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Bankrate: Conscience-based investing can be really fulfilling.
Baldacci: It is. You want the company to succeed for more than one reason, your own self-aggrandizement. You want it to succeed because the world would be a little bit better if it does.
Bankrate: You have also stepped up with your Wish You Well Foundation. What prompted it?
Baldacci: Part of it, I guess, is I don't want this country to fall apart from within. We have a huge literacy problem in the United States. There are 200 million adults, and about half of them, 100 million, read at the two lowest levels of literacy. That's a standard that might be welcomed in a Third World country, but it's certainly not a standard that the United States should aim for, but that's where we are.
It's not all just an ESL problem; it's the fact that people get out of public or private schools with very marginal literacy abilities. We need to turn that around because you can't have a full-fledged, functioning democracy where half the adults can't even read. Since there is very little federal money for adult literacy classes, it all comes from private foundations. We try to do our part. We've funded programs in about 30 states.
We've also started up the Feeding Body and Mind Program, where we collect books and send them to food banks all over the country. It's so simple, but that's the beauty of it: People come in to get food, which they need to survive, but then they go out with a book, which maybe can get them out of that cycle of poverty. We're really going gangbusters on that.
Bankrate: Do you think that the coming change in administrations will create new material for your work?
Baldacci: I think that regardless of who occupies the White House, the global situation that we're confronting now won't have changed all that much. There are still going to be terrorists out there and there will still be overzealous people who, with the total goal of trying to protect us, keep stripping us more and more of our civil liberties. Then you're also going to have issues of abuse. My last couple books have dealt with what happens when you give people too much power -- it corrupts. Some things remain the same. I'll have lots to deal with.
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