Friedman, Thomas n y t

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pundit? public intell? always wrong?

11 25

There Have to Be Consequences For Advocating Illegal Wars

yet again, the New York Times’ Bret Stephens advocates the overthrow of a sovereign government. Why do the readers of the “paper of record” tolerate this dangerous propaganda?

Nathan J. Robinson

filed 18 November 2025 in Media

In early 2003, readers of the New York Times were treated to a column by resident foreign affairs expert Thomas L. Friedman, in which Friedman claimed that invading Iraq and overthrowing its government would be a useful, moral, and sensible thing to do:

*Regime change in Iraq is not some distraction from the war on Al Qaeda. That is a bogus argument. And simply because oil is also at stake in Iraq doesn't make it illegitimate either. Some things are right to do, even if Big Oil benefits. Although President Bush has cast the war in Iraq as being about disarmament -- and that is legitimate -- disarmament is not the most important prize there. Regime change is the prize. Just by mobilizing for war against Iraq, the U.S. has sent this region a powerful message: We will not leave you alone anymore to play with matches, because the last time you did, we got burned[…] in today's globalized world, if you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it will visit you.

Friedman voiced some unease about the potential war, and at one point wrote a column in the voice of an imaginary “pro-American Arab leader” (instead of asking a real Arab leader for an opinion) to muse on the possibility of merely forcing Saddam Hussein into exile using the threat of war, rather than actually waging war. But Friedman felt that a war with Iraq would be good “shock therapy” and would “stimulate some real change in an Arab world that is badly in need of reform.”

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would soon die from Friedman’s recommended “therapy,” and the invasion of Iraq quickly became the worst crime of our century. As the war turned into a bloody catastrophe, rather than showing any contrition, Friedman accused France of “becoming our enemy” for having declined to support the atrocity. (In fact, France should have been praised for its good sense and foresight.)

:{:{There was little accountability at the New York Timesfor publishing such shameful propaganda for this terrible crime, which went well beyond Friedman’s columns. The worst offender, reporter Judith Miller, was forced to leave the paper after publishing unverified stories on Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction”—reporting which the U.S. government used to bolster support for the war, and which turned out to be false. But Friedman continues to pump out vapid columns to this day, including an outright racist flight of fancy last year imagining different Middle Eastern populations as different members of the animal kingdom. (Iranians were labeled “parasitoid wasp[s].”)}:

Nor was there any hesitation about publishing calls to bomb or invade othercountries. Subsequent years saw the publication of “Bomb North Korea, Before It's Too Late” and “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran” (by John Bolton!). Neoconservative columnist Bret Stephens has published many opinion pieces calling foror praising the bombing of Iran. Now, becaus always needs a new war, he’s turned to calling for attacking Venezuela and deposing its government. In January, Stephens published “Depose Maduro,” and now he’s given us a repeat in “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro.”}:

:{:{===}:

an 12 25

Near the end of his life, the late conservative Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) vehemently attacked U.S. President Donald Trump's dealings with far-right Russian President Vladimir Putin — arguing that Trump was negotiating from a position of extreme weakness. Trump, at times, criticizes Putin during his second presidency, but his tone is one of disappointment rather than outrage or intense disdain.

The New York Times' Thomas L. Friedman, in his December 4 column, calls out MAGA Republicans he considers "useful idiots" when it comes to Putin.

"I can think of no other American president who would have acted as if America's values and interests dictated that we now be a neutral arbiter between Russia and Ukraine and, on top of that, an arbiter who tries to make a profit from each side in the process — as Trump has done," the conservative columnist laments. "This is one of the most shameful episodes in American foreign policy, and the entire Republican Party is complicit in its perpetuation. I also can think of no other U.S. foreign policy leader who would have said about Putin what (envoy Steve) Witkoff said about this dictator whose political rivals often end up dead, who engages in vast corruption for himself and his cronies and who does everything he can to undermine free and fair elections in America and the West: 'I don't regard Putin as a bad guy.'"

Friedman adds, "Russian communists had a term for foreigners who held such views about their leaders: 'useful idiots.'"

Friedman not only criticizes Trump and Witkoff for their "isolationist" views, but also, Vice President JD Vance.

"You can imagine this retort from JD Vance isolationists: 'Hey, Friedman, you and your pals just want to drag America into endless wars,'"the conservative journalist argues. "Nope, sorry, you have the wrong cowboy. I have written since the first weeks of this war, and repeatedly thereafter, that it is only going to end in, at best, a 'dirty deal.' Russia is too big compared with Ukraine, and its willingness to fight on dictates that ending the war will require Ukraine to make concessions. Sad but true — and most Ukrainians will tell you the same today."

Friedman continues, "But as I wrote last month, there is a huge difference between a 'filthy deal' that maximizes Putin's interests, profits and ability to restart the war at any point of his choosing, and a 'dirty deal.'"

*Thomas L. Friedman's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

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https://www.alternet.org/saudi-loving-corporate-media-pundits-run-cover-wake-jamal-khashoggi-outrage

salon

No one thinks Thomas L. Friedman, the lead foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, has an easy job. I wouldn’t want it. Like his closely allied counterpart at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, Friedman stands astride the interlocked pinnacles of two powerful American institutions: the mainstream media and the national security establishment. He has unparalleled access to the innermost thoughts of the latter, and serves as the moralizing voice of the former. All of that comes at a price, perhaps best exemplified in Friedman’s use of a mysterious, pseudo-royal first-person plural.

Consider Friedman’s tormented column this week about how the United States should respond to the apparent murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by forces close to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now known around the world as MBS. This is the same prince, of course, whom Friedman lauded last November in a column he would surely love to scrub from the internet. Back then he praised MBS as the leader of an “Arab Spring, Saudi-style,” quoted lines from “Hamilton” at him during their lengthy late-night conversation in the prince’s “ornate adobe-walled palace,” and pronounced: “I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed in his reform efforts.” Here’s Friedman today, with the bromance breaking bad:

So, once again, what do we do? I don’t have a simple answer. It’s a mess. All I know is that we have to find some way to censure M.B.S. for this — without seeming to attack the whole Saudi people and destabilize the country. And we have to make sure that the social/religious reform process in Saudi Arabia proceeds — whoever is in charge there.

