Tea Party Idiots

I’m beginning to wonder if the people going these “tea parties” know what the Boston Tea Party was all about? Either they have no clue or  don’t have the creative prowess to come up with an original name for their event.

I believe civics class taught me that taxation without representation was the driving force behind the real tea party. The people living in the colonies were being taxed by a government in which they had no voice. This simply is not the case today. We elected this government so you can blather and whine all you want, but until you elect a different congress or a different President or can convince them that you are correct and the other 70+% of the country is wrong, this tax party is a folly.

If you want to cut spending, and this is something that I wholeheartedly agree with, you have to be specific.

1. What are you going to cut and by how much?

2. What are you willing to give up for cutting it and what are the long term consequences of the cut?

In my business and in my family life, I’ve had to make some tough choices and make some cuts. My family does not go out to eat as often as we once did. We entertain ourselves at home a lot more. We have not gone on a vacation in over 2 years. I took a cut in my salary in order to keep a part time employee. We have not cut in other areas and actually increased spending in areas where we may see long term benefits. We bought a tankless hot water heater, while though more expensive than an old style hot water heater, got us a good tax break AND has lowered our gas bill by almost 20%. These are choices we made. We also look at places where money is not being spent effectively. By getting a VOIP phone, I can save over 45% on my monthly business phone bill, yet when I tried it, I found the quality to be lacking, the reliability very questionable and sometimes down right bad. I never had this with a land line, so I’m spending more to make more.

If I’m talking to a client and the line goes dead, there’s a good chance I could lose that client. It’s not worth cutting spending to save $50 bucks a month.

That’s a simple example of what we should expect our government to do. Take a look at every expense, see if it is delivering on it’s marketing hype and if not, find a new provider or system or process to make it effective and if that can’t be done, cancel it completely.

This is what the Tea Party idiots should be out protesting, but like sheep, they simply say “cut cut cut our taxes…big goverment is bad” “Socialism Bad”, “Government does not create jobs”.

Well, that simply is false. The truth is that government spending HAS created jobs when partnered with private industry. The internet is a prime example. The internet started as a government project and has grown into an industry creating millions of jobs in this country alone. Who do you think built our interstate highway system? Do you have any idea of how much the interstate has helped private industry grow and improved the quality of life in the last 70 years?

Government spending alone will never save an economy. Everyone knows that and I’ve never heard anybody deny it. Yes, it must be done thoughtfully and reasonably and I’m not sure if those qualifications are being met by this administration and congress. I do have some doubts and questions about the way the money is being used. Those questions began months before this administration came into office and I still have problems in the way they are spending. Yes, there is too much pork…and republicans own about 40% of that  chunk of the pie. That has to be addressed. Private industry corruption and oversight also has to be taken into account when spending this money. Audits are indispensable, because like it or not…people like to milk the government for everything they can and many times the same people and companies we find complaining about high taxes are the ones using tax dollars for their own profits.

Halliburton and KBR…Dick Cheney’s old company have made out like bandits on overspending of tax dollars. If he was so concerned about how the government spends our hard earned money…why did this company keep getting no-big contracts and how did they get  away with charging $30 for a can of coke to our military? Where were these tea party idiots THEN?

So instead of dressing up in silly outfits and saying “cut cut cut my taxes”, go to your congress person’s office with a specific list of things government does that you are willing to personally sacrifice. Go tell them to let GM and Chrysler go into bankruptcy. Tell them that you will personally buy up some of those toxic assets because you have faith that the “free” market to do the right thing.

Tell them that you will be happy to pay a toll to drive on the ATT sponsored freeway when it is privatized. Tell them that you don’t mind the banks, telcoms, insurance companies, etc. offering you loans, credit cards, policies and then changing the terms on a whim, just because they can. Tell them that you really believe that the for profit insurance company has your child’s health best interest in mind and that their decision about whether to treat your child is NOT driven by the corporate mission statement to show a profit to shareholders.

Now…I think I’m going to go have a cup of tea.

Capital One’s Arrogance Towards It’s Customers

I’ve been getting letters from credit card companies lately saying that my borrowing rate is going up. WAY UP. I’ve never been late on a  credit card payment, I have never borrowed more than 30% of my credit limit and at least 11 out of 12 months in the year I pay off my credit cards in full. Yet because the management of these companies made bad business decisions, are accepting our tax dollars to bail them out of their own bad decisions, they have made the brilliant public relations move of adding to the lack of trust we have in these institutions.

