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Billie Jean King whose effort and persistence created the game of Women's Tennis, is alive and well with some words of encouragement, advice. Billie Jean King Commencement address at California State University Los Angeles, where she graduates in history in 2026, sixty two years after letting go college to play tennis. She grew up in Long Beach, with her brother, her parents a fireman who played basketball and a mother who was a teacher. For those who remember she comes from the period of Arthur Ashe, Stan Smith and in Australia Rod Laver, in the seventies. Stadiums are named after her at the US Open Tennis championships, and it was Billie Jean who helped create women's tennis. Some of her advice- "We can never understand inclusion unless we have been excluded." (the first African American player Althea Gibsen is celebrated in a postage stamp yet African Americans barely made it into the sport during her time. Billie Jean asked why it was all white dress, white people, white clubs.) "I like completing things. Finish what I started." (Sixty two years after postponing college in 1962 Bille Jean completes her history degree at Cal State LA in 1986). Billie Jean in another interview says history is so important and the only way to effect change that is good is to know what happened before and why. This is true for another pioneer for women a law student at Stanford named Sandra Day O'Connor of Arizona ranch territory that in those days stretched endlessly on all sides. Gandhi would agree. Hind Swaraj could not be written in 1909 by Gandhiji on a steamship to South Africa from London without asking about history and what had happened to create the Empire in India for the British East India Company traders, with warehouses and private armies, one that extended to Shanghai and Hong Kong in China. Gandhi says in 1909 "English merchants were able to get a footing in India because we encouraged them. When our princes fought among themselves they sought the assistance of Company Bahadur. That corporation was versed alike in commerce and war. We created the circumstances that gave the company control over India." Billie Jean gives some perspective on life and its lessons-"Wherever we are in life we can connect and we can impact change." "At 82 I have learnt about perspective and a few life's lessons- Champions practice their strengths. Concentrate on what you are strong and practice it." "Anything you do winning or losing, good or bad, its feedback not failure. Don't take things personally." "Don't let others define you. You define yourself." "Pressure is a privilege and champions adjust or adapt." "Just remember legacy is what others think about you, what is important is the value of the contributions you make." "Three principles for inner and outer success. Relationships are everything. Relationships with yourself, your family, your loved ones, your faith, and your friends. No. 2- Keep learning and keep learning how to learn. Be a problem solver and a innovator. Our decisions, our actions, our voices will shape what comes next. Have fun. Be fearless and make history." ...

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Adam Schiff Senator from California interview in Senate Office Feb 2026 Wash. Post- a Democrat joins the Agriculture Committee and attends farm bureau meetings. Adam Schiff talks about his role in Congress as a Democrat in Feb 2026 to deliver for the people of California for the 3 more years of the DJT administration. As Senator he sees himself as representing 40 million people of Califonria as opposed to the 800,000 people in his congressional district in the Los Angeles area. In that sense he has to take into account that DJT turned up a significant vote in California, exceeded only by Texas and Florida in 2024. He sounds ambivalent about his earlier positions opposing the president and the president's rhetoric. He has to work with administration offficals if he is to deliver on projects that help Californians. This is a position taken by Kathy Hochul governor of New York state, and by Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, both Democrats. Projects include saving a couple of rural hospitals and seeing to it that Department of Agriculture offices remain open in remote parts of California. He has sought out an assignment on the Senate Agriculture Committee. He now realizes that the Democrats have not done enough for Californians or for America, and had not looked for new ways to tackle tough problems-  working people voted for DJT he says “because they were struggling. They were working harder than ever. And they could barely get by. And the Democratic Party had come to be viewed as the party of a status quo. They found the status quo was deeply unsatisfactory.”  Like Ruben Gallego in Arizona there is a sense that a lot has to change in the Democratic party down to grassroots work and efforts which is why Schiff now attends farm bureau meetings up and down the state. ...

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How to know where inflation is headed is shown here in charts in the WSJ. One has to look at the charts for oil and energy costs, automobile costs which are about one fifth of the inflation, retail prices, travel costs, expectations that drive prices. As the pressures decrease for demand for goods in 2022 following a pandemic induced increase in demand the inflation is driven largely by energy and automobiles costs. Amazon is renting out the extra space that it does not need in warehouses is one report in WSJ today. Pharmaceutical companies such as J&J are also seeing an easing of demand as reported in WSJ. The bottlenecks at the port of Los Angeles are also easing with improved unloading of containers which eases flow of goods.

