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The auto parts industry is seeing a huge transformation as American Axle, Visteon and other companies look to Europe, Asia and other countries for growth and shift to a lower cost manufacturing base overseas. Costs are in many cases about 5 times in the USA than in other countries in Asia. And health care costs are a major part of the costs the auto parts makers face in the USA. To get an idea of how fundamental a change is going on American Axle which in 1995 did not have a plant overseas now expects 75% of its $1.3 billion in product orders to be met by plants overseas. And it is planning to build plants in India and Thailand. Visteon which used to be part of Ford Motor and made parts like heating and cooling systems mainly for Ford, will by 2010 according to Visteon's CEO, have sales to Hyundai and Kia of 28% of sales, making the Korean company its largest buyer. Ford's North American operations will only account for 6% of sales from 15% today. That is a dramatic change and involves closing plants in the US. For Visteon this means $635 million in cost reduction mainly through plant closings in 2008-2010....

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Inflation and asset price bubbles in India and China, and low inflation or near deflationary conditions in the US and Western Europe. With the US depending for about half of its growth on exports in 2009 and early 2010, according to Commerce Department figures, the tightening of credit by central banks in the high growth countries of Asia will crimp America's economic prospects.

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Jeb Bush opens his election campaign in Florida where he was two term governor, and addresses the crowd in Spanish. Jeb Bush met Columba Garnica de Gallo, a Mexican girl when he studied in a foreign exchange program in Leon, Mexico in 1970, when he was 17 and she was 16. Jeb Bush was assisting in the building of a school in a small village outside Leon, as part of a program at Andover called Man and Society. They were married in 1974 in Austin, Texas. Jeb Bush received his BA in Latin American Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His earlier schooling was at Andover, Massachusetts. He is the only candidate with deep personal and educational connections to Latin America coming from the traditional political elite. Columba's personal story as the daughter of a migrant worker who left the family when she was three, and her championing of causes related to women and domestic violence add a different aspect to the Bush story, seen as a privileged family. This makes Jeb Bush unique in the Republican Party- unlike Marc Rubio and other candidates of Cuban ancestry from the Miami area- with deep roots on both sides of the American story, and spanning generations from Columbus, Ohio to small towns in Texas and Mexico. Rubio's parents immigrated from Cuba in 1956 under the Batista regime later overthrown by Fidel Castro. The election campaign gives Jeb Bush an opportunity to create a consensus on issues relating to minorities, immigration and the struggling middle class. In a Republican debate in 1980, Reagan said "Rather than put up a fence (between Mexico and the U.S.) why don't we work out a recognition of our mutual problems." To which George Bush Sr. said: "They are good... strong people. Part of my family is Mexican." It is an opportunity to build connections to Latinos in the U.S., and rebuild the Republican party's connections to Hispanic Americans, closing the gap with the Democratic Party. This will be good for the country to move forward....

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Ford's North American operations had earnings of $889 million in the 4th quarter of 2011. The growth in U.S. was offset by loss of $190 million in Europe and a loss of $83 million for Asia Pacific & Africa. Results in Europe are expected to deteriorate further. Moody's Investors Service predicts a 6.2% decline in sales for the Western European countries compared to 2011. Increasing competition in the North American market led to a decline in the pre-tax per vehicle profit for the 4th quarter of 2011 to $1317, a drop from $2806 in the first quarter of 2011.

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Increasing college enrollment for women in the US shows no sign of changing. Women now make up 60% of college students for the 2020-21 college year, men 40%., according to National Student Clearinghouse. Another alarming piece of information is that there are 1.5 million fewer students at colleges and universities in the US, and men make up 71% of the decline. 3.8 million women filled college applications compared to 2.8 million men for 2021-2022 college year in the US, according to Common Application. The enrollment rates of poor and working class whites show alarming decline with rates of enrollment less than people from Black, Latino or Asian income backgrounds. Decline in male enrollment is highest for community colleges with family finances the main cause. The pandemic has accelerated this negative trend that is bad for America. 700,000 fewer students were enrolled in college in 2021 spring than 2019 spring, according to a WSJ analysis.  During the pandemic millions of women left jobs to stay at home with children. Many turned to sons for help, with some young men quitting school to work. Some examples shown in this report show parents having gone to college and sons deciding the skyrocketing costs of education make it too risky to take out loans that cannot be repaid. Many just feel lost, doing work landscaping for $500 a week or packing boxes at Amazon warehouses at $15.50 an hour. With so much going wrong in the way America is investing in its future generation, issues like wars in distant lands fade into insignificance, and president Biden's decision is surely "a wise decision." As is his effort to make community college at no cost given to young Americans. The $3.5 trillion investment in workers and families that Biden plans could not have been developed at a time of greater need than today. ...

