Ravi S. Iyer: Worldly

Frank Abagnale, whose story is dramatized by Spielberg in Catch Me If You Can movie, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_Me_If_You_Can , reformed later on (after serving time in various prisons), and became a good guy helping FBI and others to catch financial fraud. So the story has a happy ending, and it seems that Spielberg decided to do the film because of the way the young boy who ran away from home & school due to the shock of seeing his parents getting divorced (when he was 16 years old) and got into fraudulent stuff, eventually became a good man helping the FBI, became a good husband and a good father to three children. Here's a great speech by the REAL Frank Abagnale recounting his life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-LlwupIqc , 37 min 19 secs, published Jun 2013. Abagnale speaks very well and, in particular, the part of his talk covering his reformation is excellent. Worth taking the time to see the video, IMHO. Here's his wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org...

[The contents of this post have been copy-pasted from my Facebook post here: https://www.facebook.com/ravi.s.iyer.7/posts/1667415626808341 .] Contents of shared Facebook (FB) post of Robert Reich: Last night, at the University of Chicago, Bernie Sanders pledged that “no nominee of mine to the United States Supreme Court will get that job unless he or she is loud and clear that one of their first orders of business will be to overturn Citizens United.” Bernie couldn’t be clearer, or righter. The Supreme Court’s 2010 “Citizens United” decision has done exactly what we feared it would do -- unleash an even larger torrent of money into our political system. Most of it is from extremely wealth people -- top corporate executives, Wall Street moguls, and billionaires -- who expect something in return. In 2012, just 400 people provided 40 percent of all campaign contributions. What did they get for their efforts? Laws giving them more tax breaks and subsidies, and the blockage of laws a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5O7TjZy8b4 , 2 hr, 47 mins Here's a transcript of the debate: http://time.com/4037239/second-republican-debate-transcript-cnn/

Last updated on 17th Sept. 2015 In December 1971 I was nine years old living in Bombay (now Mumbai) in a Ground+6 stories set of buildings in Dadar (East) area of Mumbai (Central Railway Officers' Quarters, Dadar; my father was then an Accounts officer in Central Railway). If I recall correctly, we lived on the fourth floor (the building had a lift), and we had to put brown paper on glass window panes and be prepared to switch off all lights if the air raid siren went off. The fear then was that Pakistani war planes could attack and bomb Bombay. At that time, these four or five Ground+Six stories buildings, clustered together, would have been standing out among the rest of the much lesser in height (two or three storied) buildings around it in Dadar. Further, the vital railway tracks of Central Railway connecting Bombay to a large part of India was next to the buildings (Bombay also has a Western Railway which connects some parts of Western India to Bombay). So if these buildin...

A Prof. of Political Science (of University of Hawaii, USA) view on current USA presidential election contest, printed in The Hindu yesterday (12th Sept. 2015): http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/donald-trumps-run-for-the-republican-presidential-nomination/article7642384.ece . A short extract from it: The idea that economic growth can only be ensured by slashing taxes on the rich; further dismantling the welfare state; full-scale deregulation; and steeper reductions in state spending has left the U.S. in a shambles. The polarisation of society in terms of wealth has reached levels not seen since the 1920s; real wages for working class Americans have flatlined; a shrinking middle class is faced with bleaker prospects than ever; ...

Over a year old but it is Paul Krugman showering tremendous praise on a book by French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the twenty-first century. Here's a video interview of Paul Krugman on the book and related topics by Bill Moyers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzQYA9Qjsi0 , 24 min. 30 secs,  published Apr. 18th 2014, which I found to be quite easy to understand. And here's a text book review by Krugman, over a year ago again, which I found to be not as easy as the video interview, but still an important review, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/ . The book also has a wikipedia page. Some extracts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century : Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a 2013 book by French economist Thomas Piketty. It focuses on wealth and income inequality in Europe and the United States since the 18th century. It was initially published in French (as Le Capital au XXIe siè...