Leaving aside the maddeningly vague and deliberately toothless non-prescription on offer here — let’s “find some way to censure” MBS for allegedly having a prominent journalist tortured, killed and dismembered (I’m sure the prince is shaking in his handmade Italian loafers at that prospect) — who exactly is the “we” who must do something, or perhaps nothing? It sure sounds like the United States government, right? Except that Friedman does not work for the government, technically speaking, and is presumed to be voicing his own opinions as a prominent bulwark of the free and independent press.

Whatever is going on with people like Friedman and Ignatius and their sudden, fevered scramble to back away from the Saudi prince they previously lavished with flowers and hosannas, it has nothing to do with individuals changing their minds or the operation of a free and independent press.

If we assume for argument’s sake that Friedman’s opinions (or Ignatius’ opinions) are really his opinions, they are never his alone. They are formed by consensus, shaped by a coalition of “responsible adults” who work in the national security agencies, the State Department, the Washington policy think tanks and various foreign governments closely allied with our own. He speaks them as a representative of a particular elite caste who have Thought Deeply About Such Things, are not overly swayed by personal or sentimental considerations and are working (as they perceive it) for the ultimate betterment of humanity, under the permanent mentorship of the United States of America. That’s who “we” are, in the Friedman lexicon.

Given that context, it may not be entirely fair to point fingers at Friedman and Ignatius as the two biggest MBS fanboys in the Western media, now desperately trying to erase all the mash notes and sparkle-pen hearts from last year’s journals. (Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept offers a useful chronicle of Ignatius’ paeans to MBS — in the same newspaper that employed Jamal Khashoggi — and links back to a FAIR analysis of Ignatius' long track record as professional Saudi apologist.)

They certainly were not alone, and served as public spokesmen for a much larger constituency of so-called experts who went all-in on the charismatic young prince. As David Frum documents in a fascinating analysis for the Atlantic, Bob Woodward got thoroughly snookered into MBS-mania while reporting “Fear,” his book about the Trump White House, apparently by swallowing lines from one Derek Harvey, a minor National Security Council official and protégé of Michael Flynn. Dennis Ross, a former national security aide to four previous presidents of both parties, wrote an especially embarrassing Washington Post op-ed in February, headlined “America should get behind Saudi Arabia’s revolutionary crown prince.”

Meanwhile, Friedman has spent much of the last two weeks quoting his own previously-expressed doubts and reservations about MBS — always carefully inserted between the fawning passages — and I guess you can’t blame him. Beneath all that ass-covering, we may detect a note of protest: My friends made me say all that stuff but I never totally believed it!

What this gruesome and disturbing episode really reveals, however, is something more than the sock-puppet status of a major American journalist, which should not come as a huge surprise. Friedman and Ignatius and the people who fill their brains with Serious Thoughts seized on MBS almost in desperation. “Perfect is not on the menu here,” as Friedman himself wrote in his MBS puff piece last year. Embracing an ambitious young prince who promised to open up movie theaters and let women drive was a calculated gamble that – and this is the really important part – suggested a halfway plausible rationale for continuing America’s snuggly relationship with the thoroughly noxious Saudi regime.

In fairness, Friedman is well aware of this conundrum and has laid out the back story many times, including this week. (I’m accusing him of being a tool, not an idiot.) The U.S. cut a nearly explicit deal with the Saudis, some decades ago: Keep the oil flowing, keep the Arab nations from attacking Israel and keep acting as a regional rival to Iran, and “you can do whatever you want out back” (in Friedman’s words), including running the most repressive theocracy anywhere in the world, exporting an especially poisonous blend of fundamentalist Islam that fueled violent uprisings in many different places, and waging a brutal proxy war in Yemen that may be the worst and least-noticed humanitarian disaster of this century.

Friedman and the establishment forces he represents now claim to understand that this was a “terrible bargain,” for which the United States and the Western world paid a dreadful price with the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which of course Friedman supported), the rise of ISIS, the widespread panic over terrorism and all the rest of it. But the invisible “we” behind Tom Friedman, as he admitted this week, have literally no idea what to do now that their boy-prince reformer has been revealed as a stone-cold killer.

One thing the foreign-policy mandarins won’t do, and perhaps can’t do, is go back to first principles and ask fundamental questions about what sorts of relationships the United States should build in the Middle East. Is it really in America’s national interest to tie ourselves so closely to a despotic and widely despised regime that is even now facing the beginning of the end of the Age of Oil? Is Iran, with all its problems and internal tensions, a measurably worse option as a negotiating partner or a regional power? (I wouldn’t choose to live in either country, but compared to Riyadh, Tehran is pretty much Paris in the 1920s.) If we really lived in a functioning democracy, such questions would be discussed out in the open, rather than having the apparatchiks of the national-security state assure us that they aren’t even questions.

In the Friedman-Ignatius gospel, Mohammed bin Salman became a necessary ally, whatever his faults, because he promised to tone down the extremist version of Islam preached in Saudi Arabia, purge the fanatics, and thereby empower Islamic moderates throughout the region. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but it’s also a typical top-down solution from the think-tank genius bar, reflecting an ass-backwards understanding of the relationship between ideology and material conditions. Saudi Arabia is a terrible nation with terrible rulers and a terrible religious culture, but here’s something the Saudis didn’t do: They didn’t blunder into multiple Middle East wars on false pretenses, cause millions of deaths for unclear reasons and turn the entire region against America. I wonder who did that?

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no lnx https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/opinion/exxon-mobil-board.html

OPINION

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The ‘Mean Greens’ Are Forcing Exxon to Clean Up Its Act

June 1, 2021

Opinion Columnist

Since the 1990s, the wisest oil-producing countries and companies have regularly reminded themselves of the oil patch adage that the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; it ended because we invented bronze tools. When we did, stone tools became worthless — even though there were still plenty on the ground.

