All this and more in every topic discussed throughout this unending pageant. Yet, the polls and pundits, of all persuasions, seem to agree that at minimum race too close to call.
The absolute loser in this campaign and probable winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 will be the English language. Abused and manipulated it still remains staid and unwavering as it passes into irrelevance in this most communicative era in human history.
Last night the President provided the simple and short description of what a venture capital firm brings to the real world economy. Crunching numbers and the people behind those numbers to "bring value" to existing business' both large and small and at the same time and always, bringing large returns to the capital they work for and with. People are not at the top of any checklist in a M&A deal. Success in business is not a necessary or particularly valuable recommendation for being a political leader. Business is business and government is something entirely different. Efficiency is a value within a system not a prerequisite for an effective and empathetic leader for the people.
Oil will never be cheap, never has. It will be "affordable" on a sliding scale of where and who. An in depth study of the process used to set the cost of a barrel of oil would be a useful project for a macroeconomics course. As would the details of how the LIBOR is actually determined.
Recommended prerequisite for anyone wishing to take the above modules, economics 101, Understanding and Functioning in an interest bearing economy.
The devil is in the details of the fossil fuel extraction process and the race to the bottom of the well. In true old economics reasoning Shell's $4.5 billion investment will become a $4.5 billion deduction on their tax return. The interconnection between the smart money financial system and the energy industries was made clear by Romney's repeating the $90 billion dollars "fact" to create a focus for the alleged failure of clean energy initiatives during the Obama administration.
The race to the bottom of the well and the money that will be passed around among the 1% is business as usual while their current means and ways expire and they take the time to establish the rules to control any new alternative energy sectors for their continued long term growth.
The smart money folks have made the financial industry the largest sector of the US economy, they have accomplished this through controlling and setting the ground rules for all necessities in our current culture.
Clean sustainable energy and rational, life sustaining, economic structures go hand in hand. Can't have one without the other.
2012 is an interesting year and the fog keeps lifting and exposing the fact that the emperor has no clothes and a tipping point of global impact is at hand.
The smoke and mirrors are being exposed by the carbon and melting ice. The answer is not opposing the deniers but in believing what is in front of all our eyes. Commitment to efforts to reinvent society is a lifelong task and now is the time for jumping in with both feet.
In regards to Libya we have a country that was ruled by a "mad man" "terrorist leader of unequaled importance", etc. When the people of this country rise up and put their lives, their families and their survival on the line to take action it is not analogous to sitting at home watching your home team play wretchedly or suspect for 3 quarters and to transmit your dissatisfaction or armchair quarterback exhortations via shouts at the tube. There is real blood, real danger and the immediate fog of real war.
It would be expected that anyone not shooting at you would be hailed at that moment as friends of extreme importance.
See World War 2 for further examples.
When the smoke settles and the killing abates, reasoning, logic, thought, returns to the forefront and the next set of strategies and tactics, friend and foe thinking , compromise and accommodation begins.
What we all need to learn is that a hundred years of behavior and real incidents with real consequences are not overcome nor forgotten in one or a week of modern news cycles. If history has taught us anything it is that today's rubric is tomorrows mistake and academic topic.
The identity of those who are moving block to block with you or parallel to you change as you and they progress, sometimes block to block, but most certainly once the smoke clears and the bullets diminish.
An entire region of the world, containing artificial borders and political states, century old tribes, clans, sects and distinct religions, is engulfed in a period of change driven from the ground up. Not imposed by outside states, or directed by the internal powers that are. Those of us not on the ground living with the day to day need to reserve our judgements and try to relive the moment if we have had the experience or imagine the reality of making your way day by day in that reality before looking for the answers. Take a breath and then make the decision to stick your head up and put one's two cents in the game. Shit happens and happens, and happens.
That the crowds this time were not firing in our direction is welcome news. Our ability and commitment to continue to see further down this road is important and required. Romney's immediate response and continued belief that the colonialist attitude towards the world other than his "America" is the right way to move forward is a real threat to any progressive movement, anywhere, in the world.
