Kotkin: Dysfunctional California; Dysfunctional L.A.
Urban scholar Joel Kotkin of Chapman University takes turns laying into what he describes as a dysfunctional California in a Newsweek article; then goes after a dysfunctional Los Angeles in a Forbes magazine article.
While Kotkin offers some hope that California can rebound from its paralysis as it has in the past from down periods, this time through the efforts of individual entrepreneurs, he says Los Angeles’s hope rides in getting rid of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, whom he gives low marks.
Read the Newsweek piece on California, “Death of the Dream,” by clicking here.
Read the Forbes piece, “The Decline of Los Angeles,” by clicking here.
Now is not the time to scale back on marketing
During a recession, when everyone is bunkering down and cutting back, it’s very tempting for tourism agencies to scale back on tourism marketing. Some destination marketing organizations (DMO’s) across the country and in California are scaling back, for example, on international marketing and focusing more on drawing tourists from their own back yard – reminiscent of strategies used after 9-11.
As the Chair of the U.S. Travel Association, and President & CEO of the California Travel & Tourism Commission (CTTC), I believe it is even more critical than ever that we find ways to keep our investments in out-of-state domestic and international marketing going. As President Obama recently said in his State of the Union address, now is the time for long-term investing, an opinion shared in MediaWeek by Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WWP Group. Sorrell said, and I agree, “When times are tough, it’s time to invest, not cut. This comes from years of research dating back to Ogilvy’s Alex Biel and Millward Brown interaction surveys. All show that if we cut marketing during such times, the impact is damaging and it can take you longer to get back to where you were.”
A Rose by Any Other Name
“”What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. – Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II, William Shakespeare (1564 –1616).
Recent comments, and particularly, who made them, indicate that the idea of Nationalizing the Big Banks may be something that we are going to be living with very shortly: “This idea of nationalizing banks is not comfortable,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “But I think we’ve got so many toxic assets spread throughout the banking and financial community, throughout the world, that we’re going to have to do something that no one ever envisioned a year ago, no one likes. To me, banking and housing are the root cause of this problem. . . . I would not take off the idea of nationalizing the banks.”
We here in America emphatically do not like the word: “Nationalize.” For one thing, it has come to be associated with people like Fidel Castro, whose new, post-Batista (1959- present) government nationalized property owned by some big U.S. corporations, like United Fruit’s lucrative sugar mills in Cuba’s Oriente region, and then added insult to injury by pegging compensation at low valuations, a small fraction of the full, real value, which the corporations themselves had used, in order to keep their taxes low.