Mexico and Calderón Double Down on Digital City in Guadalajara

During the week of January 30th, Méxican President Felipe Calderón made a special trip to that nation’s second largest city Guadalajara to launch a new program: the Digital Creative City Project (gobienofederal, 2011). This project estimated to be worth US$10 million dollars is looking to attract entertainment, design, and digital art companies to the Jalisco region of México.

As Calderón enters into the final months of his presidency; he is embarking on a major push to use the sizable numbers of multinational companies that exist in Guadalajara and the surrounding Jalisco area (which happens to be México's second-largest population center) to lure major media players like Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp., the Walt Disney Company, and Sony Entertainment with the promise of sizable federal funding from the Méxican government. All of these moves will be made in order to try to put Guadalajara on the map as a major destination cog in digital media design and entertainment sector. This would enhance the region’s designation as the Silicon Valley of México.

In his 25 minute long address, Pres. Calderón touched on a wide area of initiatives, possibilities, and long-term goals in introducing the prospect of the Jalisco high-tech project (Walten and Doyle, 2012). As Calderón touched upon the various areas in his speech; the overreaching theme was the advancement of opportunities and the long reaching financial and social benefits of a successful project and what it would mean for the future of not just Guadalajara but for the entire Méxican nation. 

The entire speech can be heard at the link that I’m providing here on this blog piece. While the president mentioned international neighbor Canada often, the omission of possible partnerships with the government of the United States were clearly missing from his prepared text. This leaves one to wonder if this is another demarcation point for possible future strategic cooperation with other nations in the Western Hemisphere but not with the United States in particular.

In conclusion, Calderón's speech sets out some very interesting benchmarks in the terms of possible tremendous goals for not just the Méxican people; but for the emerging strength in terms of economics for Metropolitan Guadalajara. It will be truly interesting to see if these plans can take root and come to fruition in the policy of the next central government in México City. 

BBC. (2011, January 21). Profile: Felipe calderon. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12242685

gobienofederal. (2011). Presentation of the guadalajara digital city [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yqzySp0tLsM

TeamNAFTA. (2012). Guadalajara industrial profile[Web]. Retrieved from http://www.teamnafta.com/index.php/Market-Profiles/guadalajara.html

Walten, K., & Doyle, D. (2012, February 3). Ciudad creativa digital. Retrieved from http://www.mexipreneur.com/tag/ciudad-creativa-digital/

Life and Art imitate each other in the market place of humanity...

Understanding either the sociological, financial, or the psychological aspects of modern American consumerism can be a difficult task. No matter what one’s FICO score, past data mining information, or a litany of sociological testing background pervades to reveal; data is in other words the accumulation of information in the form of observation or estimation.  It is what drives the marketing and financial analysis fields to this very day.

In that light, no group of consumers has been studied in terms of their finances or consumable habits like Americans were during the 20^th century. While the specifics of the true analysis of the century (generally known as The American Century) have been studied in a very broad manner. These all centered on the single moments or the single large scale events (the Black Monday Wall Street Crash, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, the triad of assassinations of the progressive icons of the 1960s, and ultimately last innocents-Those who would be defined by the events of 9/11.).

The perspective on such matters has been in retrospective form studied in Mass Media.  The rise of cable series like Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Lies, Weeds, and The Wire are direct reflections of Hollywood’s vision of America in those terms.   The study of economic and sociological uniqueness of a group people like Generation X and the immediate demographic predecessors the Baby Boomers are vast. Outside of the children of the Great Depression (The Silent Generation) who roundly never knew any economic or sociological level of success over a period 20 years (1929-1949), these two generations cover the greatest expansion of personal wealth (the rise of home equity from the society of renters, the turn from a savers economy to investors economy). The generations that evolved from the hypocrisy of both post-wars (Prohibition and the rise of the modern American civil rights). The hidden peccadillos of the American suburbs of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s  (racial superiority, infidelity, sexual promiscuity, and misogyny), the social dilemmas aside, the great financial statements of the century were tied to these moments. Out of both World Wars after periods of intentional controlled economies, retooling from war time footing, and brief recessions came booms and eras of prosperity.

The overriding symbiotic relationship between the American way of life can be symbolized by the shows mentioned earlier. It is one matching which has generally matched the economic health of the nation. Of course as can be demonstrated by the leveraged speculation that typified the period leading to the crash of the 1929 market and subsequent decade long Great Financial Depression that followed. Eighty years later, after the passage of the ill timed Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 unintentionally had a cascade effect leading to many of the seismic collapses of great financial houses. A government in the Fall of 2008 reduced to picking “winners and losers” in the financial markets, economic engines, and watching helplessly as the markets punished excesses and scrambled to hoard cash when the cash and the equity markets shutdown and contracted to levels not seen since the beginning of the 1930s.

Some will see the exploitive nature of capitalism or the failure of the imposing any financial oligarchies saw their respective enterprises as their playgrounds or personal cash cows (Barbarians At The Gates) as a cautionary tale.  Meanwhile, there will be other individuals downstream of the carnage of governmental and financial mega powers choices that have been displayed as capitalism at its rawest form; shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad express what happens when a code of relativism becomes a way of life. The love of money and power are expressed in level of relative exploitation. The difference is that institutions with public sanction (Enron, Bear Stearns, and Country-wide Mortgage) are given a level of legal protection. Whereas, cartels of lawlessness and graft as exampled by the characters like Omar in The Wire, Walter White in Breaking Bad, or Nancy Botwin in Weeds are given to various degrees of government tenuous enforcement and prosecutorial pursuit. These are some of the great conundrums of American life.