a loss situation for the past 4 quarters. This for a company that is attracting massive amounts of capital. Is this a misallocation of capital by capital markets as structured today when there are pressing needs for infrastructure, health and education from the investment behaviour that prevailed for decades before the pandemic? Are there questions about pay packages that are thousands of times the pay of average manufacturing workers at the same company consistent with the kind of society we once were and now want to build after the pandemic? The average pay at Tesla is between $70,000 to $94,000 a year for workers making the CEO pay package about a thousand times that of the average worker. At the height of the crisis at VW it was about 170 times the average worker in 2015 in Germany. ...

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Su Liping, professor at Tsinghua Unversity, says there were 180,000 protests, riots and other incidents, protesting economic injustice in 2010. Most of the incidents were against land grabs, corruption and abuses by local officials, and unpaid wages. Inflation has hit the poor, migrant workers and people with low incomes hardest. Food prices were up 13.4% in August over the same month prior year. Pork prices were up 52.3%. Other problems are now meshed in with inflation. Local government debt in China, according to the National Audit Office, was 10.7 trillion yuan in June 2011. The National Audit Office estimates 23% of this, or 2.5 trillion yuan, depends on land for repayment. Analysts say China's local government made repayment in 2010 using the 2.9 trillion yuan in revenue from land sales. The same amount of land has to be sold in 2010 to make repayment. At lower prices even more land may have to be sold. The danger say Orlik and Jie, is that inflation and the pressure to acquire more land- and consequently more land grabs- will pose severe risks to the social contract in China....

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About 3.5 million Americans ages 45-64 were unemployed as of May 2012, 39% for 1 year or more. This is even higher than the unemployment among younger workers and is a new aspect of this recession compared to the ones before this. Some have quit looking for jobs after depending on extended unemployment benefits of upto 99 weeks, and some have taken part-time jobs. Statistics on unemployment from the U.S. Labor Department give a more distorted picture this time because the unemployment rate as defined by the Labor Department includes only people looking for work. More people today are discouraged and not looking for work, dropping out of the labor market entirely or in part-time jobs. So that the unemployment rate is much higher when these workers are accounted for.

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The U.S. unemployment rate declined to 7.7% in February 2013 from 7.9% in January, with 236,000 jobs added. IHS Global Insight's forecast of GDP growth is 1.5% for the first half of 2013 because of spending cuts and the increase in Social Security taxes in Jan 2013. Macroeconomic Advisors predicts the federal spending cuts will lead to loss of about 700,000 jobs, with most of this ocurring in the second and third quarters. As a result economists expect the unemployment rate to be at about 7.5% by the end of 2013. The job gains were broad based including manufacturing and business services, and 48,000 construction jobs were addd. At the same time the labor force participation rate declined to 63.5% reflecting some workers retiring and some discouraged workers dropping out of the job market.

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The hardest hit group in this downturn are workers who have not completed high school, with the unemployment rate for this group going up to 15.5% compared to 8.4% last year. Workers with 4 year college degrees have unemployment at 4.8%, comparedto 2.3% a year ago. The unemployment rate for women in May is at 7.5% and for men at 9.8%. Women who have finished high school have an easier time finding jobs in health care and education. The male dominated manufacturing and construction industries are among the worst hit. Harvard University labor economist Katz says the recessions of 1990 and 2001 were more "egalitarian" than the present one, which is more like the recessions of the early 1980's and the 1970's when the less educated group was the hardest hit.