Taibbi writes: "Thomas Friedman, master of metaphor, has a new set of
fixations: walls, webs and the tacking of that presidentially-contending
center-left sailboat, Hillary Clinton."
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has expressed fears that Hillary
Clinton is leaning too far toward socialism. (photo: Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty
Images)
Thomas Friedman Goes to the Wall
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
07 August 16
High priest of globalization lashes out against the enemies of progress
Thomas Friedman, master of metaphor, has a new set of fixations: walls,
webs and the tacking of that presidentially-contending center-left sailboat,
Hillary Clinton.
In a pair of recent articles, "Web People Versus Wall People" and "How
Clinton Could Knock Trump Out," the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the
New York Times expresses deep concern that Clinton's primary-season "lean"
toward the politics of Bernie Sanders isn't fake enough.
It's been a whole week since the convention, and Hillary still hasn't yet
gone back to being the unabashed friend to big banks and staunch advocate
for free trade and deregulation she just spent all of last year pretending
she was not. This has Friedman freaked out.
He fears she is leaning in the direction of socialism, "the greatest system
ever invented for making people equally poor," as opposed to staying true to
the capitalist ethos of her husband, which would "grow our pie bigger and
faster":
I get that she had to lean toward Sanders and his voters to win the
nomination; their concerns with fairness and inequality are honorable. But
those concerns can be addressed only with economic growth...
Friedman is conceding that inequality and unfairness are legitimate
concerns. He's just saying that now that the people most concerned about
these issues have been beaten at the polls, we can safely go back to
ignoring them and letting the beneficiaries of inequality worry about how
and when to fix it.
This "let's grow our pie bigger and faster" column (does this make more or
less sense than George Bush's famous "we should make the pie higher" idea?)
comes on the heels of last week's "Webs and Walls" column on the same theme.
This remarkable article divided the world into two groups of people. Roughly
speaking, Friedman is talking about people who embrace globalization ("Web
people") versus people who reject it ("Wall people").
This is already a confusing metaphor because the campaigns of the two
candidates Friedman identifies as riling up the "Wall" people, Donald Trump
and Bernie Sanders, were heavily reliant on Internet media, i.e. the Web.
Meanwhile, Friedman's definition of "web people" describes individuals who:
Instinctively understand that Democrats and Republicans both built their
platforms largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal and
the Cold War, but that today, a 21st-century party needs to build its
platform in response to the accelerations in technology, globalization and
climate change, which are the forces transforming the workplace, geopolitics
and the very planet.
That seems like a very specific and weird belief system, probably unique to
writers for the New York Times named Thomas Friedman. Also, Friedman never
explains what any of this has to do with "webs" - is it an Internet thing?
Do they have webbed hands?
But whatever, we get it, sort of. "Web people" embrace the future and "open
systems," i.e. free trade, bringing us closer to the heart of what Friedman
is talking about.
Friedman is right that this election, like the Brexit vote, has really been
a referendum on globalization. What's infuriating is the cartoonish way he
defines the critics of globalization.
"Wall people" in his mind are either xenophobic Trumpites who don't want a
flood of dirty, rapey immigrants entering their towns, or they're Sanders
socialists who don't want to compete with foreign workers and insist on
government handouts.
With regard to the latter, what troubles Friedman the most is the way
Hillary is cozying up to her critics on the left:
She is opposing things she helped to negotiate, like the Pacific trade deal,
and offering more benefits from government but refraining from telling
people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard
and playing by the rules doesn't cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you
need to be a lifelong learner, constantly raising your game.
Yes, to get by these days, working hard isn't enough to keep a job. You need
to be "constantly raising your game." Either that, or you need to marry a
shopping mall heiress and write books fawning over Fortune 500 companies.
Friedman's glib definition of globalization goes virtually unchallenged in
the pundit-o-sphere, which by and large agrees with him that critics of
globalism are either racists or afraid of capitalism.
But this issue is infinitely more complicated than that.
