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A picture is worth a thousand words. This graph represents the reasons behind the mess we are in, in a very lucid manner.

New York Times columnist and Hot, Flat and Crowded author Tom Friedman spoke at the CORE: club last Friday night on the energy crisis facing the United States, as well as some more post-election commentary.

Just before his first public appearance after the election, he was kind enough to make time for a conversation with Huffington Post Green editor Dave Burdick.

GREENING THE ECONOMY

Dave Burdick: You’ve talked (and written) about greening the bailout. Why aren’t green infrastructure projects widespread in the United States?

Tom Friedman: With oil or coal, no one ever said there had to be a payoff you had to pay it back in five years, but with something green, “What’s the payback? What’s the payback on that Prius?”

Well. What’s the payback on your Hummer?

It can’t be measured in very narrow terms. Our society at this time has all these needs. Needs for innovation, needs for jobs, needs for green technology, and needs for American companies to take the lead in innovation. So government investing in that, it seems to me, has the potential for multiple payoffs.

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Don’t the taxpayers have the right to know where their money is being spent? The Fed’s excuse ‘The information is too scary for the citizens’. What BS!

Apparently Bernanke, that wonderful bipartisan soul who is so competent and wonderful that everyone in the village thinks Obama should leave him in charge is refusing to identify who got almost 2 trillion dollars of Fed cash. Bloomberg News is suing to find out. Personally I really, really, really want to know. What exactly is Bernanke hiding? Who got the money he doesn’t want us to know got the money?

This is money that was loaned in exchange for “collateral”, by which we mean “trash no one else but the Fed would buy for anything but cents on the dollar”. Barney Frank, embarrassing himself yet again, claims the Fed should keep its clap shut because if people know how bad it is, well, there might be a run. I think Barney’s missing the point, as long as people don’t know how bad it is, they won’t trust anyone who might be borrowing large amounts of money from the Fed with crap collateral, because they don’t know how bad it is and they suspect it’s really really really bad. As in 10 cents on the dollar bad.

More to the point, that 2 trillion is taxpayer money, and taxpayers have a right to know what sweetheart deals Bernanke’s been giving out, and who’s been getting what. This whole “this information is too scary for citizens to know” schtick is so Bush regime. I thought we were moving into a new era of openness? Perhaps Barney should get with the program?

As for Bernanke, this is yet another reason why Bernanke, a central banker so incompetent he lost complete control of LIBOR, his most basic job, should lose his position. Sure, his mandate runs for another year, but if Obama asks him to step down, I can’t imagine he wouldn’t. The idea that a central bank that has screwed up as badly as the Fed has under both Greenspan and Bernanke is so much better off independent than with the public having some control is ridiculous and fundamentally anti-democratic. Central bank independence has just led to a huge financial bubble and economic collapse, while Bernanke and Greenspan both acted as if they were virtual dictators.

Bernanke needs to go, and either before or after he goes, the Fed needs to come clean about who it has given 2 trillion in loans to, and what the collateral is.

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Now this is huge. ITunes finally surpasses Walmart as the biggest music retailer in the United States. They have sold a whopping 4 billion songs since 2003. Though I am not a big fan of Apple’s business models where they very well could charge you even for calling out their name too loud and I have never owned an Apple product (ok, but for this one ), I must say this is a major breakthrough for the company. All said and done, I must admit, they are a hip company with really hip products and a lot of people love them which is what matters to me. How you ask? Well look here. I have invested heavily in this money minting company. I’ve managed to develop some nerves of steel with the stock’s journey from 200 all the way down to 115 and back up to 150+ now. Just because I believe the iPhone is going to be the next iPod or even better. In fact, there have been a few signs in that directions lately (iPhones running out of stock!).

Coming back to Apple, due credit, I must say, should go to Steve Jobs for turning around an underdog into one of the coolest companies in American history. Some analysts predict that Apple might turn out to be the first trillion dollar company in the world. Now that might be a stretch and could take quite a while too, but I’d not be surprised if they come up with the next killer product that might change the fortunes of the company overnight. They might already have?

Here is the ITunes news link