And so it will be with oil: The petroleum age will end because we invent superior technology that coexists harmoniously with nature. When we do, there will be plenty of oil left in the ground.

So be careful, wise producers tell themselves, don’t bet the vitality of your company, community or country on the assumption that oil will be like Maxwell House Coffee — “Good to the last drop” — and pumped from every last well. Remember Kodak? It underestimated the speed at which digital photography would make film obsolete. It didn’t go well for Kodak or Kodachrome.

Alas, though, not every oil company got the memo.

One that most glaringly did not is the one that in 2013 was the biggest public company in the world! It’s ExxonMobil. Today, it is no longer the biggest. As a result of its head-in-the-oil-sands-drill-baby-drill-we-are-still-not-at-peak-oil business model, Exxon lost over $20 billion last year, suffered a credit rating downgrade, might have to borrow billions just to pay its dividend, has seen its share price over the last decade produce a minus-30 percent return and was booted from the Dow Jones industrial average.

But last week — finally — Exxon got the memo, in the form of a shareholder revolt in what was one of the most consequential weeks in the history of the oil and gas industry and shareholder capitalism.

I’ve long argued that if environmentalists want to have an impact on the climate they can’t be “nice greens.” They have to be “mean greens.” They have to be as mean and tough, as diligent and vigilant, as the industry they’re trying to change.

Well, last week a little hedge fund called Engine No. 1 delivered an unprecedented master class in mean green using the tools of democratic capitalism. A plucky, purpose-driven investment fund, Engine No. 1 set out to force Exxon to improve its financial returns by getting much more serious about gradually transitioning — through innovation and acquisitions — into being an energy company, not just an oil and gas company.

At Exxon’s annual meeting, Engine No. 1 offered up a slate for four new members of Exxon’s 12-member board. The four represent deep energy expertise and climate solutions. The slate committed to push the oil giant to a net-zero emissions strategy by 2050, more investments in clean energy systems and more transparency about Exxon’s energy transition, with metrics and milestones, as well as disclosure of its lobbying payments and partners, suspected of undermining the science around climate change.

And darn if half the slate — Gregory Goff and Kaisa Hietala — wasn’t immediately elected by wide margins, and at least one other member might be as well when ExxonMobil finishes counting the votes from its very, very bad day.

Engine No. 1 was successful because it got three of the four biggest pension funds in America — fed up with Exxon’s relentless value destruction — to vote for its nominees. We’re talking about the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and the New York State Common Retirement Fund. Also, three of the world’s biggest fund managers, Vanguard, State Street and Black Rock, which together own more than one-fifth of all Exxon stock, each voted for part of the dissident slate.

[OPINION CONVERSATION

The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?

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From “Postcards From a World on Fire,” these 193 stories show how climate change is reshaping reality.

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Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency.

What are the worst climate risks in your country?

Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces.

Where are Americans suffering most?

Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S.]

And if you are keeping score at home — on your Stone-Age-ending-before-we-run-out-of-stones scorecard — on the same day that Engine No. 1 landed at least two energy/climate experts on the Exxon board, Barron’s reported: “A Dutch court ordered European energy giant Royal Dutch Shell to slash its carbon emissions by a net 45 percent by 2030. And, at Chevron’s annual meeting, shareholders supported a nonbinding proposal to ask the company to cut carbon emissions generated by the use of its products.”

Engine No. 1 and its allies are not playing around, and for good reason. As CNN reported a few days earlier, citing a newly published Harvard study, “For decades, ExxonMobil has deployed Big Tobacco-like propaganda to downplay the gravity of the climate crisis.”

“The study used machine learning and algorithms to uncover trends in more than 200 public and internal Exxon documents between 1972 and 2019,” according to CNN, which quoted this statement from the study: “These patterns mimic the tobacco industry’s documented strategy of shifting responsibility away from corporations — which knowingly sold a deadly product while denying its harms — and onto consumers.”

Exxon’s existing board was noteworthy for one thing: Other than the C.E.O., it had one member — appointed only this year — who I would call an energy expert, and none steeped in climate expertise that could help the company adapt.

The two new directors will definitely help, but getting the third —conservationist Andy Karsner— would really shake things up. Exxon says the voting results are too close to call, and it needs more time to certify if Karsner won a seat.

Bloomberg reported: “Exxon telephoned investors the morning of the ballot — and even during an unscheduled, hourlong pause during the virtual meeting — asking them to reconsider their votes, according to several of those who received calls. Some said they found the last-ditch outreach and halt to the meeting unorthodox and troubling.”

I first got to know and respect Karsner watching him in action in 2007, when he was an assistant secretary of energy for George W. Bush. He oversaw the U.S.’s National Laboratories’ applied science programs and negotiated America’s re-entry into the U.N.’s Convention on Climate Change at the Bali conference,which laid the pathway for the Paris global climate deal. Before that, Karsner built [FF?] power plants in Pakistan and solar plants in Morocco.

He has been a longtime member of the board of Conservation International, as was my wife. In full disclosure, Karsner and I are now friends, but it’s his experience and outlook that recommend him here. If there were a picture in the encyclopedia of a “mean green,” it would be Karsner: tough as nails and green as grass.

Karsner, the other Engine No. 1 nominees and Engine No. 1 itself are out to strengthen Exxon, not destroy it. They view it as one of the world’s greatest collections of scientific and engineering talent.They welcome Exxon’s sudden enthusiasm for the idea of creating a $100 billion public-private carbon-capture facility along the Houston Ship Channel to sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide. They also know that demand for oil and gas for transportation, power generation and plastics is not disappearing overnight. Wisely managed money will be made there.

But in a world where Ford just unveiled an all-electric version of its F-150 full-size pickup truck, one of its top-selling vehicles, and says that it envisages electric cars and trucks making up 40 percent of its production by the end of the decade, they think Exxon has got to stop betting that the good ole days of oil and gas profits will return — and start becoming a more diversified energy company. That means not only investing more in future carbon capture, batteries and other renewables, but also using its engineering prowess to invent that future — while it still has an income stream from oil and gas.