I called Capital One to ask them about this. Why, as a responisble and loyal customer, with a credit rating of over 730, would I be punished for their own mistakes. They responded very politely saying that it was purely a business decision in troubling economic times and not a personal reflection on my credit worthiness.

That is a load of crap. They are telling good customers to go screw themselves…pure and simple. It simply is not spinnable any other way. They don’t really give a damn about the customer because they have them over a barrel of boiling oil. Of course they happily told me that I could cancel my credit card at any time, but everyone knows that canceling a credit card, even if you have good credit, can put a bad mark on your credit rating. That is the “choice” that some wall street lovers and politicians tout. Bend over and take it or leave and risk a bad credit rating. They know this and they use it against us. Even if we are perfectly responsible with our finances.

It’s time that these loan sharks be taken to task. Write to your congresspeople and to the corporate management of these companies (good luck trying to find an address for any of them)…but make the effort. Tell them what you think and don’t hold back. It’s time we fight back. They take our tax dollars, ask for huge tax breaks for themselves, give themselves insane bonuses (which they now have re-branded as “retention awards”) and then treat their customers like idiots. If they won’t regulate themselves, it’s time for Government to step in an regulate the hell out of them.

There is nothing wrong with making a profit, but if you are doing it unethically and ruthlessly on the backs of good customers, it’s time for a change.

Business Ethics

We have a problem with ethics in business, and it’s spread over the global economy. Putting the blame on Wall Street is easy, but it’s only a part of the problem. We as consumers have to share the blame. We’ve gotten so comfortable with our “stuff” and have been so blinded by advertising, keeping up with the Jones and thinking that we all are entitled to McMansions and a new car every 3 years that we forgot our basic principals.

Today I read about the head of an outsourcing company named Satyam in India. Satyam happens to be the Sanskrit word for “truth”. Well, the truth is that the executives at Sanskrit have been cooking the books for years. It’s India’s Enron. The CEO of the company was educated in business here in the States. What are they teaching business majors in school? It seems that ethics is sort of a laughable sideshow. This has to change.

The fact is that if we want real sustainable growth, it has to be slow and steady. Time has proven that over and over again. We cannot keep lowering prices simply to be able to own more “stuff” and keep growth alive. Outsourcing is something that should not be used simply to get cheap labor. Cheap labor almost always involves corruption, abuse and cost cutting and it always comes back to bite us…hard.

Every country needs a manufacturing base. Without that, you have nothing real in your economy. You produce nothing but ideas. The last 3 decades we have moved our manufacturing overseas to save labor costs and our standard of living is actually moving down, not up. If the big 3 auto makers go under, what happens if a major war starts? We have no manufacturing infrastructure to make planes, ships, vehicles, etc. We simply cannot survive on manufacturing financial “products”. To think so is simple insanity.

It’s time to think about what is really important to us and the world. We need to feed, cloth and house the world…including ourselves. We need to educate our workers in order to compete. We need more scientists, mathematicians, doctors, researchers and designers and less marketers and sales people. We need skilled machinists and entrepreneurs. We need to value quality over quantity and think 50 years into the future and not only the next couple of quarters. That will take a sea change in the way business is taught and implemented around the world.

We need to have oversight and regulation and above all accountability. People like Bernie Maddof need to be sent to prison, and not just some country club prison, but in with the general population of murderers and rapists. White collar crime needs to be put on the same level as armed robbery. It affects millions more people worldwide on a much larger scale than shoplifting or stealing a car, yet white collar criminals get the white glove treatment and many times exit prison within a few years to make a great living as authors and public speakers telling the world how bad they feel about what they did.

It’s not right and it has to change. It’s up to us to write our representatives and force them to do the right thing. We may not be able to give them the money and lobbyist extortion, but if we are serious about getting this country and the world back on track, we have to use our own form of extortion and that is our vote. Keep on your local, state and federal representatives. Pay attention. It’s our responsibility.

Obama’s Rick Warren Pick

Barack Obama’s pick of evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at his swearing in is creating some controversy with idealogues in the gay and hard liberal sectors. Though I  strongly disagree with many of pastor Warren’s philosophies on gay and women’s rights , he is one of the few mega-church evangelicals to break with the pack to support aids awareness, environmental issues and prioritize helping the poor over some of the other more divisive social issues.

