DOD Embraces the Green Giant While Keystone XL Looks Increasingly Unattractive
Posted: January 27, 2012 Filed under: Environment, Environmental Protection, Gulf Oil Spill, health hazard, toxic waste, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics | Tags: Department of Defense, going green, Keystone Pipeline, renewable energy, tar sand oil 4 Comments »
Frankly, I was surprised by President Obama’s comments in his SOTU address about the Department of Defense’s solar program, a project that would not only provide energy to military installations but generate enough additional energy to supply ¾ million American households.
Well, lo and behold, this is not idle chatter.
Turns out ground has been broken on a 13.78-megawatt solar power system at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, CA. The project is expected to provide over 30% of the facility’s annual energy requirement and save an estimated $13 million in costs over the next 20 years. This is in keeping with a larger strategic plan to reduce the Defense Department’s reliance on foreign oil, shrink its annual $4 billion energy bill and ensure energy security in the event of a natural disaster or other unforeseen events [sounds ominous].
A year-long study indicated that of DOD’s huge landholdings in the Mojave and Colorado deserts, across which seven military bases in California were considered– Fort Irwin, China Lake, Chocolate Mountain, Edwards, Barstow, Twentynine Palms and El Centro—and two in Nevada [Creech and Nellis], 30,000 acres were deemed suitable acreage for solar production. Future facilities could produce 7 gigawatts of electricity. To put this in perspective that’s roughly equal to 7 nuclear power plants, sufficient to supply full electricity to the 5 California bases 30 times over, enough in excess to supply 780,000 California households.
This push for renewable energy use by the military has also been taken to the battlefield, namely Afghanistan. Last year, the 3rd Battalion 5th Marines began operating with Ground Renewable Energy Networks, Solar Portable Alternative Communications Energy Systems, LED lighting systems, Solar Shades, and Solar Light Trailers. In addition to reduced fuel savings, reports indicate that alternate energy use in remote locations decreases resupply convoy runs and subsequently the danger of IED attacks. Lives saved is a definite plus.
But there’s more. Army installations force-wide have implemented a 2020 goal of net-zero energy consumption, which means reducing energy consumption, and then producing power through renewable sources.
Kristine M. Kingery, director of the Army’s sustainability policy, said pilot installations in the program are “striving toward” goals the Army wants met by 2020. “With Net Zero, the idea is not just replace the energy with renewables,” Kingery said. “It’s the reduction, the repurposing, conservation and efficiency. Reduce usage, and replace what you are using with renewables.”
As the largest institutional energy consumer in the world, the Defense Department is providing a major infusion of funding for research and development and application of renewable energy projects, including advanced biofuels, the world’s largest rooftop solar project involving 127 bases, advanced fuel cells and advanced grid technology, just to name a few.
What I find remarkable about all this activity is how DOD’s push puts the Keystone pipeline controversy in an entirely different light.
As you may recall, the Republican objection to President Obama’s recent rejection of Keystone’s proposal was presumably all about jobs. The numbers have been wildly overstated. The State Department, at best, estimated 5000-6000 temporary construction jobs created, not the 100,000 jobs Speaker Boehner recently cited. Or the 250,000 that TransCanada finally arrived at. But more importantly, claims have been made that the pipeline would help break our dependence on foreign oil. This, too, has been proven patently false since the tar sand crude, once refined, had already been contracted for export to Latin America and Europe. Even the material for the pipeline [primarily steel] was being supplied not by American suppliers but by India.
This a classic battle–the old vs. the new. And who is leading the way? The United States Military, an institution of conservative values, has taken the bull by the horns and said: Time to move on, boys. The Era of Conservation and Renewable Energy is at hand.
There’s also the environmental impact of the pipeline, the danger of a leak, something pipeline supporters have openly mocked. What is rarely mentioned is that tar sand oil requires heat and pressure to move the sludge-like material along its 1700-mile journey from the Alberta sand fields to Texan refineries. Tar sand oil is toxic and very corrosive, making leaks far more likely.
What could happen?
Unfortunately, we’ve had a graphic example of exactly what could and did happen. In Michigan, a tar sands leak, estimated at over 800,000 gallons, polluted 30 miles of the Kalamazoo River, July 2010.