We never really had a referendum on globalization in America. It just sort
of happened. People had jobs one day, then the next morning they were fired,
replaced by 14-year-olds in Indonesia or sweatshop laborers in Bangladesh,
working in unsafe hell-holes without overtime or health care, beaten when
they don't make quotas.
What exactly does "raising your game" mean in the context of that sort of
competition?
Globalization in the snap of a finger essentially erased nearly two
centuries of America's bloody labor history. It's as if the Thibodeaux
Massacre, the hangings of the Molly McGuires, the Pullman Strike, the L.A.
Times bombing, the Flint sit-in and thousands of other strikes and
confrontations never took place.
In the new paradigm, all of those agonizing controversies and wars of
political attrition, which collectively produced a vast set of rules and
standards for dealing with workers, were simply wiped away.
Manufacturers just went abroad, to dictatorships and communist oligarchies,
to make their products, forcing American workers to compete not just against
foreign workers, but against their own history and legal systems.
People forget that when it comes to labor relations, America had to be
dragged, kicking and screaming, in the direction of the civilized world.
Attempts to ban child labor in this country failed repeatedly, and we didn't
actually pass a federal child labor law that stuck until 1938. Airlines in
America were still firing flight attendants for getting married through the
mid-eighties.
Now all that work spent to get even past those most basic problems is at
risk. In the global economy, employers can look at their business models as
one giant arbitrage.
You do your banking in the laissez-faire havens of the Caribbean, build
factories in slave-labor capitals like China or Indonesia, buy swaps in
less-regulated financial atmospheres in London, sell your products in
America and Europe, etc.
You also arrange your corporate structures so that you pay the smallest
amount of tax possible, often by threatening to move until you receive
subsidies and exemptions. This leads to bizarre situations like Boeing
making $26 billion in U.S. profits over a five-year period and receiving a
U.S. federal tax refund of $401 million over the same time.
This whole situation has raised profound questions that nobody has ever
bothered to try to answer for ordinary voters, as in: What are nation-states
for, in a global economy?
What's the point of all of our labor laws, or voting-rights laws, the first
amendment and a host of other American legal traditions if large pluralities
of American manufacturers do their business in countries like China, where
human rights abuses are rampant, political freedom is nonexistent and speech
is tightly controlled?
Friedman's description of "Wall People" is probably somewhat true when it
comes to Trump voters, many of whom do just want to be physically walled off
from a confusing, racially diverse world.
But to dismiss the rest of globalization's critics as communists who hate
freedom and just want to curl up in the lap of government and hide from
change is absurd and insulting.
Most educated people accept and embrace the idea of an increasingly
integrated world. The problem is how to go forward into the future in a way
that's fair and doesn't increase oppression, pollution, child labor, even
slavery and indenture, to say nothing of the disenfranchisement of the
ex-middle class in places like America.
These are very difficult questions. They're ones that probably won't have
positive solutions without the determined leadership of the world's bigger
democratic powers, like the U.S. and the E.U.
The problem is that the major parties in the United States in particular
seem almost totally disinterested in addressing the inequities of globalism.
That's because conventional wisdom is still stuck in the Friedman stage of
telling people that if they're troubled by the global economy, they're just
afraid of the future.
Because the Murphy's Law tendency of American politics demands that we draw
every conceivable wrong lesson from an event before accidentally stumbling
in the direction of progress, the twin revolts in the 2016 presidential race
will surely be misinterpreted for a good long while by the Friedmans of the
world.
They won't see the anti-establishment backlash as a reason to re-examine the
impact of globalism on ordinary people. Instead, as Friedman puts it,
they'll see an opportunity to build a single ruling coalition of
"center-left Web People" (what a creepy image!) who will dominate the next
generation of American politics:
My hope is that, for the good of the country, Republican Web People will,
over time, join the Democratic Party and tilt it into a compassionate,
center-left Web party for the 21st Century. That would be a party that is
sensitive to the needs of working people ... but committed to capitalism,
free markets and open trade as the vital engines of growth for a modern
society.
Yes, let's be sensitive to the needs of working people, unless they have
complaints about globalism, in which case we'll put our webbed hands over
our ears and ignore them. Are you loving this political season yet?
