Tom Friedman Blows Green Smoke Up Joe Taxpayer's Pantlegs

The Price of Supporting American Job Outsourcing and In-shoring

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.

Elitist champion of American job outsourcing/in-shoring, flat, hot, smelly and overcrowded Flat One Worlder, Tom Friedman, writes in this NY Times article entitled “The Price Is Not Right” that he doesn’t expect much from the G-20 meeting this week, and wishes “the leaders of the world's 20 top economies would commit themselves to a new standard of accounting — call it "Market to Mother Nature" accounting.”

Hmm. Does anyone hear another disastrous sales pitch in the offing? Why yes! Carbon taxation is Tom Friedman’s latest mantra!

Yours truly completely believes that solid green energy products and technologies have the potential to be better both for our environment and to stimulate our economy by providing American jobs at all levels. Certainly, no one can accuse champions like Al Gore of not being passionate about the challenges that climate change present. So why would anyone listen to Tom Friedman, who gets it wrong every time – he supported the Iraq War, he supports handing over American white collar jobs to India -- and now he is hustling yet another get Joe Taxpayer to cough up more dough scheme to once again benefit his crony insiders on our dwindling dime? Ben Smith’s blog at Politico offers a few insights here into the ehm, crony conflict of interest details in Friedman’s latest sales pitch on carbon taxes and cap and trade schemes.

To better understand the conflict of interest details, here is a background refresher on this administration’s few elites (also proponents of outsourcing or human trafficking) with beltway ties can capitalize on man-made global warming, which some investigative journalists have exposed as “a money-generating hoax,” with “Obama working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.”

In Friedman’s latest promotion piece to further disregard the growing numbers of unemployed and underemployed taxpaying Americans who will not profit from said carbon taxes, (who have also just come off of eight disastrous Bush years of subsidizing Halliburton & Co. in their murderous war on Iraq combined with the sociopathic push to hand American white collar jobs to India) corporate welfare mouthpiece-salesman, Tom runs a fast hustle by equating the financial system “meltdown” with what he refers to as “the climate system meltdown.”

Got that? Financial meltdown = climate system meltdown.

How is that? Because Tom Friedman said so.

Two stated problems: “financial” and “climate.” Huh? Matt Taibbi wrote a terrific article here in his hilarious assessment about how this corporate welfare megaphone makes it up as he goes along… how this

“porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.”

After proclaiming the two stated problems, Friedman then calls in and quotes a couple of experts, at least one whose expertise just so happens to be in the lofty, flat-worldish field known as outsourcing or human trafficking. (See below).

Never mind the fact that a NY Times Op-Ed propagandist (oops journalist) like Tom Friedman also said we should just all go shopping, which really means “should all go to hell” to save the economy - despite the fact that Tom supports importing Indians to take our jobs -- and this hate-thy-neighbor, sociopathic example of what America offers for journalism is a slap in the face to every citizen in this country as Friedman channels his inner man-crush by quoting an executive from one of the biggest human traffickers, Infosys, responsible for America’s disappearing jobs:

"When the balance sheet of a company does not capture the true costs and risks of its business activities," and when that company is too big to fail, "you end up with them privatizing their gains and socializing their losses," Nandan Nilekani, the co-chairman of the Indian technology company Infosys, remarked to me.”

Splendid! Who knew that the self-appointed climate expert could learn all about the financial crisis from an Indian outsourcer?

In addition to this “financial meltdown”, expert Tom also proclaims there is a simultaneous “climate” meltdown and hints that somebody (in the U.S.) has to foot the bill for both orchestrated problems so hey, why not devise a solution to a couple of problems that were cooked up by a few elitist insiders to line their pockets with taxpayer dough and then really, really stick it to these sorry-assed American taxpayers?

Quoth the expert protagonist of American Job Killing:

…"the reason we're experiencing a simultaneous meltdown in the financial system and the climate system is because we have been mispricing risk in both arenas — producing a huge excess of both toxic assets and toxic air that now threatens the stability of the whole planet.”

And, right as rain, Frank, the kind of “toxic air” Friedman is blowing amounts to more smoke up the gre$n pants legs of a few well connected insiders chomping at the bit to make a fast return on the stated carbon problem that Tom equates with the AIG mess:

“Just as AIG sold insurance derivatives at prices that did not reflect the real costs and risks of massive defaults, oil companies, coal companies and electric utilities today are selling energy products at prices that do not reflect the real costs to the environment and real risks of disruptive climate change (so future taxpayers will end up paying the difference).”

Hey Tom, you know something about AIG, eh? Well, here is Something Worse Than AIG: IBM Seeks Federal Stimulus Money While Outsourcing Jobs From The Hudson Valley to India.