 

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The situation in California on December 12 is dire as its daily cases for coronavirus increase to over 25,000. For Los Angeles county the figure is over 10,000. California coped well with the first wave. As the summer arrived fatigue with lockdown restrictions had increased, social distancing and mask wearing were not followed. When bars and restaurants opened in Los Angeles county huge numbers of people gathered in close proximity. Beaches were crowded.  A further spike in cases is expected from the Thanksgiving period. LA officials are saying one person is dying every 20 minutes. ICU capacity is shrinking. In southern California it has dwindled to less than 10%.  In Santa Clara county in Bay area only 31 ICU beds remain for 2 million residents. San Francisco is expected to run out of ICU beds on December 27, 2020. A patchwork of restrictions varying by county means there is no uniform effort. Fatigue with restrictions means compliance is patchy with social distancing and mask wearing even at the height of this pandemic. Public officials have failed to convince the public to do their part including the governor of the state and the mayor of San Francisco, because of inconsistent messages. ...

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Xi Jinping visited Hong Kong in 2017 and again this year. Jinping wanted to see Hong Kong integrated with mainland China after years of British rule and a transition period in which control remained with Beijing. This has happened after protests that sought to maintain Hong Kong's special status collapsed with huge differences on both sides. Jinping says "no country on earth would allow unpatriotic and even treasonous or traitorous people to take power." He stated his view on this trip that "political power must be in the hands of patriots." 2022 marks 25 years since the handover to China of Hong Kong by Britain in 1997. The period of transition set was 50 years. It could be said that the speed of China's integration with the economies of the US and Germany allowed by Clinton, Bush, Obama, Schroeder  and Merkel may have unwittingly determined the duration of the transition to integration with China from 50 to 25 years. In 1997 China was just beginning the transition to a market economy- 50 year seemed a long distance away.  The Clinton, Bush, Obama and Merkel years accelerated China's integration into the ports of Los Angeles and Hamburg for manufactured imports at a breathtaking pace eventually leading to the collapse of the relationship as American and European workers were ignored and communities depending on factories in parts of US and Europe were thrown out of work. With it collapsed the arrangements of Hong Kong as China by 2022 was economically already where it thought it would be in 2047. Shenzen region's economy's size exceeded the Hong Kong economy. China no longer needed Hong Kong as a entry point for foreign technology and capital. Hong Kong had lost relevance as a city state from the British period with British values for sons of the veterans of the Communist revolution of the nineteen thirties and forties, one of whom was Xi Jinping. ...

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Robert Redford American actor and founder of Sundance Film Festival of Utah passed away at age 89 years in September 2025. He is remembered for giving independent films a start by develping the infrastructure for this in Utah. Redford started buying land in Utah early in his career as he realized that the Los Angeles area where he grew up was becoming congested and lacked green space with expanding development. Utah also offered him the wide open spaces in the mountains and an opportunity to work with independent films of artistic value. He worked with director Sidney Pollack and actors Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, in many popular films including- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Way We Were, and Out of Africa. He also directed films such as The Ordinary People winning an Academy Award for direction.  After Van Nuys High School, he attended the University of Colorado on a baseball scholarship before dropping out. He spent time in Europe followed by study at the Pratt Institute in New York, and classes at American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which led to his acting in a Broadway play Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park in 1963.  Of films Redford never let the publicity affect him and cared little for being well known, preferring the wide open spaces of Utah exactly because he knew so little about the area and also because it felt like home not being so well known. Sydney Pollack sees Redford as representing a little bit of the American essence as it were, part of the old American landscape of the 1950's and 1960's, of the old heroic figures of that period in American history. ...

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The New York Times agreed to sell the Boston Globe to local owners for $70 million in 2013. In 1993 the New York Times acquired The Boston Globe for $1.1 billion. The value of newspapers has plummeted in recent years as newspapers lost advertising revenue and readership declined. A result of the shift to the internet for access to news and information, especially for the younger generation. The Washington Post was sold to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com for $250 million, with readership having declined to about 457,000 in 2013. Philadelphia newspapers were sold for $55 millon in 2012, after being acquired for $515 millon in 2006, having lost about 90% of the value in just 6 years. In Oct. 2012 The Tampa Tribune sold for only $9.5 million. Estimates for the newspaper properties of the Tribune Company are about $623 million, according to analysts. This includes The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune.

