2009 Jaffa And tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life

Shoshan Purim

And tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life...

Link to a Tom Friedman article above.
Not much good news though TASE and Nasdaq are going up after Citibank.

2009 Jaffa Small Business and Small Countries

February 22, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist Thomas L Friedman nytimes
Uncle Sam (me) agrees with tom that Small Business and Small Countries have an advantage.

Start Up the Risk-Takers

Reading the news that General Motors and Chrysler are now lining up for another $20 billion or so in government aid — on top of the billions they’ve already received or requested — leaves me with the sick feeling that we are subsidizing the losers and for only one reason: because they claim that their funerals would cost more than keeping them on life support. Sorry, friends, but this is not the American way. Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we’ll get out of this crisis.

G.M. has become a giant wealth- destruction machine — possibly the biggest in history — and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.

You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.

If we are going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can’t only be on office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.

I’ve been traveling all across the country on a book tour, and every evening I return to my hotel with my pockets full of business cards from inventors in clean energy. Our country is still bursting with innovators looking for capital. So, let’s make sure all the losers clamoring for help don’t drown out the potential winners who could lift us out of this. Some of our best companies, such as Intel, were started in recessions, when necessity makes innovators even more inventive and risk-takers even more daring.

Yes, we have to shore up the banking system, which underpins everything; and finding a fair way to prevent hardworking people, who played by the rules, from losing their homes to foreclosure is both right and essential for stability.

But beyond that, let’s think, talk and plan in more aspirational ways. We’re down, but we’re not out. As we invest taxpayer money, let’s do it with an eye to starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers. Our motto should be, “Start-ups, not bailouts: nurture the next Google, don’t nurse the old G.M.’s.”

To be fair, the stimulus package that the Obama team and the Democrats in Congress recently passed — with virtually no Republican help — goes some way toward doing just that. Hat’s off for that. Now let’s do more.

The renewable-energy business — wind, solar and solar thermal — was almost dead in this country. Most new projects stopped last fall because they depended for their financing on selling their renewable energy tax credits to Wall Street firms. As those Wall Street firms went bust or suffered steep losses, they had no need for tax credits because they had no profits to offset. The stimulus package created a mechanism for renewable energy innovators to bypass Wall Street and monetize their tax credits directly through the U.S. Treasury, for any project that starts between now and the end of 2010.

The wind and solar industries in America “were dead in the fourth quarter,” said John Woolard, chief executive of BrightSource Energy, which builds and operates cutting-edge solar-thermal plants in the Mojave Desert. Almost five gigawatts of new solar-thermal projects — the equivalent of five big nuclear plants — at various stages of permitting were being held up because of a lack of financing.

“All of these projects will now go ahead,” said Woolard. “You are talking about thousands of jobs ... We really got something right in this legislation.”

These jobs will be in engineering, constructing and operating huge solar systems and wind farms and manufacturing new photovoltaics. Together they will drive innovation in all these areas — and move wind and solar technology down the cost-volume learning curve so they can compete against fossil fuels and become export industries at the “ChinIndia price,” that is the price at which they can scale in China and India.

That is how taxpayer money should be used to stimulate: limited financing, for a limited time, targeted on an industry bristling with new technology start-ups that, with a little push from Uncle Sam, won’t just survive this crisis but help us thrive when it is over. We need, and the world needs, an America that is thriving not just surviving.

2009 Jaffa Miriam and her 6 children are threatened with eviction out into to streets

Wednesday, March 4

Alert for miriam's home - barricading NOW

Hi,

All of those in Jaffa, please go to Miriam's home at the corner of Jerusalem Boulevard 37, NOW
She has not been able to find a flat and they will evict her and her 6 children out into the streets TODAY.
We can and must prevent it.
We need you all over there

Monday, March 2

Miriam and her 6 children are threatened with eviction out into to streets

Miriam, strong and very bright, has had a tough life. But it taught her how to fight, how to be assertive and how to get what she needs. But now things have taken a worse turn.

Today the police arrived to evict her from the home she squatted about half a year ago, out into the rainy streets.

She has nowhere to go. Quick intervention gave her another two days, in which she must find another flat. Miriam's children all go to school or to a kindergarden except the 2 year old one.
They live on social security. Miriam has a tough time finding employment as her youngest daughter, two years old, has no kinder garden and private childcare is too expensive. The family lives on about 2.400 NIS monthly. But over the last two months Miriam didn't get any money due to a bureaucratic mess. In addition she is entitled to 1200 NIS a month rent subsidy, but given the fact that a small 1 room studio flat in Jaffa costs about 2000 NIS at least per months, the family's chances of finding a rental flat on the public market are close to zero. Of course they are eligible for public housing but the waiting list is taking years, as there are no flats available.
After all, the country has been selling of public housing flats and instead of investing the money obtained from the sales in constructing new public housing (as was the plan), not even one public house has been constructed over the last twenty years inside the green border line. Wages and social security payments have gone down drastically, rent has gone up and rent support has gone down. More and more people are becoming homeless. But no one really seems to care, free market is "great" after all.

If she will be kicked out, the welfare department will take her kids into foster care. Miriam is a good mother. It would make more sense if they would assist her pay the rent. After all putting 6 kids into care would not only be most tramatic for all, but is also very expensive..... Go figure.

And those in Jaffa, we may need you to defend Miriam's home, this week. Stay alert.