Continuing the post WW2 strategy and tactics will not provide the backdrop for those who have to overcome and erase centuries or at minimum decades of experience without a legal system that provides for individual rights or a governing organization that allows for direct citizen involvement.This is not an overnight process, or one to be measured by corporate quarterly expectation reports. It will take time, continued breaths of fresh air and nurturing internally and externally. Not any rush to judgments by the US or anyone else that will inspire and demand rash and self serving actions. Catering to and being guided by the requirements of the 24 hour news behemoths is not a sound basis from which to create diplomacy nor a sustainable global society and economy.
If you are not prepared to bring a gun to a knife fight than you, we, aren't prepared to go on, to say first to ourselves, there is something huge that we should consider and if it is that we have to deal it.
I understand the influence of the law as we have endowed it over the centuries, if we hadn't we would still be judging wrong and evil in comparison to ducks.
The question of global warming and our life style being a contributing factor to changing our entire eco system on a digital time line can't be viewed as a concept of law. Even if that is the context you choose to look at it, I can't believe that there aren't a handful of good, underemployed, lawyers sitting behind their well organized home office desk looking for a large 33% score.
There is enough data lying around, available to file a few hundred law suits in the public interest with a private payday as an added incentive.
No I think it much deeper than the law being a controlling force, I think it more that the issue, climate change, has a multiple choice answer, yes or no, and letting people have an option that says work at it or let it be, fits perfectly into our current malaise of why the hell should I do anything about anything. The malaise that says he who has the corner office with view knows better than I and you, and you. The current malaise that makes us concentrate on the small toys that get us as close as we can to the anointed Mad Men stars we have all been raised to aspire to.
A sustainable life style means it cruises along without an over consumed and raising consumption algorithm that is the question that needs to be asked and right now that question sits out there with no one in charge having the guts to ask or answer:
How do you turn the Titanic built upon consumption, the Walmart Effect.
Alex- the science was less than conclusive when electricity was being harnessed, when infections were thought to be here and there, mechanical transportation was coming on line to compete with the horse, so why are you so sure that the science , or most of the science and inquiry of today into are atmosphere is wrong, hyperbole from the mistaken?
What does it cost to pay attention, look at it closer and see what else might do the same job? Global corporations, in most industries, have invested in research and modifications to their existing practices and saved red ink and turned it into cost effective actions. Nothing wrong with that, in fact they want to be thought well of for making the effort. Why is it an either or game? Prudent, professional and the correct way people, created, have grown and maintained the insurance industry. Why does it appear to insult and upset you that looking at man induced atmospheric changes and intrusions in the natural eco systems is something to be ridiculed, argued against and dismissed as mass delusions.
I don't get the tone and tactics of the opposition at this base a level. Want to argue about carbon sequestration as a plus or minus pursuit, okay, that the entire concern is ludicrous, makes me pause and wonder why so certain about the uncertainty of others? We know, shit happens, in every way, in every day, why not look at and work on the possible shit that, to many scientific and non emotional minds say and bother to illustrate has happened, is happening and has the potential and scope t0 end all happenings down the road a piece?
Running for the hills isn't an option any longer. History and the present tell us that turning the Titanic is not a job for one person or a group of captains. Turning our Titanic is a group endeavor that cannot depend upon waiting for the captains of industry and government to get it. The knowledge and tools to start the process are available to the 99% we need to all jump in and put our strength to the wheel. Insist upon the need to take the necessary steps that are available to begin and sustain the work to create a sustainable economy and society today. Think of it as the necessary permanent campaign for the globe.
In addition we have slogged through the residue from the Father Knows Best crowd and retained our humanity; we have at least 50% of the country still believing in working for social equality at home and abroad. We have learned how some of the major tools used by the free market finance industry were used to rip us off. We have 4 years of pent up actions waiting to be loosed upon our economy and not the economy of more of the same,.with more of all being sent upwards and not across the body politic. We have the choice of being led by a man who has been called every name in the book, disrespected and targeted as a failure, with smiles on his accusers faces and lies flung far and wide, yet he remains still engaged and optimistic enough to want to continue along the thankless path.
