Tom Friedman has a great article this morning in the New York Times: Green the Bailout
Friedman says that we need to add a buildup to the bailout and that it should be green.
In a green economy, we would rely less on credit from foreigners "and more on creativity from Americans," argued Van Jones, president of Green for All, and author of the forthcoming "The Green Collar Economy." "It’s time to stop borrowing and start building. America’s No. 1 resource is not oil or mortgages. Our No. 1 resource is our people. Let’s put people back to work — retrofitting and repowering America. ... You can’t base a national economy on credit cards. But you can base it on solar panels, wind turbines, smart biofuels and a massive program to weatherize every building and home in America."
It's fascinating how quickly the idea of building a new Green economy has become a mainstream idea, as evidenced by this interesting Friedman article.
In the beginning of the article he talks about how we have had economic crisis before, boom and bust cycles where lots of money has been made or lost. But the difference with this particular crisis is that we have nothing but dead derivatives to show for it.
Many things make me weep about the current economic crisis, but none more than this brief economic history: In the 19th century, America had a railroad boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many lost money. But even when that bubble burst, it left America with an infrastructure of railroads that made transcontinental travel and shipping dramatically easier and cheaper.
He then goes on about how we need to get back on track by rebuilding the American dream by creating new things and the best focus of that investment will be the Greening of America.
The point is, we don’t just need a bailout. We need a buildup. We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a "liar loan" from an underregulated bank with no money down and nothing to pay for two years.
Wow. Is it possible that this disaster might actually get us moving toward a Green machine that will truly lead us into the 21st Century?