Tom Friedman, ultimate wanker

i completely forgot about atrios' top ten wankers of the decade, a list he compiled to celebrate his ten years in blogging... i'd followed the other nine but it slipped my mind that he was to announce number one on tuesday... so, without further ado, here it is...

THE ONE TRUE WANKER OF THE DECADE

Tom Friedman.

He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.

Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything. The important thing about an issue is whether it proves Tom Friedman fucking right, but if it doesn't we can just move on to the next big thing that will prove Tom Friedman fucking right. If you advocate for wars that go a bit bad, well, it's not your fault. If only Tom Friedman had been in charge everything would have been great.

Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.

i remember the first and only friedman book i read - The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization... i read it when it first came out in 1999 and thought that in doing so i had joined the ranks of wise and sophisticated global thinkers... in the thirteen years since, i have come to share atrios' opinion...

thomas friedman's biggest fan is thomas friedman... friedman loves to bask in the praise those worshipful acolytes who think he's the ultimate representation of wisdom and political savvy... atrios thinks he's merely a buffoon... i agree...

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Read this quote from today's NYT column by Tom Friedman very carefully

ready...? here goes...

The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.

absolutely stunning, isn't it...? the kind of government "WE" want...? WE...?? i had to stop and read that twice and then even a third time... the unmitigated gall of someone who could write something like that for one of the world's major newspapers simply bowls me over...

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The myth of free trade and neoliberalism, special to "The Mustache of Understanding"

a somewhat lengthy but quite informative article in alternet via truthdig by chalmers johnson, reviewing Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, by cambridge economist ha-joon chang that, besides debunking neoliberal economic policies and the so-called "washington consensus," excoriates tom friedman...

[The] book is a discursive, well-written account of what [Chang] calls the "Bad Samaritan," "people in the rich countries who preach free markets and free trade to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's markets and preempt the emergence of possible competitors. They are saying 'do as we say, not as we did' and act as Bad Samaritans, taking advantage of others who are in trouble."

[...]

[Neoliberal policies include] privatizing state-owned enterprises, maintaining low inflation, shrinking the size of the state bureaucracy, balancing the national budget, liberalizing trade, deregulating foreign investment, making the currency freely convertible, reducing corruption, and privatizing pensions. It is called neoliberalism because of its acceptance of rich-country monopolies over intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, etc.), the granting to a country's central bank of a monopoly to issue bank notes, and its assertion that political democracy is conducive to economic growth, none of which were parts of classical liberalism.

chang's - and johnson's - bottom line...

[F]ree trade, privatization, and [neoliberal] policies are ahistorical, self-serving economic nonsense...

[...]

It is time to recognize, particularly in the English-language economic press, that a "level playing field" leads to unfair competition when the players are unequal.

i spend a great deal of time outside the united states... i have worked on economic development projects in so-called "emerging economies," principally in former socialist countries, i reside part-time in argentina, i have traveled extensively throughout latin america, eastern and southeastern europe, and i have seen first-hand the devastation wreaked by neoliberal, world bank and imf policies... following those policies, it is virtually impossible for a country's producers and manufacturers to prosper... how could they when transnational corporations flood the national markets with goods and services, establish a country-wide presence, and operate with an economy of scale that home-grown businesses find it impossible to match...

every time i go to shop, i always look at the fine-print on the labels of the items i purchase because i want to see what corporation is behind the product... 9 times out of ten it is a transnational corporation, unilever, nestle, proctor and gamble, pepsico, coca cola, danone, bayer, etc., etc... sure, if the country is a big enough market, those corporations may license local companies to produce their products in-country which is at least somewhat better than importing everything, but the money still largely flows out of the country... and, if the market is small - macedonia, for instance - most brand-name products on store shelves are 100% imported... (and, yes, there are plenty of knock-offs, but that's a whole 'nother story...)

anyone who espouses free trade and neoliberal economic policies is either grossly ignorant of the realities those policies have created in the developing world or committed to serving his or her own economic interests at the expense of others...

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For Atrios - the mustache of understanding

simply too good to pass up...



leave it to tom tomorrow to capture all of friedman's shallowness and banality, skills for which all of us would like to be paid even a fraction of what he earns...

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