We are better off, we have a choice between being told to, wink, wink, get the experiment out of the way and let us play with the common piggy bank once again, we need the stimulus.
Or clear the obstacles and lets do what we know how to do and stop the hateful and embarrassing game that has been richly financed and loosed upon us.
Folks, the number and scope of the responses indicate that economics should be placed among politics and religion as topics that shouldn't be discussed over the dinner table or if one hopes to reach a consensus.
I am not sure how to state the obvious in a more easily understood graphic or paragraph.
I can only ask the obvious, one more time and as simply as I can manage, In 2007 after 8 years of concerted and unfettered control of the national economic policy of the US, a major catastrophe struck at the core of the industry. Collective and universal support from central governments was needed to save the industry. Individuals whose buy in had been the kindling for the surge and prosperity of those same 8 years lost the most, became at risk to the accumulated debt taken on to bail out the initiators and players in the grand game, and are now being told that it wasn't us, it was him, that one black guy, and we need you to help us get him and bail us out one more time. Oh and by the way don't put in your time sheets and hold onto your epson salts because we are going to need every nickle and dime we can corral to help you, help us, to fix this mess.
Okay best I can do on a short fuse. How do you explain to someone as deluded as I am how this reasoning in the least makes any sense?
I am not sure where the questions come from. The numbers, graphs and thoughts of the piece are relative to each other. The question isn't take from some and give to others. That is a creation of the Big Lie. The issue is and the question is, Who does not have to contribute in a democracy to solve a national problem?
Corporate profits and higher income levels have risen at and reached levels not seen since the beginning of the 19th century when their was little or no interference from government in the "free" market.
What the "We Built It" crowd forgets and doesn't want to remember is that same period was the time when the smart money crowd called upon the interfering governments to send them foot soldiers to "protect" what was built, from those who had actually built it.
It was also the same time that others pushed harder for government involvement to provide a social network to help its citizens who were being used when healthy and tossed aside when not or told their collective quarter in wage demands were not cost effective or smart business.
Now we are being asked to cheer and chant to return us all to those glorious days of yesteryear.
No, never again, we, our children, and our planet don't have the time to waste digging ourselves out of that hole, all over again.
I don't give anyone who is or was a representative of the people over the last 30 years a pass for the well documented and obvious state of economic inequality that exists today.
However, it is impossible for me to believe that the answer to inequality, at any level, in any area, is to give control to those who believe that their input, passive or pro-active, was missing or somehow stymied, and hence they bear none of the responsibility for creation of the problem.
From Ronald Reagan, through Bill Clinton and throughout the entangled and dangerous years of George 2, the majority of our political leaders, on both sides of the aisle, were convinced and initiated, free market trickle downs, globalization as the foundation of a prudent and rational foreign policy, lower taxes and stabilization on a world wide scale of the macro economic conditions these actions brought about.
To think that the solution, the one and only answer is to continue on the same path adding a jigger of religious zeal and a base of moral steroids. No discussion, no middle road, no other options and all collectively enforced and heavily financed to create an unctuous cloud of public amnesia. To once again, induce the marks into believing that all their good intentions and past efforts, to work hard and do the right thing was squandered away by their sentiment and deviation from past truths, biblically long axioms and falling for the liberal chant of "can't we all just get along."
The audacity and arrogance of the effort is in itself as insulting as the heavily bet on and continuing belief that it will be enough to succeed.
Putting your thoughts into words with simple, logical and common sense order and intent will get you no where today, Mr.Cole.
Tremendous piles of green, freshly pressed and bundled together dollars have loosed themselves on the multitudes and come to own the broadband.
Truth is an anachronism, facts are for the timid and the time of the Big Lie returns with 24 hour access.
