Currently viewing the tag: "policy-making"
When state and municipal budgets are tight, education funding is usually targeted for cuts. The politics of the cuts is almost always framed as being about “holding teachers and schools accountable” as a way of protecting the future we expect for children. The reality is that those cuts reduce the resources available to students, and “non-essential” courses like music and art are eliminated in favor of those subjects standardized test-makers know how to test for.
Buckminster Fuller was one of the 20th century’s most visionary architects, whose philosophy of socially responsible planning and design has influenced cutting-edge technology research and public policy the world over, through the UN’s development programs and pioneering entrepreneurship aimed at lifting billions out of poverty. His vision was, in his own words, “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
The Citizens Climate Lobby is a national non-partisan, non-profit organization, working to organize citizen volunteers, by state, county or Congressional district, to lobby elected officials for a strong emissions reduction plan that will prevent catastrophic climate change and speed the transition to clean energy. On June 22 and 23, the CCL team took its message to Capitol Hill, meeting with 45 different members of Congress, or their energy and climate staff, in both the House and the Senate.
There is nothing ideological about the issue of renewable energy resources. Proponents tend to care about the health of the natural environment, which motivates their wish to see renewables replace high-polluting resources like oil and coal, but the technologies, the fact of their economic viability and their usefulness for society at large, are not in any way a matter of ideology.
In Florida and elsewhere, migrant workers who do not enjoy the legal protections that come with legal paperwork are easily subjected to abuses, near zero pay and even violence. Conditions on some farms amount to slavery, and the US Justice Department has prosecuted at least 7 such farms in the last decade.
Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.
One of the great complaints heard from groups opposing comprehensive health insurance reform, especially from quarters where the chief concern is to prevent a drop in private profit related to healthcare services, is that reform will strip away incentives to devote funding to medical research, in pathologies, treatments and technology. This is a point of philosophical dispute, but to make sure we enact reforms that will not curb research incentives, we should institute a new medical research tax credit.
From the moment I took office as President, the central challenge we have confronted as a nation has been the need to lift ourselves out of the worst recession since World War II. In recent months, we have taken a series of extraordinary steps, not just to repair the immediate damage to our economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting and sustained growth. We are creating new jobs. We are unfreezing our credit markets. And we are stemming the loss of homes and the decline of home values.
Electronic medical records (EMR), like health insurance, benefit from being spread over the widest pool possible. A system that aggregates and cross-references data from hundreds of millions of patients can find statistical evidence far more efficiently than today’s statistical modeling for health problems and solution improvement.
We don’t have a good answer for how to solve healthcare in America. Let’s start there. Every interest group sees the problem differently, depending on immediate interests, learned perceptions, or advertised distortions. But the fact is, every interest group has some overlap with others, and there is a lot of common ground to be had, if we put ideology aside and try to focus on the problem itself.
The Obama administration is looking at the severity of the banking crisis with a mind to settling the issue of survivability and recoverability of banks, case by case, based on facts in evidence. The first step will be to gather evidence, through a series of ‘stress tests’ designed to examine what resources troubled banks have to weather oncoming storms, then plan according to the results of those tests.
The hardest thing to understand about the current, and deepening, economic crisis, is that it came about largely because some of the most experienced, well-staffed and prestigious financial institutions in the world gambled on untenable projects of unlimited expansion, without ever producing sound mathematics to back up the projections. Philosophical exuberance replaced philosophical underpinnings, and the dynamo of financial speculation greased the wheels of commerce in a way that masked underlying shortfalls.
There is talk of a major overhaul of the US banking system, with some analysts and economists saying the situation is so dire that widespread “nationalization” —or government takeover— will be necessary, and others saying there needs to be a bad-debt takeover bank, that takes on the huge financial risk of major banks’ “toxic assets”, so that the banks can “clear their books” and begin to lend. But another possibility looms as the likely more appealing option: the creation of a Federal Competitive-Lending Bank (FCLB)…
Pres. Barack Obama announced, just one week after taking office, the creation of a new website, Recovery.gov, which will detail the manner in which all the money from his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, once passed by Congress and signed into law, is being spent. The website is another in a series of steps to create a far-reaching reform of the federal government’s reporting to the public about its activities, with the aim of achieving Obama’s promise of the “most transparent” government in US history.
All systems fail, all organized interactions are vulnerable to entropy, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And at best, we are but stardust, a beautiful yet haunting explanation of our origins. Infused with light. Doomed to shadow. Whatever your spiritual beliefs, in the mortal physical realm, entropy is always interfering. The intellect often uses convenient conceptualizations to feel it is better understood or more secure, more real and lasting, than it is.
A long-running bellwether legal case in Canada’s farming industry, which has left at least one farmer unable to farm any crop variety of rapeseed (canola) —for fear of having to pay accidental royalties to bio-chemical giant Monsanto—, highlights the need for comprehensive reform of international seed regulation standards. The Canadian courts ruled that the individual farmer had to shoulder the burden of ferreting out any instance of “contamination” of his crop by pollen from nearby genetically-modified (GM) planting, as Monsanto held a patent on the seeds. The farmer, and those who support his claims, argue that there is no means by which anyone can prevent cross-pollination from GM plants.
President-elect Barack Obama held a press conference today in Chicago to announce his choice for Health and Human Services secretary, former Democratic Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. Daschle is a top adviser to Obama and the two have made clear their commitment to ending the problem of underinsurance and the uninsured and making sure that no Americans go without treatment.
The spread of cholera due to Zimbabwe’s foundering hygienic infrastructure is reaching crisis proportions. UNICEF is calling for an emergency fund of $17.5 million to fight the spread of cholera in Zimbabwe, calling the outbreak “a cholera crisis of unprecedented levels”. With 13,960 cases already declared and an estimated 589 dead to date, the UN warns upwards of 60,000 people could become infected if drastic and immediate action is not taken to contain the epidemic.
The issue is not, as so many would like to believe, whether carbon-based fuels are affordable to the end-user. They are not. The total costs per gallon of gasoline are estimated at more than $11, covered by government subsidies, public-private research funding, tax incentives, military spending, public health funding, and funds devoted to cleaning up the ill effects of pollution. Capitalist markets need not be dependent on unsustainable excesses in resource use, but we are in the current global economic crunch, because they have been.
Just a couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom dictated that financial minds must view “green technology” as pie in the sky, an unaffordable idealistic quest for something beyond the “easy” solution of endless oil. Then, almost overnight, the financial markets discovered that oil was not infinite, that the entire US economy was beholden to the pricing whims of an international cartel —this was long known, but tolerated—, and failure to go green could cripple the world’s most powerful democracy.
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