America is frozen. We have failed to face our nation’s most crucial challenges—and we are about to pay the price.
Delighted by our disorder, China builds with uncanny strength and determination. While we have been diverted and lost momentum, a dragon leaped into the breach. China fully expects to pass us by.
Now, in Becoming China’s Bitch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now (Turner Publishing Company: March 2012; $27.95) widely influential business builder and venture philanthropist Peter D. Kiernan offers innovative and realistic steps which transcend partisan agendas that can help put our nation back on the path to greatness.
A leader in investment banking, philanthropy, education and healthcare, Kiernan provides a cogent analysis of our most pressing national problems and a unique perspective of how to get past the gridlock of polarized leaders and partisan gamesmanship. With provocative insight and analytic depth, he offers radical yet practical solutions—solutions every American must act upon before it’s too late.
Kiernan begins by revealing the five factors that freeze us and uncovers an architecture of divide that prevents our progress: polarizing and proselytizing media; the unbridled and expansionist role of lobbyists; the well-funded Selectorate of think tanks that have a far more influential relationship with policy makers than we do; our confusion of Constitutional and religious imperatives; and the challenges to an entrenched and aging two party system.
Then Kiernan provides innovative and common sense ways to address ten impending catastrophes that pose the greatest threat to America’s future: our semiconscious dependency on China; retiring our aging to nursing homes instead of realizing the longevity dividend they represent; the labor pains of union’s changing role in society; our lack of a coordinated intelligence effort; America’s dual addiction to cigarettes and sin tax revenues; our downward-spiraling healthcare system; our faltering efforts at sensible education reform; mishandling of illegal immigration; a missing-in-action energy policy; and our inability to accept same sex marriage as the ultimate test of who we claim to be as a nation and move on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter D. Kiernan is a successful business man, philanthropist, entrepreneur, and corporate and government advisor. The former Goldman Sachs partner for nearly two decades and multi-billion dollar hedge fund president now chairs a venture firm. He is recent Chair of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation and the Robin Hood Foundation and board member of numerous other healthcare, hospital, poverty fighting, and disease-related charities. He is Chairman of University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, board member of UVA’s Graduate Schools and College of Arts and Sciences; and formerly of Williams College, was a founding board member of the Center for Charter School Excellence and board member of the Al Smith Foundation. A frequent guest on television and radio, Kiernan has appeared in lively and dynamic interviews and segments on programs including “Good Morning America,” “The Today Show,” “Larry King Live,” CNBC’s “Power Lunch,” and on CBS News, CNN, and Bloomberg. A graduate of the Darden School where he earned an MBA and Williams College (BA), he currently lives in Connecticut with his family.