From his throne, Thomas Friedman calls Boomers bad

Would you buy a used car from this man, even if you could afford it? (Photo of Thomas Friedman/Wiki Commons)

On Meet the Press back in September, 2011, Thomas Friedman said:

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.

The Rich ARE Different: They lie, cheat and steal more

Princess Diana may be one of the few rich people who actually felt--and showed--compassion. Here, dancing at the White House with John Travolta. (Wiki Commons)

Quite a number of years ago, I was at pains to convince my young nephew that rich people were just as nice as the rest of us. I took him to the riding academy where I kept my very modest pleasure horse, and introduced him to a top jumper rider who had more valuable horses on board there than I would ever see in my life. That rider was a nice guy, and talked basketball with my nephew for quite a while. My lesson was a success. And apparently it was wrong.

Rich people are unethical

A new study published by the National Academy of Sciences found that rich people “are more likely to take candy from children, lie, cheat, endorse unethical behavior at work, and cut off pedestrians while driving…,” according to a report in Huffington Post.

The Greatest Generation=The Biggest Pigs

It noted their feelings of entitlement and inattention to consequences of their actions on others. Indeed, it appeara to me that while rich people of any age may engage in such attitudes and behaviors, those attitudes and behaviors are ingrained in the so-called Greatest Generation, the one that grabbed all the goodies while the grabbing was good, tossed its own kids―the Baby Boom―into the quagmire of Vietnam, and  the snake pit of fierce competition for education and jobs and housing caused by the enormous number of boomers who didn’t screw themselves into existence, but were selfishly mass-produced by greedy WWIIers. 

Here is just one hint that the study applies to the “Greatest Generation” as well as those identified as wealthy:

In another study, nearly half of all drivers of expensive cars cut off pedestrians at crosswalks, while no drivers of the cheapest cars and about 30 percent of drivers of cheaper cars did the same thing.” 

These days, an awful lot of boomers are driving cheaper and cheapest cars―as are their own kids whom they have been unable to save from the cascading debacle caused by, to begin, Reagan and enhanced mightily by the Bushes, I and II (and heaven forfend, don’t give us No. III.) No wonder my 36-year-old friend recently FBed about the “old farts” cutting off on the roads, honking at her for turning a corner and assorted other ills all in one short shopping trip on the day well-off local oldsters get their rather redundant benefit checks in the mail.

Bush: A Generational Throwback to the "Greatest Generation"

The same HuffPo article did, however, go a long way to explaining how the Shrub, despite being a nominal boomer (the cohort that never experienced the widespread wealth and security of its parents’ generation, the one that grabbed most of it) could do the reprehensible things he did, from approving waterboarding to destroying nations. HuffPo noted that “report from researchers at the University of California-Berkeley released in December came to a similar conclusion: That rich people are less likely to feel empathy.”

How the Greatest Generation silenced the baby boom

Boomers have gotten a raw deal; it isn’t BOOMERS who have destroyed the nation. It is the wealthy. But it’s Boomers who get the blame, for the simple reason that the wealthy control the media and therefore can put the blame off on whomever they want. Who did they choose? Boomers…just as they have done since 1964, when the boomers first noticed they were getting a raw deal. Overcrowded colleges and no jobs thereafter. Vietnam (misery, maybe death) or protest (jail, maybe death: Kent State). The wealthy and the WWII Generation had to ensure boomer silence. They did it the first time by making it necessary for every family to have to breadwinners to live less well than the WWII Generation did on one, and then blaming the boomers for the breakdown of the family. The fact that the WWII Generation voted itself increases in social benefits year in and year out didn’t seem to track for the boomers. It's not hard to see why boomers also have a corner on increasing suicide rates.

It should now. Because of what they extracted from us, we have little for ourselves and nothing for our children. Because of the inflation caused in part by funding both the Greediest Generation's increasing appetite for stuff, and our own children's upbringing, we have saved little. Add that to the diminished pensions (virtually no corporate ones) and diminishing Social Security/Medicare benefits, and the boomers are in the worst position of any generation to weather the current socio-political financial storm.

Who is the greediest generation?
Are we boomers the greediest generation, as so many have alleged? Not by half. Look at the WWII Generation (NOT the greatest in anything except greed) and the tiny Brokaw cohort that enabled the WWIIers. They’ve already gotten theirs, paid directly from boomers' increasing FICA (it's a transfer payment, folks, not an "account" in your name), and from companies that funded their retirements but made boomers pay their own via 401Ks and IRAs. 

