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During the primaries Trump appealed to blue collar voters of a white working class that felt neglected by leaders and policies of both parties that did not seem to work for ordinary people. Having caught onto this early long before Republican candidates, Trump registered a series of wins in the Republican primaries. He continued this theme in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on July 21, 2016, saying- "The forgotten men and women of our country- people who work but no longer have a voice: I am your voice." The idea was to couple this with the theme of law and order and put perception of Hillary Clinton as part of the rigged system of the past that Trump would change, with Clinton's legacy described in terms of "death, destruction, terrorism and weakness." As a change agent Trump described his entering the political arena in terms of coming into this election only to help blue collar people "so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves." The two themes for the rest of the election season- law and order, and blue collar lives- and who can best defend them a traditional Democratic politician with a fighting spirit for traditional Democratic values, or a blustery newcomer adept with slogans and the public mood and ironically representing the Democratic values of representing the working class to become the  Republican nominee, with the law and order theme thrown in. The voter or independent listening in to all this will hopefully ask what all this means. As the WSJ, July 19, 2016, pointed out in a recent look at economc policies under the two candidates- on Glass Steagall Act being reinstated to increase safety of the banking system that caused many of today's problems through the 2008 financial crisis both Trump and Clinton are similiar, on opposing trade agreements similiar except that Trump's bluster is a riskier approach, on infrastructure building similiar with Clinton's $275 billion plan spelled out out for source of financing and Trump's unclear as to source of financing. On immigration the candidates are different, on the minimum wage which impacts low income people Clinton supports $15 minimum wage and Trump has not taken a stand. On ISIS and the Middle East Clinton is in reality a hawk and not much difference in the candidates, on law and order more chance of divisions in the country with Trump than Clinton. Overall for the working class and blue collar voter his life will take a decade or more to rebuild, with both candidates commiting to go in that direction. And the bluster and ads to come- just that.  ...

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Akasaki of Meijo University, Amano of Nagoya University, Japan, and Nakamura of UC Santa Barbara, produced blue light beams from semiconductors in the 1990's. Nakamura, working for Nichia Chemicals developed his own version of the LED in 1988 following the earlier efforts of Akasaki and Amano, leading to the development of a cheaper easier method of creating LED. The technology is also behind the blue ray disc by using blue lights much shorter wavelength to store 4X more information. Today it is the technology used in smartphone screens.

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The Washington Post points out the damage to civil society and the rule of law in Egypt in 2014-2015. It cites the Working Group on Egypt's conclusions that repression only works to increase the extremism in the region. A bipartisan group of seven senators including John McCain and Marc Rubio, in a letter to Mr. Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State, says the U.S. foreign policy must always support human rights, political reform and civil society. It calls these core principles.

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How Ben Bernanke is having to invent Fed policy on the fly. His thinking in academia was that the Fed should not make ad hoc policy but go through things carefully. Now with crisis after crisis in the financial markets in 2007 this is what he has to do make policy in response to changing events.

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British Airways to start flights from New York to Paris with a new carrier its launching called OpenSkies. Flights will be added to Amsterdam, Milan and Brussels. This is part of the new Open Skies aviation treaty between the USA and the European Union which lets airlines of both the EU and the USA fly on all transatlantic routes.

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Prof. Cusumano of MIT, says that with the loss of Apple's Steve Jobs, the company has lost a great visionary, and it will be difficult for Apple's new CEO Time Cook to make up for this loss. Cusumano has talked to many Apple employees in 2013-2014, and is writing a book on innovation. In this piece Chen and Richtel point out the ways Tim Cook is trying to fill the role Jobs filled, by assembling a group of people within the company who can play the pioneering role for new products, and making new acquisitions such as the Beats acquisition to bring in outside talent. Cook pushed for the introduction of the iPad Air, which now accounts for 60% of all iPad sales. The constant push for the magic in new products that Steve Jobs obsessed with down to details, will be missing. Jobs met daily with design chief Jonathan Ive for lunch at the Cupertino headquarters. Cook meets Ive 3 times a week. And Jobs pulled all the pieces of the new product together in a way that others will have difficulty doing. Cook has brought a different dimension to leadership at Apple by talking about Apple in terms of "advancing humanity," talking about his own personal experiences in the South, and seeing racial discrimination barriers for minorities. He was challenged recently to address issues of working conditions at Apple supplier factories in China. Cook is bringing some manufacturing back to the U.S. with building of new plants in Arizona and Texas. These are areas which were gaps in Jobs record, which Cook is filling gradually, and asking shareholders, customers, to be patient....

