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| Would you buy a used car from this man, even if you could afford it? (Photo of Thomas Friedman/Wiki Commons) |
We had a generational shift. We went from the Greatest Generation which the philosophy basically was ‘save and invest’ and we are still living off of their saving and investing. To the Baby Boom Generation whose philosophy turned out to be ‘borrow and spend.’ And we’ve really shifted from a generation born in The Depression, World War 2, and the Cold War, these were serious people. They wouldn’t think of shutting down the government for a minute, ok [sic]. To a generation basically that is much less serious. We’ve gone from basically the values of the Greatest Generation, which my friend philosopher Doug Simon calls ‘sustainable values.’ Values that sustain. To a Baby Boom Generation whose values are situational values. Do whatever the situation allows. You put them all together and I think you really account for a lot of the hole we're in right now structurally.
Blather. Blather by a man married to a woman whose family fortune was estimated by Forbes, in 2007, at $4.1 billion. Later, the same Wikipedia article notes, it plummeted to about $25 million in the aftermath of the meltdown: I don’t figure they were eating cat food. Still, they manipulated the system and filed bankruptcy for the company in 2009. One wonders what they were doing in the meantime. Friedman, for one, was living in a house worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $9 million on seven-plus acres within toasting distance of the toney Bethesda Country Club, and raking in 500 grand for speaking engagements.
Rich Boomer says Boomers are BAAAAD people
What are his values? Apparently, they include living high―higher even than most WWII folks―and convincing the rest of his generational cohort, the Baby Boom, that we are BAAAAD people for getting sucked into immense debt that we can’t pay. When his wife’s family business couldn’t pay its debt, it didn’t act like “serious people” and work like beavers―or slaves―to pay things off. No, sir. It went belly up…so the REST of us could pay it off in higher prices and other cascading fallout from major business bankruptcies. But we’d surely want to pay it off if we were “serious people,” wouldn’t we, Tom? (Except, of course, those who couldn't take it a minute more and committed suicide."
How, then, does a member of the generation most grievously harmed in the financial meltdown, after years of being sucked dry by its greedy parents who consistently voted themselves more benefits and voted down school construction bonds for Boomer’s kids…how does he justify such a mouthful of utter gastrointestinal debris?
Simple. It’s because the wealthy lie, cheat and steal almost as a matter of course…and divine right. Don’t believe it? Click here.
