Salient to Investors:

Fareed Zakaria said:

  • The US justice system is a rubber stamp for the prosecution due to America overreacting to the crime wave of the 1970s and enacting bad legislation.
  • The vast prison industrial complex lobbies aggressively, which means more arrests, lockups, and prisons.

Conrad Black says:

  • The US has 25% of the world’s prisoners but only 5% of the global population.
  • Because of the plea bargain, US prosecutors win 95% of their cases, 90% without ever having to go to trial: vs. a conviction rate of 60% in Canada and 50% in Britain.
  • Judge Jed Rackoff says the US criminal justice system bears little relationship to what the founding fathers contemplated, to what movies/tv portrays, and to what the average American believes.

Thomas Erdbrink at The New York Times said:

  • Iran’s hardliners are unlike the hardliners in the West and take their cue from Ayatollah Ali- Khamenei, the great architect behind the nuclear talks.
  • Ayatollah Khamenei is very well aware of the wish of his people for sanctions to be lifted.
  • Rouhani and Zarif’s limited power is demonstrated by their inability to get Jason Rezaian released.

The Global Burden of Disease Study found:

  • In 2013, more people died from drowning than from natural disasters, more from road injuries than from malaria, twice from suicide than from breast cancer, and nearly as many from falls as from leukemia and prostate cancer combined.
  • UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman had very high injury road injury death rates – Oman twice the global average vs. Sweden with a quarter of the global average.
  • Since 1990, India and China accounted for half of all global suicides; a rising number in India, a falling number in China.
  • US maternal mortality rates are rising and are much higher than in other developed countries.
  • In 2010, Rwanda’s biggest risk factor for premature death and disability was indoor air pollution from cooking.

 

Blaine Harden said:

  • The Kim family dynasty in North Korea survived its creator – unlike every other totalitarian system – because its family system institutionalized Stalinist tools of control.
  • Kim Jong-un is very rational, very cunning – like his father and grandfather – and good at purging and eliminating challengers. He projects an image of being wild to inhibit challengers.
  • North Korea is exactly where it was 15 years ago, with no indication that the family’s rule is in any imminent danger.

Robert Putnam said:

  • The unbelievable contrast between rich and poor US kids is new and nationwide, and a result of the growing wealth inequality and segregation along class lines.
  • There is growing gap between classes in terms of how much time their parents spend reading to them, a growing and large gap between how much money parents spend for summer camp, piano lessons etc – 7 times as much for the average rich kid vs. the average poor kid.
  • Gaps in quality of schooling, church attendance are growing. Social mobility is low, as seen in getting the college degree with the necessary credentials.
  • Kids with high-test scores and low parental income are less likely to graduate from college than rich kids with lower scores.
  • Universal early childhood education works, and especially so for poor kids.
  • Charging for extracurricular activities – which have a payoff with employers – has resulted in poor kids dropping band and chorus and football, etc.

Watch the video at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/category/gps-episodes/ or read the full transcript

at http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1505/03/fzgps.01.html