Like it or not, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who follow his beliefs and if we as progressives continue the Neocon tactic of ignoring those who disagree with us, we will never even get the chance to grow. We will continue the divisive agenda of the Republican elites and become the people we don’t want to be.

Unless we are willing to sit down with people we may have differences with and find common ground, we will get nowhere. Being open to at least listening to our opponents is the only way we can learn, grow and change. If we are afraid to listen we are no better than the neo-cons who have been running things the last 8 years.

Maybe by selecting Rick Warren for this important occasion, some of the closed minded thinking of the past can be opened to hearing another viewpoint.

The one thing that really impressed me about Barack Obama is his openness to new ideas and cooperation. We have not had that in politics in many years and it’s time that we find our common ground and address those problems first. The divisive issues still need much work and much debate, but unless we open ourselves to the debate in the first place and develop the trust it takes to actually hear the other point of view, we will be stuck in the ruts of the Bush/Cheney administration for decades to come.

Personally I wish he had representatives of the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist and other sectors of the religious and secular movements speaking in January, but at least this is a start to healing the divisions in this country.

The Culture of Bernard Madoff

Every day we are reading about another “bad apple” in the investment business. Bernard Madoff has moved the bar of ethics and greed even lower. How can it be that one man can defraud investors, many of them supposedly very knowledgeable and skilled, of over 50 billion dollars in a ponzi scheme. Even I thought that the large ponzi schemes were perpetrated on primarily uneducated or extremely naive people, but apparently greed and ignorance runs the gamut of culture. 

How could he pull this off? I know that the current administration hates government, so they put incompetent people in places of power to prove their point, but this is absurd. Our tax dollars still pay regulators, whether we agree with regulation or not, those regulators have failed miserably. I don’t care what political party you belong to or how you feel about regulation or big government, but those who ARE paid by tax dollars should be held accountable for their failures. That includes democrats, republicans and independents. If you are corrupt, you should be held accountable. Period. End of story. 

This Bernie Madoff was the head of NASDAQ! He was and is a crook. In my opinion, anyone pulling off this sort of fraud in a time of war should be tried not only fraud, but of  treason. This sort of thing destroys the fabric of our country, our standing in the world and our personal honor as a people. 

I’m all for giving people opportunity to succeed, but there must be some sense of decency in how that is accomplished. It’s time we as a people take a real stand against greed and corruption and get back on the path of truth, honor and the American way. At this point, we are way off course and we as citizens have largely looked the other way. We’ve become lazy and sedated by our own comfort.

Make a point of taking 10 minutes out of your day to write to your congressman, your mayor, your Governor, the CEO of companies you purchase products for and tell them what you want. Let them know you are paying attention. You have come out of your coma. It’s not that difficult to do and it’s the only way we can get things right.

The Era of Corruption

It seems that corruption and cheating have become a way of life in America. Corruption has and will always exist, but lately every facet of our lives seem to be affected by greed and hubris. Over the last 20 or 30 years, we seem to accept it as the way of the world. Hopefully the great experiment of getting something for nothing is coming to an end, but it’s going to be painful for a while. This lifestyle of greed and corruption seems to have no boundaries. Every political party, large corporation, religious organization, union, school boards, city and national government, financial institution seem to be filled with people who put themselves above any sense of honor, ethics, humanity or even common sense.

Are we ready to say “ENOUGH!!!! We’ve had it and we will hold people accountable for their actions”? I’m not sure if we are. The aisles at Wall Mart are full, even though Walmart is largely responsible for insisting on insanely low prices from their vendors so that they can be the “low price leader”. This means that manufacturing MUST move overseas, killing what once were middle class jobs in this country. Yet our addiction to stuff and keeping up with the Joneses has us crawling back to Walmart like junkies needing a fix. Even though China is the world leader in abortion and corporate corruption is rampant with executives in China doing anything to cut costs in order to fill those Walmart orders at the price Walmart, and it’s customers, have come to expect. What happened to Sam Walton’s original vision of BUY AMERICAN? He died, so now it’s the stockholders who call the shots.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame Walmart for all that ails us. If we as consumers started to insist on FAIR trade and not FREE trade and kept the pressure on retailers to keep American made products on their shelves, China would have to compete in more ways than being the lowest cost per unit supplier. They would have to compete by paying their employees a fair wage and keeping the quality and safety of their ingredients and parts high. Are we willing to do that? I sure hope so.

