March 2018 / Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They posses and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful. In a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I found myself in Penn Station recently one evening, and with...
February 2018 / I found myself in Penn Station recently one evening, and with every step I took was accosted by a panhandler. I mention this because the experience was eerily familiar to my undergraduate days at Rutgers University when walking through the Station was akin to leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to satisfy a school of piranhas. In my University days, New York City was told to...
January 2018 / A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March. Brutus to Julius Caesar, Act 1, JULIUS CAESAR (William Shakespeare, circa 1600) As we fast approach the Ides of March, we need to reflect upon the five crucial energy issues, which will have to be resolved in order for us to formulate an energy policy that is both good for us and for the planet. They are in no particular order of...
November-December 2017 / Almost as if on cue, the Labor Department reported on September 6, 2017 that job creation in the month of September was a negative 33,000 jobs. That means that the economy lost 33,000 jobs in September. The spin artists blamed the hurricanes, the solar eclipse, the blighted orange crop in Florida, and the swarming of bees on Wall Street. But what is overlooked is the...
October 2017 / The new landed gentry are those who manufacture money, who have access to massive amounts of capital. — Ayad Akhtar in “JUNK” I want to begin this piece by looking back to near the end of the nineteenth century when Parisians, more specifically a French newspaper, organized a 78 mile road race from Paris to the city of Rouen. The purpose of the exercise was to determine...
Best-selling financial author, Wall Street investment banker, social commentator, award-winning poet, energy consultant, off-Broadway producer, and community organizer in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Ron Spurga is the ultimate Renaissance Man.