French Fried Friedman
Thomas Friedman has garnered a lot of admiration for his articles and books promoting corporate globalization. Most recently, he's praised the idea of a "flat earth" which is much the same old WTO transnational capitalism that wishes to treat every country as equally open to exchange, despite vast differences in local economies. Friedman's pro-corporate argument omits the most important factors however -- things like human beings.Vandana Shiva argues against Friedman in "The Polarised World Of Globalisation" here: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-05/27shiva.cfm
And today Greg Palast blasted Friedman's latest piece:
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French Fried Friedman
By Greg Palast
Vicente Fox got a well-deserved boot in the derriere for saying Mexicans come to America for taking jobs "not even Blacks want to do."
But Thomas Friedman earns plaudits and Pulitzers for his column which today announces that East Indians are taking jobs the French are too lazy to do ["A Race to the Top," New York Times, June 3]. His fit of racial profiling was motivated by his pique over France's rejection of the globalizers' charter for corporate dominance known as the European Constitution.
It's not the implicit racism of Friedman's statement which is most irksome, it's his ghastly glee that "a world of benefits they [Western Europeans] have known for 50 years is coming apart," because the French and other Europeans "are trying to preserve a 35 hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day."
He forgot to add, "and where Indian families are ready to sell their children into sexual slavery to survive." Now, THERE'S a standard to reach for.
In his endless series of pukey peons to globalization, Friedman promises that free trade, an end of regulation, slashing government welfare and privatization of industry will lead to an economic nirvana.
Yet, all he and his globalization clique can point to as the free market's accomplishment is the murderous competition between workers across borders to cut their wages for the chance to work in the new digital sweatshops.
Friedman praises the New India, freed of the shackles of Old India's socialist welfare state. I've seen the New India: half a billion people in dirt huts supporting a tiny minority's right to shop in air-conditioned malls. It is a Fritz Lang film in Hindi. . . ."
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See rest of Palast's blast at:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-06/05palast.cfm
posted by E. Heroux @ 3:06 PM
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