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Occupy Wall Street

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I’ve followed the Occupy Wall Street activities and have heard several of them speak to NPR reporters. They seem particularly well-spoken about their concerns…and their frustrations.

I certainly understand their frustration….and I share their concern about the unfairness in our political economy. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are any ‘big’ solutions to the problem…other than motivating/educating a LOT of people to change their consumption patterns and their political instincts.

I read a David Brooks editorial and he thinks the real solutions cannot be simplified to the 99% versus the 1%…..I agree. He also thinks real solutions are often seen as boring…..I also agree. Real solutions are thoughtful, complex and subtle…and don’t accommodate today’s sound bites.

Facing Planetary Enemy No. 1: Agriculture

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Consider: Cropland and pasture now cover 40 percent of our planet’s land surface; farming consumes nearly three-quarters of all the water that humans use for any purpose; farming accounts for a third of all the emissions of greenhouse gases that humans release into the environment. (Those greenhouse emission come from clearing forests or grassland for crops, the emissions of methane from rice paddies, and the conversion of nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide — a powerful greenhouse gas.)
The NPR Report

A New Direction for American Economic Policy

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Americans with a college degree are generally okay. Their unemployment rate is 4.3% and average incomes are above $60,000 per year. There are many help-wanted signs for talented computer programmers, engineers, and other high-skilled workers. Americans with a high-school diploma or less are falling into poverty, with unemployment of 10% and incomes averaging less than $30,000 per year. For these workers, the only help-wanted signs are for dead-end jobs that lead to poverty.

What is surprising and distressing is how few young people are finishing a four-year degree or an equivalent path to high job skills. The proportion of young people achieving a bachelor’s degree has peaked at around 40%. Many more try college, but ended up dropping out because they can’t meet tuitions and can’t afford to be out of the labor market for the period of college study.

With America at the brink of financial collapse and class war, it is time for all sides to follow a new direction: a long-term effort to invest in skills and twenty-first-century infrastructure, paid for by increased taxes paid by cash-rich multinational companies, high net-worth individuals, and polluting industries. Rather than creating low-skilled and temporary jobs for our kids, we should be helping kids to stay in school until they have the skills to compete effectively in the new global economy.

The money to pay for this expanded effort can come largely from the top of the income distribution. The top 1% of households took home 10% of household income in 1980 but now take home roughly 23%. Along with this remarkable surge in income after 1980 came tax cuts and increasingly easy access of the rich to offshore tax havens.

It’s time we insist that the rich do their part to help rescue America from decline. The tradeoff for America comes to this: fewer mega-yachts and other luxuries for the rich, and millions better educated children and young workers for society as a whole. America will recover when all Americans, especially those at the top of the heap, pay the price of civilization.

The entire article by Jeffrey Sachs

How macroeconomic statistics failed the US

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This is a very interesting article on the poor quality of current macroeconomic data about the US economy…and how it altered decisionmaking on our current financial crisis. The article also points out the broader social issue of how we as a society ‘value’ work – both financially and in terms of social prestige. In essence, the value of those who compile our social statistics has fallen…and so has the qualities of the data.

The article

[FullMovie] [HD] Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) English Episodes Free Watch Online

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) Full Movie Online Watch Free , English Subtitles Full HD, Free Movies Streaming , Free Latest Films.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) HD [1080p]

Director : Luc Besson
Release : July 20, 2017
Production Company : EuropaCorp
Language : en
Runtime : 137 min.
Genre : Science Fiction, Action, Adventure.

Plot
‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ is good movie tell story about In the 28th century, Valerian and Laureline are special operatives charged with keeping order throughout the human territories. On assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two undertake a mission to Alpha, an ever-expanding metropolis where species from across the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence, and cultures. At the center of Alpha is a mysterious dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe. This movie have genre Science Fiction, Action, Adventure and have 137 minutes runtime.

Cast
Dane DeHaan as Valerian, Herbie Hancock as Defence Minister, Clive Owen as Commander Arün Filitt, Ethan Hawke as Jolly the Pimp, Rihanna as Bubble, Cara Delevingne as Laureline.

Production
The Director of this movie is Luc Besson. The movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is produced by EuropaCorp and released in July 20, 2017.

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Robert Reich’s Question to Hank Paulson

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I was listening to a speech that Robert Reich gave last week at Dartmouth College. The speaker, during the question and answer period, gets to record for the next speaker in the series a question…to be the first question the next speaker answers.

The next speaker in the series was to be Hank Paulson.

Reich had two questions…the first of which was a question about Paulson’s handling of the bank failures and bailout…the second question was:

Whether the social benefits of Wall Street exceed the social costs?

Social Impact Bonds

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I was invited to a discussion this morning on Social Impact Bonds…and the likelihood that Rhode Island might participate in a Social Impact Bond offering.

It’s an interesting idea, hatched by the English, to deal with the cost of social interventions (which are difficult to fund). Most of our social service dollars go to the prison, or treating the disease…not to preventing the problem in the first place.

The idea of the Social Impact Bond is to get socially motivated investors to take the risk that a given social intevention (for example, job training and education to prevent prison recidivism) will reduce government cost in an amount greater than the initial social costs (prison, parole care, etc.). If the social outcome ‘contract’ in the Bond succeeds, investors make an agreed upon return paid by the government (out of a portion of their cost savings). If the social outcome fails, the investor takes the loss as a charitable donation.

It is an intelligent approach to ‘curing’ social problems, and it could add substantial capital to private social service organizations that now struggle to finance their very respectable, measureable work.

Rebuilding Infrastructure

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Ricardo Bayon wrote an article for the Ecosystem Marketplace this week making the completely sane point that we should rebuild ‘green’ infrastructure while we rebuild ‘grey’ infrastructure (the built environment).

Totally sensible, completely defensible.

I would also ask the next question. How do we develop a plan? Americans certainly have a huge list of built infrastructure needs – roads, bridges, utility systems – all reaching the end of their lifespan.

Less obvious, but just an important, is the need to rebuild/conserve/restore or natural infrastructure. One of the problems, however, with politically defending restoration of natural infrastructure, is the lack of a ‘database’ of what needs to be done. With bridges and roads, we have detailed data on existing conditions, rebuilding needs, and cost estimates. For natural infrastructure, there is no such list.

I was pleased to see in a report John Holdren (the White House Science Advisor) just sent to President Obama a call for such a system -they named it ECOINFORMA. Unfortunately, the description failed to take advantage of the jobs potential of such a project if it made use of regional/local information gatherers (biologist, engineers, etc.) It also needs to be less ‘coarse’ than they propose. But, all in all, a wonderful idea.

My compliments to Ricardo Bayon for starting the discussion. Perhaps we can bring others to the task.