Personal guilt and no plaid pants to wear to hide our collective failure with not being smart enough or working hard enough to be among the anointed and gaining access to the right clubs where Father Knows Best.
Thank you for the commitment to see beyond the Mad Men landscape and keeping the moments of insight fresh. Please continue to feed the well of understanding that provide the fuel needed to make it clear and understood to the smart money crowd that we are not all as dumb as they believe and that knowledge is power and that the game is on and people actually matter. Numbers do not always win.
Each of us needs to Occupy our Space.
Whether Romney wins or President Obama wins the next 4 years will be taken up trying to reach the smallest of understanding or compromise with the close minded yet centrally controlled Republican legislators. We have seen since 2008 what they are capable of not producing and the benefits they look to develop for themselves and their creed at the expense of the citizens. Despite any individual or political commitment to the issue there will be no break through to a sustainable economy or sustainable development, nationally in the US. The battle will continue and any compromise or "bi-partisan" legislation will be slow and diluted by the process.
The leverage and movement in the US will come from the many acting for the many.Just as big money is trying to buy political control and only individual commitment and involvement can win the immediate battle, the same holds true for the larger, longer and more involved war on the destruction of our eco systems.
Individuals, business, state and local governments have to move and take advantage of the tools and knowledge that is now available without having to meet the high priced guidance of consulting and software companies who have spent the last years exploiting the possible for their private gain and the improved efficiency and lower energy cost for their customers alone.
The tools, training and job creation opportunities are there; and to borrow a page from the Father Knows Best Republican 'We Built It" clan; we need to measure, GHG Inventory, acting locally in an organized and deliberate process, creating data, sharing technology and proven and possible ideas, building a carrot mob of GHG statistics on a grand scale, then we can manage, earn and save. We need to take hold of the tools for a new economy, before they become the exclusive property of the smart money crowd.
Whatever your position on man induced climate change, global warming or what a sustainable economy looks like, to continue to do nothing is foolish and not in the least smart business.
All this and more in every topic discussed throughout this unending pageant. Yet, the polls and pundits, of all persuasions, seem to agree that at minimum race too close to call.
The absolute loser in this campaign and probable winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 will be the English language. Abused and manipulated it still remains staid and unwavering as it passes into irrelevance in this most communicative era in human history.
Last night the President provided the simple and short description of what a venture capital firm brings to the real world economy. Crunching numbers and the people behind those numbers to "bring value" to existing business' both large and small and at the same time and always, bringing large returns to the capital they work for and with. People are not at the top of any checklist in a M&A deal. Success in business is not a necessary or particularly valuable recommendation for being a political leader. Business is business and government is something entirely different. Efficiency is a value within a system not a prerequisite for an effective and empathetic leader for the people.
Oil will never be cheap, never has. It will be "affordable" on a sliding scale of where and who. An in depth study of the process used to set the cost of a barrel of oil would be a useful project for a macroeconomics course. As would the details of how the LIBOR is actually determined.
Recommended prerequisite for anyone wishing to take the above modules, economics 101, Understanding and Functioning in an interest bearing economy.
The devil is in the details of the fossil fuel extraction process and the race to the bottom of the well. In true old economics reasoning Shell's $4.5 billion investment will become a $4.5 billion deduction on their tax return. The interconnection between the smart money financial system and the energy industries was made clear by Romney's repeating the $90 billion dollars "fact" to create a focus for the alleged failure of clean energy initiatives during the Obama administration.
The race to the bottom of the well and the money that will be passed around among the 1% is business as usual while their current means and ways expire and they take the time to establish the rules to control any new alternative energy sectors for their continued long term growth.
The smart money folks have made the financial industry the largest sector of the US economy, they have accomplished this through controlling and setting the ground rules for all necessities in our current culture.
Clean sustainable energy and rational, life sustaining, economic structures go hand in hand. Can't have one without the other.
2012 is an interesting year and the fog keeps lifting and exposing the fact that the emperor has no clothes and a tipping point of global impact is at hand.
