French-fried Friedman, nouvelle globalizer

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Fri, 03 Jun 2005 15:21:07 -0400

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French-fried Friedman, nouvelle globalizer

 

 

FRENCH FRIED FRIEDMAN

The Nouvelle Globalizer

by Greg Palast

Friday, June 3, 2005

 

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.

 

 

 

There is, of course, a hopeful, growing India where the much-heralded

cyber work is based. But, 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. A huge apparatus of state-owned or

state-controlled industries, redistributionist tax systems, subsidies

of necessities

from electricity to food, tight government regulation and affirmative

action programs for the lower castes are what has created these

comfortable refuges for Oracle and Microsoft.

 

 

 

And the successful Indian states, unlike the dreadful free-market Uttar

Pradesh, have labor unions so tough they make the French CGT look like

a luncheon club of baguette biters.

 

 

 

A few years ago, I dropped in on a fishing village in Kerala in

Southern India. Most fisherman worked from motorless dug-out log

boats. Their

language is Malayalam, but a large banner slung between two cocoanut

trees announced in English, " WordPerfect applications class today. " After

they brought in the catch, the locals practiced programming on

cardboard replicas of keyboards.

 

 

 

What made this all possible was not capitalist competitive drive (there

was no corporate " entrepreneur " in sight), but the state's investment

in universal education and the village's commitment to development of

opportunity, not of a lucky few, but for the entire community. The

village was 100% literate, 100% unionized, and 100% committed to sharing

resources through a sophisticated credit union finance operation.

 

 

 

This was the communal welfare state at it's best. Microsoft did not

build the schools for programmers -- the corporation only harvested what

the socialist communities sowed.

 

 

 

The economist Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for predicting

that Southern India, with it's strong communalist social welfare state,

would lead the economic advance of South Asia -- and do so without the

Thatcherite sleight-of-hand of pretending that riches for the few

equates to progress for the many.

 

 

 

When I asked the fisherman on their way to programming lessons what the

West could do to encourage their efforts, they did not suggest

privatizing Kerala's social security system. Rather -- and this was

before the

Seattle demonstrations of 1999 brought the World Trade Organization to

the West's attention -- they called for the abolition of the WTO and

greater protection for their wooden fishing fleet against the foreign

factory boats marauding in their waters. With protective trade barriers,

they could do as the US did for a hundred years: build up local

resources and industry that creates the infrastructure of growth.

 

 

 

And the programmers themselves do not dream, Mr. Friedman, of stealing

work from indolent Frenchmen or slothful Seattle geeks. Indians are not

in love with the new method of brain-drain by satellite. They would

hope for the opportunity to write code in their own languages for their

own industries.

 

 

 

Friedman ends with the typical globalizer's warning that, " it's a bad

time for France and friends to lose their appetite for hard work, " or

they will lose their jobs to Indians and Chinese willing to work for

noodles. What Friedman means is that the French should give up their

taste

for old age pensions, universal health care, top-quality public

education, protection of their skies and waters and all those things

we used

to call advances but now, according to the Friedman world order, stand

in the way of progress.

 

 

 

It is too bad that the Times' opinion columns have not been outsourced

to India. Were it so, a Keralite might explain to Friedman that human

advances are measured not by our willingness to crawl lower and lower to

buy ourselves a job from Bill Gates, or by counting the number of Gap

outlets in Delhi, but by our success in protecting and nurturing

liberté, égalité and fraternité among all humanity.

 

 

 

 

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best

Democracy Money Can Buy which contains his investigation of

globalization, " Sell the Lexus, Burn the Olive Tree. " Subscribe to

Palast's columns

at www.GregPalast.com.

 

 

 

 

 

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