This is the Great Depression II
The present crisis that we are now facing can rightly be called as the Great Depression II of 2009 and it is several times severe than the Great Depression I of 1929. It is not mere a financial melting down; not mere a credit crisis; nor even a recession that disappears within two years. The dimensions and intensities of the Great Depression II are quite different from the early one. Who had brought out the present crisis and where had gone all the money or credits that were available before four or months, are the two questions that the general public is asking.
Who has brought it?
Almost all banks had been lending five to ten times more than what they had, by diluting the principle of 80/20 in the age of electronic cash and e-banking or e-commerce, that ultimately resulted in the credit crisis and crushing of the stock markets. Further, the heavy expenditure on armaments incurred by almost all nations and terrorist organizations had aggravated the crisis. By siphoning off billions from the accounts of the big corporations and also individuals, especially the elderly, the terrorist organizations made money for their operations. Governments borrowed heavily for defense expenditures. Unfair business practices and high level frauds had made every thing very complex.
The Basic Reason
After high and fast growth and booms now it is the turn of gloom, recession and depression. There is a limit for speed and growth. Development based on aggressive marketing, consumerism and globalization, ignoring the vast majority, cannot go on very long. Recessions and depressions are self correcting mechanism for the maladies of a society that strives for unlimited growth at a high speed. No human being or economy can run fast for very long. Information Technology and the Modern Management Techniques do not have any answer for the present crisis. These are the basic lessons that the Great Depression II teaches us.
After a period of fast life, everybody has to go back to slow life. In the fast life, nobody has any time even to dream, imagine, think and learn. Knowledge and scholarship are pushed back for data and information; learning is reduced into an exercise for scoring of higher grades or marks; reading is neglected for the sake of scanning and extracting from the internet. Critical thinking and creative ideas or works are denigrated; superfluous analysis and mimicries are dominated in the place of sound theories and strategies. Men of ideas, scholarship, theories and strategies and multi-disciplinary backgrounds could alone solve the present crisis.
In the fast life, even young men and women could not find time for romance and love making other than fast sex, that too without the botheration of child birth. The greatest causality is the family life, the cordial relationships between wife and husband and between parents and children. Even in religion, faith in God and love of human beings are pushed back by the harsh and rigorous practices and rigid interpretations, without any element of mercy and forgiveness.
The Missing Link
The value and importance of rural life, especially agriculture are withered away for the over projection of the glory of urban life and the service sector. But cities could not survive without farming and rural sector. Urban sector is depending too much on the rural sector rather than the villages relaying on cities, because most of the villages could be easily made self sufficient with regard to the basic necessities of life. Service sector of an economy could not flourish when its agricultural or industrial sectors are weak.
How long it will be?
The Great Depression II, now in its first phase, would continue for a minimum period of five years, sometimes ten years, in a more rigorous way. It brings about a crisis of faith in technology, money power, managerial talents and the entire banking and insurance sector, besides the money and stock and share markets and the credit system The highly acclaimed economic and business wisdoms and formulas are crushed and shattered. A sense of helplessness and even meaninglessness are to dominate in the thinking and behavior of the common people. Everybody, including the top billionaires and technocrats and the most trusted business houses, has become vulnerable. A good many of them, especially the youth, are in the verge of a suicide or mental brake down.
We have to accept that the age of consumerism and the dominance of the service sector over the agriculture and industrial sectors are over. The age of supermarkets and malls besides the over-salaried CEOs and their big bonus are over. So also is the case with cities over the villages. The inter-sector imbalances with regard to growth and wage or salary structures and the striking disparities with regard to the standard of living of the people of the various sectors are the basic reason for the present global crisis. The growth of defense industries is possible only jeopardizing all the other industries and sectors.
The only agency to deal with The Great Depression II with long term strategies and policies is the Governments that must be strong and duly functioning. No single country or government could tackle it; instead, global efforts and strategies are required. The UN must be made strong enough to act globally for dealing with the Great Depression II, chalking out the area of international cooperation. It must act on a war footing; other wise, over 80 per cent of the jobs would be wiped out; and billions would die out of hunger, epidemics and civil wars.
Ineffectiveness of the Keynesian Strategies
The Great Depression II could not be dealt with a set of conventional monetary and fiscal policies as have been prescribed by the Keynesians or the Post-Keynesians that have reached the saturation level. There is a limit for technology and management techniques, including marketing in this regard. Now what are required are a massive behavioral change and a new way of life, freeing from consumerism and fast life style on the part of the society as a whole. Greater cooperation and mutual support between nations, even at global level, are the only means for survival and growth. All nations must cut their defense expenditure to the extent of seventy or eighty per cent and a joint global strategy against terrorism must be launched as no nation can be made free from it.
Time for Re-creation
This Great Depression II brings life slow. It is the time for learning and acquiring knowledge, creative works and above all reinventing the basic human, family and religious values coupled with humanism, spirituality and cooperation. It is the time for baby booms. It is the time for the re-birth of rural and farming sector. People find new meaning in agriculture and country life. Now, it is unproductive to make heavy investments in cities and high technologies and the service sector. Religions have to play a very important positive role in these regards, even by developing mutual respect and cooperation rather than revelry and aggressive fundamentalism.
Counter Strategies
The best strategy to deal with The Great Depression II is to invest heavily on the rural and farming sector and develop their infrastructures along with making heavy investment in education, especially basic science and engineering, social sciences and humanities. Learning must be encouraged by developing libraries and encouraging the overall reading habits of the people. Cost effective Open Learning– Open Schools and Open Universities or Virtual Universities, even in Science and Technology must be set up or developed to make education reach in the hands of millions.
These strategies are equally applicable to both the East and West, developing and developed nations, including GCC countries. Nobody, including the American President, Barrack Obama, has a magic stick to deal with The Great Depression II, other than following the above noted long term strategies and policies. It is high time to realize that no affluent nation can survive by keeping a large number of nations or people poor and depressed and selling arms and defense equipments and following consumerism. It is high time to realize that terrorism and religious fundamentalism add miseries and sufferings of the humanity and bring hell on earth.
From Dooms to Booms
When implementing the above policies and strategies, people will come out with innovative ideas, plans and strategies and to apply them in agriculture, industry and the service sector within three years. All these will push up economic activities, including global trade and business. International cooperation between developed and developing or underdeveloped societies and nations would emerge so as to ensure a minimum development and standard of living for all. The people will dictate their terms of peace and co-existence over the Governments and the Terrorist Organizations, including aggressive and fundamentalist religions.