The smoke and mirrors are being exposed by the carbon and melting ice. The answer is not opposing the deniers but in believing what is in front of all our eyes. Commitment to efforts to reinvent society is a lifelong task and now is the time for jumping in with both feet.
In regards to Libya we have a country that was ruled by a "mad man" "terrorist leader of unequaled importance", etc. When the people of this country rise up and put their lives, their families and their survival on the line to take action it is not analogous to sitting at home watching your home team play wretchedly or suspect for 3 quarters and to transmit your dissatisfaction or armchair quarterback exhortations via shouts at the tube. There is real blood, real danger and the immediate fog of real war.
It would be expected that anyone not shooting at you would be hailed at that moment as friends of extreme importance.
See World War 2 for further examples.
When the smoke settles and the killing abates, reasoning, logic, thought, returns to the forefront and the next set of strategies and tactics, friend and foe thinking , compromise and accommodation begins.
What we all need to learn is that a hundred years of behavior and real incidents with real consequences are not overcome nor forgotten in one or a week of modern news cycles. If history has taught us anything it is that today's rubric is tomorrows mistake and academic topic.
The identity of those who are moving block to block with you or parallel to you change as you and they progress, sometimes block to block, but most certainly once the smoke clears and the bullets diminish.
An entire region of the world, containing artificial borders and political states, century old tribes, clans, sects and distinct religions, is engulfed in a period of change driven from the ground up. Not imposed by outside states, or directed by the internal powers that are. Those of us not on the ground living with the day to day need to reserve our judgements and try to relive the moment if we have had the experience or imagine the reality of making your way day by day in that reality before looking for the answers. Take a breath and then make the decision to stick your head up and put one's two cents in the game. Shit happens and happens, and happens.
That the crowds this time were not firing in our direction is welcome news. Our ability and commitment to continue to see further down this road is important and required. Romney's immediate response and continued belief that the colonialist attitude towards the world other than his "America" is the right way to move forward is a real threat to any progressive movement, anywhere, in the world.
Continuing the post WW2 strategy and tactics will not provide the backdrop for those who have to overcome and erase centuries or at minimum decades of experience without a legal system that provides for individual rights or a governing organization that allows for direct citizen involvement.This is not an overnight process, or one to be measured by corporate quarterly expectation reports. It will take time, continued breaths of fresh air and nurturing internally and externally. Not any rush to judgments by the US or anyone else that will inspire and demand rash and self serving actions. Catering to and being guided by the requirements of the 24 hour news behemoths is not a sound basis from which to create diplomacy nor a sustainable global society and economy.
If you are not prepared to bring a gun to a knife fight than you, we, aren't prepared to go on, to say first to ourselves, there is something huge that we should consider and if it is that we have to deal it.
I understand the influence of the law as we have endowed it over the centuries, if we hadn't we would still be judging wrong and evil in comparison to ducks.
The question of global warming and our life style being a contributing factor to changing our entire eco system on a digital time line can't be viewed as a concept of law. Even if that is the context you choose to look at it, I can't believe that there aren't a handful of good, underemployed, lawyers sitting behind their well organized home office desk looking for a large 33% score.
There is enough data lying around, available to file a few hundred law suits in the public interest with a private payday as an added incentive.
No I think it much deeper than the law being a controlling force, I think it more that the issue, climate change, has a multiple choice answer, yes or no, and letting people have an option that says work at it or let it be, fits perfectly into our current malaise of why the hell should I do anything about anything. The malaise that says he who has the corner office with view knows better than I and you, and you. The current malaise that makes us concentrate on the small toys that get us as close as we can to the anointed Mad Men stars we have all been raised to aspire to.
A sustainable life style means it cruises along without an over consumed and raising consumption algorithm that is the question that needs to be asked and right now that question sits out there with no one in charge having the guts to ask or answer:
How do you turn the Titanic built upon consumption, the Walmart Effect.