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Solyndra Inc. and what went wrong. Solyndra filed for bankruptcy in Sept. 2011, after investments of private and government capital of over a billion dollars. Of this $535 million was a loan backed by the U.S. Department of Energy, leaving taxpayers with large losses. When emails were being exchanged between Vice President Biden's advisor and OMB staffers on August 31, 2009, according to the Washington Post, Solyndra was already in trouble. OMB pleaded for more time to do due diligence and analysis of the company. A $535 million loan was approved just when the economics behind Solyndra's cylinder coated solar materials were being made obsolete by the existing technology of polysilicon cells laid out on a flat panel. At Solyndra's inception in 2005 the cylinder based technology held promise, as the polysilicon cells technology relied on polysilicon material which was costly to make. In 2009 China was investing heavily in the polysilicon technology and bringing prices down to where the material cost was coming down quickly-down as much as 80%. By the end of 2009, it cost $4.00 per watt to produce Solyndra's product, while the competing Chinese polysilicon product cost $1.00 per watt- today this is down to 75 cents for the polysilicon product. The Solyndra product was harder to manufacture and had more defective material that had to be discarded. It is in the midst of these sea changes in technology, costs, and the economics of the project, that the government pushed for and OMB approved the Solyndra loan of $535 million to build a new factory that could produce 500 megawatts. In 2010 the economics worked as it would be expected, leading to Solyndra sales of 65 megawatts. The original factory had a capacity with improvements of 100 megawatts. Solyndra lost $172 million in 2009 on revenue of $100 million. Private investors attitude to their investment changed in 2009. The Wall Street Journal quotes one investor who saw the government loan followed by an IPO as a way to exit and cash out. A press release by Solyndra in July 2009, stated the company had a contractual backlog of $2 billion, even as the economics of the Solyndra product were collapsing. Yet these orders were not firm orders but framework agreements. In Dec. 2009 the lead underwriters, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, made an initial filing for an IPO, which was cancelled by the board 6 months later when the new factory had to be closed. The private investors interests and the governments interests had already diverged by the time of the email pushing for the $535 U.S. government loan from McSweeney, Biden's domestic policy advisor, to the senior OMB staffer, cited in the Washington Post, Stephens and Leonnig, 9/14/2011. OMB and the White House staffers failed to see this and the bankruptcy outcome that seemed highly probable in August 2009, based on the economics and competitive technology and pricing. This does prove the often cited comment that the government is not good at choosing winners and losers when handing out money. It goes beond this to show the whole process of due diligence failing at agencies such as the Energy Department and the Office of Management and the Budget, where one would think technically qualified staffers could catch the problems and risks of a project that were so apparent. ...

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Gates experience one rainy night in March, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, welcoming 4 dead soldiers who lost their lives to a roadside bomb on a rutted road near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, provides an insight into what he sees as important for the US military. One is to address the realities of the war that is facing the US in the now, not some theoretical conventional war as the Pentagon is overly focused on. This war is fought in insurgencies in Iraq and in the Pakistan-Afghanistan area. And even the takeover of nuclear weapons by Taliban, is not ruled out with the collapse of the government in Pakistan. So he sees reason for doing things quickly. At Dover that night, Gates expressed his anger to his staff, "find out why they had'nt gotten their goddamn MRAP's yet (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles). Gates went into the 747 carrying the draped coffins, and knelt alone and prayed for 5 minutes. Gates was President of Texas A&M University, before he took the assignment at Defense during the last 2 years of the Bush administration. He knows the ways of the bureaucracy, and is a persistent and effective when faced with lack of cooperation and delays. When the field commanders in Afghanistan said they needed 40 Predator combat air patrols instead of the 12 they had, Gates went around the bureaucratic delays and had his task force set up and and doing problem solving down to details. They went about getting more flying time, and pilots, and control stations in the air force to support this. He keeps presentations limited to 45 minutes, and inists all slides be turned in the day before, for him to look over carefully. And he is decisive in making changes. The Army Secretary was asked to come to Washington immediately, and fired on the spot, not Gates says for the appalling conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital, but for not acknowledging that problems existed and taking quick action to fix them. And Gates is using the 2010 Defense budget to steer away from large scale conventional weapons programs, and get more money for the immediate needs of the field commanders in the wars being fought today. He makes it clear in talking with lawmakers, that "listening to our troops and commanders, unvarnished and unscripted, has from the moment I took the job been the greatest single source of ideas on what the department needs to do." In doing this he has to face up to the bureaucracy and set ways of doing things at the Defense Department, things that were never questioned under his predecessor Rumsfeld. In 2008 the generals who run the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps formally "non-concurred" with the classified version of Gates's National Defense Strategy, which said it was necessary "to take additional acceptable risk" in the area of conventional war so that the military could improve its ability to fight irregular wars. Gates met with all the defense chiefs to listen to their objections, and decided to draw his own conclusion after thinking it over, that the reasons given "were non-compelling," considering the grave dangers that the military was facing in existing wars. Gates is convinced that its his job to give the troops in the field the equipment and resources they need, and he is not letting the military brass or officials block the way. He does not let the criticism affect him. Gates is very quiet when he listens to arguments presented on the other side that he does not share, responding in a thoughtful and controlled manner. Last week, Jaffe of the WPost says, Gates flew to Afghnistan to ask for the resignation of Gen McKiernan the field commander there, a man he had chosen 11 months earlier, but now felt was the wrong man for the job. During this trip he visited a new base being built in southern Afghanistan, and met four marines whose MRAP vehicle took the blast from a roadside bomb, all survived with minor scratches and injuries, and one broken arm. Gates was mightily pleased. ...