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Andy Grove makes this passionate plea for the dignity of workers in America in 2010. It is worth reading in 2020 what this founder of Intel Corp and pioneering spirit of Silicon Valley has to say. Andy Grove of Intel says there is something seriously wrong when the unemployment rate in the Bay Area is higher than the 9.7% national average for the USA. American companies have added jobs like crazy in Asia, but things are sputtering back home. Hon Hai has 800,000 employees and makes most of the electronic and computer products for American companies. Grove says startups are not the answer, unless they scale up and create jobs the way Intel did starting back in 1968, with a $3 million capital infusion by investors. The move from the first production model to mass production is critical, as companies hire thousands of people. Innovation and scaling up have to go together. He makes his point clearly by pointing out that Apple has 25,000 employees. For every Apple employee there are 10 employees in China working on Apple iMacs, iPods, iPhones. And he adds that the same 10 to 1 relationship applies to other U.S. tech companies. And here Grove asks the tough question by first posing an answer. He says it sounds like- no big deal, we keep the high paying jobs, we keep most of the profits, but what kind of society are we going to have with highly paid professional workers and lots of people unemployed? And he doesn't mention that there are a lot more young people unemployed. He says the US has become very inefficient at creating tech jobs, and it would be a great mistake not to act decisively early on. And adds that the investments in such areas as solar power and electric car batteries have to be made early on to maintain leadership in these areas. Grove faults academics like Alan Blinder and others who say loss of manufacturing jobs and whole industries was no big deal. The U.S. has forgotten the value of manufacturing jobs. He wants to see America focus on jobs and rebuild its industrial base. And less of transferring engineering knowhow and new technologies overseas, technology that can help bring innovation and scaling up of factories at home. In his view individual companies doing their own thing, in a misguided fashion that jobs don't matter, is not the answer to the situation we face. The industrial economies of Asia, China at the present day, have focussed on jobs and technology, and scaled up. Grove reminds readers of the situation in America in 1932, when jobless veterans demonstrating outside the White House in large numbers were dispersed by soldiers with live ammunition and fixed bayonets. This makes him shudder at the very thought of it, and brings back memories of his early years in Hungary, as a young man in 1956. Are we listening? ...

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The companies that run US ports are based in Europe and Asia. US dockworkers are fighting for a 77% pay raise over 6 years. Harold Daggett is leading the fight for the dockworkers. The port operation companies offered 40%. Negotiations are going on with the Biden administration seeking a settlement that is fair to workers left behind in previous wage negotiations, and following other strikes of the United Auto workers and other unions. The UAW was able to gain a fair settlement with president Biden joining the picket lines, a first for any American president.

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Questions remain about how well Mehmet Oz, who had a popular television health show Dr Oz, can deliver on reducing obesity levels, handle the cuts in Medicaid, and tackle the overspending on Medicare Advantage, as head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, With it's $1.5 trillion budget it is the largest agency in the US government other than Defense. It is also not delivering health results as American health for the dollars spent is failing to deliver, many nations in Asia and Europe have better health with a small fraction of the US cost.

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TSMC will build a third plant in Arizona with the $6.6 billion in grants it gets from Biden's CHIPS Act. It will increase its investment in the US from $40 billion to $65 billion, essential to make the US a manufacturing hub for semiconductors. Intel, Samsung and other companies are making similar investments in the US in semiconductor plants. After years of post Reagan/Friedman period orthodox economics that led to the US chip industry and other advanced manufacturing following textiles to Asia, the US is making its policies follow actual practice and experience. This experience shows that in semiconductors with long lead times of a decade to build plants the country which supports its semiconductor industry gets ahead while others following orthodox Reagan/Friedman period economics fall behind. This has revealed the danger of a theoretical economic textbook approach that doesn't work and endangers American manufacturing and technological leadership. A culture wrapped around the textbook approach has led to the US and the EU, India, losing their competitive advantages and losing manufacturing in industry after industry, with loss of millions of jobs and deindustrializing. It has also led to decline and increasing lack of economic opportunity in towns and communities dependent on this manufacturing across the US and the European Union. ...

