As US leaders dither, President Xi Jinping vies for the technological future of finance.
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Intro Video
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
The Tao of Goo: Lessons From a Slime Workshop
Chadwick Boseman is unbothered by Martin Scorsese’s remarks
Chadwick Boseman is speaking out regarding the recent criticism that filmmaker Martin Scorsese has hurled out into the world.
Scorsese has made more than a couple remarks about one of Boseman’s studio homes, Marvel. The highly decorated director has stated that the house that produces many of the highest grossing superhero movies in history, makes films that are more of a circus than cinema.
READ MORE: The bold way Mahershala Ali snagged Marvel’s ‘Blade’ Reboot
Scorsese, an Oscar-winning filmmaker threw some shade at Marvel during an interview with Empire, saying “It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being,” according to The Wrap.
In a Nov. 4 Op-ed New York Times piece, Scorsese also likened Marvel movies to theme park rides and that when you watch a superhero film, there is nothing emotionally that the viewer risks in the experience, no “spiritual revelation,” and no complexity in character development. He also says that these films are everything negative that Spike Lee films are not.
Those are fighting words for filmmakers who spend their lives crafting stories they hope will connect and hit a nerve with their fans worldwide. Marvel in fact has done that with Black Panther which became “the ninth-highest-grossing film of all time, the third-highest-grossing film in the U.S. and Canada, and the second-highest-grossing film of 2018,” according to reports.
Marvel chief creative officer Kevin Feige defended his life’s work, disagreeing with Scorsese, saying, “I think that’s not true. I think it’s unfortunate,” Feige says about Scorsese’s “not cinema” comment.
“I think myself and everyone who works on these movies loves cinema, loves movies, loves going to the movies, loves to watch a communal experience in a movie theater full of people.”
According to The Independent, Boseman, who plays the Black Panther character in the Marvel cinematic universe, went on record praising the movie for its cinematic complexity in a recent radio interview with BBC 5 Live.
READ MORE: Tessa Thompson to portray Marvel’s first LGBTQ superhero in ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’
“The mystery that Scorsese’s talking about, it’s in Black Panther. And I think the funny thing about it is, maybe if he saw Black Panther, he didn’t get that,” Boseman said.
“He didn’t get that there was this feeling of being unsure, there was this feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen, because we never had a superhero like this before. We thought that white people will kill us off. So it’s a possibility that we could be gone. So we felt that angst. We felt that angst that you would feel from cinema when you watched it. That’s cultural. Maybe it’s generational. I don’t know. But I’m secure in what we did, so his statements don’t really bother me.”
Haters gonna hate.
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Prominent Black Leaders Part of New $10 Million Fund to Make Loans to Black Businesses
Black small business owners starting or expanding a business can now perhaps get some fresh capital from the African American Chamber Fund (AACF). The new fund, a program led by Jersey City, New Jersey-based World Business Lenders, will initially offer up to $10 million in loans to black businesses.
Borrowers must seek financing through a U.S. based African American Chamber of Commerce office, a move to help ensure loans are made in black business communities.
World Business Lenders (WBL) has compiled an elite list of “Board of Managers” for the AACF. The list consists of high-profile individuals with political, business, spiritual, and athletic backgrounds who will reach out to local chambers to affiliate with.
Also known as advisory board members, they include U.S. Congressman Ed Towns (D-NY), Washington, D.C. Archbishop David J. Billings III, World Business Lenders CEO/Founder Doug Nadius, as well as Bob Beamon and Jackie Joyner Kersee, both Olympic gold medalists. Derrick Chambers, program manager of AACF/WBL, is a former NFL player for the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Organizers report there are currently 2.6 million black-owned businesses in the United States, employing 975,000 workers across the nation and generating $150 billion in annual receipts.
