Van Jones :: Interview with Lawerence O'Donnell :: Rebuild the Dream

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Guess What? It Is Cheaper to Use Federal Government Employees Than Contractor Employees

Having looked at federal government contracting for 30 years, I have heard over and over again that government employees make too much money and that the service contractor employees are cheaper. The mantra has been repeated that the government workers are bad, ineffective and expensive and that the federal government would do better to hire service contractor workers to do more and more of the government's work. This belief that the "free market" will always do better than the government at any task has increased over the years until each president since Reagan has taken it as a given.

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Arizona Sun, US Solar Attract France’s Saint-Gobain

Saint-Gobain Solar announced that construction of its solar thermal mirror plant in Goodyear, Arizona has begun. The plant is slated to start production in this year’s fourth quarter, creating 50 permanent jobs and manufacturing millions of square feet of solar mirrors used in solar thermal and concentrating solar power (CSP) installations, including solar concentration towers and liner Fresnel lenses.

The plant’s projected production capacity corresponds to an annual thermal power output of 300-megawatts (MW), enough to supply an American town of 150,000 with clean, renewable electrical power. The clean energy produced using the plant’s mirrors could avoid as much as 320,000 tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of replanting some 62,000 acres of forest, according to the company, a subsidiary of France’s Saint-Gobain.

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Rebuilding America's Transportation System through the American Jobs Act

America is the country that built the transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system; the Hoover Dam and Grand Central Station but today, we have roads, bridges, airports and railway lines all across the country that are in need of repair and updating. This afternoon, President Obama was in Cincinnati, Ohio where the Brent Spence Bridge, located on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America, is in such poor condition that it has been labeled functionally obsolete.

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