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President Biden's style and years of effort leading to the presidency are similar to another Democrat - US president Harry Truman who took the US and the world through the last years of World War II, the Berlin Crisis and rebuilding war torn Europe through the Marshall Plan, and the Korean War. By doing so Truman built the security and economic structure that was the foundation of the Free World. Prsident Biden faces a similar opportunity says Mr. Zoellick in the WSJ. Mr. Biden is already engaged in a similar task as large as that facing Harry Truman as he sets a new direction for America. To build a new supply chain for the US and Europe, to advance the technological and scientific leadership of the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and India, and to build a new security alliance in Asia and Europe, and strengthen Latin America. Mr. Truman was not deterred by the 1946 midterm elections with Republican majorities and used his experience as a Missouri Congressman to work with Republicans of like minded thinking to strengthen American leadership in the world. Mr. Biden is not deterred by Mr. Trump's challenge and shifts in voter sentiment as he set his focus on what matters most for America in the decades ahead from climate change to economic leadership. ...

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Turkish American MIT economist is awarded the Nobel Prize- but not for the work he needs recognition for the renewal of America and US Way Forward. Daron Acemoglu's work is important not just for a new look at countries that experienced colonialism noted by the Nobel folks in Stockholm. Much of his recent work on "Why Nations Fail," and "The Narrow Corridor," cover the United States and why it is important that US policies keep the goal of "We the People" uppermost. George Washington reminded America to be wary of the  "absurd notion that the many are made for the few," in his Draft of the Inaugural Address in 1789. In this sense the Nobel committee and much of the economics profession is far behind the times as the focus has shifted to how countries that were once known as developed have neglected rebuilding their industrial base, neglected their infrastructure modernization investments, and neglected workers and families connected with it, that are the foundations of progress and a better life. This is also an issue in 2024 for the right Way Forward for the US, and for nations in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. ...

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A fellow Christian of Pope Francis who distributed food and blankets to remote villages in the Andean mountains of Peru driving his white pickup truck is the man chosen to lead the Catholic Church in the third decade of the 21st century. He is Robert Francis of Chicago, an American who first came to an Augustinian mission in Peru near the Ecuador border in 1985. In 1988 he returned to Peru, this time to the Augustinian seminary in Trujillo, Peru, where he taught canon law and was a judge in the regional ecclesiastical court. He spent 13 years in Peru before returning to the US in 1998. He was appointed by Pope Francis of Buenos Aires, Argentina, as apostolic administrator of Chiclayo in 1998, then Bishop in 2023 and Cardinal in 2024. In his speech from the Vatican Pope Leo XIV- Robert Francis- switched to Spanish in the middle of his speech. We now have not one but two popes from different parts of Latin America from the Atlantic coast Buenos Aires to the Andes mountains of Peru, knowing that Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brazil ar Catholic countries, so is Central America and part of the US that is Irish and Italian, Spanish and French. It includes Spanish colonies in Asia such as the Philippines, and Portuguese settlements in Africa. ...

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New Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, has contacts with the Chinese leadership, and has years of experience on China trade issues. He was Governor of Washington state, which has about a third of its jobs dependent on foreign trade and looks west to the Asia Pacific region for growth. He is the country's only Chinese-American governor, as governor of Washington state from 1997 to 2005.

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 WSJ looks at the story of one Indian engineer 39 years from Bangalore, India on a extraordinary category visa. 79000 H1-B engineers and others keep California's population growing in 2024. The state loses population everyyear from domestic migration WSJ charts show, yet it makes up for this through international migration. Also helpful is the fact that California has more births than deaths by about 110,000. California has the largest percentage of its population as foreign born, about 25%. About half of the international migration of 2.7 million since 2010 is Asian, and one third is Latin American. Pew Research shows only about 17% of California's immigrants in 2023 were undocumented. During the pandemic California lost 400,000 people, the population of Oakland. Net immigration dropped to 44,000 a year in the worst year of pandemic, then rebounded to 300,000 in 2024, but remains uncertain with tighter immigration controls under DJT. ...