About the Author

Dr. Raju M. Mathew is a strategist and theoretician with strong background in Economics, Cybernetics, Education and Information Science & Technology with long years of experience in teaching and research, including directing a major research project and supervising ten doctoral works. With the publication of his book, ‘Library Resource Allocation’ from England in 1981 he has been recognized as a theoretician and strategic thinker, that made the Netherlands based FID to nominate him as one among the International Committee on Research on Theoretical Basis of Information Science in 1983. He formulated two basic theories of knowledge consumption and knowledge production that got published jointly by the FID and the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1985 in their work, ‘Theoretical Problems of Informatics’.. Now they are known in his name and become the field for doctoral research.

In 2005, Prof. Mathew proposed Knowmatics and Knowledge Technology in the place of Computer Science and Information Technology for processing and handling knowledge and also set the International Forum for Knowmatics & Knowledge Technology (IFKT); http://www.ifkt.net. Dr. Mathew on 25th Oct. 2008 in his letter addressed to The National, forecasted the fall of oil price to the extent of $ 40 per barrel within a period of two months when the price was $78. In his web site: http://www.mathewrm.com , in Sept 2000, when IT was in boom, he successfully predicted the Great Crisis of IT within a period of five months and in April 2001, his was the only site on IT crisis. Dr. Raju M. Mathew can be contacted by mobile: 0097155-7423450 and e-mail: rajoocyber@yahoo.com.

p.s. if Robert jumps in front of the A-train, I won’t be able to get to the Port Authority bus terminal.

Call me sardonic, but I want to be able to blame someone so I can shred him. I want people to be friggin’ accountable! I want heads on sticks. Now, I realize that won’t get me anywhere, but it will fell good!

For a lot of folks in America they’ve been at step 6 for 7 or 8 years or even longer. I grew up in a steeltown that was abandoned by the rest of the country about 1975, if you want to see the future go to Youngstown Ohio. It’s been like that for over a quarter of a century, read the police blotter. That is the future. Very wealthy and very poor and very few in between. The middle class has been gutted in this country, the policies and lack of regulation and enforcement have caused this. This is not a natural disaster, this is both man made and deliberate.

Buy canned goods, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to stock up on ammo, even if you don’t own a gun, it might make a good barter item.