That’s your answer.

Boomer Mortgage Default Examined

Overstressed Boomers! Help send your local one-percenter on this tour...but help yourself at the same time! (Wiki Commons)

Remember when Other People’s Money―the play, the movie and the activity―was all the rage? OPM was the best sort of currency to use and lose. But it was limited, back then, to corporate raiders and other reptilian creatures of the putative one-percent.

Now…it’s the people’s turn. The REAL people. In the current economic climate, with people reduced to their “skill set” and their assets reduced to smoke and ash, it’s time for turnabout. After all, if you have nothing to lose because you’ve lost it all, why not just get free and let the phoney structures of modern commerce fall down around the ears of the oligarchs who raped you?

As a comment on Smirking Chimp recently explained it:

Car dealers are selling to bad credit customers, and you can pay by the week too. Even banks are investing in the pawn shops, which are lenders of last resort. And used furniture and appliance stores are selling the used furniture of dead baby boomers while rent-to-own and other businesses are adjusting to our new banana republic type economy for ordinary American people.

Dead baby boomers, arise!

Dead baby boomers. The very thing the youngest of the generations has been calling for, blaming the boomers for sucking all the juice out of the economy. It is difficult to deny, especially when such belly-walkers as George W. Bush and the Enron Club were baby boomers. But the fact is, the boomers were just as set up as everyone else. By whom? By the Greatest Generation, a ludicrous meme coined and profited from by Tom Brokaw, Talking-Head-in-Chief of his own generation, the tiny one between the so-called Greatest and the boomers. The generation that could waltz onto the world stage and grab anything it wanted, simply because―at whatever age―they had virtually no competition for the goodies of society appropriate to their age.

Brokaw brokers generational warfare

So there it is; a self-aggrandizing and none-too-sensitive member of the smallest generation in eons (Brokaw) elevates the most pampered generation in history (the WWII generation, or “greatest”) to godlike status in order to trash the largest generation ever, the boomers.

It’s beautiful. It lets the Brokaw contingent feel like king-makers; it lets the WWII generation strut around like they enjoyed the divine right of kings, and; it bashes the boomers with every barrel of every gun in existence from those wielded by the oldest WWII shirkers (in the US: in the UK, they really did fight and win a war) to the pop-guns of the youngest member of Generation Whine and everything in between.  No wonder there’s so much used furniture of dead boomers around.

Boomers: Bashed, or belly up? Your choice.

Here’s the solution for boomers: go belly up. Do it whenever you decide you’ve had enough of sucking up morsels left by the masters of the universe (a motley collection of bankers, politicians, old money inheritors, and so on) to stave off starvation for just one more day. Do it to save yourselves―something you’re not really good at, being much better at ending Southeast Asian wars, ending various forms of apartheid in the world or at least diminishing same―and maybe to save your kids.

How will going belly up help? 

• It’s honest; you ARE belly up, whether you realize it yet or not. When your retirement accounts lose 40 percent or more due to anyone’s efforts except yours, your house is worth less than the flimsy sticks it’s made of, and the government can pull the rug out of the most meaningless social benefit in the western world, Social Security, any time it wants―you ARE belly up.
• It makes sense. In cases such as this, using OPM is the most sensible thing you can do. You haven’t got any, anyway. So use theirs. How? Default on your upside-down mortgage…but buy some new cars first that might last until your credit is repaired (seven to ten years). Make sure you’ve got a paid-for bolt hole someplace…maybe the vacation house you bought and couldn’t afford so you rented it out. Take it back. Winterize it. Live frugally. 

 It would seem only right to abandon your mortgage. You can't pay it anyway. And the wealthy do it all the time. When they have a doggie investment, whether their own house or the company you work for, they divest without giving a second thought to the collateral damage.

Bush made it painful to dig out, but not impossible

You can, too. But there is one difference between you and them. They can also declare bankruptcy and get a clean slate. You can’t. Why? In a word, George W. Bush. His 2005 credit reform laws ensured that only corporations and wealthy people who use the law the way corporations do can get a clean slate. The rest of us? Serfs forever, as a bankruptcy discharge is now all but impossible for the working masses. The ONLY avenue left to exact any justice from the jackals who earned back their investment in your home during the first few years of usurious interest they charged you it to default. Walk away from your mortgage, from your home.

Yes, they have indeed added insult to injury.