Make California a G7 Member

Donald Trump may have personally run exclusive clubs, but America, under his presidency, is dropping its membership in global clubs left and right. His administration recently severed our ties to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as well as other organizations where countries collaborate on addressing borderless challenges and opportunities. In the last week, the Trump administration has been absent from the COP 30 Climate Summit in Brazil. It has no plans to attend the upcoming G-20 meetings in South Africa, which will bring together the world’s largest economies. 

In this moment, as America retrenches from global leadership, cities and states need to step up and join as many multinational organizations as will have them. Whether staying in the Paris Agreement on climate or coordinating with global health organizations to head off the spread of bird flu, measles, and AIDS, subnational actors need to fill the vacuum Washington is creating. Moving fast and breaking things has consequences.  READ MORE

Coronavirus failures are our bad. We’d been warned it was coming for decades

Two years ago, the stock market was on a one-way trajectory: Up. 

In 2018, we watched how bioengineering advances and a technology called CRISPR held the promise of personalized medicine and cures. People lived longer, healthier lives.

That year also was the 100-year anniversary of the globally devastating Spanish Flu pandemic. That silent viral scourge killed more people than World War I. The Spanish Flu took between 50 million and 100 million lives worldwide.

World War I’s occupations, trench warfare, shooting and bombing, and the starvation that followed, killed 20 million. The war’s casualties split nearly evenly between military and civilian deaths; Americans and Europeans. READ MORE