“Clearly, African American entrepreneurs are a driving force in our nation’s economy but, like all minority groups, they have more difficulty getting access to capital,” Bishop Billings, Fund Vice Chairman stated publicly earlier this year. “Our goal is to ensure that the opportunity to thrive is available to every single one of these entrepreneurs who want to create more economic growth for our communities.”
An alternative lender, WBL allows borrowers to use real estate as collateral to get short-term business loans. Its AACF unit can make unsecured loans based on the guidance and insight borrowers receive from a local chamber. The bottom line is borrowers can pursue loans they might not from traditional lenders like banks.
Currently, the AACF has launched the program with the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce in New York, and the Caribbean Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Brooklyn, New York.
The AACF is in talks with other black chambers nationally, including the Illinois Black Chamber of Commerce in Chicago and the Mississippi Black Chamber of Commerce in Jackson to affiliate with the fund, Chambers says. He added the AAFC will also determine whether to make loans to black businesses at a local chamber outside of their business location.
AACF borrowers can seek loans ranging from $25,000 to $2 million. Chambers figures the average size of a typical loan will be from $25,000 to $100,000. He added the criteria to receive a loan will be based on an interview about the applicant’s financial background, why they need the loan, and other factors. Loan participants can use the money for business purposes, including buying equipment, inventory, as well as cash flow for payroll.
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Maya Rockeymoore Cummings set Congress
Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, the widow of late Congressman of Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), has confirmed rumors and announced that she will run for his House seat.
READ MORE: Rep. Elijah Cummings: Politicians and celebrities react to sudden death of Baltimore congressman
“I am, of course, devastated at the loss of my spouse, but his spirit is with me. I’m going to run this race and I’m going to run it hard, as if he’s still right here by my side,” Rockeymoore Cummings, 48, told The Baltimore Sun.
Rockeymoore Cummings, the chairwoman of the Maryland Democratic Party has vowed to continue her husband’s political legacy. Cummings was not only her husband but a well-respected mover and shaker on Capitol Hill who chaired the House Oversight Committee. He was also a powerful Baltimore Democratic Congressman in Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. He was also beloved by his city.
Cummings died last month, at Johns Hopkins Hospital from complications from longstanding health challenges, according to a statement provided by his office.
Rockeymoore Cummings resigned as chairwoman of the Maryland Democratic Party and plans a formal announcement this morning, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.
“I believe very strongly that I have the background, the focus, the commitment and the ability to take the reins and make a good run for this seat,” she told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. Her husband, she said, “wanted me to continue this fight.”
READ MORE: Elijah Cummings’ widow rumored to run for his Congressional seat
Rockeymoore Cummings will face contenders such as former congressman and NAACP chief Kweisi Mfume, who plans to run again for a seat he once held before Cummings did in the 7th Congressional district in Maryland.
The 71-year-old Mfume said he wants “to make sure that all he and others fought for is not lost, tossed to the side or forgotten.”
The filing deadline to run is November 20. A special election will be held Feb. 4 followed by the general election April 28. Cummings’ term runs until January 2021.
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Monday, November 11, 2019
Economics for hard times
Economists, on the whole, favor open immigration and free trade policies, which they regard as catalysts for economic growth. But as polling shows, many people in the U.S. and Europe disagree. They are wary of losing jobs and earning power where there is immigration, and they believe free trade pushes industry abroad. So who’s right, the economists, or the people?
Well, according to MIT’s newest Nobel Prize laureates, economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, each side gets one count right and one wrong.
“If you look at the best evidence, it tells us that economists’ view of migration is more correct,” Duflo says. “It is not a big problem to let more migrants in.” Study after study shows that increased immigration does not affect wages, for instance. And the presence of migrants tends to let more women who are longtime residents enter the work force.
Okay, what about trade?
“On trade it is the opposite,” Duflo says. “The evidence shows that people’s instinctive view of trade, that it does hurt them, has a lot that is true about it, and economists’ instinctive view on trade, that it should be good for everyone, is not correct.”