Everyone knows it won’t be easy. Making the kind of profits that Exxon once piled up from oil and gas will be very, very hard as a more diversified energy company. But it beats becoming a corporate fossil by betting the house on increasingly unprofitable, increasingly obsolete, increasingly unhealthy fossil fuels.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook

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no lnx https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/climate-change-summit-glasgow.html

OPINION

The Climate Summit Has Me Very Energized, and Very Afraid

Nov. 9, 2021

Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

I spent last week talking to all sorts of people gathered for the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, and it left me with profoundly mixed emotions.

Having been to most of the climate summits since Bali in 2007, I can tell you this one had a very different feel. I was awed by the energy of all the youths on the streets demanding that we rise to the challenge of global warming and by some of the amazing new technological and market fixes being proposed by innovators and investors. This was not the old days — everyone waiting for the deals cut by the priesthood of climate diplomats huddled behind closed doors. This was the many talking to the many — and I am buoyed by that.

But for me, there was one question that hovered over every promise coming out of this summit: When you see how hard it’s been for governments to get their citizens to just put on a mask in stores, or to get vaccinated, to protect themselves, their neighbors and their grandparents from being harmed or killed by Covid-19, how in the world are we going to get big majorities to work together globally and make the lifestyle sacrifices needed to dampen the increasingly destructive effects of global warming — for which there are treatments but no vaccine? That’s magical thinking, and it demands a realistic response.

Here’s my reporter’s notebook that produced those conflicting emotions:

The Street Where It Happened

For the first time, it felt to me that the adult delegates inside the conference halls were more afraid of the kids outside than they were of one another or the press.

Clearly, the internet and social media are super-empowering young people, who daily are manifesting that power in Glasgow to call out the adult negotiators — who clearly don’t want to be flamed, blamed or shamed as “blah leaders,” or “bleaders,” who just “blah, blah, blah,” as wall posters slapped around Glasgow suggest. I was warned before a panel I was on that if any young protesters disrupted the session, simply let them have their say.

Gen Z — all those who were born between 1997 and 2012 and grew up as digital natives — is now the world’s largest population cohort, 2.5 billion strong, and their presence is palpable at the summit.

They know that later is over, that later will be too late and that sticking to our business-as-usual trajectory could heat up the planet by the end of the century to levels no Homo sapiens has ever lived in.

One day last week, Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swedish climate activist, and hundreds of other youths gathered at a Glasgow park for a snap rally to call out global leaders with the chant, “You can shove your climate crisis up your. …”

I watched the video and couldn’t make out the last word. Must have been “glass.”

[vid]

Greta Thunberg Has Given Up on Politicians

“All political and economic systems have failed, but humanity has not yet failed.”

So why are you striking? I’m striking for us to take the climate crisis seriously and treat it like a crisis. Yes, but what do you want the politicians to do? I want them to listen to and act on the science. How are we going to solve this climate issue? Just the fact that this question is asked to me, a teenager, over and over is absurd but not as absurd as the fact that the climate and ecological emergency is being reduced to a problem that needs to be fixed. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced. We demand a safe future. Is that really too much to ask? I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. All political and economic systems have failed, but humanity has not yet failed. A year before my U.N. speech, the thought of seeing pictures of myself everywhere would have been unthinkable. If you would care about this kind of attention, then you’d probably develop a self-image that is far from sane. Presidents, prime ministers, kings and princesses suddenly see their opportunity to get a selfie, which later they can post on their Instagram with the caption hashtag #savetheplanet. Perhaps it makes them forget the shame of their generation letting all future generations down. “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.

Yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” “And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. The world is waking up. And change is coming whether you like it or not.” On the subway home, some come forward to congratulate me. Someone suggests that we should celebrate. But I don’t understand what their congratulations are for. And I understand even less what we’re supposed to be celebrating. Yet another meeting is over. And all that is left are empty words. It gets a bit repetitive after a while. Politicians are pretty much the same no matter where you are in the world. I urged them to listen to the science and act now before it’s too late. They say that they think it’s so amazing that I’m so active and committed and that, when I grow up, I too can become a politician and make a real difference. I then explain that when I’ve grown up, it will be too late to act if we are to stay below the 1.5 or even 2 degree Celsius target. Then they laugh nervously and start talking about something else. Washington, D.C. I’m called to testify in the U.S. Congress.

“I am submitting this report as my testimony because I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the scientists. Thank you.” In the latest update from the I.P.C.C., scientists underline keeping the global temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. We have today already passed about 1.2 degrees of global heating. On January 1, 2018, we had 420 gigatons of CO₂ left to emit globally. This is the carbon budget which gives us the best odds of staying below the 1.5 degree target. We emit about 42 gigatons of CO₂ every year. So today, the world is down to lower than 280 gigatons of CO₂ left. That is the equivalent of less than six and a half years of today’s business-as-usual emissions until that budget completely runs out. Do you remember “Gangnam Style”? That happened about eight years ago. That’s longer than the amount of time we are talking about.

And that is to give us the best possible chance to avoid passing tipping points or feedback loops, irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. The climate crisis is not a fair crisis. The ones who’ll be hit hardest from its consequences are often the ones who have done the least to cause the problem in the first place. The climate crisis cannot be solved within today’s political and economic systems. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. And since the truth is uncomfortable, unpopular and unprofitable, the truth doesn’t stand much of a chance. The emperors are naked, every single one. It turns out our whole society is just one big nudist party. “And if you belong to that small group of people who feel threatened by us, then we have some very bad news for you. This is only the beginning.” Every Friday, I continue to strike wherever I find myself to be at that moment.

Everywhere, lots of people show up, people of all ages. We are facing the need to make changes which are unprecedented in human history. Things may look dark, but I’m telling you there is hope. And that hope comes from the people, from democracy, from you. “What do we want?” “Government action.” “When do we want it?” “Now!”We have passed a social tipping point. We can no longer look away from what our society has been ignoring for so long. It is an existential crisis. We must now do the seemingly impossible. And that is up to you and me because no one else will do it for us. But who really is Greta? I think people want to get to know Greta. I’m not important. This has got nothing to do with me. I’m simply doing this because no one else is doing it.

