David Sirota- "Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman"

[ralps]

David Sirota wrote a good article about Tom Friedman on Sunday. Here is the link & some paragraphs- http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=C0EB620B-E0C3-F084-DFE28A740D37E6E2

Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman
I've documented repeatedly how New York Times columnist Tom Friedman parrots the propaganda of Big Money, using his column to legitimize some of the worst, most working-class-persecuting policies this country has seen in the last century - all while bragging on television that he doesn't even bother read the details of the policies he advocates for. I have always believed Friedman's perspective comes from the bubble he lives in - that is, I have always believed he feels totally at ease shilling for Big Money and attacking workers because from the comfortable confines of the Washington suburbs he lives in and the elite cocktail parties he attends, what Friedman says seems mainstream to him. But I never had any idea how dead on I was about the specific circumstances of Friedman's bubble - and how it potentially explains a lot more than I ever thought.
As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." He "married into one of the 100 richest families in the country" - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.

Let's be clear - I'm a capitalist, so I have no problem with people doing well or living well, even Tom Friedman. That said, this does potentially explain an ENORMOUS amount about Friedman's perspective. Far from the objective, regular-guy interpreter of globalization that the D.C. media portrays him to be, Friedman is a member of the elite of the economic elite on the planet Earth. In fact, he's married into such a giant fortune, it's probably more relevant to refer to him as Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman than columnist Tom Friedman, both because that's more descriptive of what he represents, and more important for readers of his work to know so that they know a bit about where he's coming from.

Mind you, I don't think everyone needs to publish their net worth. But Friedman's not everyone. He's not just "doing pretty well" and is not just any old columnist. He's not just a millionaire or a multimillionaire - he's member of one of the wealthiest families in the world, and is one of the most influential media voices on the planet, who writes specifically about economic/class issues. If politicians are forced to disclose every last asset they own, you'd think at the very least, the New York Times - in the interest of basic disclosure - should have a tagline under Friedman's economic columns that says "Tom Friedman is an heir to a multi-billion-dollar business empire."
snip

:hi: :loveya: :hug: :pals: :woohoo:

[Captain Hilts]

1. What's the "Bethesda" Country Club? There's Chevy Chase, Columbia, Kenwood

Congressional, i.e. "Congo, Avenel, Burning Tree.

Don't know the Bethesda Country Club.

[ralps]

4. Here's the website for the Bethesda Country Club

http://www.bethesdacountryclub.org/
:hi: :loveya: :hug: :pals: :woohoo:

[Captain Hilts]

13. I live on the same street as this club and have never heard of it! Thanks!

[On the Road]

2. Thanks for the Insight

I actually have mixed feelings on Thomas Friedman. On one hand, I am repelled by his support for the Iraq war and other neocon initiatives, although like a lot of people he seems to be backing away from them a little. He also lends his support to some very destructive public policies.

On the other hand, I truly liked "The World is Flat." It's not a complete story, but it's an important perspective on the positive side of what's happening with globalization. It helps explain Democratic support for policies that are sometimes attributed to pandering to large business interests. I believe it's important for Democrats to understand both sides of what's going on economically, and he presents a side that is often underrepresented in print.

Friedman is also not an economic Darwinist. He claims to be a strong supporter of government programs to offset the negative effects of globalization, going so far as to say that anyone who does not support such programs is both immoral and a fool. (I wish my Democratic congressman used language like that.)

There are definitely some disconnects in his statements on various subjects. I expect that the explanation is that Friedman lives in an upper-class bubble.

[Cassandra]

3. My great-grandmother was a Bucksbaum...

how did I miss out?

[acmejack]

5. If you wouldn't have entered that qualifier, you would have found

a legion of suitors...

[NNN0LHI]

6. But he just seems so "down home" in his writings and appearances K&R n/t

[ralps]

7. LOL Thanks NNN0LHI

:hi: :loveya: :hug: :pals: :woohoo:

[UTUSN]

8. K&R n/t

[HughBeaumont]

9. Well, that explains a lot, don't it?

This neo-lib offshoring fluffer sickens me to NO end. So now that I know he can't even begin to understand the very real suffering, hard luck and humiliation a worker who has just been priced out of his/her career faces, it feels kind of bittersweet that this dollish man's credibility on this subject has been destroyed completely. It's like my wife's friend is a pro-offshorer, anti-laborer libertarian, yet where does he live? In a $350,000 home, as a director for his daddy's company.

[glitch]

10. Lol! Libertarian working for Daddy just strikes me as hilarious.

Not sure why. :rofl:

[HughBeaumont]

15. He's like the quintessential son of privilege.

It's like, aren't libertarians generally about self-reliance? This guy did NOTHING to get where he's at but fall into the right family. He spouts the virtues of how job offshoring leads to lower prices which benefit all of us, the impact is minimal, "economics 101", blah blah blah blah BLAH! Like Tommy Freidmannnnn, this is a guy who's never EVER going to be in the position to see and live the other side of the coin, so it sounds SO easy to look down on the serfs and "tsk tsk" their plight.

[glitch]

18. I knew one too who was very big on "pulling himself up by his bootstraps"

why? He didn't work for Daddy, he worked for Daddy's best friend.
I love how these Daddy's boys try to convince themselves. They would be harmless fun if they weren't actually put in positions of power.
Bright side, at least their Daddies didn't buy them jobs in government. Amplifying the ineptitude, big time.

[mcscajun]

11. Explains a great deal...

...thanks for sharing.

[BlueEyedSon]

12. I've been reading TF in the NYT since 9/11.... he is a POS. nt

[Captain Hilts]

14. Journalism is a rich, Ivy-League kid's game now. nt

[Gabi Hayes]

16. among the VERY worst....... remember the underpants story?

http://www.gregpalast.com/index.php?tag=thomas_friedman

[Gabi Hayes]

17. how anybody can take that pompous, venal globalizer seriously is beyond

me:


FLATHEAD
The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.

By Matt Taibbi

So I tried not to think about it. But when I heard the book was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.



Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.


On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.



It's impossible to divorce The World Is Flat from its rhetorical approach. It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the most important columnist in America today." That it's Friedman's own colleague at the New York Times (Walter Russell Mead) calling him this, on the back of Friedman's own book, is immaterial. Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he's in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.



Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the outer limits of this trick's potential, and it's absolutely perfect, a stroke of genius, that he's choosing to argue that the world is flat. The only thing that would have been better would be if he had chosen to argue that the moon was made of cheese.

more
http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

one more thing. I watched just THIS much of him with Russert over the weekend

"blah blah blah....GLOCALIZATION....blah blah blah"

he really used that word