Suan Eisenhower on current affairs & the upgrading the energy grid

[housewolf]

Speaking to a group at the Miller Center in Virgina recently about the need to upgrade our interstate energy grid

On the state of our current affairs:
"We've been through a tomultous year, 2008 and then 2009. We've came this close to a full ecomonic meltdown. We've got climate change concerns. We've seen high oil prices that have become a way of life. We have a messy international situation. We're now focused on an 11 trillion dollar debt, 44% of which is owned by foreign countries. The United States has become the world's largest debtor nation. Who would have imagined that China would end up with a 2 trillion dollar reserve fund in dollar denominated currency. And there's even talk on the world scene of the dollar being supplanted by a basket(?) of currencies.

I think that some of the anger we feel today, and I'd like to emphasize that anger is not a public policy perscription, that some of the anger we feel today is really a tremendous sense of uncertainty we feel about our future. Unlike the period in the 1960's when I was in school, today we are no longer, clearly pre-eminent in the world, in the way that we were during the cold war. We've got real challenges, economic challenges speciffically.

And so Americans feel, in a sense, that we've lost our way.

To me, I think that the future is as bright as it ever has been, or that it could be.

But the thing that concerns me most, perhaps, is the thing that Americans are no longer strategists. And there are all sorts of reasons for that. Some of it is that we operate in a 24-hour news cycle. We have file quarterly earnings reports in business. We have a political cycle that operates around the 2-year schedule but at most 4 years. And some of the biggest challenges we're facing are very long term projects. This is what puts us in a very awkward position when it comes to talking about modernizing America because so many of the things that we need to do to re-calibrate our position, to sustain our global leadership, are long-term projects that take a long-term approach. And so if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. "

[midnight]

1. Our infrastructure has been neglected -we're stagnating.

[Tesha]

2. any road...

"And so if you don't know where you're going, any road will take (get) you there"

Alice in Wonderland - by Lewis Carroll


Yup, that the US these days...