Alex- the science was less than conclusive when electricity was being harnessed, when infections were thought to be here and there, mechanical transportation was coming on line to compete with the horse, so why are you so sure that the science , or most of the science and inquiry of today into are atmosphere is wrong, hyperbole from the mistaken?
What does it cost to pay attention, look at it closer and see what else might do the same job? Global corporations, in most industries, have invested in research and modifications to their existing practices and saved red ink and turned it into cost effective actions. Nothing wrong with that, in fact they want to be thought well of for making the effort. Why is it an either or game? Prudent, professional and the correct way people, created, have grown and maintained the insurance industry. Why does it appear to insult and upset you that looking at man induced atmospheric changes and intrusions in the natural eco systems is something to be ridiculed, argued against and dismissed as mass delusions.
I don't get the tone and tactics of the opposition at this base a level. Want to argue about carbon sequestration as a plus or minus pursuit, okay, that the entire concern is ludicrous, makes me pause and wonder why so certain about the uncertainty of others? We know, shit happens, in every way, in every day, why not look at and work on the possible shit that, to many scientific and non emotional minds say and bother to illustrate has happened, is happening and has the potential and scope t0 end all happenings down the road a piece?
Running for the hills isn't an option any longer. History and the present tell us that turning the Titanic is not a job for one person or a group of captains. Turning our Titanic is a group endeavor that cannot depend upon waiting for the captains of industry and government to get it. The knowledge and tools to start the process are available to the 99% we need to all jump in and put our strength to the wheel. Insist upon the need to take the necessary steps that are available to begin and sustain the work to create a sustainable economy and society today. Think of it as the necessary permanent campaign for the globe.
In addition we have slogged through the residue from the Father Knows Best crowd and retained our humanity; we have at least 50% of the country still believing in working for social equality at home and abroad. We have learned how some of the major tools used by the free market finance industry were used to rip us off. We have 4 years of pent up actions waiting to be loosed upon our economy and not the economy of more of the same,.with more of all being sent upwards and not across the body politic. We have the choice of being led by a man who has been called every name in the book, disrespected and targeted as a failure, with smiles on his accusers faces and lies flung far and wide, yet he remains still engaged and optimistic enough to want to continue along the thankless path.
We are better off, we have a choice between being told to, wink, wink, get the experiment out of the way and let us play with the common piggy bank once again, we need the stimulus.
Or clear the obstacles and lets do what we know how to do and stop the hateful and embarrassing game that has been richly financed and loosed upon us.
Folks, the number and scope of the responses indicate that economics should be placed among politics and religion as topics that shouldn't be discussed over the dinner table or if one hopes to reach a consensus.
I am not sure how to state the obvious in a more easily understood graphic or paragraph.
I can only ask the obvious, one more time and as simply as I can manage, In 2007 after 8 years of concerted and unfettered control of the national economic policy of the US, a major catastrophe struck at the core of the industry. Collective and universal support from central governments was needed to save the industry. Individuals whose buy in had been the kindling for the surge and prosperity of those same 8 years lost the most, became at risk to the accumulated debt taken on to bail out the initiators and players in the grand game, and are now being told that it wasn't us, it was him, that one black guy, and we need you to help us get him and bail us out one more time. Oh and by the way don't put in your time sheets and hold onto your epson salts because we are going to need every nickle and dime we can corral to help you, help us, to fix this mess.
Okay best I can do on a short fuse. How do you explain to someone as deluded as I am how this reasoning in the least makes any sense?
I am not sure where the questions come from. The numbers, graphs and thoughts of the piece are relative to each other. The question isn't take from some and give to others. That is a creation of the Big Lie. The issue is and the question is, Who does not have to contribute in a democracy to solve a national problem?
Corporate profits and higher income levels have risen at and reached levels not seen since the beginning of the 19th century when their was little or no interference from government in the "free" market.