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The US ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach after Liberation Day- soon to be relics from the China Trade of yesterday. On April 9 US responded to China's 34% tariff with another 50% tariff of its own on China. The US tariff now stands at 104% to China's 84%. China says it won't back down and "will fight to the end." The US president DJT is now certain to restore world trade to the days before China entered the World Trade Organization and upended the world trade order leading to the deindustrialization of the US when US corporations followed Apple in 1998. With Tim  Cook in charge of Apple manufacturing in 1998 doing the first major act of outshoring the whole manufacturing base of a company to China. It was a strategy- to use the huge profits of a three punch approach- brand the product at the high end to command high price in the US through innovation and design (punch 1), followed by making using Chinese labor at low cost in China (punch 2), to generate the huge profits to create a virtuous cycle of investment from these profits to generate new cycle of growth (punch 3). What Apple gained, America's workers lost. This was sold by economists at the service of corporate narrative that it was good for America in the face of the facts showing just the reverse for 25 years 2000-2025. Soon almost the entire manufacturing base of the US was shipped out to China, or Chinese supply bases Vietnam. Japan fell in line and became a supplier to this China Manufacturing for the World. What started out as Microsoft demolishing Apple by 1998 and Apple using this 1-2-3 punch strategy turned into first a disaster for American workers, a loss of the working class leading to the loss of the middle class backbone of America, replaced by Silicon Valley and financial interests in New York City and disproportionate rewards to capital, the rural and small towns, cities across America's heartland thrown into decay and neglect.   ...

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Lael Brainard, head of the National Economic Council, and former Vice Chair at the Federal Reserve answers questions at the Council of Foreign Relations in Dec. 2024. Points she made are- The inflation we experienced was correctly diagnosed by Powell and the Fed as caused by Supply shocks from the pandemic not 1970's style embedded expectations inflation.  The response was to free up the supply by freeing up the clogged Los Angles Ports with labour and logistics coordination, and other actions. It also included redoing the supply chains to reduce dependence on China as only supplier. The 2017 tax cuts mean revenue will be 1.5 percentage points lower than the historically 18% of the GDP. This will increase the deficit. Biden administration had kept the deficit in control and reduced it by making offsetting adjustments when investment in certain areas such as childcare was done. The childcare tax credit is important for American families. Action is needed to increase the supply of housing. These are reminders of what is needed for the new DJT administration to keep the American economy on a strong footing says Brainard.     ...

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A loan scandal at Post Hellenic Bank cost the bank $678 million. The CEO of Pos Hellenic Bank, Angelos Filippidis, recklessly approved loans without guarantees according to prosecutors in Greece. He is now in a Turkish jail awaiting extraditon to Greece after being arrested in a Istanbul hotel. Eleni Raikou, and Popi Papandreou, are the two leading Athens prosecutors conducting the investigations. Three deals for submarines, tanks and aircraft cost $6.8 billion and are said to be purchased at inflated prices. These deals are being investigated. It is this widespread corruption in the political elite in Greece that has drawn the ire of Germans when considering the request for new loans to prevent a bankruptcy in Greece in 2011-2012. Especially because ordinary Germans have accepted lower wages to bring down the once high unemployment rate.

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Somini Sengupta and Brian Frank provide this award winning quality of coverage in text and pictures of life in California's San Joaquin Valley, hit by wildfires and scorching heat in the middle of the pandemic. Shown are workers in the fields of one of America's largest agricultural regions fighting heat and the pandemic, struggling to survive on a precarious hourly wage in these conditions. During earlier periods from 1970 this was an almost picturebook place particularly in the cool and foggy winters, which stretched for miles with apricot, grape, almond and other fruit and vegetable fields. A dry valley using irrigation of fields with water from the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains. Most affected are millions of workers of Hispanic origin originally from Mexico, who provide most of the labor for harvesting of crops. California with a good educational system and without the drought that hit the region, without the effects of Silicon Valley splitting the people of the state in opposite directions most on minimum wage with a concentration of wealth around major cities and spiralling property values, was a very different place in the 1960's and 1970's from what it is today. Increasing wealth concentrated in pockets and not spread out as it was in the early post war period after Truman and Eisenhower has impoverished large areas and segments of the population, creating what Dickens called in his day- "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," depending on who and where you were. ...