7:48

Greta Thunberg Has Given Up on Politicians

“All political and economic systems have failed, but humanity has not yet failed.”

“These young people don’t just want to purchase your products or vote for you. They want to take action with you,” argued Molly Voss Fannon, C.E.O. of the Museum for the United Nations — UN Live, an independent organization that works to help people all over the world discover and flex their own power. “My oldest daughter, who is only 10, is the person who got me to become a vegetarian. My middle daughter recently ran for student council at her school on the platform of: ‘Vote for me because I can talk my parents into anything.’ With her, it’s like raising Al Capone with a heart of gold.”

The Bad News for Gen Z (and the Rest of Us)

Good news, Gen Zers: You won the debate on climate change. And thanks for that. Both governments and business are now saying: “We get it. We’re on it.” The bad news: There is still a huge gap between what scientists say is needed by way of immediately reducing use of the coal, oil and gas that drive global warming and what governments and business — and, yes, average citizens — are ready to do if it comes to a choice of heat or eat.

As energy experts point out, it is never a good idea to take off your belt until your suspenders are on tight. Governments will not quit dirty fossil fuels until there is sufficient clean energy to replace them. And that will take longer or require much greater sacrifices than are being discussed in any depth at the summit.

Read this from CNBC’s website on Nov. 3 and weep: “The global supply of renewables will grow by 35 gigawatts from 2021 to 2022, but global power demand growth will go up by 100 gigawatts over the same period. … Countries will have to tap traditional fuel sources to meet the rest of the demand. … That shortfall will only widen as economies reopen and travel resumes,” which will spark “sharp rises in prices for natural gas, coal and electricity.”

We need to stop deluding ourselves that we can have it all — that we can do foolish things like close down nuclear plants in Germany that provided massive amounts of clean energy, just to show how green we are, and then ignore the fact that without sufficient renewables in place, Germany is now back to burning more of the dirtiest coal. This moral preening is really counterproductive.

Energy is a scale problem. It requires a TRANSITION, and that means a transition from the dirtiest fossil fuels to cleaner fuels — like natural gas or nuclear — to wind and solar and, eventually, sources that don’t today even exist. Those who propose ignoring that transition risk producing a huge backlash against the whole green movement this winter if people can’t heat their homes or run their factories.

So, Are We Doomed?

No, but now would be a good time to start praying. Pray that technology plus artificial intelligence can close that gap between what today’s humans are actually willing to do to mitigate climate change and what is actually needed. And pray that humans start to understand that preserving our future almost certainly will require some pain. Because right now, without sacrifice, our only hope is to design and deploy technologies that allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things at scale.

Where Is Al Gore When We Need Him?

My first day in Glasgow I was walking into the New York Times media hub when I passed a gray-haired security staffer explaining to her much younger colleague what this conference was all about. She said in a thick Scottish accent, “There was this guy, Al Gore, and he predicted all of this before anyone.”

[OPINION CONVERSATION

The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?

What does climate change look like around the world?

From “Postcards From a World on Fire,” these 193 stories show how climate change is reshaping reality.

What should our leaders be doing?

Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, finds reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency.

What are the worst climate risks in your country?

Select a country, and we'll break down the climate hazards it faces.

Where are Americans suffering most?

Our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths in the U.S.

You know you’re old when a young person at a climate summit has no idea who Al Gore is.]

Happily, Gore is still seeing around corners. We had a few minutes to chat in a hallway and he spent most of it telling me with great excitement about a data science project he was backing — Climate TRACE, which uses sensory data from satellites and artificial intelligence to do real-time monitoring of CO₂ emissions, especially those that never get reported by governments and business.

With 24/7 satellite coverage provided by the start-up Planet, whose hundreds of tiny satellites image Earth’s land mass every day in high resolution, we will be able to watch a logging truck go into the Amazon rainforest and cut a road and then count each tree chopped down. Or, conversely, we’ll be able to count trees that are planted and put a price on the carbon that each one is saving — instead of just a price on the lumber taken from the forest.

“The era of radical climate transparency is about to be born,” said Andrew Zolli, Planet’s chief impact officer. Everyone — your customers, your competitors, your employees and activists — will soon know exactly what you are emitting with one click. That is a big deal.

“You can have a scale impact on the climate when you can measure, monitor, manage and monetize the value of saving a forest or a watershed,” said Andy Karsner, who was the principal U.S. climate negotiator in Bali in 2007 and whose Elemental Labsis now building more tech tools for market-based solutions for climate change.

“We humans don’t have big claws or razor-sharp teeth to survive,” Karsner told me. “Instead, we were endowed with large brains, and I still believe the enlightened self-interest of our species will drive us to come together and use our collective brains to develop and deploy the tools” we need to thrive on this planet.

Is There Anything I, Just One Person, Can Do?

Yes! Plant a tree — or prevent one from being chopped down — by supporting Indigenous communities, whose territories contain 50 percent of all the world’s remaining forests and 80 percent of the healthiest functioning ecosystems, according to Peter Seligmann, a co-founder of Nia Tero, an organization recently started “to ensure that Indigenous peoples have the economic power and cultural independence to steward, support and protect their livelihoods and territories they call home” — which also happen to be home to some of the planet’s greatest biodiversity treasures.

Seligmann (a donor to my wife’s language museum) introduced me to Teofilo Kukush, chief of the Wampis Nation, an Indigenous people, some 15,300 strong, who have been living for multiple generations on their own territory — 1,327,760 hectares (5,126 square miles) of mostly forest and watersheds, in the northern Peruvian Amazon. (When I wrote down on my notepad “1,327,000” hectares for short, Kukush pointed to the imprecision of my number and insisted that I write down the last 760 hectares.)

And no wonder. Speaking in Spanish and Wampis, his Indigenous language, through a translator, Kukush explained that every year their still largely intact forested region — with which they live in harmony, using rotating agriculture — absorbs 57 million tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and stores millions of tons of carbon by keeping those trees standing.

