Today’s discussion will not reflect on the past, but look forward to the New Year, 2008 and our thoughts and predictions regarding the future. We will try to focus on the political races, what will be the economic fallout regarding the sub prime mortgage debacle and the credit markets, global warming its impact, the media and its growth, how science is changing our coming world, entertainment, with some thoughts about the ongoing labor disputes, the steroid revelations in sports and the social trends facing our society.

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Our first guest this morning is Dr. Lewis J. Perelman is a Washington-DC policy and management consultant.  A native of Mount Vernon, New York, and one of my oldest friends, he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from the City College of New York, and went on to study space and planetary physics at Columbia University and Harvard University.  He later earned his doctoral degree in administration, planning, and policy from Harvard, where his studies focused on sustainable economic development.
 
Dr. Perelman has worked for over 30 years—as an analyst, thought leader, teacher, and consultant—on key strategic problems of human ecology: transportation, energy, environmental protection, human capital management, national security, technology innovation, and economic and business development. In 1992 he gained renown for his best-selling book “School’s Out”, which anticipated much of the revolution that the Internet and information technology would end up causing in learning, work, and the keys to business success. 
Dr. Perelman’s recent work has focused on strategies to meet the security, environmental and economic needs to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. He also contributed to a recent Commerce Department study of the economic impact of investments in research and innovation.

One of our studio guests is Mr. John Berenyi, who has undergraduate and graduate degrees in, engineering, management sciences and applied economics from Columbia University. He has been an investment banker, who has specialized in alternative energy and environmental finance for the past 25 years. In the early part of his career, as a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University, he developed the composite set of environmental indicators to measure the quality of life in cities across the United States. Cities, counties, states, and academic institutions have adopted this work, across America, as a tool for public of public policy and evaluation. Today, after a long career serving companies like Citicorp, HSBC Capital and IF Rothschild, he is the managing director of Ecocite, a Canadian-based company that works as an energy investment trust for eco-property development. John is focused today on the crisis in today’s money markets with a special emphasis on forecasting the impact of the potential credit crunch emanating from the sub prime lenders.

Along with Mr. John Berenyi are Mr. John Puma of Mount Vernon, NY, and Henry Ferlauto of White Plains. John Puma’s career has ranged from creating start-up businesses, to developing communications systems for multi-national communication giants, to building housing for the middle and working class citizens, and to developing alternate energy concepts for communities.  John, who was brought up on Long Island, and gravitated to Mount Vernon, was educated at the State University of NY in Buffalo, and took graduate courses in entertainment arts at NYU. John is interested in encouraging and developing local and market interest in alternative fuels and the effort to wean our economy from fossil fuel dependency.

Henry Ferlauto, is an account executive with Genius Inside, who has had many years of experience with information technology. He has been deeply involved with project, vendor, and directory management. He has been an acclaimed trainer, and currently works in areas that include working on project management goals and objectives, along with consulting on sales of collaborative enterprise management software. His special interests are; American history with a focus on the Revolutionary War and NYC, along with public policy issues that affect local government.