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Journalists shot and wounded in the violent police crackdown on protesters in Cairo on August 14, 2013.

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The South China Morning Post, SCMP, looks at China at the 40th year of the great economic experiment  that changed China. This started with the Deng reforms by the then Chinese leader that opened up the economy in 1978. As this report points out in 1978 Deng Xiaoping's efforts at loosening the state control of the economy and business was actually a way to get out from the effects of the Cultural Revolution and prevent another Cultural Revolution. Deng was removed from office during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of unquestioned acceptance of Mao the new criterion was "Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth." In economic and business matters this was followed so that if it worked then the experiment was expanded, gradually giving life to the Chinese model of state capitalism, economic expansion under the state with the state supporting state corporations that operate in a market economy.  This means the Communist Party was to continue its control but with experimentation away from the planned economy in the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, and then into Shanghai. Experts close to Jiang Zemin, the next leader after Deng, say China's Communist state would not have survived without the changes started by premier Deng. Farmers still did not own the land but they were free to plant and own the yields for their efforts.  Deng established the Three Benefits Principle in 1992 trip to Guangdong, whatever helped increase productivity, increased the strength of the country and improved living standards was good, you did not judge it by whether it was socialist or capitalist. Jiang Zemin's work was to follow Deng's ideas and help negotiate the entry into World Trade Organization and set up the new economic regulations. Capitalists were allowed to join the Communist Party for the first time. State and local government ownership of land was turned into an advantage as this provided one of the critical inputs in terms of land for setting up new factories, with capital coming from savings, and other inputs of technology and investment coming from the U.S. after entry into the WTO brought American and European companies to China. A steady supply of labor poured in from the countryside and urbanization became a goal of Chinese development policies. Today India and other countries in Africa, Latin America, can look at the Chinese experience and effort and look for ways to modernize, urbanize and improve living standards, productivity and strength of their economy. One key is to experiment and look for what works that can then be expanded to other locations, and build on the advantages that may open up as the experiment makes progress. Following entry into WTO China was able to take advantage of overseas markets and build an edge in manufacturing, something that was not evident even in 1992.   ...

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Joe Parkinson of the WSJ gives a in-depth account of the emergence of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey's politics, with contributions by Emre Peker, Ayla Albayrak, Yeliz Candemir. Erdogan grew up in a poor neighborhood of Istanbul, and became the head of a local youth branch of the Islamist National Salvation Party in 1976 after an adolescent period steeped in mosque culture and Islamic ideas. In 1994 he is elected Mayor of Istanbul amid voter discontent with corruption and problems with infrastructure and public services. He served for four years making improvements. After reciting a poem publicly that said "the mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets and faithful our soldiers," he is jailed for 4 months by a military backed secular government in 1999. During this period Erdogan, described by friends from his youth as having a unique ability to adapt to difficult situations, makes a transformation. He moves to the centre, coming out in favor of stronger ties to the EU, and works hard to attract support from the secular and nationalist voters to add to his conservative religious base. In 2003 he is elected prime minister as head of the Justice and Development Party. This begins a period of ten years in which Turkey sees remarkable period of economic growth during which Turkey's GNP nearly quadruples from a little over $200 billion in 2002 to $794.5 billion in 2012, according to the IMF. It may be partly coincidence and partly good management of the economy under Erdogan. Turkey's previous banking and currency crises before 2003 created a better understanding and discipline for managing the economy. Emerging markets such as Brazil, India, China, Russia, Indonesia, and other parts of Asia and Latin America were able to achieve high rates of growth during this 10 year period. Competitiveness in Brazil and Turkey has not improved significantly in this period according to experts, and large capital inflows into Turkey partly supported the credit boom in Turkey. And just as growth is slowing significantly in all emerging markets, Turkey under Erdogan faces a new test. Especially now that Erdogan is seen as autocratic in his effort to suppress protests to build an Ottoman era army barracks in Taksim Square, Istanbul. The fears of secularists in Turkey are that this is the Erdogan of the period in 1999, after serving as Mayor of Istanbul. Just as Turks turned away from the overreaching actions of the military, the public sentiment may be shifting beyond the overreaching actions of the religious parties in Turkish politics. The protests in Brazil against the Rouseff administration after the popularity of the Lula administration, show that slowing economic growth and missteps by the elected government can alienate younger voters. The parties still retain a majority but face an uncertain future in which lower economic growth and missteps lead to a search for alternatives. At the same time Turkey's efforts for accession to the EU are beng put on hold as Germany opposes the actions to suppress protests of the Justice Party in Turkey. ...