But like so many Indigenous communities controlling tropical forests, his faces daily attacks from human predators — miners, loggers, animal parts traffickers, drug smugglers and industrial farmers. Indigenous leaders were brought to Glasgow by Nia Tero to highlight their critical role.

“We have been taking care of this for the world, and our future generations, and we need to make sure that it is there forever,” said Kukush, who was hard to miss with his brightly colored headdress made of toucan feathers. “But we have not benefited one cent. The carbon credits all go to the government and not us.”

If you’re looking for an ordinary thing that could have an extraordinary impact, it would be protecting these biodiversity protectors.

Worst Idea From Climate Skeptics

“OK, climate change is real, but it is too late to do anything serious, so let’s stop with all the green stuff and focus exclusively on adaptation. What’s so bad about golf in Minnesota in February?”

If there is anything we should have learned from Covid-19, it’s that Mother Nature doesn’t play nice. Just when you think you’ve masked or vaxxed your way out of a problem, she surprises you with a Delta variant. “Adaptation” sounds so nice, so soft, so gradual — until it isn’t. Of course, we’re going to have to adapt, but I’d prefer to have to adapt by building a single sea wall than rebuilding Miami or New Orleans every three years. The difference will be what we do to minimize climate change now.

One of the most compelling voices on this subject in Glasgow was the earth system scientist Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Mother Nature, Rockström remarked to me, has evolved an amazing tool kit to keep temperatures from fluctuating too hot or too cold and maintain us in this Garden of Eden climate that we’ve enjoyed for the last 11,000 or so years — which enabled us to build civilization.

But if the warming of Earth’s surface continues at the pace we are on, and the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets melt and no longer reflect the sun’s heat away from the oceans, and the Amazon flips from a tropical forest that soaks up carbon pollution into a deforested savanna that produces it, and the level, temperature and salinity of the oceans dramatically change, affecting monsoons, ocean circulation in the Atlantic and the jet stream, WATCH OUT.

Our planet can go from a self-cooling, self-moderating system to a self-warming system. If that happens, adaptation will be a daily struggle for survival for hundreds of millions of people.

“We have more and more evidence that the planet is more fragile than we thought,” concluded Rockström. So, it may be hard, it may be impossible, but this is no time to give up on trying to phase out fossil fuels and prevent these tipping points from tipping.

Otherwise, We Will Be the Punchline to a Bad Joke Making the Rounds in Glasgow

Two planets are talking to each other. One looks like a beautiful blue marble and the other a dirty brown ball.

“What on earth happened to you?” the beautiful planet asks the brown one.

“I had Homo sapiens,” answers the brown planet.

“Don’t worry,” says the blue planet. “They don’t last long.”

Other views on addressing climate change

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odd no mention of his pal andy

In his column in the March 28 New York Times, Tom Friedman talks about the Bush administration and the role of its former climate change communications operative Phil Cooney, and draws a contrast with the bipartisan and science-accepting approach being taken by the governor of California.

Excerpt:

New York Times

March 28, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

How Many Scientists?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Sometimes you read something about this administration that is just so shameful it takes your breath away. For me, that was the March 20 article in this paper detailing how a House committee had just released documents showing “hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.”

The official, Philip A. Cooney, left government in 2005, after his shenanigans were exposed in The Times, and was immediately hired by, of course, Exxon Mobil. Before joining the White House, he was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main oil industry lobby arm.

The Times article, by Andrew Revkin and Matthew Wald, noted that Mr. Cooney said his past work opposing restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions on behalf of the oil industry had “no bearing” on his actions at the White House. “When I came to the White House,” he testified, “my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration.” (How about loyalty to scientific method?) Mr. Cooney, who has no scientific background, said he had based his editing on what he had seen in good faith as the “most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge.”

Let’s see, of all the gin joints. Of all the people the Bush team would let edit its climate reports, we have a guy who first worked for the oil lobby denying climate change, with no science background, then went back to work for Exxon. Does it get any more intellectually corrupt than that? Is there something lower that I’m missing?

I wonder how Mr. Cooney would have edited the recent draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, written and reviewed by 1,000 scientists convened by the World Meteorological Society and the U.N. It concluded that global warming is “unequivocal,” that human activity is the main driver, and that “changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent.”

I am not out to promote any party, but reading articles like the Cooney one makes me say: Thank goodness the Democrats are back running the House and Senate because, given its track record, this administration needs to be watched at all times.

But I also saythank goodness for the way Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has built a Republican-Democratic coalition in California to blunt climate change. The governor is not only saving the Republican Party from being totally dominated by climate cranks, like Senator James Inhofe, and hacks-for-hire, like Cooney, but he also is creating a bipartisan template for dealing with climate change that will be embraced by Washington as soon as the Bush team is gone…….

March 29th, 2007|Global Warming Denial Machine

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/a-six-alarm-fire-nyt-columnist-warns-united-states-could-be-nearing-a-potential-second-civil-war/

new York Times columnist Tom Friedman fears America could be at the cusp of a "potential second civil war" if President Donald Trump's insinuations and suggestions are not taken seriously.

On Thursday evening, Friedman appeared on CNN's "AC360" with Anderson Cooper where he expressed concern about the president's refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and what it could mean for America.

“I think what happened in the last few days is a six-alarm fire,” said Friedman.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist offered a chilling translation of Trump's words as he insisted the president only laid out two choices for the upcoming election — both of which would lead to the same outcome if Trump is not stopped.

“The President of the United States has told us ‘either I win the election or I delegitimize the election.’ Those are your choices, folks,” Friedman said.

According to Friedman, there are many context clues Trump has presented that signal the possibility of civil woes ahead. With Trump working tirelessly to destroy the integrity and legitimacy of the election, Friedman believes Republican lawmakers are enabling the president threats to undermine America's democracy while conspiracy theoristss continue to spread misinformation that his fierce supporters believe.

“When you have a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a network [fox?]without integrity, and by social networks that are marinated in conspiracy theories, behind whom are a lot of armed people — if you are not frightened by this, you are not paying attention.”

