| | | | | |  | | By Ryan Heath | Presented by |  | | Welcome back to the final edition of Global Translations from the 23rd annual Milken Institute Global Conference. HOW TO WATCH: All sessions can be viewed here live, and will be immediately available after the session for catch-up viewing. Our new Global Translations podcast season launches today, hosted by Luiza Savage and your author. Listen and subscribe here. We're focusing on the many ways supply chains have been disrupted but ultimately strengthened in 2020, as the pandemic forges a new consensus on globalization. We and our expert guests take a deep dive into global supply chains and what "decoupling" and "reshoring'" are all about when it comes to America's reliance on China and the rest of the world. | | | | A message from Bank of America: Bridging the technology gap to keep learning alive: When the Kern County school district made the shift to distance learning in March, technology was a major concern. A grant of $75,000 from Bank of America, as part of its $100 million grant program in support of local communities, helped support distance learning for all students in Kern County. | | | WHAT TO LOOK FOR TODAY As the U.S. gears up for election day, more and more Republicans are suddenly willing to buck their president: Mitch McConnell, governors and operatives, alike, are pushing back against President Donald Trump on everything from stimulus to climate change to Covid-19. That tension bubbled up occasionally in Milken conference sessions Tuesday (see "Meeting the Moment" section), and is likely to do so again today, as Trump tells people to move on with their lives despite the still-raging pandemic. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn will speak at 2:45 p.m. ET., while Francis Collins, director at the National Institutes of Health, will address the closing plenary at 4:00 p.m. ET. Based off Collins' NPR interview Tuesday — where he expressed "great confidence" in Dr. Anthony Fauci, and warned that while "people are tired of it (coronavirus restrictions), but the virus is not tired of us" — we'd wager he won't be acting as a Trump booster. Collins also revealed that the president hasn't met with his coronavirus taskforce for months, and instead is getting his pandemic information from Vice President Mike Pence and Dr. Scott Atlas, neither of whom are infectious disease experts. 9 a.m. ET: The Impact Revolution: From Sustainable Development Goals to Solutions 11:30am ET: Evening the Odds: A Conversation with Pharrell Williams 1:15pm ET: Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia 2:45 p.m. ET: Fireside chat with Salesforce Chair and CEO Marc Benioff MEETING THE MOMENT ON BIG ISSUES — CLIMATE CHANGE The Milken Conference was focused on solutions to climate change, rather than politics. Still, it was hard to remove politics from the discussion. The Republican panelist, John Kasich, is voting for Democrat Joe Biden, and an audience poll showed that only one in 10 viewers think the government can do a better job than companies in addressing climate change, which aligns with Republican philosophy. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, founder of Urban Ocean Lab, observed that, "the majority of climate deniers are older white men." And she had a proposal for how to convince them climate change is real: "The best people to persuade them are their daughters." Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) was on a naming and shaming tear Tuesday, starting with the suggestion that we get rid of what the International Monetary Fund calculates as $600 billion of annual subsidies propping up various aspects of U.S. domestic fossil fuel industries. He went on to say that the country's largest trade associations — the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — are "the two biggest obstructors" lobbying against climate change action in Washington. And he blamed individual businesses for "punting climate to the back of the line" in their lobbying efforts: "They haven't seen this as real to their business yet. When they come to Congress they're serious about things that they need," and they don't see a healthy climate as one of those needs yet, he said, even though "this is going to clobber their business models." Kasich, for his part, acknowledged, "We have a long way to go," when it comes to combating climate change, but added, "I just don't want to say it's all bleak. I'm not pessimistic ultimately about where business is going." He credited the Business Roundtable for beginning to "aggressively talk about environmental issues," and said that, ultimately, there wouldn't be effective legislation and funding to protect the climate until more Republicans advocated for the issue. | | | | A message from Bank of America: .jpg "Advertisement Image")  | | | TUESDAY HIGHLIGHT KELLY CRAFT — PLENTY OF STYLE BUT IS THERE SUBSTANCE TO GO WITH IT? Amb. Kelly Craft , the U.S. representative to the United Nations, was in full force during her Tuesday Milken session. As a top diplomat, first in Canada and now at the U.N., Craft is engaging, sincere and never short of words. She recounted Tuesday now familiar stories about taking her ambassadorial peers to her home state of Kentucky and surprising Pacific Island leaders with phone calls they don't usually get from America's top brass. People love talking to her, and listening to her. Yet for all her outreach, Kraft has precious little by way of accomplishments after 16 months at U.N. headquarters. Craft is clearly constrained in her U.N. work: It's hard to influence the World Health Organization when the president she reports to is yanking the U.S. out of the health boy. But 2020 has offered no shortage of diplomatic opportunities, which the U.S. keeps missing or losing. The U.S. federal government has been all-but-absent from discussions on climate change, the issue the U.N. has defined as the long-term crisis of our time. And the world has ignored its efforts to invoke U.N. sanctions against Iran. Syria remains a mess, and China continues