And Quelle Surprise! There was a resultant cover up.
Recall the Gulf of Mexico, BP and the environmental disaster of nightmarish proportions.
Then remember that the United States Military has clearly gotten the message and acted upon it: The Age of Fossil Fuel, the rush for Black Gold is coming to an end. The way forward financially and security-wise is colored Green.
Which would you rather see–this?
Or this?
Personally? I’ll take door number 2 and follow the generals into the future.
Friday Reads
Posted: January 27, 2012 Filed under: morning reads 10 Comments »
Good Morning!
I’m still trying to recover from the flu and the MRSA infection. I’ve spent a lot of time sleeping. The antibiotics are really nasty. I haven’t been able to stomach my coffee for nearly two weeks. I wonder if I should just stick with green tea from now on?
There’s an interesting retort by Mark Thoma to a Matt Yglesias article suggesting that Obama supports Mercantilism. That’s the precursor to Capitalism that was actually the basis of our country’s economy when it was founded. Contrary to Republican lore, capitalism has its roots in mercantilism but really didn’t develop until the 1800s during the industrial age. As usual, Ygelsias’ understanding of economics is cursory and Thoma has no problem correcting his mistakes.
Here are what I think of as the “tenets of Mercantilism.” I’ll let you decide the extent to which they accord with the president’s policies:
Mercantilists believed gold and silver are the most desirable forms of wealth. They also believed that the wealth of a nation depended upon the quantity of gold and silver in its possession. To maximize their holding of gold and silver, countries should maintain a positive balance of trade (with every country in the early years, but in later years they thought that an overall positive balance of payments was the goal, not a positive balance with every country you trade with).
They did not see lowering costs of production, or production in general, as creating wealth. This was a time when guilds produced most goods, and they were very inefficient. Thus, there was no notion of say, using division of labor and innovation to reduce costs and gain a competitive advantage over other producers (producers were not thought to add any value to production — this was a big part of their belief that economics was a zero-sum game — when they looked at their society and history, they didn’t see much in terms of productivity led growth, or much growth at all, the key was to maximize your share of the wealth that existed rather than try to gain wealth through productive innovations). The key to wealth was arbitrage and astute trading, not production. So trade — and merchants who could win the trade battle — were the focus of attention. Nations became strong by winning the zero-sum trade game.
They promoted nationalism. Since everyone cannot have a positive trade balance – they saw trade as a zero-sum game – a country needs to be powerful in order to compete effectively. This led to a desire for a strong military, a strong navy in particular (many advocated war on land and war at sea as ways to increase wealth).
They promoted protectionism in all its guises to maximize exports and minimize imports.
They supported colonization. This was a source of cheap raw materials, and a captive market to sell the finished goods. This essentially creates monopoly power since they did not let other countries trade with their colonies.
There’s a lot more tenets that have no relation to Obama’s policies or modern economics for that matter. Why do all these journalists try to be armchair economists?
President Barack Obama today signaled an aggressive tact [sic] for his early re-election campaign, critiquing his Republican opponents by name and insisting he’s ready to “fight with every fiber of my being” for a second term.
“How much do you want it?” ABC News’ Diane Sawyer asked Obama during an exclusive interview in Las Vegas.
“Badly,” the president said, “because I think the country needs it.”
“Whoever wins the Republican primary is going to be a standard bearer for a vision of the country that I don’t think reflects who we are,” Obama said.
“I’m going to fight as hard as I can with every fiber of my being to make sure that we continue on a path that I think will restore the American dream,” he said.
Obama pushed back against what he called Republicans’ “rhetorical flourishes,” including Newt Gingrich’s oft-repeated contention that Obama is the “food stamp president.”
“First of all, I don’t put people on food stamps,” Obama said. “People become eligible for food stamps. Second of all, the initial expansion of food-stamp eligibility happened under my Republican predecessor, not under me. No. 3, when you have a disastrous economic crash that results in 8 million people losing their jobs, more people are going to need more support from government.”
“The larger point is this: that there’s going to be a debate over the next eight, nine, 10 months about how to move the country forward,” he said. “They’ve got an argument. They will make it forcefully. I think it’s an argument that is wrong.”
