UO E-clips, Jan. 17-20

Inauguration events on tap at UO (Register-Guard): The University of Oregon will host several free events Tuesday to celebrate the presidential inauguration. Live broadcast of the inauguration will be shown on two big-screen televisions beginning at 8:30 a.m. at the Erb Memorial Union Fish Bowl. Additional televisions will be located in the Buzz Coffeehouse and The Break and the Mills International Center. The event will be replayed at 11:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. The Mills International Center will show repeat coverage throughout the day.

Barack Obama stands at threshold of catastrophic climate change (Straight.com, guest commentary by Mary Wood, UO Philip H. Knight Professor of Law and Tim Ream): On election night, Barack Obama told the United States it faces “a planet in peril”. Without immediate, dramatic greenhouse gas pollution reductions, scientists fear the planet will cross the threshold of catastrophic runaway heating. Last year, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told world leaders: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

LCC term’s enrollment balloons (Register-Guard): Evidence is mounting that more people are turning to college to ride out the recession, a trend that has boosted the competition for financial aid even though more money is available. At Lane Community College, more students enrolled for winter term classes than signed up for fall term. … Elizabeth Bickford, financial aid director at the University of Oregon, said anyone who is even thinking about attending college this fall should apply for financial aid now. She said it would be a mistake to wait to see how the state and federal budgets play out or how the economy fares.

Younger audience has Tour atwitter (Golfweek.com): The PGA Tour, like your teenage son or daughter, likes Justin Timberlake and uses Facebook and Twitter. These pairings may seem odd for the Tour, but they represent the circuit’s increasing willingness to try the unconventional in the search for more fans. … “There is certainly a recognition that the sweet spot for (golf) is always going to skew a little older,” says Paul Swangard, director of the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center.

Capitalism's burning house: Interview with John Bellamy Foster (WIN Magazine): WIN: According to a quotation by Jim Reid that you and Fred Magdoff included in your article entitled "Financial Implosion and Stagnation" (Monthly Review, December 2008), the U.S. financial sector has made around 1.2 Trillion ($1,200) of "excess" profits in the last decade relative to nominal GDP. How has the structure of the capital economy contributed to the ease with which such excess profits were obtained by the banks and lending institutions? JBF: Jim Reid in London is the Deutsche Bank's chief credit strategist. He made the observation you refer to in July 2008 when the financial implosion was already a year old, but a couple of months before the serious bank crisis that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, leading to a deepening of the financial crisis. In the piece by Reid that Fred Magdoff and I referred to in our article, he provided a chart showing that financial profits and profits in general had been skyrocketing on top of a sluggish U.S. economy. … (more Q&A format followed)