Although free trade boosts overall growth, it also produces concentrated pockets of job losses. And while economic theory has long held that displaced workers will move to new job opportunities, this rarely happens. In countries that started trading with China during the last two decades, for example, the working-age population has not decreased in the areas most hard-hit by imports from China.
What the mistaken ideas about both immigration and trade ignore, Banerjee says, is the “stickiness” of real life. Most people do not want to uproot themselves.
“One thing that ties those two issues together is the idea of stickiness,” Banerjee says. “Ordinary people like to stay in place. [Economists] think trade should be fine because, yes, it could hurt some people, but people are going to move to other jobs in other places. But people are very reluctant to do that. They don’t want to go to a different sector and a different place and a different life.”
Until recently, these were not the kinds of issues Banerjee and Duflo often discussed. But now, in their second book, “Good Economics for Hard Times,” published today by Public Affairs Press, the MIT duo examines large-scale, politically fraught issues with economic implications, including immigration, trade, social identity, inequality, automation, and more.
In each case, the book examines what empirical research tell us about the world — as well as the limits of our knowledge. Only on that basis, Banerjee and Duflo suggest, can we think effectively about economic policy.
Or, as the authors write in the new book, “The world is a sufficiently complicated and uncertain place that the most valuable thing economists have to share is often not their conclusion, but the path they took to reach it — the facts they knew, the way they interpreted those facts, the deductive steps they took, the remaining sources of their uncertainty.”
Scaling up
The new work by Banerjee and Duflo follows “Poor Economics,” (PublicAffairs, 2011), their first book, which focused on helping the world’s 1 billion poorest people, who exist on the equivalent of $1 per day.
“Poor Economics” stemmed from research Banerjee and Duflo have created and facilitated as co-founders (with Sendhil Mullainathan) of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a leading antipoverty research network. These smaller-scale, empirical projects are what won Duflo and Banerjee the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences last month, which they shared with Michael Kremer of Harvard University.
By contrast, “Good Economics for Hard Times” examines issues of global scale, while maintaining the authors’ taste for empiricism. Trade is a hotly debated issue, but how much does it contribute to growth? As the authors note, it produces a notably modest benefit in the U.S., where it equals about 2.5 percent of GDP, no more than what a good year of growth is worth.
Similarly, while immigration stereotypes abound — think of the “Polish plumber” who supposedly takes away fix-it jobs from the British or French — people do not migrate as often as the popular perception suggests. About 3 percent of Greeks have left the country this decade, despite unemployment rates reaching as high as 27 percent and the presence of open borders in the European Union.
“The Polish plumber is an iconic figure in France but lives mostly in Poland,” Duflo says.
To be sure, large sections of “Good Economics for Hard Times” focus on other issues. In one chapter, Banerjee and Duflo contend that people’s sense of ethnic or partisan identity is more flexible than is often assumed. If so, that would be good news for some policy advocates. In many countries, ethnic or political divisions can create a barrier to public spending if people are unwilling to be taxed for the sake of other social groups. But Banerjee and Duflo suggest that a significant part of this is a public-perception problem.
“At the core of this is a lie,” Banerjee says. “And I think we have to start by saying that. It’s just not true that all federal and state spending goes to ‘other’ people. There’s a lot of polarization that was created by such lies, and while we won’t fix these prejudices in a day, I do think it’s worth pushing back.”
As Duflo points out, it is also tough to establish cause and effect when examining why some governments tax and spend more than others.
“It’s true the U.S. is a diverse society and Denmark is not diverse, and Denmark has much higher taxes than the U.S.,” she says. “But I’m not sure whether that comes from the fact that Denmark is [more socially homogenous] or from the fact that the government as an enterprise is [seen as] a more legitimate enterprise generally.”