We’ll have to have Dr. Boomer look at the methodology on this one: Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice.
There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.
The findings combine three hot-button topics.
“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”
Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]
“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”
The Republican debate last night opened with a free for all on immigration.
“The idea that I am anti-immigrant is repulsive,” former Massachusetts governor Romney told Gingrich following the former House Speaker’s live accusation. “You should apologize.”
Gingrich and Romney are running ads against one another in the state, where they are currently neck-and-neck in current state polling.
Gingrich and Romney have both committed to heavily campaigning in Florida where 50 delegates are up for grabs for a single candidate in the Jan. 31 primary. (Florida chose to flout Republican National Committee rules and allocate all of their delegates in a winner-take-all system.)
Texas Rep. Ron Paul has chosen not to actively campaign in the state and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has been non-committal regarding whether he will even hold an Election Night party there.
In a rare moment of solidarity in the debate, Santorum and Gingrich voiced support for Romney’s “self-deportation” theory, which suggests illegal immigrants will leave the United States if they can’t find suitable employment.
“I actually agree with Governor Romney,” Santorum said. “We have to have a country that not only do you repect the law when you come here, you respect the law when you stay here.”
Barney Frank has announced his marriage plans with his longtime partner Jim.
Frank and Ready plan to wed in Massachusetts. Frank’s home state is one of six states, in addition to the District of Columbia, that permits gay marriage.
Frank announced in November that he would be retiring from Congress after 16 terms to pursue other opportunities. In 1987, Frank disclosed that he was gay, becoming the first openly gay member of Congress.
Ready and Frank have known each other since they met in 2005 at a fundraiser in Maine, and began a relationship in January of 2007 after Ready’s partner died. Ready works as a photographer and has a small buisness doing custom awnings, carpentry, painting, and welding according to Frank’s office.
Ready, like many political spouses, has occasionally found himself in the headlines. He was arrested in 2007 for growing marijuana outside his Maine home; Frank was present at the time he was arrested. Ready later pleaded guilty to a fine for civil possession, and related charges were dropped.
“I told him that our relationship could not develop if he could not promise me that he would not repeat this. He apologized, with great sincerity I believe, and he made that promise and has lived up to it,” Frank said in a statement in 2010.
Frank’s vows come at a crucial time for the gay-rights movement. In Maryland, New Jersey and Washington, bills that would legalize same-sex marriage are poised to pass this legislative session.
So, that’s some of the headlines that I’m following. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
The Bloodsport is Back…GOP Debate Gladiator Style Live Blog
Posted: January 26, 2012 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, 2012 primaries, immigration, Live Blog, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Republican presidential politics, the GOP, U.S. Politics | Tags: CNN Debate, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul 154 Comments »Good Evening…
Well I should actually say, “Let the games begin!”
As you are well aware, tonight is yet another damn GOP Debate. However, unlike the civilized one we had a couple of days ago, hosted by NBC at USF, it is back to the loud Colosseum like crowd. Yup, CNN caved in to Newt’s demands and tonight proves to be one hell of a show. You won’t know if you are listening to an Ultimate Fight Championship…or a scene from Spartacus. So with that in mind, I give you the GOP Candidates…
Now, I just want to say that I was gone all day today, taking my daughter to the doctor in the county to the west of us, then heading down south over the big mountain to Gainesville. So these images are not as “high quality” as I would have liked them to be.
See what I mean. (I think the Santorum and Romney came out okay…)
I kind of envision Romney as an elite Roman businessman. It would have to be a despicable sort of business, perhaps one of those gladiator slave owner/trader. He would have to be rich off of the suffering of others, yet not get his hands dirty in the process. Of course, he would have no personality and the other slave owners/traders would make fun of his lack of social skills and a propensity for making lame ass jokes. When the big money men who run the Colosseum have big fundraiser parties, you know for the next years gladiator season, they reluctantly invite Romney…he’s a bore, but he is a rich bore.
As for Newt, he has to be one of the slimy dudes in the Senate. He is and will always be a politician. (I stuck him on Charles Laughton…to get the correct girth.) I would expect him to be scheming and plotting his takeover of the Empire. He would be one vindictive son-of-a-bitch who has the goods on everybody, and uses that Intel to his advantage. Of course he has had many wives…but no need to wait for cancer or another debilitating illness for him…poison is the name of the game. And why not, everybody does it.
