How much profit is fair? To find out more and get teaching resources, go to www.whypoverty.net
Rüschlikon is a village in Switzerland with a very low tax rate and very wealthy residents. But it receives more tax revenue than it can use. This is largely thanks to one resident – Ivan Glasenberg, CEO of Glencore, whose copper mines in Zambia are not generating a large bounty tax revenue for the Zambians. Zambia has the 3rd largest copper reserves in the world, but 60% of the population live on less than $1 a day and 80% are unemployed. Based on original research into public documents, the film describes the tax system employed by multinational companies in Africa.
Director Christoffer Guldbrandsen
Producer Henrik Veileborg
Produced by Guldbrandsen Film
Original title: Our man in Sudan.
While huge parts of Africa are still famine-stricken, large areas of fertile agricultural land on the continent are put up for sale. Since the collapse of the financial markets smart investors have gone looking for new opportunities and, given the increasing world population and high prices of raw materials, agricultural land seems a safe bet. With lots of cheap land Africa is a Walhalla. We never see how these investors actually operate. But Backlight was able to watch one of them, Phil Heilberg, former Wall Street banker, in action.
VPRO Documentary:
Our globalized world causes societies, economies and cultures to seek a new balance. VPRO Documentary reflects on this with new features every week. We research subjects like politics, world economy, society and science with experts and try to grasp the essence of prominent trends and developments.
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Credits:
Director: Shuchen Tan
Research: Maren Merckx
Camera: Hans Fels
Sound: Charles Kersten
Local producer Sudan: Godfrey Victor Bulla
Editor: Hans Dunnewijk
Re-recording mixer: Rob Dul
Color grader; Jef Grosfeld
Producers: Mariska Schneider, Rosa van Tienen
Commissioning editors: Henneke Hagen / Jos de Putter
Thanks to: Ibrahim Jadelkarim, Thomas Wakow Lual
English, French and Spanish subtitles: Ericsson.
French and Spanish subtitles are co-funded by European Union.
What can you do against regimes and armies that provide no or little information about incidents, bombings, torture or abuses? The citizen detective finds out by himself. With the tools and data available in the digital domain, citizens are very well able to reconstruct what happened and thus discover ‘the truth’.
They’re the new eyes and ears of democracy. Organisations of citizen detectives, internet investigators and blogging experts. Every day, they gather new and relevant information from everything going around the worldwide web and social media. Data about geolocations, acts of violence, the people involved, destruction, airstrikes, torture, shipping routes, weaponry, targets hit and the number of victims. By connecting the data in this multitude of publically available evidence (open source intelligence), the digital citizen journalist network Bellingcat has discovered more about the downing of flight MH17 than the national commission of inquiry.
VPRO Documentary:
Our globalized world causes societies, economies and cultures to seek a new balance. VPRO Documentary reflects on this with new features every week. We research subjects like politics, world economy, society and science with experts and try to grasp the essence of prominent trends and developments.
The Senate voted on March 23 to overturn internet privacy rules created to prevent providers like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T from sharing users’ personal information or selling it without permission. While the House has yet to vote on the issue, the Senate vote has worried consumer groups who cite privacy concerns. Recode reporter Tony Romm joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.
Various parts of the world have “dimmed” and “brightened” at times, as measured by surface solar radiation records, and some of that is clearly related to pollution patterns. But new data suggest an additional mechanism is at work. That something is whitening global cloud-free skies and changing the way that solar radiation reaches Earth’s surface. A provocative new analysis, presented in this briefing, points to a likely cause—an unintentional geoengineering experiment.
Participants:
Charles Long, Senior Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.;
Martin Wild, Professor, ETH (Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science), Zurich, Switzerland
jake Tapper held a panel on Friday evening to take a closer look at the GOP pulling its health care bill today as well as the president’s response. President Donald Trump said on Friday that “The best thing we can do, politically speaking, is let Obamacare explode.”
Previous White House Staff Assistant David Gergen said the president’s response “was delusional in some ways.” He said, “This is a man who just shoves it off on other people and described things in ways that are just misleading. I’m sure he’ll get better at this, and I think it’s also fair to say that a lot of presidents stumble. A lot of presidents had trouble in their first hundred days.”
However, Gergen continued, “When you add up the totality of it — you (Tapper) said this is the worst week of his presidency. I actually think this may be the worst hundred days we’ve ever seen in a president.”
CNN chief correspondent John King spoke to Gergen’s remark, pointing out that Trump is the President of the United States, “which means he’s president to those who like Obamacare, too. He’s their president, too.”
“Imagine if a fire chief showed up — [Trump] said Obamacare is exploding and we’re going to watch and let it explode, and then maybe we’ll do something about it,” King continued. “It’s like a fire chief showing up, saying ‘no, don’t squirt any water at that building , let’s just let it burn to the ground.’”“He’s in charge now. I know he doesn’t like this program, I know he thinks the people who built this program made a mess. But guess what, he’s the president now. It’s his mess. He didn’t start it, but he inherited it,” said King.
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
This weblog explores the transition to a sustainable future on our finite planet. It provides links to current news, key documents from government sources and non-governmental organizations, as well as video documentaries about climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice concerns.
The links are listed here to be used in whatever manner they may be helpful in public information campaigns, course preparation, teaching, letter-writing, lectures, class presentations, policy discussions, article writing, civic or Congressional hearings and citizen action campaigns, etc. For further information on this blog see: About this weblog. and How to use this weblog.
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