Tom Friedman Blames the Victim for Subprime Values

from AlterNet's PEEK:



Tom Friedman Blames the Victim for Subprime Values

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, Majikthise at 1:50 PM on May 7, 2008.

The New York Times columnist is completely out of touch with the reality of ordinary Americans.



Tom Friedman blames the victims:



Friedman's sanctimonious attitude is offensive. A colleague posted this passage to a listerv yesterday. I was surprised to see so many progressives defending Friedman's basic point: Americans are morally bankrupt these days.

The mortgage crisis is not a reflection of the moral turpitude of the borrowers. If you want to criticize someone's values, assail the greed and shortsightedness of lenders who got caught up in a speculative frenzy and loaned money to people who had no realistic prospect of paying it back. Professionals loaned money to amateurs, not the other way around.

Earlier generations weren't more virtuous because they had less debt. Their dollars bought more. They were more likely to have steady jobs with benefits, including employer-subsidized incentives to save (retirement plans, life insurance, etc.).

Housing and college were more affordable, relative to the average worker's salary. Health care costs had yet to spiral out of control. Gas was cheap. If worse came to worst, people could still declare bankruptcy and get a real fresh start.

Americans have always valued hard work--and nothing has changed. In the USA, the average worker clocks more hours than anywhere else in the industrialized world. The work week has been getting longer, not shorter. Paid vacations are going the way of the dodo.

Friedman implies that consumers got locked into balloon mortgages because they were morally degenerate. He wants to paint these decisions as weakness and self-indulgence. He doesn't seem to understand that buying a home is an investment, a way to save for the future.... Buyers thought they were taking advantage of a rare opportunity to better themselves over the long term.

Remember how you couldn't turn around in the subway or open your email browser without being bombarded with ads for ridiculously cheap mortgages? Even "respectable" lenders went along with these schemes because of the collective faith that housing prices would keep rising indefinitely. The human weakness for speculative frenzies is as old as capitalism. It's not some new-fangled moral defect. (Tulip bulbs, anyone? How 'bout some tech stocks?)

Americans may be bad at math, but they aren't lazy.


http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/84721/

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/12/20031216-9.html

?

I am not blaming anybody... except isn't Tom one of the people who thinks the world is flat or something?


On edit -- added relevant excerpt:

those kids out at Brown? University threw a pie at his head a few days back. I applauded them.

into a new loan. When banks needed money after the crash they called in the loans and no one had the money to pay the principal. They were put out just as today.

Savings and loans became the new idea. Instead of Potter you had George Bailey.

There was regulation and bank examiners back then.

This crisis was brought on by the want of material things and the greed of financial institutions.

It's like dancing, it takes two to tango.

by a ruling class that no longer needs him now that it has everything it ever wanted.

This sanctimonious enabler of the robber class need only look at statistics that say we're working more hours and doing the work of more people to know that the work ethic is alive and well.

What is dead and buried is the social contract that ensured workers got the value of their work returned to them in salary and benefits.

Debt was what was offered people as a substitute for wages. Is it any wonder so many of them took it rather than exist in a state of penury?

to keep the money rolling in at an obscenely fast clip.

Fools and their money, yanno.

The inventor of the "Friedman unit"....

How many "Friedman units" has this war dragged on, Tom? 10 eh?

This man is habitually wrong. It is his only consistency.

but this is taken out of context and completely misconstrued. The column is about how America itself is living on debt and endangering our future. Much of the column condemns the Bush Administration for their policies.
This is a little throw away line about how houses were bought on bad debt and "no money down", and his implication is that we, as a nation, sat back and even encouraged it. He is not "blaming the victims".
Please read the whole column;
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/opinion/04friedman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
And watch the kneejerk reactions.

Seriously, there was a lot in that article I liked reading.

must f*ck up one's entire :D

It's just that his stance on Iraq was so wrong, so pig-headed, so arrogant, and so naive that he has lost a ton of credibility. It would be one thing if he apologized for all of his war crimes loving articles, but I doubt he ever will, so fuck him.