EnergizeUS is all about local energy jobs and the manufacturing needed to support that. EnergizeUS coalition member and Arizona Senate candidate Rodney Glassman has a background in arid land management and he immediately keyed in on the water issues associated with energy production.
This isn’t well known yet, but it is a very serious concern, and one we’d do well to address sooner rather than later.
Lately we’ve been hearing a lot of excuses: people are unemployed because they’re lazy. They’re unemployed because they have skills mismatch.
The real reason people are unemployed is that the jobs they have the skills to perform have been exported at every possible opportunity for the last thirty years. We’ve retrained and retrained and retrained while this has gone on, until now they only industries left are training ... or going further into debt funding education in the next career that will be offshored as soon as someone figures out how.
Jim Holbert, Kentucky District 5’s House candidate provided us with his campaign platform, five sets of well organized bullet points, and he had appended another little section just for EnergizeUS.
This is the sort of discipline we’ve come to expect from the military candidates we see and Jim’s background as an Army and Coast Guard pilot, used to performing a preflight checks, is clearly apparent.
It’s a pleasure to put together an introductory piece like this when given such well organized source material.
Energize US is a coalition of candidates united around one central message: we can fix our economy and put Americans back to work in good paying jobs by focusing our attention on renewable energy and conservation. Today's diary is the first in a series that will be introducing you one by one to the members of the coalition.
We hear talk about local energy production jobs and the young people along with those who want to retrain into a new industry get excited, but what does it all mean? What sort of jobs are there?
This little photo diary will give you some sense of what is possible.
There will be no recovery without jobs. It's just that simple. We've watched for thirty long years as the manufacturing jobs that made America strong were spirited away to countries with lax environmental regulations and little or no protection for their citizens. American workers were forced to compete with three hundred million underemployed Chinese who were willing to work for $132 a month.
We have to buy it here. We have to make it here. And unless those doing the making are themselves making it our downward spiral will continue.
We can make this change and local energy production is the first step we should take.
Every day America sends a billion dollars overseas for energy. This would be a bad idea if supplies were stable, but oil depletion and instability in the Persian Gulf means we're not wondering if we're going to have trouble, we're waiting to find out when.
Rather than sitting around hoping things turn out fine, we’ve formed a coalition of candidates to talk about how to take the steps necessary to make sure our future is safe and secure. We'll do that by fixing the biggest problems this country faces today – lack of self sufficiency in energy and the lack of good paying career paths.
Today I’ve come to Daily Kos to introduce you to EnergizeUS.