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has expressed fears that Hillary
Clinton is leaning too far toward socialism. (photo: Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty
Images)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/new-york-times-thomas-friedman-goes-to-
the-wall-w433066http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/new-york-times-thomas-f
riedman-goes-to-the-wall-w433066
Thomas Friedman Goes to the Wall
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
07 August 16
High priest of globalization lashes out against the enemies of progress
homas Friedman, master of metaphor, has a new set of fixations: walls, webs
and the tacking of that presidentially-contending center-left sailboat,
Hillary Clinton.
In a pair of recent articles, "Web People Versus Wall People" and "How
Clinton Could Knock Trump Out," the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the
New York Times expresses deep concern that Clinton's primary-season "lean"
toward the politics of Bernie Sanders isn't fake enough.
It's been a whole week since the convention, and Hillary still hasn't yet
gone back to being the unabashed friend to big banks and staunch advocate
for free trade and deregulation she just spent all of last year pretending
she was not. This has Friedman freaked out.
He fears she is leaning in the direction of socialism, "the greatest system
ever invented for making people equally poor," as opposed to staying true to
the capitalist ethos of her husband, which would "grow our pie bigger and
faster":
I get that she had to lean toward Sanders and his voters to win the
nomination; their concerns with fairness and inequality are honorable. But
those concerns can be addressed only with economic growth...
Friedman is conceding that inequality and unfairness are legitimate
concerns. He's just saying that now that the people most concerned about
these issues have been beaten at the polls, we can safely go back to
ignoring them and letting the beneficiaries of inequality worry about how
and when to fix it.
This "let's grow our pie bigger and faster" column (does this make more or
less sense than George Bush's famous "we should make the pie higher" idea?)
comes on the heels of last week's "Webs and Walls" column on the same theme.
This remarkable article divided the world into two groups of people. Roughly
speaking, Friedman is talking about people who embrace globalization ("Web
people") versus people who reject it ("Wall people").
This is already a confusing metaphor because the campaigns of the two
candidates Friedman identifies as riling up the "Wall" people, Donald Trump
and Bernie Sanders, were heavily reliant on Internet media, i.e. the Web.
Meanwhile, Friedman's definition of "web people" describes individuals who:
Instinctively understand that Democrats and Republicans both built their
platforms largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal and
the Cold War, but that today, a 21st-century party needs to build its
platform in response to the accelerations in technology, globalization and
climate change, which are the forces transforming the workplace, geopolitics
and the very planet.
That seems like a very specific and weird belief system, probably unique to
writers for the New York Times named Thomas Friedman. Also, Friedman never
explains what any of this has to do with "webs" - is it an Internet thing?
Do they have webbed hands?
But whatever, we get it, sort of. "Web people" embrace the future and "open
systems," i.e. free trade, bringing us closer to the heart of what Friedman
is talking about.
Friedman is right that this election, like the Brexit vote, has really been
a referendum on globalization. What's infuriating is the cartoonish way he
defines the critics of globalization.
"Wall people" in his mind are either xenophobic Trumpites who don't want a
flood of dirty, rapey immigrants entering their towns, or they're Sanders
socialists who don't want to compete with foreign workers and insist on
government handouts.
With regard to the latter, what troubles Friedman the most is the way
Hillary is cozying up to her critics on the left:
She is opposing things she helped to negotiate, like the Pacific trade deal,
and offering more benefits from government but refraining from telling
people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard
and playing by the rules doesn't cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you
need to be a lifelong learner, constantly raising your game.
Yes, to get by these days, working hard isn't enough to keep a job. You need
to be "constantly raising your game." Either that, or you need to marry a
shopping mall heiress and write books fawning over Fortune 500 companies.
Friedman's glib definition of globalization goes virtually unchallenged in
the pundit-o-sphere, which by and large agrees with him that critics of
globalism are either racists or afraid of capitalism.
But this issue is infinitely more complicated than that.