to fill top U.N. posts. It all serves to make Craft's memorable soundbites unsatisfying. So what if "WHO was nothing but a mouthpiece for China," and China is "basically a predatory lender" in Africa, if the U.S. can't use the U.N. system to do something about it? When it came to the tough questions from Jennifer Griffin, the Fox News national security correspondent, such as what the U.S. has done to alter the course of the global pandemic, Craft either deflected or spoke in generalities. Watch the session for yourself. BY THE NUMBERS 285,000 — the American "excess death count" since mid-March: The largest CDC study to date points us closer towards the true Covid-19 death toll in the U.S., well above the official count of 220,000 deaths to date. Many of the excess deaths are of young Americans and member of minority communities. Some are likely to be deaths of despair linked to Covid-19, but not directly caused by it. $931 billion — the boost America's billionaires have gotten since March. The collective wealth of America's billionaires is now $3.88 trillion, a 30 percent jump this year, alone. The left-leaning advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) used Forbes data to present their calculations (see spreadsheet of all billionaires). Politifact confirmed the assessment. 15 to 27 — the median ages across Africa HOUSE RECOMMENDATIONS Kevin Klowden , the executive director of the Milken Institute's Center for Regional Economics and California Center, specializing in the study of competitive regional economies, said that his biggest takeaway from the conference is that "unless we can keep small and medium-sized businesses going, people are going to suffer. And unless we can convince everyone it's in their best interest to follow best practices (on Covid-19), it's going to continue to cripple the economy. We can't really recover until we do that." Top solution — collaboration: "Every solution I've heard that excites me involves collaboration. Think about our supply chain problems with PPE. You had a bunch of groups grabbing their own resources, and the dynamic only changed when they started working together," Klowden said. "We can't just focus on our own little piece. There's nothing the pandemic has done better than fracturing and isolating us, but the solutions are around collaborating and adapting," Klowden stressed. "We need to assist small and mid-sized businesses with the tools, whether technology, data, or new and adapted supply chains, so that when the next disruption happens, they will be able to find out what they're missing to be able to function and to (eventually) grow." He nodded to vaccine and PPE supply chains as obvious risks heading into winter. | | | | A message from Bank of America: Technology: a learning lifeline. As public schools shifted online this spring, some communities found themselves at a disadvantage: Not all families can afford the technology that makes distance learning possible. Learn more about how Bank of America worked with the Kern County Superintendent of Schools to bridge that gap in the community. | | | QUOTABLE "I think we're looking for 2022 to start to feel normal again." — Todd Boehly, Los Angeles Dodgers co-owner "We will not raise taxes in Brazil. As a matter of fact, we will reduce corporate taxes … We are about to join the OECD." — Paulo Guedes, Brazilian minister of economy "Philanthropy has a clear role in this moment to support people-led movements operating at (the) nexus of social, economic, and ecological issues. We must give more, fund movements, and fund structural change efforts." — Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund. "Never again ask if someone believes in climate change. It is not a matter of faith. It is a fact. We need to move from, 'do we or do we not do something' to 'what is your plan?'" — Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, founder of Urban Ocean Lab "When you don't get paid the same, when you don't get the same respect, when you don't get the same media attention, when you don't get and you don't get and you don't get, you have to get really creative and find innovative ideas and ways to be seen and heard." — Abby Wambach, Olympic soccer player, activist and author ATTENTION GRABBING HUMANS AND MACHINES TO SPLIT WORK EQUALLY BY 2025: The World Economic Forum released a big report overnight on the global jobs market, predicting that, "By 2025, employers will divide work between human and machines equally," alongside a second report on 20 promising "Markets of Tomorrow." Together that work provides the backdrop for WEF calling on governments to set targets and use indicators beyond GDP to measure their country's recovery from Covid-19. Fifty percent of companies told the WEF they are accelerating the automatization of tasks, which the study calculates will displace 85 million jobs in the next five years. The good news is that the so-called "robot revolution" could also create 97 million new jobs. The political problem is that there won't be a neat swap between the displaced jobs and the new ones, meaning the communities most at risk of disruption will have a clear need for government-supported skills training. Today, only 21 percent of businesses worldwide may make use of public funds for reskilling and upskilling programs. "The pandemic has disproportionately impacted millions of low-skilled workers," said Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, a report partner. "The recovery must include a coordinated reskilling effort by institutions to provide accessible and job-relevant learning that individuals can take from anywhere in order to return to the workforce." Meanwhile, 84 percent of companies said they have sped up the digitization of their existing processes. Watch a video overview. MILKEN COMMUNITY Has Covid-19 made the Milken Community more nervous about public health threats like climate change? Forty-six percent said yes, while 54 percent no. THANKS to editor Emily Cadei and Luiza Savage.
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