Thomas Friedman, perfumed fop.

Sir Thomas Friedman just wrote an article on globalization which has been gnawing at me like a neglected toothache.

A Race To The Top

I think Friedman is sincere in his opinions, and believes that the grand swoops of action that he lays out in his editorials are correct. He is all Big Ideas, macgyver’d together with whatever is at hand. He is one of the prime torch bearers for globalization mythology, and he’ll believe anything in service of same.

Friedman is as dumb as a bag of rocks.

I had meant to more specifically criticize the column I link to above, but Greg Palast beat me to the punch with a salty denouement of the New York Times “liberal media” prince.

French-Fried Friedman, Nouvelle Globalizer
Most irksome (is) 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.
…
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.

Mr. Friedman, please note these brains for hire are found in Karnataka and Kerala, states whose cussed adherence to social welfare makes them more French than France and nothing like Thatcherized dog-eat-dog Britain or Reaganized America. The computer wizards of Bangalore (in Karnataka) and Kerala are the products of fully funded state education systems where, unlike the USA, no child is left behind.

I am not at all opposed to international trade. I’m all for fair trade. Free trade, now – that is newspeak for taking it where the sun don’t shine. Friedman drivels out a headline “The Race to the Top,” in a limp attempt to invert a common criticism of globalization, which is to say,

It is a race to the bottom, which French and Dutch voters have rejected.

I guess having 6 weeks of vacation gives a sentient time to think. This is what the cult of “efficiency” is all about; keeping people from thinking. From extended free time comes the gumption to reject spastically genetically modified crops and boy bands.

Peak Energy will rip modern globalization to shreds. None too soon