A 21st CENTURY MARSHALL PLAN
The Marshall Plan played a catalytic role in both accelerating the recovery of post-World War II Europe and ushering in the centricity of strong alliances within the Free World for almost a century under American leadership within a more altruistic, friendly, rules-based order that raised up whole societies and their communities into a more stable, healthy and optimistic world.
Today, as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, communities and societies worldwide are struggling not only to thrive but also to grapple with new strategic and potentially existential threats that cannot be solved by state-sanctioned violence and self-centered economic policies alone - as 8.1 billion humans are collectively exceeding the carrying capacities of our increasingly fragile planet. In Dr. McDonald’s view, these threats are trending into polycrises within the United States, as well as globally.
If we were to implement a 21st century Marshall Plan, what would it look like and what would determine its successes and failures in our own American society and the world? How would it work in a world that is trending toward more serious armed conflicts, with an oligarchy and associated autocrats commanding and controlling emerging crypto currencies, AI, social media and a space-based political economy, and in a time of rising geopolitical tensions, militaristic adventures and even potential collapse.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Michael McDonald is Chairman and CEO of OVIAR Global Resilience Systems, Inc. and Executive Director of Health Initiatives Foundation, Inc. in Washington, D.C. Dr. McDonald received his doctorate in public health from the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in health policy and management. He also holds a dual specialty masters in public health and an honors BA degree in an interdisciplinary study of medicine from the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. McDonald has served as CEO and as a board director of multiple non-profit and for-profit institutions, as well as managing director of the Koop Foundation with the former Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop. Dr. McDonald led the U.S. National Health Information Infrastructure Consortium and U.S. Medical Technology Policy Committee (IEEE). As founding chairman, he took HealthCentral public, before retiring to develop over 160 Resilience Systems and Resilience Networks around the world often during crisis conditions. Dr. McDonald currently coordinates almost 900 Resilient America Community site dashboards around the U.S. and additional Alliance for Global Resilience and Regeneration (AGRR) sites overseas.
Today, Dr. McDonald is engaging AI, energy and space tech into Resilience Systems on islandable Distributed Collectively Intelligent (DCI) Grids. He is also leading the EarthCup L1 XChallenge in the first of ten missions using solar radiation diffusion to cap climate change from space.