The Republican Party has become "a political brothel that rents itself out by the night to whoever will energize it… https://t.co/lC7dJZHhIA

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@Anderson Cooper 360°)1600995293.0

He also reflected on the tone and delivery of the Republican Party's message during its national convention. Friedman made it clear that all of the clues almost guarantee that America is "going to have a disputed election."

“This is a party that went into its convention with no platform, just basically said whatever Trump wants, we want,” Friedman pointed out. “And I — if you’re not frightened now if you are not terrified for what could happen, it’s not ‘We might have a disputed election.’ It is ‘We are going to have a disputed election, almost certainly,’ unless Trump wins, in which case I shudder to think what four more years of this would be like.”

When Cooper asked what Americans can do to change the course of what could possibly shape the future of the country, Friedman stressed the importance of voting "overwhelmingly."

“So what do you do?” Cooper asked.

“There is only one thing to do,” Friedman concluded. “Vote. Go out and vote. Vote for Joe Biden…There is only one tool we have. It is a tool that can work. That is to overwhelmingly vote. I have written and I will repeat: I will walk to the polls. I will crawl to the polls. I will slither to the polls, bike to the polls, hike to the polls, but I will cast my vote for Joe Biden.”

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https://www.alternet.org/saudi-loving-corporate-media-pundits-run-cover-wake-jamal-khashoggi-outrage

salon

Consider Friedman’s tormented column this week about how the United States should respond to the apparent murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by forces close to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, now known around the world as MBS. This is the same prince, of course, whom Friedman lauded last November in a column he would surely love to scrub from the internet. Back then he praised MBS as the leader of an “Arab Spring, Saudi-style,” quoted lines from “Hamilton” at him during their lengthy late-night conversation in the prince’s “ornate adobe-walled palace,” and pronounced: “I, for one, am rooting for him to succeed in his reform efforts.” Here’s Friedman today, with the bromance breaking bad:

So, once again, what do we do? I don’t have a simple answer. It’s a mess. All I know is that we have to find some way to censure M.B.S. for this — without seeming to attack the whole Saudi people and destabilize the country. And we have to make sure that the social/religious reform process in Saudi Arabia proceeds — whoever is in charge there.

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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/what-super-wealthy-times-columnist-tom-friedmans-attack-sanders-misses

The latest column by Thomas Friedman lays out the ways climate change can act as destabilizing stressor on geopolitics, especially through its effect on food prices. [NYTimes]

bill mck:

Soon after the big D.C. rally, the state department issued a report downplaying Keystone XL's environmental impact, thus advancing the pipeline proposal another step. Since then, at the urging of the remarkable cellphone-company-cum-activist-group Credo, nearly 60,000 people have signed a pledge promising to resist, peacefully but firmly, if the pipeline is ever approved. By early March, even establishment commentators like Thomas Friedman had noticed – he used his New York Times column to ask activists to "go crazy" with civil disobedience; 48 hours later, 25 students and clergy were locked down inside a pipeline-company office outside Boston. It's not a one-sided fight anymore.

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AlterNet [1] / By RJ Eskow [2]

Why Tom Friedman Is the Ayn Rand of Our Times

July 29, 2013 |

If Thomas Friedman didn't exist, America's high-tech entrepreneurs would have had to invent him. Come to think of it, maybe they did. The dark science-fiction vision he celebrates serves them well, at pretty much everyone else's expense.

Friedman's vision is worth studying, if only because it reflects the distorted perspective of some very wealthy and influential people. In their world the problems of the many are as easily fixed as a line of code, with no sacrifice required of them or their fellow billionaires.

Case in point: 15 or 20 million Americans seeking full-time employment? To Thomas Friedman, that's a brandingproblem.

Ayn Rand with a human face ...

Friedman occupies a unique place in the pundit ecosystem. From his perch at the New York Times,he idealizes the unregulated, winner-take-all economy of the Internet and while overlooking human, real-world concerns. His misplaced faith in a digitized "free" market reflects the solipsistic libertarianism of a technological über-class which stares into the rich diversity of human experience and sees only its own reflection staring back.

Friedman is a closet Ayn Rand in many ways, but he gives Rand's ugly and exploitative philosophy a pseudo-intellectual, liberal-friendly feel-good gloss. He turns her harsh industrial metal music into melodious easy listening: John Galt meets John Denver. That make him very useful to those who would dismantle the engines of real economic growth, the ones which create jobs while protecting life and limb.

Friedman's column in this weekend's New York Times is, characteristically, a Panglossian panegyric to online technology as the salve for all economic problems. In it he paints the picture of a global dystopia where decent jobs are scarce, educational advancement is unattainable, and people must sacrifice their homes, their possessions, and their personal lives to serve and amuse complete strangers.

He can hardly wait.

Mi casa es su casa ...

The framing device for Friedman's vision is the tale of two twenty-somethings who, like so many Friedman protagonists, built an Internet company. Friedman's column is called "The Sharing Economy [3]," and it celebrates the creators of an online platform called "Airbnb" which lets people rent out their homes to strangers. Online marketplaces like Airbnb are very interesting economic phenomena. They can be useful and even transformative. But they can also be dangerous, unsafe, and overhyped.

Enter Thomas Friedman.

Digital libertarians like Jeff Bezos of Amazon see these digital marketplaces as the electronic realization of a free market fantasy. They promote platforms like Bezos' "Mechanical Turk" system of online job sharing, unconcerned about their ability to accelerate the destruction of decent wages and secure jobs. (They're also blissfully unaware of the embarrassing contradiction between their own libertarianism and the fortunes they've earned from government-created technologies like the Internet.)

Friedman seems to share a Bezos-like vision of unregulated marketplaces for every aspect of human activity. He waxes ecstatic about Airbnb, which he sees as both a practical solution and a broader model for a future economy. Friedman thinks that renting out your private space, your personal time, and your possessions will soon become the only way to make ends meet - that is, unless you possess extraordinary skills, which could land you a mediocre job at best.

And he thinks that's just fine.

Decoding Friedman

Consider this passage from Friedman's column:

"In a world where, as I've argued, average is over -- the skills required for any good job keep rising -- a lot of people who might not be able to acquire those skills can still earn a good living now by building their own branded reputations, whether it is to rent their kids' rooms, their cars or their power tools."