Our government representatives are still adding things like pay raises for federal judges to bailout packages. Wall street and financial institution CEOs are still flying in corporate jets, throwing big parties and laying off hundreds of thousands of low level employees in order to justify giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses by looking “fiscally responsible”.

I want to start hearing some honesty from politicians, CEOs and union bosses…even if it’s not what I want to hear. Somebody…please speak up.

Here are a couple of suggestions.

1. A pay freeze for all politicians starting with congress until they get their house in working order.

2. Bills introduced by local, state and federal governement should be limited to ONE issue at a time. THAT alone would bring transparency to our government. All of these riders and hidden agendas would become painfully obvious and that’s what we need. A bit of pain always will lead to a way to avoid more pain. If you KNOW what is in a bill, the bill better be a damn well thought out one or it won’t pass.

3. Corporate CEOs, celebrities, government leaders get paid on merit and performance. No more golden parachutes…period. If you really are worth your pay, show us. You pay should not be based on past performance. It should be based on present time performance. Resting on your laurels just does not work. If you know you can make millions even if you do a POOR job, there is simply not much motivation to do your best. We keep hearing about how horrible tenure is for teachers and professors. Tenure is no different from a golden parachute as a “hiring” incentive for a CEO. I don’t believe in either. Laying off employees is NOT good job performance. It’s the easy way to pad your own income and to make the books look good to your investors.

Union bosses also have to get their act together. If your company goes out of business, you have not done your job well. I believe in unions, but a good union leader absolutely MUST understand business, which is not inherently bad and business leaders MUST understand that labor rights are not inherently evil. Both must exist in a rational balance in the real world or everything falls apart.

It’s time for accountability. Write to your local, state and federal representatives and PAY attention to what they are doing. Write to corporate CEOs and tell them you want to see more locally produced products on the shelves. Talk to the proprieter of your local restaurant and your plumbing, electrical vendors. Tell them to hire citizens and if they do, they get the job. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to pay a little more, even if it takes six more months of work to afford the higher price? That is the reality. It’s up to us to turn the ship around.

Corporate America won’t do it on it’s own. Government won’t do it on their own, unless you as a consumer and voter show them you mean business. You have to say NO sometimes. Are you willing to stop going to your favorite restaurant if they hire undocumented workers simply because they will work for less? Are you willing to stop shopping at Walmart or Macys until they have 30% of the products on their shelves made in the USA? I went to Macy’s the other day looking for a dress shirt made in America. Not even USA…just somewhere in the western hemisphere. I went home empty handed. THAT is part of the problem. We just let it happen.

We will murder Walmart employees by trampling them to death on Black Friday in order to save a few dollars on some piece of junk, yet if thousands of people lose their jobs because we want something to cost less we just say…”that’s the way of the world”.

Well…it does not have to be that way. It’s up to you and me to make the difference. Think about it. Then make a choice and do something about it.

Automotive Industry Bailout Pre-Conditions

There’s a lot of talk about bailing out the US Auto Industry. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are all sinking faster than the Titanic and are begging for a bailout.

The US Auto industry started sinking in the 70′s and the complete incompetence of the corporate leadership and their marketing department’s iron grip on the designers has led them down a path to self-destruction. We hear that it’s the unions, the benefits and the regulation that brought them down, yet Toyota, Honda and BMW all have thrived, while building cars here in the good ‘ol USA, so though the volitile relationship between corporate and union management has not helped matters, it’s just a small part of what ails the US Auto industry.

It’s bad design, bad management and moronic marketing coupled with a complete lack of forward thinking and a vision for the future that has largely led to the suicidal path. If the US auto industry wants a bailout, it’s going to take a 180 degree turnaround from the way they have been thinking.

Replace all of the top executives, designers and marketing department heads with leadership culled from the Japanese and European automakers. Make sure that salaries and benefits of all corporate leadership are based solely on performance and force them to design more fuel efficient, well designed, safe cars and trucks. Back to basics. Forget all of the DVD players, surround sound systems, electronic jewelry and high power, fuel guzzling engines. Make vehicles that will get you from point A to point B in comfort, safety and reliability. Show us you can do that for once.