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The US economy is growing at a much faster pace than Europe or China in the last quarter of 2021- at 7% annualized growth in the fourth quarter up from 2% in the third quarter, according to Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. This compares to 2% in eurozone and 4% in China. Major US ports such as Los Angeles are processing 20% more container volume in 2021 than in 2019, while Rotterdam and Hamburg are almost flat compared to 2019 level. Consumption of durable goods has jumped 45% above 2018 levels in the US, only 2% in eurozone, according to ECB data. The factory gate prices in China are far outpacing the consumer prices in China, suggesting weak domestic demand and strong foreign demand. Lars Jensen, head of network at container ship company A.P. Moller-Maersk says the global supply bottlenecks were started by this surge in US demand with more ships headed for the US taking ships away from other places. The US economy will grow at 6% in 2021 and 4% in 2022, with wages growing 4% a year above the pre-pandemic trend rate, compared with 1% in eurozone, according to Bank for International Settlements. This is pushing inflation up in other countries by pushing up the value of the dollar. In Mexico hitting 7.4% and the central bank raising interest rates 0.5% point to 5.5%. In Russia inflation up to 8.4% and central bank raising interest rates by 1percentage point to 8.5%. The equipment investment in the US is up by 13% this year according to JP Morgan Chase, only 3.6% in eurozone, 0.1% in Japan. All this is creating a large gap between the US and Europe, US and China in economic growth and demand growth, and in income growth. ...

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The U.S. Census Bureau shows incomes of American households, the median household income, surged in 2015 by 5.2%. This increased by $2800 to $56,500. This is the largest increase since 1967. It shows that steadily improving employment and hiring is leading to improvement in incomes for the middle and working class. Ris in minimum wage has also helped . The largest increase was for the lowest 20% of the income tiers. Full time working women did better than men, with increase annually of 2.7% for women, and 1.5% for men. Nocitizen incomes increased 10.5% to $45,100, native born households went up 4.4% to $57,200. The number of people without health insurance also declined from 33 million or 10.4% of the population to  29 million people or 9.1%. Another way the changes are helping lower income households is the decline of the official poverty rate to 13.5% in 2015 by 1.2 percentage points from 14.8% in 2014. Through a series of small incremental steps the path is being set for a recovery of household incomes for the middle class and working class. A bright spot is that the improvement has affected all age groups, household types, regions and ethnic groups, though among full time workers women did better than men. In this recession older white men have had more difficulties getting back into the workforce. This is reflected in the political scene in 2015-2016 for the election season. ...

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The new minimum wage of $15 effective Nov. 1, 2018, applies to 250,000 current employees at Amazon, 40% of its global  workforce. An additional 100,000 seasonal workers also get the $15 wage. California's minimum wage is set to go to $15 an hour in 2022. The Amazon move helps it attract and retain workers in competition with other retailers such as Target, UPS and Fedex. In doing this Amazon is removing certain incentive pay and stock compensation for these hourly employees. Target has set 2020 as the date for $15 per hour wage, currently it is $12 at Target. Walmart with 1.5 million employees set $11 per hour as the starting hourly pay for workers in 2018. Overall median salary annually for Amazon workers worldwide was $28,446 in 2017, which works out to about $13.68 an hour, but this includes software engineers and lower wage workers overseas. That figure is lower than the poverty level set by the U.S. government for a family of four. Much of the criticism has focused on wages at companies such as Amazon, as lack of upward mobility is a major issue in the U.S. - growing worse over two decades of tech advances, also carrying with it literacy levels for children which have also deteriorated. ...

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The recent appointment of fast food executive Andrew Puzder as Labor Secretary has caused great concern among union leaders. Puzder supports a $9 minimum wage compared to $15 supported by Democrats. Unions now represent 7% of the labor force, down from a high of 20% during Reagan's time when Reagan appointed a construction company executive as Labor Secretary and cut regulations.  Globalization has thinned the ranks of workers in unions. And the failure of Democratic administrations to stem the shift of factories overseas to China, Mexico and other places, as part of global supply chains focussed on cost, has weakened Democratic support among workers since the period of Bill Clinton. It eroded to the point where Obama won 65% of support among unions and Hillary Clinton won 56% in 2016. Interestingly the Republican Romney gained 33% versus 37% for Trump, showing voters were more inclined to move away from Democrats and only a smaller number willing to support Republicans, but the shift enough to give Republicans a win in 2016 for the presidency. The figures are from a Election Day survey of trade union AFL-CIO, and a larger proportion in midwestern states showed disaffection with policies from Clinton to Obama. In fact Obama spent years promoting another free trade agreement TPP that favored tech more than auto and older industries, just as Bill Clinton had promoted NAFTA, without giving thought to what this was doing to its worker base of support. A similar situation happened with Social Democrats in Germany as a SPD administration moved to the centre and handed Christian Democrats led by Merkel a win in parliamentary elections. As Democrats such as former Labor Secretary Reich, a professor at UC Berkeley who served under Bill Clinton, describe the problems of working class people their is less reflection on the impact of the changes from globalization and how Democrats handled or mishandled it, and more on the politics between the two parties.   ...