Neal Peirce / Jun 23 2011
For Release Sunday, June 26, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Can one region “JumpStart” a national economy?
However unlikely the proposition, the Northeast Ohio region of 4 million people is giving it a real whirl.
First, it’s leading by practice. Drawing on the region’s historically large foundation resources, since 2004 it’s had a “Fund for Our Economic Future” focused on such goals as connecting cutting-edge industries. “This is regional, collaborative, and for the long haul,” says its president, Brad Whitehead. He cites the sparks of creativity and growth potential in such innovations as taking “a Rolls Royce facility in fuel cells in North Canton, hooking with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, with polymer technology in Akron, and then materials and metal strength in Youngstown.”
Now, the Ohioans’ signature job-producing non-profit — JumpStart, a seven-year old organization that invests public and private funds in entrepreneurial start-ups — is “going national” with a new affiliate, JumpStart America, which aims to raise $2 billion in the next decade for investments in promising ventures across the country.
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Neal Peirce / Jun 16 2011
For Release Friday, June 17, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — June 17 marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s declaration of an American “war on drugs” — a struggle opponents say has cost $1 trillion, countless ruined lives, an eruption of dangerous crime rings, gross racial injustice, and precious little success in reducing drug use or addiction.
Observing the date, the Drug Policy Alliance is staging 50 events in cities ranging from New York to Los Angeles, Denver to Providence, Columbus (Miss.) to Inglewood (Calif.). Meanwhile, Students for Sensible Drug Policy is organizing a set of nationwide candlelight vigils to honor victims of the drug war.
But will it make any difference? Not if you check the White House’s brushoff of a just-released international panel report highly critical of the drug war, urging total U.S. and international rethinking of the issue including possible legalization of marijuana.
Members and signatories of the Global Commission on Drug Policy included a former Secretary General of the United Nations (Kofi Annan), a former U.S. Secretary of State (George Schultz), a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve (Paul Volcker), and the former presidents of Colombia (Cesar Gaviria), Mexico (Ernesto Zedillo), and Brazil (Fernando Henrique Cardoso- the commission’s chair).
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Neal Peirce / Jun 08 2011
For Immediate Release Wednesday, June 8, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
SAO PAULO, June 4, 2011 — For the cities of the world, there’s rarely if ever been such a momentous single week.
Faced with the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change, the C40 organization of world’s large cities met in this Brazilian megacity to announce a set of landmark agreements. All the accords, said New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, current C40 chairman and the prime driver of its new initiatives, will be designed to undergird their struggle against rising seas and disruptive weather patterns — in a world in which cities as responsible, directly or indirectly, for up to 80 percent of global climate emissions.
“The leaders of C40 Cities — the world’s megacities — hold the future in their hands,” Bloomberg asserted.
As a first step, the three dozen C40 mayors confirmed a full merger with the Clinton Climate Initiative, assuring added funding for a centralized, high-grade professional staff as well as full-bore support from former President Bill Clinton, who flew to São Paulo to seal and celebrate the agreement. Staff operations are global, with current bases in London and New York.
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Neal Peirce / Jun 02 2011
For Release Sunday, June 5, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
The Supreme Court declares the conditions that inmates are subjected to in penitentiaries of the nation’s most populous state amount to “needless suffering and death,” thus violating the Constitution’s explicit prohibition, in the Eighth Amendment, of inflicting “cruel and unusual treatment.”
Rarely has a state been chastised so harshly by the nation’s top court. Small wonder it was a narrow 5-4 decision.
But will the order to California, to start significant reform by reducing its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates, prove to be historic? Is this the long awaited turning point — to reverse the United States’ decades of tough “law and order” politics, a course that has led us to incarcerate 2.1 million men and women, the most of any nation on earth?
It’s true — even civil rights advocates agree no state has a record of prisoner abuse comparable to California’s. Maybe the case will be dismissed as an “outlier.”
But the opening to what can occur behind bars is startling. Packing more and more inmates into its prisons, California created conditions conducive to gang formation, prisoner fights, sexual assaults and suicides. It failed to respond adequately to 70 court orders for remedies in class action lawsuits — some dating back to 1990 — that had been filed on behalf of seriously ill or mentally disturbed prisoners.
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/ Jun 02 2011
Welcome to Citiwire.net! Can we hope the Supreme Court’s ruling in the California prison constitutional rights case marks a key national turning point in our malfunctioning incarceration practices? My column probes that possibility. … Bill Stafford, meanwhile, looks into fiscal debates on the future of the empire, including Emperor Romulus Augustus Obamatus and his political adversaries.
