Where is Friedman's article, could you post a link. O.K. ________________________________ From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx> To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 4:08 PM Subject: [lit-ideas] Tom Friedman's Article I read Tom Friedman's article. The sovereign debt that Friedman is talking about is of course the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain). At the moment they are the most severely affected by debt. We're actually the worst in debt, but they're feeling the effects first; Greece most of all for now probably because they're the smallest. If Greece defaults on its debt, investors lose whatever they've invested in that country. Investors are hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, banks, construction companies, etc. They all lose money. If they lose money, people who have money in mutual funds, construction stocks, whatever, don't get paid and a deflationary cycle beings (i.e. if people don't get paid, they can't buy, if they can't buy, there's no reason for factories to make things, if factories aren't working, people aren't working and can't buy and it begins to spiral downward into depression). So Friedman is working off the deflationary model. The contagion is when the other countries begin to default on paying back loans and everybody goes into a depression. Depression is what the Fed is terrified of, and apparently what Tom Friedman is afraid of. Depression is why the Fed is promoting inflation. I think what Friedman is saying is that we, the U.S., are also in a sovereign debt crisis. We are up to our eyeballs in debt along with everybody else. However, what he's not saying is that corporations were the cause of this problem. Corporations were promoting debt on steroids, especially in the real estate market. NINJA (no income, no job) loans, liar loans, banks and other financial corporations were giving mountains of money to anyone with a pulse, never asking if they could get repaid, just lumping the loans together and selling them to each other as sound investments, which again means hedge funds, pension funds, whatever anyone was invested in. These 'investments' were given the highest rating by rating agencies. It was the way to make money out of thin air basically, greed run wild, the financialization of the economy instead of old fashioned manufacturing. The corporations during the housing bubble did everything in their power to deregulate, i.e., remove government's role in slowing them down from selling this stuff. When people began to default the whole thing went down and it was all government's fault for not regulating. Goldman Sachs was a prime mover in advising Greece all along. However, if anyone watched that documentary on Monsanto, they'll see that government and corporations are virtually one and the same, not just in food but in all corporations, whether it's news, transportation, anything. Corporations make the laws, Congress rubber stamps the laws. The bottom line with Goldman Sachs and with all corporations is that they're out to make money for themselves and their investors. They absolutely absolutely do not care about the country or anybody in it. Today deregulation is continuing, also on steroids, in the form of the tea party, who the Republicans are manipulating to eviscerate government altogether. They're defunding the EPA, which is to say our air and our water is now industry's to do what they want with. That's where we're different from the 90's. In the 90's people got it that the government was on their side. Today people are brainwashed that government is the enemy. They want Obama to do something, but Obama is like all presidents, another pretty face while corporations rule. We aren't a capitalist country. We're a corporatocracy. Capitalism is based in competition. Corporations do everything they can to eliminate competition so they can make money for their shareholders. That's why they exist, literally. And they have all the protections of people. Recently the Supreme Court ruled that they can donate as much money as they want to election campaigns, no disclosures are necessary. The power they had is now logarithmically greater. Enter limits to growth and resource depletion which says growth is over. Without growth, investment is over. That's where I don't understand Goldman Sachs. They know about oil and all the other commodities. Goldman Sachs thinks this is the 30's all over again and they'll make lots of money off of it, and they may, for a while, but how do you keep cooking when your pantry is emptying out? It's like they're in denial seeing only dollar signs. And they're the ones who are advising everybody else. In fact, they effectively run the government. Hank Paulson, secretary of the treasury under Bush, had been a CEO of Goldman Sachs. The Goldman Sachs pedigree runs throughout the political system, whether state or federal. Effectively, they rule the world, and they're making money no matter what happens, at least for now. Corruption on Wall Street is so endemic and so widespread that it collapses countries. As far as Tom Friedman, he does campaign for the climate, and that's a good thing, since that's resource depletion in the end. However, he does it from the perspective of keeping the status quo with renewables, and that can't be done. Everything has to be rethought from the ground up, transportation, food, everything. Certainly junk will go away. Humans are not stepping up to the rethinking plate, so nature will do it for them. In the end, nature bats last, and a system based on rabid meaningless consumption had to end up this way. I'm seeing a paradigm shift in the making, but the good news is that once it all shakes out, the world will really be a much nicer place. Getting to that place might be a little lumpy, or not, depending on how much kicking and screaming we do to hang on to the old ways. We'll just have to wait and see. Andy