What the "We Built It" crowd forgets and doesn't want to remember is that same period was the time when the smart money crowd called upon the interfering governments to send them foot soldiers to "protect" what was built, from those who had actually built it.
It was also the same time that others pushed harder for government involvement to provide a social network to help its citizens who were being used when healthy and tossed aside when not or told their collective quarter in wage demands were not cost effective or smart business.
Now we are being asked to cheer and chant to return us all to those glorious days of yesteryear.
No, never again, we, our children, and our planet don't have the time to waste digging ourselves out of that hole, all over again.
I don't give anyone who is or was a representative of the people over the last 30 years a pass for the well documented and obvious state of economic inequality that exists today.
However, it is impossible for me to believe that the answer to inequality, at any level, in any area, is to give control to those who believe that their input, passive or pro-active, was missing or somehow stymied, and hence they bear none of the responsibility for creation of the problem.
From Ronald Reagan, through Bill Clinton and throughout the entangled and dangerous years of George 2, the majority of our political leaders, on both sides of the aisle, were convinced and initiated, free market trickle downs, globalization as the foundation of a prudent and rational foreign policy, lower taxes and stabilization on a world wide scale of the macro economic conditions these actions brought about.
To think that the solution, the one and only answer is to continue on the same path adding a jigger of religious zeal and a base of moral steroids. No discussion, no middle road, no other options and all collectively enforced and heavily financed to create an unctuous cloud of public amnesia. To once again, induce the marks into believing that all their good intentions and past efforts, to work hard and do the right thing was squandered away by their sentiment and deviation from past truths, biblically long axioms and falling for the liberal chant of "can't we all just get along."
The audacity and arrogance of the effort is in itself as insulting as the heavily bet on and continuing belief that it will be enough to succeed.
Putting your thoughts into words with simple, logical and common sense order and intent will get you no where today, Mr.Cole.
Tremendous piles of green, freshly pressed and bundled together dollars have loosed themselves on the multitudes and come to own the broadband.
Truth is an anachronism, facts are for the timid and the time of the Big Lie returns with 24 hour access.
Personal guilt and no plaid pants to wear to hide our collective failure with not being smart enough or working hard enough to be among the anointed and gaining access to the right clubs where Father Knows Best.
Thank you for the commitment to see beyond the Mad Men landscape and keeping the moments of insight fresh. Please continue to feed the well of understanding that provide the fuel needed to make it clear and understood to the smart money crowd that we are not all as dumb as they believe and that knowledge is power and that the game is on and people actually matter. Numbers do not always win.
Each of us needs to Occupy our Space.
Whether Romney wins or President Obama wins the next 4 years will be taken up trying to reach the smallest of understanding or compromise with the close minded yet centrally controlled Republican legislators. We have seen since 2008 what they are capable of not producing and the benefits they look to develop for themselves and their creed at the expense of the citizens. Despite any individual or political commitment to the issue there will be no break through to a sustainable economy or sustainable development, nationally in the US. The battle will continue and any compromise or "bi-partisan" legislation will be slow and diluted by the process.
The leverage and movement in the US will come from the many acting for the many.Just as big money is trying to buy political control and only individual commitment and involvement can win the immediate battle, the same holds true for the larger, longer and more involved war on the destruction of our eco systems.
Individuals, business, state and local governments have to move and take advantage of the tools and knowledge that is now available without having to meet the high priced guidance of consulting and software companies who have spent the last years exploiting the possible for their private gain and the improved efficiency and lower energy cost for their customers alone.
The tools, training and job creation opportunities are there; and to borrow a page from the Father Knows Best Republican 'We Built It" clan; we need to measure, GHG Inventory, acting locally in an organized and deliberate process, creating data, sharing technology and proven and possible ideas, building a carrot mob of GHG statistics on a grand scale, then we can manage, earn and save. We need to take hold of the tools for a new economy, before they become the exclusive property of the smart money crowd.
Whatever your position on man induced climate change, global warming or what a sustainable economy looks like, to continue to do nothing is foolish and not in the least smart business.