Santorum would have to be the Caligula kind of Roman, he is just as crazy. For example, Santorum brings home a 20 week old fetus to play with…Caligula appointed his beloved horse, Incitatus, to the Roman Senate…need I say more?
Ron Paul, now I could see him being the only one of the four who would and could actually fight. Like a rebel that he is, he would always be on the wrong side of things…and have a very bad view of the empire. Aside from being worn out and hateful, he has a crazed bunch of followers who somehow believe he is an all-powerful wizard, and that they should start their own colony with their own set rules. Paul has looked around the Mediterranean for a nice island to call his own…Citizenship based on his approval, no Nubians need apply.
Okay, the debate should be starting in a few minutes. Sadly I have no links for you tonight, except for the live feed, which you can find here:
President – Election Center 2012 – Elections & Politics from CNN.com
Live feed:
Video – Breaking News Videos from CNN.com
Are Mitt Romney’s Lies Supported by Mormon Church Leaders?
Posted: January 26, 2012 Filed under: Women's Rights, U.S. Politics, Barack Obama, Reproductive Rights, 2012 presidential campaign, Republican presidential politics, fetus fetishists, abortion rights, religion, Mitt Romney | Tags: abortion, Mitt Romney, lies, Mormonism, Ted Kennedy, Bain Capital, Judith Dushku, Eliza Dushku, Mormon church, Belmont MA Mormon temple, Masschusetts Senate race 1994, tithing, Suzan Mazur, Scoop NZ 27 Comments »
Mormon temple in Belmont, MA, completed in 2000
I realize that’s a provocative title, but please stay with me. I’ll get to the point after some background.
I’ve been reading the new biography of Mitt Romney, The Real Romney by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman. I bought the book after reading a lengthy excerpt published by Vanity Fair, which focused heavily on Romney’s treatment of women when he was a powerful leader in the Boston Mormon church. I wrote about this in a Morning news post at the time.
I was disappointed to discover that the book itself is somewhat of a fluff piece–Boston Globe reporters Kranish and Helman put as positive a spin as possible on Romney’s history and his activities as a church and business leader. However, by reading between the lines and googling names, places, and incidents from the book, I’m still getting some useful information about “the real Romney.”
One prominent Mormon woman quoted in the book is Judith Dushku, associate professor of government at Suffolk University in Boston, and incidentally the mother of actress Eliza Dushku, who played Faith in the TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and has appeared in a number of popular Hollywood movies.
Judith Dushku with daughter Eliza
Judith Dushku is a self-described feminist and a long-time contributor to the Mormon feminist magazine Exponent II. It was in this magazine that an anonymous author published the story of the Bishop Romney’s cruel treatment of her over a life-saving abortion. From the Vanity Fair article:
In the fall of 1990, Exponent II published in its journal an unsigned essay by a married woman who, having already borne five children, had found herself some years earlier [the late 1970s] facing an unplanned sixth pregnancy. She couldn’t bear the thought of another child and was contemplating abortion. But the Mormon Church makes few exceptions to permit women to end a pregnancy. Church leaders have said that abortion can be justified in cases of rape or incest, when the health of the mother is seriously threatened, or when the fetus will surely not survive beyond birth. And even those circumstances “do not automatically justify an abortion,” according to church policy.
Then the woman’s doctors discovered she had a serious blood clot in her pelvis. She thought initially that would be her way out—of course she would have to get an abortion. But the doctors, she said, ultimately told her that, with some risk to her life, she might be able to deliver a full-term baby, whose chance of survival they put at 50 percent. One day in the hospital, her bishop—later identified as Romney, though she did not name him in the piece—paid her a visit. He told her about his nephew who had Down syndrome and what a blessing it had turned out to be for their family. “As your bishop,” she said he told her, “my concern is with the child.” The woman wrote, “Here I—a baptized, endowed, dedicated worker, and tithe-payer in the church—lay helpless, hurt, and frightened, trying to maintain my psychological equilibrium, and his concern was for the eight-week possibility in my uterus—not for me!”
