Of all the grim economic statistics produced in the debacle of 2008, one really nailed me as I reviewed the news of the first day of 2009: “The World Federation of Exchanges, which tracks stock markets in 53 developed and emerging economies, said that some $30 trillion in market value evaporated through the end of November.” ((Wednesday 31 December 2008, Kim Coghill and Claudia Parsons, Reuters). And that doesn’t even include December!
“Evaporated” is the key word here. It was not lost in the sense that somebody came and took it away or buried it in a box in the desert and forgot where – it evaporated from the world’s balance sheets via stock markets around the globe, like the morning dew on your front lawn when the sun first comes up. Up in smoke. If my math is correct, that means $44, plus a few dimes and pennies, each, theoretically evaporated from the pockets of every man, woman and child on earth – all 6 ¾ Billion on them – in 2008. To put this into some perspective, according to World Bank statistics from 2003, half the world’s population – some 2.8 billion people — live on less than $2 (U.S.) per day, with 1.7 billion of those getting by (somehow) on less than $1 per day.
While economists can argue endlessly about the threats posed by widening world income disparity and what exactly constitutes income for averaging and comparison purposes, and they do, my focus here is not on those issues. Instead, consider for a moment just how staggering last year’s paper losses were in the great scheme of things as we look forward to seeing some relief sometime in 2009, despite economic forecasts which suggest that 2009 could be even worse, and what we are going to do about it this new year other than just complain and commiserate, which we did plenty of in 2008.
The Obama Transition Administration is sending a massive spending bill to Congress as soon as they come back into session. It is rumored that the bill will propose spending perhaps shy of another Trillion dollars, but not by much, to revive state and local public works construction projects which may have been abandoned by strapped state and local governments wondering how they will make it through 2009. Those projects should include major increases in broadband capacity and Internet reception across America. Although we invented the Internet here in the US (nope, not Al Gore – ARPAnet [Advanced Research Projects Agency Network] developed by US Defense Department and your tax dollars, was the predecessor of today’s global Internet), the US now finds itself lagging at 15th in the world in broadband and Internet delivery behind both developed and some undeveloped nations. That is really shameful in our wired global world where the only retailers who did well over the year-end holiday season were the ones who sold online (other than McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, the only 2 of the Dow 30 stocks which actually had an ‘up’ year in 2008).
Now is the time to wire America’s cities and towns for Wi-Fi reception like so many cities in Europe and Asia have done, so that, like TV in the early 1950’s which came to us through the air, we can all have strong broadband Wi-Fi Internet at our fingertips wherever we go and this global linkage can continue growing into the mass information and social/business facilitator that it should be in the 21st Century world. Often, the opposition to doing just this has come from local interests, certain telecommunications carriers in the US, and their legions of well-paid Washington lobbyists, taking the shortsighted view that since they own the portals to the Internet, they can and will control its access, usually to the detriment of society as a whole.
It is just plain dumb, having created this technology which historians will rank right up there with Gutenberg’s printing press for dramatically changing how the world thinks and communicates, to now allow other countries to gain supremacy in this vital communications technology because they were able to put selfish profit motives of their corporations aside for the greater good of connectivity for all. Telecommunications is, after all, an inherent monopoly – there are only so many wavelengths and channels and infrastructure to go around and the costs of creating a rival system from scratch are impossibly large.
And, while we are at it, we can put many thousands to work on government projects to modernize our shamefully outmoded electric grid, which is a real accident waiting to happen, and has been sorely neglected for decades. Our roads, bridges and tunnels are just crumbling away with no real plan for how they will be upgraded and replaced, as we await more earthquakes, natural disasters and things just falling down from old age, without real and comprehensive planning for new replacement infrastructure designed for this new century, not the past, tired old one. We critically need the jobs and mass infusion of capital to counter the tide of this still unfolding economic crisis and to re-infuse our morale for the New Year and well beyond and we need it right now. Enough bailing out companies that don’t deserve it; it is time to invest heavily in America this year.