coming up soon: Sam Sedar takes on bloated media hog Tom Friedman

can't wait for that.

for whatever reason, lots of people take that creep seriously

prep for the segment here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1245393

Every few years a book comes along that perfectly expresses the moment's conventional wisdom--that says pretty much what everybody else in the chattering classes is saying, but does it in a way that manages to sound fresh and profound. Notable examples are Paul Kennedy's 1989 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, with its theme of "imperial overstretch", of a United States declining under the weight of its military commitments; or Lester Thurow's 1992 Head to Head, with its vision of a desperate commercial struggle among the advanced industrial nations, and of a United States unable to compete effectively because of its naive faith in free markets. It is already clear that Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree--which tells the story of the new global economy, and of a United States triumphant because it is the nation best suited to capitalize on that global economy--is the latest in the series. The question is whether Friedman's vision will date as quickly as those of his predecessors.

It's possible to summarize what Friedman has to say fairly quickly, mainly because it's what you read in just about every issue of Business Week. Information technology, he tells us, has made the world a small place, in which ideas and money can move almost instantly across borders. This smaller world richly rewards countries and societies that meet its needs--which is to say places that have strong property rights, open minds, and a flexible attitude; but it inflicts devastating punishment on those who fail to live up to global standards. Old-fashioned power politics is becoming increasingly obsolete because it conflicts with the imperatives of global capitalism. We are heading for a world that is basically democratic, because you can't keep 'em down on the farm once they have Internet access, and basically peaceful, because George Soros will pull out his money if you rattle your saber.

This story is told via hundreds of anecdotes, most of them involving the author. (Someone once defined an intellectual as a person who can utter more than two consecutive sentences that do not mention himself or anyone he knows. This definition might have been specifically crafted to exclude Friedman; as a reader-reviewer at Amazon.com--hey, the Internet really can be a democratizing force!--puts it, he "uses the first person singular the way most writers use commas.") But these anecdotes, annoying as they may be, do serve a purpose: By personalizing the story, they make it seem more convincing to readers who find analytical abstractions off-putting. Of course, as the history of global visions teaches us, what is convincing is not necessarily true. Has Friedman got it right?

A good place to start is with something that he almost certainly has wrong. If there is one single fact that transformed America's image of its place in the world, that made earlier vintage global visions look so foolish in retrospect, it is the contrast between our own unexpected prosperity and Japan's even more unexpected economic malaise. There isn't really any careful discussion of what went wrong with Japan in this book, but the clear implication of his various parables and metaphors is that Japan is in trouble because it is hidebound and inefficient, and that this makes it unfit for the global economy. Yet, as Friedman himself points out, Japan's export sector remains world-class (In fact, it's sort of bizarre that he names a symbol of Japanese manufacturing prowess, rather than some American specialty like software or entertainment, in the book's title.) What has faltered in Japan is production for the domestic market--and while this production is and always has been inefficient, the immediate problem is not inadequate supply but inadequate demand. Put in a nutshell, the Japanese simply save too much; that is, although Friedman's only reference to Keynes is a disparaging one (he's a "defining economist of the Cold War system"), Japan is in fact suffering the most classically Keynesian crisis since the 1930s.......

more

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/books/1999/9906.krugma...

FAIR on Friedman, via Hardball:

Next 6 months will be critical in determining how democracy in Iraq plays out. he just said that a week or two ago

problem is, he said almost the exact same words in 2003. he's been saying that just about every six months or so since then

Sam: how do they let anybody like him sit there and say stuff like that all the time? How does the New York Times allow this doof to write his insipid column, when his insights are always so, uh, devoid of any insight?......loose paraphrase by me

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002538889

they link 10....pretty funny

"The next six months in Iraq -- which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there -- are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time." (The New York Times, Nov. 30, 2003)

"What we're gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war." (CBS's Face the Nation, Oct. 3, 2004)

"Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile." (The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2004)

"I think we're in the end game now…. I think we're in a six-month window here where it's going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt I think the next congressional election -- that's my own feeling -- let alone the presidential one." (NBC's Meet the Press, Sept. 25, 2005)

The title of his latest book "The Earth is Flat" sums up his thinking pretty well I think.

particularly how he torturously gets from a quote by an Indian businessman regarding 'leveling the playing field' to FLATTENING it, to 'the world is flat'

Taibbi takes this fraud apart like no other

http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

Taibbi nails him.

he's my favorite writer of late. right up there with Sarah Vowell and Joe Queenan.

from your link on Friedman

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

His recurring predictions on Iraq are a hilarious indictment of his never ending quest to support BushCo's big adventure regardless of the facts.

His ideas on the "Flat Earth" and global economy are ridiculous mostly because he assumes that corporations act as benevolent entities. The truth is that global corporations are in the exploitation business and the 21st century will be the age of the corporation. This period will be defined by a steadily increasing competition for resources and it will witness an unrelenting search for the cheapest labor. Nation-states will become merely the enforcement arm of the corporations. Current US policies under Bush are just a preview.

(the zaibatsus) since Neuromancer...1984 or thereabouts