Romney would later contend that he couldn’t recall the incident, saying, “I don’t have any memory of what she is referring to, although I certainly can’t say it could not have been me.” Romney acknowledged having counseled Mormon women not to have abortions except in exceptional cases, in accordance with church rules. The woman told Romney, she wrote, that her stake president, a doctor, had already told her, “Of course, you should have this abortion and then recover from the blood clot and take care of the healthy children you already have.” Romney, she said, fired back, “I don’t believe you. He wouldn’t say that. I’m going to call him.” And then he left. The woman said that she went on to have the abortion and never regretted it. “What I do feel bad about,” she wrote, “is that at a time when I would have appreciated nurturing and support from spiritual leaders and friends, I got judgment, criticism, prejudicial advice, and rejection.”
Judith Dushku had a number of run-ins with Mitt Romney during his years as Stake President and Bishop in the Boston Mormon community. In fact, Dushku confronted Romney over the incident described above, after which he “broke off their friendship.”
Greedy Bastards
Posted: January 26, 2012 Filed under: Banksters, commercial banking, Corporate Crime, corruption, financial institutions, Global Financial Crisis, investment banking, lobbyists, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Dylan Ratigan, extractionism vs capitalism, Greedy Bastards 15 Comments »No, I am not making an editorial comment.
But after nonstop blathering served up by the GOP, only to be followed by President Obama’s Teddy Roosevelt impersonation [although I have to admit—the State of the Union was a surprisingly good speech], I thought a moment of palate cleansing might be in order. In this case Dylan Ratigan offers up the sorbet.
Ratigan is someone willing to call out the shysters, the casino players and shakedown artists, including their political handmaidens for what they truly are, and ‘Greedy Bastards’ is the title of his newly released book. The author’s name may ring a bell because Dylan Ratigan has a public platform on MSNBC, an hour-long show Monday through Friday. The program airs at 4:00 pm, EST, in my neck of the woods.
Ratigan’s slant focuses on the collision of worlds, that of finance and politics, how the incestuous relationship is literally squeezing the life out of the United States. His take is not an indictment of capitalism. Rather it is an indictment of what is posing as capitalism, a system he refers to as ‘extractionism.’
Ratigan is not a newcomer or a pundit simply reading a script. He worked the financial beat with Bloomberg News, serving as Global Managing Editor to Corporate Finance until 2003. He’s also the former anchor and co-creator of CNBC’s Fast Money. He has launched and anchored a number of financially-related broadcasts over the years but decided to leave Fast Money after the 2008 financial meltdown. Ratigan has publicly stated that he was personally disgusted by the Wall Street banking sector’s shakedown of the American public. The Dylan Ratigan Show was launched to provide discussion and analysis of the financial/government intersection, a system that has acquiesced to the wanton theft of the Nation’s wealth and resources by . . . Greedy Bastards, of course.
Though the show has been on air for three years, Ratigan has admitted that his voice was finally heard after an infamous meltdown last August. It was an on-air rant that would have made Patty Chayefesky proud, a Howard Beale moment.
That woke people up! It also led to Ratigan’s Get the Money Out [of politics] Movement, working towards a Constitutional Amendment to remove the corrosive element of money in the political sphere. And then, there’s the book.
One thing I liked about Ratigan’s approach is that instead of pointing out one segment of the population for public pillorying, his title basically refers to a state of mind and the all too frequent way of doing business and politics in the 21st century.
For instance, in the case of capitalism, Ratigan uses the example of venture capital, a subject that has come up in reference to Romney’s connection to Bain & Company, specifically Bain Capital. From Chapter 1:
If I start a venture capital firm that lends out money to drug researchers trying to find new cures for disease, and I get rich doing it, then I made my money by investing in the productive future of the country. I used my money in a way that facilitated scientific innovation and a cure. I’m what the director of the Havas Media Lab Umair Haque a ‘capitalist who makes.’ But instead, if I take the same money and use it to lobby for changes in government regulation—changes that help me trick a union into investing its retirement savings in flawed investments so that I can collect the commissions—then I may move as many dollars into my bank account as someone who funded cures for diseases, but I haven’t made anything. I’m a ‘capitalist who takes,’ exploiting my power to influence the government for my own private gain, no matter the harm to anyone else. I’m a greedy bastard.
