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The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

John Tepper Marlin: Green Edge 10: Can Government Create Green Jobs?Today

Can government create green jobs? (I'm thinking now of city or state government.) Well, yes, by hiring people or imposing regulations that require building owners to hire more green workers. Trouble is, the taxes to pay for the government jobs or the additional expenses for building workers may drive up costs and cause the city to lose as many private-sector jobs as it creates.

Six weeks ago I suggested another way in an op-ed, "How the Mayor Can Really Help Create New Jobs," for City Hall News. I proposed that the Mayor of New York should spend the money and time to convene meetings of green thinkers and entrepreneurs to launch new businesses. My argument went as follows:

Nearly 30 years ago, Mayor Bloomberg left Salomon Brothers during the recession of 1981-82, and he invested his $10 million severance check and Salomon shares into his insights into the value of technology to Wall Street. He grew a giant company with more than 9,000 employees concentrated in the New York City area.

Now, New York City is losing at least 40,000 jobs in the financial services sector alone. To replace these jobs, New York City needs to repeat Bloomberg's trick many times. The city has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harness the energy of Wall Street entrepreneurs bursting with ideas as grand as Bloomberg's was in 1981, but who need partners to make their ideas a reality.

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Jason McCabe Calacanis: The 120% SolutionToday

Reprinted with permission from Jason's email list

Many intelligent people I've been speaking with believe that the economic crisis facing our country today is our biggest challenge since America's inception. Intelligent folks can argue the relative risks we faced when confronted with the Civil War, Great Depression, Vietnam, two World Wars and the New Millennium Economic Crisis (what I'm calling what we're going through today), but there is no debating that the current situation is dire.

Extremely dire.

Huge companies are closing or imploding and layoffs are skyrocketing; debt levels and savings are hitting new highs and lows, respectively. It's so bad that even the most intelligent economic minds in the world can't explain what is happening, and almost everything our government does seems ineffective. We're deep into uncharted waters and we don't have a navigator.

Oh yeah, it's going to get worse.

I've been thinking a lot of what got us into this mess and how we might be able to get out of it. What follows are my extremely basic thoughts on what has caused the problem and what the solution might be. These ideas are simple, but problems and solutions typically are. Truth be told, knowing what went wrong and how to fix it is the easy part -- it's implementing the solution that's hard.

There is no silver bullet and my hope here is not to convince you I have one. Instead, my hope i

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders: OdettaToday

A few days ago, Odetta died, age 77. I photographed her on February 6, 2003 in a makeshift studio in the lobby of Radio City Music Hall.
Portrait (c) Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Alex Remington: I Missed You, Jean-Claude Van DammeToday

Those do-gooders are all a bunch a pitiful losers, every last one of them. Want results? You have to go to the Schwarzeneggers, the Stallones, and to a lesser extent, the Van Dammes.
Bart Simpson, episode 2F17, "Radioactive Man"

When I was growing up, that line infuriated me. I loved Bloodsport more than any Stallone or Schwarzenegger movie -- still do -- and wanted Bart to see Van Damme as their equal. Instead, my hero made so many stinkers that he stopped getting theatrically released in the States about a decade ago.

Then a crazy Algerian director named Mabrouk el Mechri decided to remake Dog Day Afternoon and cast Van Damme as himself. What resulted was probably Van Damme's best-reviewed movie ever, though that's not saying much. He was back in theaters in America, albeit in the arthouse: new territory for the Muscles from Brussels. Finally, his terrible filmography worked in his favor, as critics gave him numerous backhanded compliments for his surprisingly decent acting. "Van Damme proves himself a brave, possibly foolhardy actor, which is more than Steven Seagal ever did," wrote the Chicago Tribune's Michael Philips.

And that seemed to be the general reaction in the arthouse too. When I went to buy my ticket, the cashier told me he'd only seen the first half, "But it's okay." Then he said, "You know, Van Damme's sort of like Steven Seagal -- some of his movies are great, some are terrible." Seagal, I though