We never really had a referendum on globalization in America. It just sort
of happened. People had jobs one day, then the next morning they were fired,
replaced by 14-year-olds in Indonesia or sweatshop laborers in Bangladesh,
working in unsafe hell-holes without overtime or health care, beaten when
they don't make quotas.
What exactly does "raising your game" mean in the context of that sort of
competition?
Globalization in the snap of a finger essentially erased nearly two
centuries of America's bloody labor history. It's as if the Thibodeaux
Massacre, the hangings of the Molly McGuires, the Pullman Strike, the L.A.
Times bombing, the Flint sit-in and thousands of other strikes and
confrontations never took place.
In the new paradigm, all of those agonizing controversies and wars of
political attrition, which collectively produced a vast set of rules and
standards for dealing with workers, were simply wiped away.
Manufacturers just went abroad, to dictatorships and communist oligarchies,
to make their products, forcing American workers to compete not just against
foreign workers, but against their own history and legal systems.
People forget that when it comes to labor relations, America had to be
dragged, kicking and screaming, in the direction of the civilized world.
Attempts to ban child labor in this country failed repeatedly, and we didn't
actually pass a federal child labor law that stuck until 1938. Airlines in
America were still firing flight attendants for getting married through the
mid-eighties.
Now all that work spent to get even past those most basic problems is at
risk. In the global economy, employers can look at their business models as
one giant arbitrage.
You do your banking in the laissez-faire havens of the Caribbean, build
factories in slave-labor capitals like China or Indonesia, buy swaps in
less-regulated financial atmospheres in London, sell your products in
America and Europe, etc.
You also arrange your corporate structures so that you pay the smallest
amount of tax possible, often by threatening to move until you receive
subsidies and exemptions. This leads to bizarre situations like Boeing
making $26 billion in U.S. profits over a five-year period and receiving a
U.S. federal tax refund of $401 million over the same time.
This whole situation has raised profound questions that nobody has ever
bothered to try to answer for ordinary voters, as in: What are nation-states
for, in a global economy?
What's the point of all of our labor laws, or voting-rights laws, the first
amendment and a host of other American legal traditions if large pluralities
of American manufacturers do their business in countries like China, where
human rights abuses are rampant, political freedom is nonexistent and speech
is tightly controlled?
Friedman's description of "Wall People" is probably somewhat true when it
comes to Trump voters, many of whom do just want to be physically walled off
from a confusing, racially diverse world.
But to dismiss the rest of globalization's critics as communists who hate
freedom and just want to curl up in the lap of government and hide from
change is absurd and insulting.
Most educated people accept and embrace the idea of an increasingly
integrated world. The problem is how to go forward into the future in a way
that's fair and doesn't increase oppression, pollution, child labor, even
slavery and indenture, to say nothing of the disenfranchisement of the
ex-middle class in places like America.
These are very difficult questions. They're ones that probably won't have
positive solutions without the determined leadership of the world's bigger
democratic powers, like the U.S. and the E.U.
The problem is that the major parties in the United States in particular
seem almost totally disinterested in addressing the inequities of globalism.
That's because conventional wisdom is still stuck in the Friedman stage of
telling people that if they're troubled by the global economy, they're just
afraid of the future.
Because the Murphy's Law tendency of American politics demands that we draw
every conceivable wrong lesson from an event before accidentally stumbling
in the direction of progress, the twin revolts in the 2016 presidential race
will surely be misinterpreted for a good long while by the Friedmans of the
world.
They won't see the anti-establishment backlash as a reason to re-examine the
impact of globalism on ordinary people. Instead, as Friedman puts it,
they'll see an opportunity to build a single ruling coalition of
"center-left Web People" (what a creepy image!) who will dominate the next
generation of American politics:
My hope is that, for the good of the country, Republican Web People will,
over time, join the Democratic Party and tilt it into a compassionate,
center-left Web party for the 21st Century. That would be a party that is
sensitive to the needs of working people ... but committed to capitalism,
free markets and open trade as the vital engines of growth for a modern
society.
Yes, let's be sensitive to the needs of working people, unless they have
complaints about globalism, in which case we'll put our webbed hands over
our ears and ignore them. Are you loving this political season yet?
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