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History will see the lack of working on a bipartisan basis from the beginning of the Trump and Biden terms to stop illegal migrants and fight CMC (Canada, Mexico and China) on fentanyl flows as a blot on both parties. A remarkable change has happened in a matter of 100 days in Canada's stance on immigration and fentanyl flows. Trudeau now calling for eradication of fentanyl, his deputy prime minister saying Canada has more fentanyl deaths per capita than the US because of smaller population, and the need to wipe it out off the face of North America. The Canada Conservatives generally support DJT. The Trudeau Liberals have shifted policy to support DJT policies on immigration and fentanyl flows. In general Canada is making a pronounced shift towards support of the US position on immigration.  It is not just DJT policy as closing the border was part of the agreement agreed by Biden in 2024 with Republicans in Congress led by Lankford-Graham-McConnell which was not passed because it was too close to the election. One can only say the Covid pandemic, vaccination shortfalls, failures of supply chain distracted Biden from acting early and similar to DJT on the first phase of immigration action on illegal migrants committing offenses. The release of illegal migrants across the US is something that Democrats will years from now see as a major error in its policies. History will see the lack of working on a bipartisan basis from the beginning of the Trump and Biden terms to stop illegal migrants and fight CMC (Canada, Mexico and China) on fentanyl flows as a blot on both parties. ...

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The trade deficit with China has led to loss of 3.8 million jobs, 75% of them or 2.9 million in manufacturing. Go back to 1990 and Beijing was a city of bicycles not cars. If Beijing shifted to a open economy and simply imported products from the US and Europe as it had done since 1700 it would have remained a backward agricultural economy. It took 20 years of focused effort after 2000 for China with US technological assistance to excel in manufacturing, as the US had done after 1920. Can or cannot the US excel in Manufacturing with its own focused effort and restore jobs and decent wages to the American people, that is the question. That a $1 trillion deficit that has already destroyed the US manufacturing and its capacity to defend itself by rapidly building up the US Navy, is that not an emergency, then what is, is also the question, and the role, the duty, of the president of the US in such a situation. The federal appeals court has allowed the DJT Tariffs to remain in place till it goes to the US Supreme Court. Today May 30 the WSJ in a front page article shown here says the one California shipyard could assemble a supply ship in 5 days in 1942. China's independence in the fight against Imperial Japan and the Kwantung Army's adventures, and the independence of Europe in the 1940's depended on this vital US capacity. Is this forgotten? FDR acted step by step by 1938 to restore the US lost capacity at that time, what is the role of the president today? ...

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Egypt's presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi, leads in the first round of presidential elections over Amr Moussa. He has no ties with the Mubarak regime and comes from the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi is an engineer trained in Egypt and the U.S. Morsi graduated with bachelors and masters degree in engineering from Cairo University, and a PhD. from the University of Southern California in 1982. From 1982 to 1985, he was a professor at California State University at Northridge, California. In 1985 he returned to teach at a university in Egypt. He was elected to parliament as an independent candidate as the Mubark regime banned the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2011 he was elected head of the Freedom and Justice Party and made its candidate for president. Because of the severe economic problems facing Egypt- a demographic explosion of young people with few job opportunities, enough foreign reserves to finance a limited period of food and essential imports and dependent on the IMF for financing, neglected infrastructure development during decades of misrule under Mubarak- a candidate with an advanced engineering background trained in the U.S. could bring the right set of skills to the job of rebuilding Egypt. ...