Then, Friedman continues to profess that if products are “mispriced” and do not reflect “the real costs and risks” associated with their usage, people go to excess. “And that is what happened in the financial marketplace and in the energy/environmental marketplace during the credit bubble."

Bubbles? Oh really, Tom? You want to start talking bubbles? How about the dot.com bubble where your pals assigned themselves boatloads of tech stock options in all kinds of dogs of startups and made a clean sweep at the trough? Think the same thing can’t happen all over again with the same Chicago Climate Exchange cronies promoting a public rip-off funded by Obama before he was even POTUS?

Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, many investigative journalists report that Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress, and who better than Friedman to wind up throwing out this corporate sales pitch? While our nation’s “financial” problem can be tempered by employing our own citizens so they can start spending again, Obama his Economic Advisors have pledged to keep handing over American jobs to India anyway, and no amount of carbon taxation is going to stop the bleeding of our jobs which is eroding our economy and our society. But guys like Friedman don’t care about human beings, only human trafficking.
And does Friedman actually expect anyone to believe that by taxing carbon offenders, they won’t find loopholes, i.e., more business as usual?

“Our biggest financial-services companies, some of which came to be seen as too big to fail, engaged in complex financial trading schemes that did not adequately price in the costs and risks of a market reversal. And our biggest energy companies, utilities and auto companies became dependent on cheap hydrocarbons that spin off climate-changing greenhouse gases, and we clearly have not forced them, through a carbon tax, to price in the true risks and costs to society from these climate-changing fuels.”

Re: above – large and small corporations know how to work tax cuts and loopholes, so carbon taxing is still “taxing” a bunch of lawyered-up insiders who will exploit those loopholes, the same way that Friedman’s outsourcing pals exploit human beings in the form of labor. Read Citizen Carrie’s post here about Wachovia employees being forced to train their foreign replacements.

Case in point: Forget the word “carbon” for a moment, and take the case of an outsourcing shop “headquartered” in North Carolina, Synechron, that specializes in the outsourcing or human trafficking of cheap, imported labor to the U.S. from India to take jobs away from Americans.

Rather than Tom taking his puffed up journalistic backside down to North Carolina to interview the fired locals from Wachovia who have lost their jobs because of the legalized, Indian cheap labor lobby that Friedman triumphs, he instead is content to dispense quotes from officials at companies like Infosys who are complicit in this war on America’s white collar middle class.
Friedman goes on to proclaim that we need new banking regulations that reins in the leverage and speculative trading that big banks and insurance companies can undertake. Fair enough. But THEN he displays his salesy, bag-of burning rats in a meth lab, pseudo analysis here:

“And this is ALSO why we need a tax on carbon — so we and our power utilities don't become permanently addicted to cheap coal that makes for lower electricity prices today but spits out toxic greenhouse gases that have to be paid for by future generations tomorrow.”

Huh? Coal is bad. Check. Let’s tax all those American hillbillies who rely on coal to heat their dreadful shanties. Check. Let’s tax Utility companies that don’t do business with businessman Al Gore’s portfolio companies. Check. Let’s tax every effing body in this country, while we’re at it – to subsidize all of that other gre$n stuff that Gore’s VC firm is pushing. Check!

And just when I thought I would never, ever agree with anything this guy has to say, Friedman ejects this gem:

“This capitalist engine doesn't need to be discarded; it needs some fixes. For starters, we need to get back to basics — accountable lending, prudent saving, reasonable leverage and, most important, more engineering of goods than just financial products.”

Yay, Tom! I couldn’t agree with you more. I also want to see our capitalist system restored with some good, old-fashioned, non-sociopathic regulation and a stop to selling American jobs to India to end this human trafficking once and for all.

But wait…he resorts AGAIN to more pap by quoting a tank of hot air, finding another ‘expert’ on this mind-blowing, newly plucked from the nether region, stealth term called “destructive creation”:

“Some of our biggest financial firms got away from their original purpose — to fund innovation and to finance the process of "creative destruction," whereby new technologies that improve people's lives replace old ones, said Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, in an interview in The American Interest. Instead, he added, too many banks got involved in exotic and incomprehensible financial innovations — to simply make money out of money — which ended up as "destructive creation."

Gee whillackers, Mr. Hooper... By now, just about every Joe Blow on the street knows that “to simply make money out of money” has kind of put us in deep doo-doo, but I suppose Tom needed to quote an expert anyway…

“Destructive creation”, indeed. For this complicated, exotic term, to guys like Tom, in the end, translates to ‘kill American jobs by handing them to Indians AND get American taxpayers to support us greedy elites in every scheme we can pull out of our patooties and get these deplorable American plebes to subsidize.’

By now, it is plain to see that Thomas L. Friedman is every corporate welfare queen’s biggest proponent of the Cash Cow of Indian Outsourcing and mega-propagandist in this war on America’s educated middle class destructively created by them.

-2Truthy