Give them a limited time to do so and give the union members part ownership in the companies so that they too have a stake. Corporate management and the unions also have to start playing ball and get real about the future. The Japanese auto makers and the unions have found a way to work together instead of this constant antagonistic war that has gone on for way too long with the ex-big 3.

The politicians involved in talking about this bailout also have to get their priorities straight. If these car companies and their workers go under, not only will you have destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs, but the votes and tax revenue that go with them. A bailout without VERY well thought out pre-conditions that are both fair and realistic to management, workers and stockholders is simply a bribe.

It’s time for this country to get back into innovation, quality and creativity instead of just marketing hype and quarter to quarter results for hedgefund managers.

What’s The Matter With People?

I can’t really imagine why anyone would really want to run for political office, especially a national one. I’m also always amazed at how blind a considerable amount of people are to the back stabbing and snake oil salesmanship that goes on to win votes. It’s incredible how people will vote against their own best interests and toss common sense to the wind and get riled up over nothing.

The working class, and especially the white working class got all riled up when they heard that Barack Obama said that people cling to God and Guns in troubled times. Well, he was right. Gun sales are booming. People are clinging to their guns. God….many people, including myself look to a higher power for answers or at least comfort in times of economic turmoil, war and natural disaster. We’ve had all of those things over the last 8 years.

The conservative media tried to make it sound like it was some sort of elitist smear, rather than a thoughtful observation. They tried to make people think that Senator Obama was not like us, that he turned up his nose to those of us who may not have a world class education. I find that simply absurd.

American people are a bit smarter than that. Now that the election is over, it’s becoming a lot more clear just who the elitist party is. John McCain’s campaign staff has turned their vile sense of supremacy and economic elitism on Sarah Palin. They brought her in to counter Obama’s intellectual background and tried to give us another “I’d like to have a BBQ with that candidate” moment. After all, it worked with George Bush. But when it failed this time around, her own party leaders are calling her and her family the “Walissa Hillbillies”. The “real” Americans they like to push with their campaign marketing strategy are are once again just the little people who can be used for votes and then tossed out with the garbage.

Now I never thought that Sarah Palin was up for the job, but come on. They knew who she was when they picked her and why they picked her. In the neo-con mind, a pretty and feisty hockey mom is an advertiser’s dream and that image is just what they were trying to sell. She was fiesty enough to play the bad cop to John McCain’s humble war hero and keep the dirt off of them and the voter’s eyes off the real issues. She was being used, pure and simple, as a marketing gimmick and once that ad campaign failed, they are throwing her to the dogs…or the huskies as it is.

Luckily for the country, we didn’t fall for it this time like we did in 2000 and 2004. We realize now that all of the talk from the Bush campaign about being a “uniter not a divider” was just slick marketing. We know now that we need someone much smarter than the average Joe the Plumber to lead this great country. It’s not that being a hockey mom or a plumber is a bad thing, after all, that’s what most of us are. Simple working people. We just want to get by, make a decent and safe life for ourselves and our families and pursue our happiness. We don’t want fame and fortune, though we can respect someone who gains either by ethical and respectable means. The problem we have is when gaining fame and fortune by ANY means becomes the ideal, and that is what the last eight years have pushed on us.

They put business above people. Wealth and money became their God. Fear of God simply became the ace up their sleeve that they pull out at election time to get people riled up. They use God as a weapon to instill fear. It didn’t work this time. People fought back .

My father, who is the most devout Christian I have ever met is a Democrat and when 4 years ago, for the first time in his 70 year life in the church, he heard people telling him that only Republicans are good Christians…he fought back. It so offended him and all he has worked for his 85 years, that he said NO MORE!!!

America finally is seeing the truth through the fear mongering, religious divisiveness and racial innuendo. Americans know that there are good people who are republican, democrat, independent, white, black, asian, latino, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Atheists. We just want to live our lives, raise our families, earn ourselves a bit of security and do our best in life.

So, Governor Palin and he supporters…though I didn’t vote for ya, I feel very badly that your own party is turning on you now that you didn’t give them what they wanted. Their true colors are coming out. Maybe you should reconsider who really has your back.

Obama Is In…What’s Next?

