This week, I’m launching the 30 Million Jobs tour.  We’re taking the Dylan Ratigan Show on the road, and going all over the country to demonstrate that we are a nation flush with potential.  We’ll visit what I call “cradles of innovation” all over the place – in education, health care, and energy – mini-ecosystems where innovators and pioneers are taking resources and capital and using it to improve the world.  We will also show what I detail in my book – Greedy Bastards – the systems holding back this potential, starving it of necessary capital.

30 Million Jobs is the number of jobs we need for full and complete U.S. employment.  We start our tour in California’s Silicon Valley — one example of our country’s cradles of innovation.  Where most people see a problem, the people I’m spending time with see a job.  And it’s pretty clear that, once we end the corruption in our banking, tax, and trade policies, we will have more than enough work for the 30 million people who need it.

Let’s begin with energy.  When it comes to stationary power generation efficiency, we’re at 34%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy Information Administration.  That means two out of every three units of electricity we use are tossed out, with nothing to show for it.  Generating efficiency gains will take work, and thankfully, we have plenty of people that are unemployed.  The problem here is that there is no investment in the sector – t’s a desert landscape desperate to be irrigated by a flow of capital.  Remember, capital isn’t just the central banks and governments. It’s private businesses, personal accounts and most importantly, all human potential.  The river exists — its massive, some might say even infinite.  It is surging with potential if we only release it.  Right now, as I document in my book Greedy Bastards, this flow is going into the pockets of status quo interests because of rigged tax, trade, and banking policies.  But there’s no reason it couldn’t instead go towards bumping up our energy efficiency to 60%, 70% or even 90%.

Or take health care.  We all know how screwed up the health care system is.  But spending time with Dr. Jeffrey Brenner in Camden, New Jersey, or at the Mayo Clinic, shows that this is a choice.  Brenner has demonstrated, through his hotspotting work, that we can dramatically reduce costs by targeting the small number of extremely high cost patients.  And the Mayo Clinic, with its innovative team-oriented approach to health, is relentlessly bringing evidence on outcomes into its practice.  These are models for us.

Education is another arena where innovation is bursting out all around us.  Take the Khan Academy in San Francisco, which flips the traditional model of teaching on its head.  Rather than a teacher lecturing students and assigning homework, the Khan Academy offers supremely good lectures online, and then enables classroom time to be a workshop where students get help from teachers.  It lets teachers teach, and students learn at their own pace.  But importantly, the philosophy behind the Khan Academy strategy is “expect failure, demand mastery” – failure is NOT penalized, but getting 70% on a lesson quiz means you don’t move on to the next lesson.  The lessons are about learning, not bureaucratic testing regimes.  Again, reconfiguring our education system will take enormous amounts of work, but fortunately, we have plenty of unemployed people that want to work.  All it takes is the right financing flows.  And that’s what my 30 Million Jobs Tour is about.

There’s plenty of sun to grow these ecosystems of innovation.  We have the know-how.  But the river of capital that can enable and scale these models is being held back by three major barriers: man-made levies of bank, tax and trade policy auctioned off by our bought election system. We, in our Greedy Bastards behavior are creating these gates and in the process are holding back the flow of capital by incentivizing credit speculation, job outsourcing, and corrupt pricing on almost every major U.S. service. We auction tax benefits and subsidies through the money and political system to ensure that.  But this too is a choice.  We will also show in this tour the fights in our electoral and political process, the gerrymandering and corruption, the noble activism and citizen work to get money out of politics.

By using our values of shared visibility, integrity and choice we can achieve aligned interests and demand real, comprehensive trade, tax and bank reform to break down those barriers.  And in the process, we will unleash a flow of investments to irrigate these cradles of innovation and yield solutions to our problems while building millions of jobs for America.

Join us, as we explore this fascinating place called America.  It is brimming with potential.  And it is us.