The latter example, taking money from others without providing anything of value is, according to Ratigan, the opposite of capitalism. An extractionist system loses increasing value over time until there’s nothing left. Call it the vampire or vulture model. A system based on the extractionist principle, provides no incentive for people to make good deals, where both sides benefit. Instead, it rewards those who take and give nothing in return.
Sound familiar?
Ratigan covers the areas that have pushed the extractionist model to the max: banking, education, healthcare, energy, trade negotiations and the unholy alliance of government and big money fueling the feeding frenzy of the Nation’s resources and our future. But unlike many gloom and doom tomes, Ratigan offers solutions and brings an optimism to the subject, namely that we have the ideas, the people and yes, even the money to solve what at times seems insolvable. He concludes in a rather convincing way that what is needed is a realignment between investment and the needs of capable, innovative people. If loans and investments offered the highest returns when they provided the highest value as opposed to simply taking the highest risk, then prevailing attitudes and business practices would shift and win/win deals would be created.
Sound like pie in the sky? I don’t think so. Yes, it’s a matter of will, public pressure to exact the necessary changes but this realignment idea is possible by citing the goals first, and then targeting the resources to get there. Ratigan refers to this as hotspotting—zeroing in on the problem, determining what methodology provides the best results, and then aiming resources to match those needs.
Though some critics have dismissed this idea, it is very attuned to what Bill Clinton recently suggested in his Esquire interview about highlighting the successes and needs across the country, and then linking them, matching them up. Just another turn on the realignment idea:
. . . the two best things you could do are the infrastructure bank and a simple SBA-like loan guarantee for all building retrofits, where the contractor or the energy-service company guarantees the savings. So that allows the bank to loan money to let a school or a college or a hospital or a museum or a commercial building unencumbered by debt to loan it on terms that are longer, so you can pay it back only from your utility savings. You could create a million jobs doing that because of the home models that are out there now.
There are these two guys on Long Island who started a little home-repair deal. They got thirty-five employees now, and they’re — they can go in, tell you how much they’ll save you. There’s an operation in Nebraska that’s in and out in a day, and they’re averaging more than 20 percent savings, and conservative Republican Nebraska is the only state in the country that has 100 percent publicly owned power.
And,
You’ve got Orlando with those one hundred computer-simulation companies. They got into computer simulation because you have the Disney and Universal theme parks, and Electronic Arts’ video-games division. And the Pentagon and NASA desperately need simulation, for different reasons. So there you’ve got the University of Central Florida, the biggest unknown university in America, fifty-six thousand students, changing curriculum, at least once a year, if not more often, to make sure they’re meeting whatever their needs are, and they’re recruiting more and more professors to do this kind of research that will lead to technology transfers to the companies. You’ve got Pittsburgh actually becoming a real hotbed of nanotechnology research. You’ve got San Diego, where there are more Nobel-prize-winning scientists living than any other city in America. You’ve got the University of California San Diego and other schools there training people to do genomic work. Qualcomm is headquartered there, and there are now seven hundred other telecom companies there, and you’ve got a big private foundation investing in this as well as the government, and nobody knows who’s a Republican or who’s a Democrat, they’re just building this networking.
We have fabulously innovative, creative people working on all kinds of things. Our true wealth is in our people; our true value is . . . us.
Ratigan is now on a 30-million jobs tour showcasing business enterprises that are, in fact, answering a need, offering value to their communities, providing jobs and in the best capitalist tradition—making a profit.
The endnote is that the country hasn’t lost its edge. We’ve lost the path that works, the one that values quality and integrity. Greedy Bastards will always exist, those hoping to make a quick buck [or trillions of bucks] off the backs of others. They have no shame. The goal is to make them and their thievery the exception, not the rule.
Btw, Ratigan’s book is highly readable, written for the layperson. No economic degrees required. If you’ve been following the financial blowout and/or Ratigan’s show, this will be a fast review. If you’re just starting to pay attention, consider the book a primer—what the country underwent and where we need to go. The sooner, the better. Ratigan encourages us to reclaim our voice, demanding that our people and country come first.
It’s a worthy message. Read the book. Get the word out.
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