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October 1 is a national holiday in China  and the 75th anniversary of the founding of People's Republic of China in 1949. Youth and students in China travel across the country to visit historic sites in the Chinese Revolution in what is called Red Tourism. The perceptions of young people and students on Mao in 2024 is shown in this video in FR24. This is how China wants to remember its past- a century of conflict with European powers and the British Empire after European Powers tried to breakup China following the Opium Wars in the 1850's. This was followed by the Japanese Empire staking its claims over parts of northern China in 1900-1945, and the period in which the US under General Joe Stilwell struggled with the dilemma of China knowing the corruption and failure of leaders to modernize China.  Then followed the decades when hunger and inadequate healthcare was banished from China, yet the industrial revolution that happened in western Europe and the US was elusive. Efforts in the 1960's to do this failed. Only when China showed the spirit of humility to work with Europeans and Americans and the Japanese and opened up its thinking to adopt markets in its own context of state run operations was the industrial revolution accomplished and modernization made to happen in the 1990's onwards. Three decades of rapid industrialization transformed an ancient nation in the heart of Asia. ...

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Iranian missiles and drones flying low and close to the ground avoided detection by Saudi and American air defense systems. The missiles and drones hit Saudi oil facilities stopping about half of the Saudi oil production. Iranian cruise missile technology was used for the attack, according to U.S. officials. The attack also showed how vulnerable the oil supplies from this region are to disruption. The U.S. is not dependent on Saudis for oil as it has increased its production from shale. China, Japan, South Korea and India are dependent on Saudi oil supplies. Yet the U.S. is shouldering a greater burden for ensuring reliable supplies to Asian countries, something the Trump administration sees it should be compensated for. Tougher sanctions on Iranian oil hurt its economy, resulting in actions taken by Iran to disrupt Saudi oil supplies. The Saudi intervention in Yemen is another source of tensions in the region. The Trump administration says it is not interested in endless wars in the region, yet its tougher oil sanctions on Iran are pulling it into the conflict in unpredictable ways. China, India, and other countries had sought sanctions waivers to import Iranian oil, and see the sanctions as hurting oil supplies. India with limited supplies of its own was affected by the oil sanctions. ...

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The UN deputy special representative for Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith- and the highest American official there who was also an advisor to Richard Holbrooke, the US representative for South Asia- resigned over differences with his Norwegian boss the Un Representative over the Afghan elections. The issue was whether to take a softer stand on the elections or to confront the Karzai government with evidence of fraud in the elections.

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A new Arizona law tells school districts they would lose 10% of their state education funds if their ethnic studies programs do not comply with state standards. Programs that are not allowed are programs that advocate ethnic solidarity, are primarily for one race, or promote resentment toward a race. Classes in the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican-American program have been declared illegal. Arizona's attorney general Tom Horne, declared the classes illegal, in violation of a state law going into effect Jan 1, 2011. Other programs for black, Asian and American Indian students have not been affected. All this is happening in the midst of fierce protests about the state's immigration laws. Mr. Horne, was superintendent of public instruction for Arizona before becoming attorney general. At that time he wrote a law challenging Tucson's ethnic studies program, which the legislature passed and Governor Jan Brewer signed into law in May 2010. It takes aim at texts used in the classes, such as "Occupied America," and "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed."...

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This merger is part of a process that happened after 1970 when Penguin Books a national institution in Britain in the war years 1939-1945 was acquired by Pearson Plc, and later sold in 2013  to German publisher Bertelsmann. Penguin became a part of British culture because it sold a million cheap paperbacks at 6 pence in 1939 and continued to provide low cost access to books to all parts of the English speaking world from UK to Asia till the 1960's. The astonishing period of creativity and design of founder Allen Lane ended in 1970 after Pearson Plc focused on profitability and acquisitions. Under this new deal in 2021 a large part of the world publishing industry would come under the control of German publishing house Bertelsmann. Penguin Random House is owned by Bertelsmann and the deal would bring its rival Simon and Schuster under its control. The US Justice Department filed a lawsuit to block it. Attorney General Merrick Garland says- "American authors and consumers will pay the price of this anticompetitive merger- lower advances for authors, and ultimately fewer books and less variety for consumers." Penguin Random House already controls 22% of titles published in the US. The US publishing industry has already seen mergers leading to reduced competition. News Corp. acquired Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May and merged it into Harper Collins. Largadere Hachette acquired Workman in September. ...