“We have much more to learn”
While the intent of “Good Economics for Hard Times” may be to get people to think sharply about pressing problems, Banerjee and Duflo also discuss the kinds of policy interventions they think are promising. Some of these aid people in “transitions” during life, especially job loss. These transitions have significant social impact; research shows that people who lose jobs after age 50 have lower life expectancy than those who keep working. In a rapidly-changing economy, we need to worry about the many people who will have a hard time in the labor market.
“The idea that people are going to find the opportunity, left to themselves, is implausible,” Banerjee says. “”[Our] view is we need to act on this collectively: You aren’t a failure because you lost your job. This is a transition. It’s society’s problem rather than only yours.”
While there are a variety of policy measures to do this — such as improved Trade Adjustment Assistance for people displaced by trade-induced job losses — Banerjee and Duflo also favor what they call the “somewhat radical idea” of subsidizing entire firms and older workers affected by trade, keeping them in business and at work, respectively. A robust effort to do this, they write, would help “prevent communities from falling apart” when firms struggle.
And, as Duflo says, “People don’t want just money. They want dignity. Giving them that is not betraying some deep philosophical principle.”
For this reason, the authors are more skeptical of universal basic income proposals; as they note, U.S.-based surveys shows that about 80 percent of workers have a strong sense of satisfaction, usefulness, or personal accomplishment tied to their jobs and careers.
Perhaps more conventionally, Banerjee and Duflo also strongly favor greater support for “labor-intensive public services” such as public education and care for the elderly. Crucially, these kinds of jobs are unlikely to be either replaced by technology, or outsourced to another country, since they are firmly situated in particular places.
As “Good Economics for Hard Times” also points out, a wealth of research strongly suggests the high social value of, say, early childhood education; such investments would clearly pay for themselves, on a society-wide basis.
In all cases, Banerjee and Duflo write, “The goal of social policy, in these times of change and anxiety, is to help people absorb the shocks that affect them without allowing those shocks to affect their sense of themselves.” And, as they note, “we clearly don’t have all the solutions, and suspect that nobody else does either. We have much more to learn. But as long as we understand what the goal is, we can win.”
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Atlanta-based Black women in TV & film unite to form #TheReelDivas
These are women directors, producers and writers, who have formed a powerhouse group: 1) to bring awareness to the lack of women in TV and film and 2) to highlight Atlanta being the Hollywood of the South.
Atlanta has been Hollywood’s best-kept secret for a while now but a group of creatives from the town affectionately known as “Southern Hollywood” want to let everyone know about the talent coming out of the A.
Twenty Black women in TV and film have united to form #TheReelDivas in an effort to raise awareness about the lack of representation in the industry and to highlight Atlanta’s contributions to the entertainment landscape.
Jasmine Guy (A Different World, Grey’s Anatomy), Terri J. Vaughn (The Steve Harvey Show), Cas Sigers-Beedles (NAACP Image Award Nominee), Denise Hendricks (HLN), Tamra Simmons (Surviving R. Kelly) and Ty Johnston-Chavis (Founder of Atlanta Pitch Summit) are just a few on the ladies behind the initiative.
“With our brother-in-film, Tyler Perry, getting so much notoriety and acclaim for opening his 330-acre lot here in Atlanta, we feel that the time is now,” says Co-Creator of The Reel Divas, Cas Sigers-Beedles, who is also a writer, producer and director. “Atlanta has already served as the home base and mecca for a lot of TV and film projects, so we are doing our part to continue pushing this narrative to the masses.”
Earlier this year, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed the bill that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy. This stunned the nation – with many actors and production companies, including Netflix, being the most vocal about the controversial Georgia anti-abortion law. One of the purposes of The Reel Divas is to advocate for the rights of women in TV and film, especially in situations like these. The group will focus on being a collective unit to showcase how women are more powerful together than individually.
“We are mothers, wives and daughters, but we are also the writers, producers and directors of Southern Hollywood,” says Co-Creator of The Reel Divas and TV & film producer, Ty Johnston-Chavis. “We are all consistently working, either in development, production or post-productions – and we are here to stay.”
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