Neal Peirce / May 26 2011
For Release Sunday, May 29, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Are we ready for a “transit moment” in America?
In one way, it seems impossible. “Who cares” when three out of four of us still commute in a car, alone? And then there’s money: Federal transit assistance may well be on the chopping block of a cut-hungry Congress. State and local budgets are so pinched that regional bus and rail agencies already face serious service cuts and deferred maintenance.
But don’t despair — and think forward with hope. That was the message of a transit conference, sponsored recently in Washington by the Brookings Institution as it unveiled a study of unprecedented detail on how transit functions in America’s top 100 metro regions.
The “transit moment” message is straightforward. Gas prices have careened back up to the $4-a-gallon range. Fuel cost for the average household will be roughly $825 higher this year than last — meaning, almost assuredly, more and more families looking for transit alternatives.
Concurrently, policymakers talk incessantly about generating new jobs to fix the country’s prolonged job deficit. The simple message they need to hear, says Brookings’ Robert Puentes:
“It’s not enough to create jobs if people can’t get to them.”
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Neal Peirce / May 19 2011
For Release Sunday, May 22, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
For most Americans the recent news of popular demonstrations in Mexico was probably a small diversion from the daily tide of bloody global news from such faraway hot spots of Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Bahrain.
Why worry, most of us likely concluded, if thousands of Mexicans are marching in the streets, protesting the horrific violence and high death toll in their nation’s raging drug war? Isn’t that their problem, not ours?
It’s true, the news reports focus less on the American role, more on growing anger with the government of President Felipe Calderon and the meager returns from the massive police and military crackdown on the drug trade he inaugurated in 2006.
Since then, some 37,000 Mexicans have been murdered, often tortured and brutalized before their deaths, as cartels battle for control of drug smuggling routes and brazenly assassinate anyone, official or simple citizen, they think’s in their way.
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Neal Peirce / May 12 2011
For Release Sunday, May 15, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — If millions of Americans continue the illusion that climate change isn’t real, how about food? Are we ready to face the clear danger of precipitous price increases, both short-term and long-term, linked to global scarcities?
On May 4, the United States received a severe royal warning. We were told we’re overtaxing nature, pushing our food system — and by extension the world’s — into deep crisis.
Visiting the United States just days after the celebrated marriage of his son William, Britain’s Prince Charles keynoted a day-long conference on food issues at Georgetown University. Then the heir to the British throne, whose outspoken stands on modern architecture and other public issues have set a new standard of leadership rare in the British or any other constitutional monarchy, was off to visit Washington, D.C.’s Common Good City Farm.
In contrast to the London pageantry of the week before, Charles examined a compost heap, planted a tree, and chatted with local public housing residents as well as discussing nutrition and obesity issues with Common Good’s executive director, Pertula George.
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Neal Peirce / May 06 2011
For Release Sunday, May 8, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Will President Obama’s National Export Initiative, his call to double exports in five years, actually make a difference and help to respark our economy?
There’s discouraging news. Congress isn’t providing funding. Fiscally squeezed states are cutting back on their trade promotion offices. The national debate seems to be about the size of government, not how we create the goods and services to compete against such fast-rising world economic powers as the “BRIC” block (Russia, Brazil, India, China).
My colleague William Stafford, who heads the Seattle region’s rather unique Trade Development Alliance, notes caustically:
“Either we get our exports up or our economy won’t come back. We’re still smug, still thinking we’re No. 1.” He describes federal export efforts as little less than pitiful.
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Neal Peirce / Apr 29 2011
For Release Sunday, May 1, 2011
© 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Does the rightward swing in national politics spell “curtains” for the Obama administration’s push for “green” agendas, for “sustainability” in America’s cities and neighborhoods?
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan argues no — and cites congressional action to prove his case.
The hard-fought budget compromise for 2011 protects, for example, two stellar programs of the new push, both triggers for hundreds of competitive applications.
One is the Sustainable Communities Initiative that helps localities (and federal departments) tie together and improve their efforts in housing, transportation and environmental decisions at the regional and grassroots level. The program is to receive $100 million for this fiscal year.
Another save, with $528 million appropriated, is the highly popular “TIGER” program of competitive transportation-related grants to cities and regions that come up with creative ways to rebuild the economies through such steps as safer streets, reduced carbon emissions and greater community livability.
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