This paragraph reads like a Zen koan pieced together from cast-away fragments of motivational sales speeches. We're left to infer the meaning of its more obscure phrases from their context, the same way World War II codebreakers cracked particularly difficult passages in enemy telexes. So let's try to tease out its meaning, phrase by phrase:

"In a world where, as I've argued, average is over ..." (Emphasis from the original.)

"Average is over"? Averaging is a mathematical function, inextricably woven into the fabric of reality as we understand it. How can it be over? It's like saying that subtraction is over, or means and medians are null and void. (Watch yourself, standard deviation. Thomas Friedman has his eye on you.)

What's he really saying here? The "as I've argued" offers one clue to motivation, if not meaning: Anything self-referential from this author - and that's a lot - is a signal that he's floating another potential "The World Is Flat" book title.

But what's he saying? Our context-driven codebreaking takes us to the next phrase:

"... the skills required for any good job keep rising ..."

Ah, I see. "Average is over" is connected to job skills. Friedman apparently means that you can't get a good job anymore if your skill level is only average.

Why didn't he just sayso?

20 Million Startups

What are the implications of a world in which you must be above average to get "any good job"? When Garrison Keillor described Lake Woebegon as a place where "all the children are above average," it was a joke. But Friedman's not joking. He's describing a world in which ordinary people are excluded from decent employment - and he's doing it without expressing regret or demanding change.

To be fair, Friedman is an advocate for education - in his own way. But his education arguments, like his economic ones, focus on the online, the gimmicky, and the jargon-laden. Friedman's world doesn't seem to include manufacturing jobs, or construction jobs, or good government jobs. He envisions a workforce made up almost exclusively of "lateral thinkers" and "integration" engineers. Students should be trained to "invent [4]" their jobs, says Friedman, who claims that self-invented work will be the best source of future employment.

Based on the number of people currently seeking full-time employment in the US alone, 15 or 20 million people need to "invent" their jobs pretty quickly. That's a lot of Internet start-ups, along with a whole boatload of "lateral thinking."

Friedman's unrealistic view of the labor force, shared by many tech entrepreneurs, is one in which the middle class is as passéas a Commodore 64. How can formerly middle-class Americans survive in the world they envision?

Average White Brand

According to Thomas Friedman, tens of millions of un- and under-employed Americans can "earn a good living online by building their own branded reputations." (That's right: He went there. He said "branded reputation.") Using websites like Airbnb, Friedman suggests, they can rent out "their kids' rooms, their cars or their power tools."

Friedman seems unaware that millions of Americans don't have kids' rooms. (Lots of people don't have cars or power tools, either.) He might be astonished to learn that even in New York City, where he is professionally based, nearly half the population is considered either "poor" or "near poor." Those who live in ghettoes or other concentrations of minority poverty don't seem to exist for him.

Airbnb was co-invented by a kid who needed rent money after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. But there are families that can't afford to send their kids to the Rhode Island School of Design. And not everybody can move to San Francisco, where Friedman's plucky young heroes conducted the business transaction which led to the creation of Airbnb.

"Three people stayed with us," said co-founder Brian Chesky, "and we charged them $80 a night. We also made breakfast for them and became their local guides."

San Francisco's one of the most desirable tourist destinations in the country. It doesn't seem to have occurred to Friedman that not everybody lives in such a desirable location - or that some of us would rather not give up a large chunk of our personal space to strangers while serving as their personal cooks and chauffeurs. What's next? Hiring ourselves out to millionaires as "faithful family retainers," antebellum-style ?

As I read this column my mind kept wandering to the recent Bill Moyers program about Milwaukee, "Two American Families [5]," and to a recent visit to my equally hard-hit home town of Utica, New York. Trust us, Mr. Friedman: There won't be a lot of "Airbnb" tourists looking to rent beds or cars in Milwaukee or Utica.

hellonearth.com

Friedman seems blithely unaware of the role of regulation in keeping us safe. Do we really want to rent cars from strangers without knowing whether they've been properly maintained? A "branded reputation" is fine until the brakes give out on a steep incline. And power tools? One broken chain-saw blade and you could wind up looking like a bit player in a Tobe Hooper movie.

But safety, important as it is, barely scratches the surface of the problem. Friedman's overall vision, his conception of a "new economy," is what's truly terrifying.

Any rational person who has glimpsed Friedman's dystopian future - which he has pretty accurately envisioned, based on current trends - would urgently begin seeking out alternatives and solutions. They'd want to prevent our economy from becoming an electronic marketplace where the needy and desperate peddle their time, space and possessions to the well-to-do in a desperate bid for survival.

They certainly wouldn't celebrate this sci-fi dystopia, as Friedman does.

Mirror, mirror ...

There are alternatives we can pursue collectively: An aggressive government program of job creation. A return to the days of social mobility. An end to the gross concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. And, above all, affordable education for all so that we can restore the American dream of self-advancement.

Instead Friedman glorifies globalization and the destruction of good jobs. He's indifferent to the loss of social mobility and infatuated with mediocre or at best mildly clever web enterprises. Friedman is the praise singer of Palo Alto, the griot of Los Gatos, and he's never met a Internet billionaire he didn't like.

Thomas Friedman is the perfect mirror for the undeserved self-infatuation which has infected our corporate, media, and political class. He's the chief fabulist of the detached elite, the unfettered Id of the global aristocracy, the Horatio Alger of self-deluded, self-serving, self-promoting techno-hucksterism.

But give the man his due: When it comes to "building your brand reputation," Friedman's a master of the art. It helps to have the perfect platform, of course. As soon as the New YorkTimes is ready to hire 20 million more columnists, our employment problems will be over.

See more stories tagged with:

tom friedman [6]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/why-tom-friedman-new-ayn-rand-our-dark-digital-future

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rj-eskow

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html?pagewanted=all

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/opinion/sunday/friedman-need-a-job-invent-it.html

[5] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/two-american-families/

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tom-friedman

[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B