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Damato of The Day Is... "Only Radical Change Will Fix This"

By Rick Damato
September 26, 2008
It is a pleasant Sunday afternoon in Atlanta, a cloudy but cool day. It seems that autumn just cannot wait. While I can certainly enjoy the weather, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to enjoy the state of affairs in this country.

It is a pleasant Sunday afternoon in Atlanta, a cloudy but cool day. It seems that autumn just cannot wait. While I can certainly enjoy the weather, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to enjoy the state of affairs in this country. We just went through a week when we, as American taxpayers, have just been assigned the task of cleaning up after a bunch of greedy bastards that nearly tanked the world’s economic engine (the U.S. economy).

It would be easy to blame the bankers and investors for the calamity, but we must look deeper. Our duly elected politicians who oversee and regulate the systems facing collapse seem to have been asleep at the switch. We as voters must accept our share of the responsibility for that. As we make our living in the construction industry, at some level we knew all along that the mortgage industry could not sustain all the foolishness in which we knew they were engaging.

Plenty of blame to go around and we will all pay. How do you fix it? How do you take a direction that will ensure this does not happen again? Hell, I don’t know. But I do have an opinion, thanks to our nation’s ability to do one thing reasonably well (not completely, but reasonably), and that is defend my right to have and express an opinion.

I think our political system is largely broken. Radical change is the only thing that will correct a system that demands candidates for public offices spend most of their time kissing the rear ends of contributors so they can remain in office. It is their reality … a reality of modern politics. There is too much power in Washington and it is controlled by too few. Term limits (translated as “power limits” by politicians) would go a long way in this regard. Moving to a consumption tax, preferably The FairTax, would reel in the power of politicians (at least limiting it to the spending side of the equation).

The problem with radical change in our system is the real power brokers think they are powerless. That would be you, me, and the rest of the voters in this country. Voters and their mood carry more clout than they think and if they were only of a mind to limit the power of the federal government, it can be done. Easy? No. Possible? Anything is possible.

Why all the attitude suddenly? Because if the events of the week ended Sept. 20, 2008, do not wake up the American people as to what is being done to them, they will have missed a tremendous opportunity to defend and improve our position in an increasingly competitive world.

I do not think the mortgage and banking crisis spell doom or the end of all business opportunities. This is still the greatest country on the planet and the American worker is still No. 1 in the world. But I also think that taking any of that for granted is pure folly, and if we do we are dooming our children and grandchildren to world quite different from the one in which we were raised. 

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Rick damato update
Rick Damato is the editorial director of Roofing Contractor. He has held a number of posts in the roofing industry since 1974 and has contributed to the magazine since its inception in 1981. He can be reached at 770-331-7858 or on Twitter @RoofsByRick.
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