Showing posts with label Great Recession. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Great Recession. Show all posts

Monday, April 18, 2011

My Non Personhood Of 2009, 2010


2009 and 2010 have been my years of roaming the tech circles of this city and avid tech blogging. I have done so as a non person. Tech felt safer than politics.

I have roamed. I have done so as a window shopper. I have not had the option to participate. It's called being in an immigration mess. For the rest it might have been the Great Recession, for me it was the Great Immigration Humiliation.

I was done raising 100K for my IC startup - that was the stated goal - months before the 2008 primaries were over, but I decided to be with Barack just a few more months. The primary was the only real contest. November was a no contest, it was so obvious to me. I had been his first full time volunteer in the city. I was in before he announced he was in.

But my political enemies came after me. The day the primaries ended, I disappeared. They had me disappear. The establishment picked that precise day lest I missed the message.

One day early in 2009, in March perhaps, maybe April, I went to see someone at Columbus Circle. We had met online, we had met, and we were going to meet again. I had two dollars in my pocket. That is all the money I had. I did not have any money back home. I did not have a bank account, let alone money in a bank account. I did not have a credit card. And I could not have walked back home. I would not have known the way. I did not have a phone. I did not have a metro card.

I remember thinking, if I lost those two dollars, I could not get back home.

Just Became A Cofounder
Sean Parker, Billionaire, Was Really Poor Once
Permanent War
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Monday, November 29, 2010

Racism Caused Recession

Comet P/Halley as taken March 8, 1986 by W. Li...Image via Wikipedia
Farrakhan: Levee May Have Been Bombed To Flood ... flood poor black people out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
You could argue it was cyclical. It happens every 70 years. The last time was the Great Depression. And there was something like the Great Depression about 70 years before the Great Depression. I guess I will not see the Halley's Comet or another Great Recession in my lifetime then.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Intelligent Manufacturing


Factories getting carted away to Mexico was that "huge suction sound" Ross Perot heard way back in 1992. That image still persists. The Great Recession has made those fears much more concrete and real. Those jobs that are gone are gone. That seems to be the thinking.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Ageism And Entrepreneurship


I believe you can start a company at any age. I believe you can join a startup team at any age. I don't believe a startup has to do with coding and coding alone. There is always room for startups in every industry, in every sector of the economy.

Monday, July 26, 2010

The Economy: Uncharted Waters

Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," a...Image via Wikipedia
The convulsion of the Great Recession has been the birth pang of a new kind of economy, a new kind of world. We had already been moving towards a post-industrial society, towards an information age for over a decade, but our pace had been too slow, not global enough, not as drastic as it ought to be. We are still unsure as to which directions to go. There is open talk of a double dip recession. The jobs are not here yet. It is still scary times.

After the Great Depression, America very clearly became an industrial economy. It was no longer the agriculture economy of Abraham Lincoln's time. A huge economic shift had been made. But there was pain along the way.

It is one of the failings of democracy that you need a big, bad event to get people riled up to go do something big. FDR wanted to enter the war long before Pearl Harbor happened, but he waited, and waited and waited until Pearl Harbor happened.

Why do you need a 9/11 before you realize the cause of democracy needs to be furthered across the Arab world? Why do you need a Gulf Oil Spill before even the average person starts thinking in terms of a zero emissions future? Why are intellectual extrapolations not enough? Or perhaps Hollywood is not doing its job.

I supported the Obama stimulus plan, but my criticism was and is that it was not forward looking enough. Roads and bridges are important but those are rickety swings of the industrial age. The roads and bridges of the information age are to do with the internet.

The stimulus bill was not big enough. It should have been a trillion. And it was not future oriented enough. The stimulus needed to be about turning America into a country of 75% college graduates. You can't do that with the existing colleges and so you turn the entire country into one big college. Universal broadband. Free up the spectrum, not in 10 years, but now. (India Broadband Spectrum Bids)

It was lack of vision that brought down Wall Street more than anything. Pumping more and more money into real estate is not my idea of visionary investment. They were accumulating so much money and all that needed to go somewhere. And so they came up with ever nefarious ways to put more and more money into real estate.

Wall Street was not thinking in terms of the jobs of tomorrow, the companies of tomorrow, the industries of tomorrow. It was not thinking futuristic enough. It was not thinking global enough. If it had been thinking global, it would have sunk a few trillions into global microfinance and seen returns that were better than that of the S&P 500. It would have put the money into global infrastructure projects. There were clear alignments to be sought between self interest and global interests, but they were not sought.

BusinessWeek: Lucky for Obama, U.K.'s Cameron Is Embracing Austerity First
Plugging their economies into the life-support system of central bank liquidity and massive government stimulus packages was the easy part. The tough question is how long their governments should stand in for a private sector too nervous about the future to invest and hire. With the world economy threatening to slide into a double-dip recession, both the U.S. and the U.K. are nevertheless talking about fiscal austerity. The only good news for Obama is that Cameron is going first. ..... spending cuts of as much as 40 percent ..... the U.K. doesn't want to be the next Greece. ...... bond vigilantes are driving U.K. economic policy. "Questions that were asked about the liquidity and solvency of banking systems are now being asked of the liquidity and solvency of some of the governments that stand behind those banks" ...... "The austerity debate is now not about whether fiscal tightening in advanced economies is necessary, but on when it should begin in earnest." ..... growth collapses if all of the members simultaneously abstain from spending. Too many governments curbing spending and raising taxes in parallel would snuff out the nascent recovery. ...... Consumer confidence has dipped ..... government aid can't be removed without risking a relapse. ..... With so many job cuts, Cameron could find himself coping with strike action on a scale not seen since Margaret Thatcher neutered the nation's private-sector unions. ...... The banking industry, meanwhile, is crying foul at the prospect of bonus caps and a top income-tax rate that will climb to 50 percent from 40 percent. Threats to leave for Switzerland may prove more than empty. ...... The path Cameron is charting is so arduous, and public opposition is likely to become so intense, that rating agency Standard & Poor's isn't convinced he can deliver ...... If he forges ahead, there is a real chance that Britain returns to a recession. Neither scenario is cheery—and neither is beyond imagining for the U.S.
I am for a second stimulus bill that will focus primarily on creating jobs. It was finally the massive spendings of World War II that ended the Great Depression. Bold action is necessary.

A second stimulus package would be big, it would focus on a radical freeing of the wireless spectrum with a goal of cheap, universal broadband, it would entail creating millions of new government funded jobs, likely in the education and health sectors that people can go for with short training periods.

A lot of smart people ran banks. But banks had to be bailed out. Then the stimulus happened. That was the government bailing out the government. A lot of money has gone to keep unemployment benefits rolling, to keep paying teachers and police officers and firefighters. We did not expect the private sector to take care of the bailout and the stimulus. Similarly in these times, it has to be the government that has to step in to create millions of new jobs. Just like the banks paid back, the people will too.

The deficit and the debt will have to be reigned, but now is not the time.
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