My guests on this year’s edition of our year-end show are back from last year.  Again this afternoon we have Dr. Lewis Perelman calling in from Virginia, and in our studio, John Puma from Mount Vernon, Henry Ferlauto from White Plains, and John Berenyi from New York and all over the world.  The topic today will cover three areas, the year 2008 in review, positive ideas to turn the country around, and predictions for 2009.

Download | Duration: 00:51:37

Henry Ferlauto                                     John Puma	John Berenyi

 

Our first guest this morning is Dr. Lewis J. Perelman is a Washington-DC policy and management consultant.  A native of Mount Vernon, New York, and one of my oldest friends, he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from the City College of New York, and went on to study space and planetary physics at Columbia University and Harvard University.  He later earned his doctoral degree in administration, planning, and policy from Harvard, where his studies focused on sustainable economic development.
 
Dr. Perelman has worked for over 30 years—as an analyst, thought leader, teacher, and consultant—on key strategic problems of human ecology: transportation, energy, environmental protection, human capital management, national security, technology innovation, and economic and business development. In 1992 he gained renown for his best-selling book “School’s Out”, which anticipated much of the revolution that the Internet and information technology would end up causing in learning, work, and the keys to business success. 

Dr. Perelman’s recent work has focused on strategies to meet the security, environmental and economic needs to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. He also contributed to a recent Commerce Department study of the economic impact of investments in research and innovation.

Mr. John Berenyi, has undergraduate and graduate degrees in, engineering, management sciences and applied economics from Columbia University. He has been an investment banker, who has specialized in alternative energy and environmental finance for the past 25 years. In the early part of his career, as a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University, he developed the composite set of environmental indicators to measure the quality of life in cities across the United States. Cities, counties, states, and academic institutions have adopted this work, across America, as a tool for public of public policy and evaluation. Today, after a long career serving companies like Citicorp, HSBC Capital and IF Rothschild, he is the managing director of Ecocite, a Canadian-based company that works as an energy investment trust for eco-property development. He is also the Senior Advisor on Energy to the AJ Congress to implement the US-Israeli Energy Independence. Act. He is directing the Infrastructure & Energy Solutions Group (IESG), which is working on solutions regarding sustainable infrastructure and renewable energy for municipalities.

Along with Mr. John Berenyi are Mr. John Puma of Mount Vernon, NY, and Henry Ferlauto of White Plains. John Puma’s career has ranged from creating start-up businesses, to developing communications systems for multi-national communication giants, to building housing for the middle and working class citizens, and to developing alternate energy concepts for communities.  John, who was brought up on Long Island, and gravitated to Mount Vernon, was educated at the State University of NY in Buffalo, and took graduate courses in entertainment arts at NYU. John is interested in encouraging and developing local and market interest in alternative fuels and the effort to wean our economy from fossil fuel dependency.

Henry Ferlauto, is an account executive with Genius Inside, who has had many years of experience with information technology. He has been deeply involved with project, vendor, and directory management. He has been an acclaimed trainer, and currently works in areas that include working on project management goals and objectives, along with consulting on sales of collaborative enterprise management software. His special interests are; American history with a focus on the Revolutionary War and NYC, along with public policy issues that affect local government.

Today’s discussion will not only reflect a bit on 2008, but look forward to the New Year, 2009 with our ideas regarding needed solutions and reforms, along with our thoughts and predictions regarding the coming year.

Some of the subjects discussed will be the following:
a) Federal bailouts, are they working?
b) Confidence in our economic system, can it be resurrected?
c) What will the pension funds do?
d) How will the loss of person wealth affect the Western World?
e) The cost of the “Green Revolution,” and is there really global warming and what can done?
f) What can President-Elect Obama do to re-start the economy?
g) Is our consumer-based, import dependent, foreign bank- supported currency and economic system beyond help?
h) The pathetic legacy of George W. Bush
i) How can we extricate ourselves from the Middle East without more damage?