It has been a long road, but the election is over and Barack Obama is going to be the next President of the United States. Now it’s time for the return trip to make this country whole again. This one is all uphill and it’s going to take a lot of thought, a lot of work and a lot of compromise. We can’t all get everything we want, but we can find ways to limit the bad things and inspire the great things.

We need to learn more about the world, science, business, cultures, conservation, honor and dignity. We need to help those not as fortunate as ourselves, not because we are forced to, but because it’s the right thing to do. Somewhere the right thing to do got lost in the “me first” attitudes of the last 30 years. We all thought that we were entitled to the pretty pictures in magazines and on television. We’re not. That has to be earned. What we should be entitled to is opportunity and as the wealthiest country on earth, opportunity got confused with things.

I too like new things. I want a flat panel television and would love a nicer car than my 1999 Honda Accord and I’d like to grow my business more. Taxes really are not preventing me from doing that. After all, I was able to purchase my home in 2000 when the tax rates were higher than they are now. Today, I could not purchase that same home, yet I have lower taxes than I did in 2000.

Even though the atmosphere for business was extremely favorable in the last 8 years, the economy is tanking, unemployment is growing, retirement portolios are shrinking, home prices are down considerably and national debt is the highest in decades.

After meeting with my accountant, I have determined that  even if every penny I spend on corporate taxes was eliminated, I could not hire a new employee full time and under Obama’s plan it won’t make it any more difficult for me to hire a new employee. At best, under McCain’s plan, I could up my advertising budget by a couple of thousand dollars or replace a window in my business that could use an update. So Obama’s tax plan does not frighten me in the least. Most likely, my wife and I will do slightly better in our personal income than under McCain’s plan.

That does not mean that I expect Obama to be able to save the country, nor am I looking for him to do that. My business is my responsibility and so is my family. I save money, don’t borrow money I can’t repay and have cut my expenses as much as I can until things get better. I’m taking classes to learn new skills and keep up to date on new technology which I need to stay viable and that’s something we all must continue to do.

Education is the key to prosperity and to find a way to pay for it by exchanging public service for tuition is simply common sense. Not all of us can afford the $100,000 or more that it takes to get a top notch education and borrowing to do it is simply bad math.

We’ve got to start living within our means and saving for the things we really want. We’ve got to prioritize and not be seduced by our neighbors and advertising into spending money we don’t have. We’ve got to make some tough decisions as to what’s really important in our lives, what truly makes our lives better and not what makes them more entertaining.

It’s not going to be easy. We have been taught that things are good and that the more things you have, the more valuable your life is. That simply must change. Getting stressed out because you don’t have what your neighbor has is no way to live. I’ve always found that doing something for somebody else give me a lot more satisfaction than buying a new iPod. It lasts a lot longer. Sometimes I forget that and get caught up in the marketing hype. I think that most of us forget that way to often.

I’m glad that we now have someone coming to the White House who puts people first, not balance sheets or next quarter profits. With people first, the balance sheets and the profits will follow…not the other way around.

Today I Witnessed History

I don’t know who is going to win this election. I think that it’s going to be a lot closer than the predictions, but in my 54 years, the only election I remember being so exciting was when I was a very young boy and my parents voted for Kennedy.

This election has been full of possible firsts…our first female President, our first black President, our first Morman President and our first female Vice President. It truly is an historic election if only for that reason.

Today I was in line at the polling place (a neighborhood garage in my case) and it was most definitely a change from every other election I’ve voted in. In the past, I’ve never seen more than 4 to 5 people in line there. This morning, there was a line of over 50 people very excited about voting. It was an electric atmosphere.

Not only are we voting for a new President in an era of turmoil, but there are a lot of emotionally charged ballot initiatives to consider. I’m glad people are taking it so seriously for once. I sincerely hope that people are voting on issues and not personalities or thinking that “I want someone like me” in the White House.

I want someone not like me at all. I want someone much smarter than me. I don’t want a President who I can go have a beer with. I want someone who considers all sides of an issue and who thinks things through before jumping into a decision that can cost lives or lose jobs. I want someone who will listen to other opinions and who will change his or her mind when they find themselves wrong. I want a negotiator and not a egomaniac “decider”.

It’s an historic day and I’m glad and honored that I have had a chance to participate in it. Regardless of the final outcome.