Thomas Friedman Calls For Green Revolution
Hindsight is 20/20. Foresight; Well, it depends on your perspective. Take the war in Iraq, for example. 30% of us had the foresight to see the travesty coming; Yet we invaded, and arrogantly pronounced our "mission accomplished". Just look at how things turned out.
Now everyone is concerned about something which, to my admittedly biased eyes, is obvious. In the very near future, we are going to need to shift away from fossil fuels and start utilizing renewable energy sources. This is not a new line of thinking. Unfortunately, we are slow to adapt. Why only now do we strive to create a sustainable economy? Why only now are we, as a whole, asking ourselves the questions that the few asked earlier and were mocked for? Why have we allowed our culture to deteriorate to the point that we are unable adapt without usurping our status quo?
Thomas Friedman is asking the same question that I am, but from a different perspective. He is thinking in economic terms. He is thinking of solving our problems the same way we have for the last hundred years. The problem with his line of thinking is that it is constrained by his disillusion with the free market system we have in place. He wants the system to work for us, and he believes that the system is in place for us. He is wrong, because he fails to include in his calculations things like greed, fear, corruption, and bigotry. He wants something to happen within a system designed to trample over new ideas, allowing only the most connected and expedient to survive. He wants a revolution of thinking, but he's talking to the wrong crowd.
Still, he has a hell of a good point.
Michael
3 comments:
Is this guy related to Milton Friedman? Milton Friedman and his accomplices have f**d up a good part of the world, including the USA. Their belief that the free market solves all problems and is all knowing and all good is a fallacy that hides cruelty in practice.
Thomas Friedman's lament that the world is "flat" seems to be his way of complaining that some of the poorest people in the world now have access to a slightly less poor lifestyle and that they will drag others down. If only they'd remain dirt poor and work in sweat shops for pennies.
What he doesn't admit is that the middle class is disappearing, and the new "middle" is sinking to lower economic levels (in developed countries, like ours), in order to support a much smaller and much much wealthier elite.
Milton Friedman and his followers, including Dick Cheney, were/are part of that elite. In practice, the philosophy requires some people to be expendable, so that when they commit suicide over debt caused by global speculation, or when they are killed or tortured for not bowing to the free market, that's just the system coming to a new equilibrium. They'd as soon swat most of us like flies.
I realize flat and crowded can be interpreted in more than one way, but it seems as if the obvious conclusion is there are too many people. And, the most expedient solution is to lose some of them. That's scary, unless you own Blackwater, and then you make money off it. War, two birds with one stone.
Otherwise, the global weirding rings true, and so does the need for real energy change. I'm not in favor of 100,000 people f**king up 5-10 years of their lives working by themselves for nothing in their garages, in the hope that a few will strike the lottery with their inventions.
There ought to be a middle ground between this extreme form of individualism (where individuals bear all the risk) and complete government control (where individuals bear none).
I think the link in this blogpost is broken- it leads to an article about the porn industry doing well because of those "stimulus" checks.
All I can say is... it figures!
Das link... DAS LINK!!!
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