"What's The Matter With Tom Friedman"

His enormous mustache of understanding just kept growing and growing until it crawled up his nose and consumed his brain.

It's actually a pretty tragic tale.

The president has apparently does something like this for oil companies...

As I am in the middle of reading the "The World is Flat" I can only say what are you talking about?  As I read him he is pointing out that Indians, Chinese and others aren't content to be low cost providers for ever.  That all the anti trade blather from the Left and the Right is pointless.  

It seems to me that what he is advocating that the idea of so many here that the European Model of social democracy is going to be under enormous pressure as those who will work harder and more productively come to the fore.  He is suggesting that Americans stop acting like we have a divine right to economic leadership and prosperity and get off our collective rear ends and get to work.

Personally, I think the constant sniping at Friedman by many at the Cafe is illustrative of what is wrong.

"Personally, I think the constant sniping at Friedman by many at the Cafe is illustrative of what is wrong."

I'm not a Friedman hater.  The dude has had a couple of profound and important ideas in his career which everyone should be familiar with.

But he has precious few ideas beyond those central ones, and as a result he comes off like a braindead hack in his regular NYT column.

If I were the first person to write a popular book explaining why it gets dark at night, I'd have written a profound and important book.  But if I kept regurgitating sections of my book twice a week in the Times for all of eternity, there'd be a problem.

Maybe Friedman realized that free trade in it's present form is a bad deal. 

I was all for free trade when NAFTA was passed in the early 90's.  It was supposed to open up markets for US business interests and create new jobs for our economy.  We did have a strong manufacturing infrastructure in place.  But from the outset it became clear that much of the world was not going to play by the same set of labor and trade rules as we have.  So the corporations benfitted by exporting jobs to places where labor costs were low.  But it didn't benefit the economy as a whole because the lost manufacturing jobs were not replaced.  In the meantime China and India have reaped the benefits of globalization because of their supply of cheap available labor.  And other countries refused to move away from nationalized industry also giving their corporations a leg up on us.  Now we have the passage of CAFTA last night.  So Central America is a new free trade zone.  Judging by the effect NAFTA had on our economy, huge trade deficits and an erosion of our manufacturing base, I am not doing cartwheels about what will happen with CAFTA.

But to the main question I like petey's assessment of what happened to Friedman...

Get more plumber jobs since it will be a good, solid position -- that is until robot repairmen are controlled from overseas.  Until the standard of living is raised overseas, until our brother and sister workers overseas get comparably decent pay and working conditions, decent benefits and retirement, we cannot compete with the foreign workforce.  People got to eat and they will get sick every now and then:  I say best be finding yourself a good service job.  

As Friedman has written elsewhere, we are reaping the rewards for winning the Cold War.  We are not fighting some communist-totalitarianism trying to take over but competition from free market capitalism.  Aren't we lucky?  Isn't this what we were fighting those commies for?

One thing to keep in mine is the coming social unrest from the influx of wealth and an improvement in the standard of living of a lucky few that is going to happen in India and China.  I don't know that much about the situation in Ireland but the same thing will happen there -- that is, unless they have another one of those big dog meetings Friedman is talking about.  That all this redistribution of wealth in Friedman's flat world has no social consequence is what I find wanting in his grand scheme.  

Another thing to keep in mine is that if Bush called that type of meeting it would be to maximize his and his friends' profit margins from the situation, and certainly do nothing benefiting the average American that would adversely affect those margins.

Finally, Matt, the offer is not what would it take to keep you from leaving Prospect, but what would it take to keep your position rather than offer it to someone off shore who could produce identical reality-based commentary at much less the cost.  Do we need to have a meeting to prevent blogging from moving overseas?

Matt,

This is rather silly of you.  Do you really think Friedman is advocating that the president would literally do exactly what these corporate cheiftans said?  

Freidman is obviously saying that right now a lot of companies are outsourcing because they have no choice, they cant find the skills they need here in the US.  You can disagree with that and argue it but to suggest Freidman is literally saying tell me what you want to do and I will do it is rather childish.   

Come-on Matt, you can do better.. There are many many things substantively wrong with Tom "I know it all" Freidman's ideas. i say this as someone who supports outstanding and believes in free trade.  I think we would be better off arguing the substance of his claims then in taking a line and interpreting in an absurd fasion... 

 Your last paragraph is much more important and deserves elaboration.  Thats where the focus of this argument should be not in Freidman wants Bush to do as CEO's want no matter how bad, cause anyone with hal a brain can clearly see thats not what Tom was suggesting.

when he talks about the Middle East, where he is a true expert, he is wonderfully interesting and nuanced.

If you want to see how "wonderfully interesting and nuanced" Friedman is about the middle east read Riverbend's (http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com) takedown of one of the recent pieces of crap he calls a column. Friedman writes about the schisms he sees between Sunnis and Shias. Riverbend replies:

Now, it is always amusing to see a Jewish American journalist speak in the name of Sunni Arabs. When Sunni Arabs, at this point, hesitate to speak in a representative way about other Sunni Arabs, it is nice to know Thomas L. Friedman feels he can sum up the feelings of the "Sunni Arab world" in so many words. His arrogance is exceptional.
It is outrageous because for many people, this isn't about Sunnis and Shia or Arabs and Kurds. It's about an occupation and about people feeling that they do not have real representation. We have a government that needs to hide behind kilometers of barbed wire and meters and meters of concrete- and it's not because they are Shia or Kurdish or Sunni Arab- it's because they blatantly supported, and continue to support, an occupation that has led to death and chaos.
The paragraph is contemptible because the idea of a "Shia leader" is not an utterly foreign one to Iraqis or other Arabs, no matter how novel Friedman tries to make it seem. How dare he compare it to having a black governor in Alabama in the 1920s?

I'm not quite sure just what Friedman is an "expert" on, except bloviating. I would be interested in reading about "What's the matter with Tom Friedman," but I don't have the time to wade through all three volumes.

I think I'll take Friedman over Riverbend on the question of the Sunni/Shiite split.

Sounds like the real problem Riverbend has is that Friedman supported the war.

Tom Friedman is the gift that keeps on giving.

Never mind his blind faith in technological determinism, following in the proud footsteps of... Karl Marx; never mind his errant predictions about the Iraq war; never mind his  mangled syntax; but please do mind this:

Referring to those pesky Palestinians, he writes: 

"I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands." 

Who else talks like this but a racist jackass?

One can be for or against the intervention in Kosovo, but only someone mentally deranged can write:

"Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389."

The man is whack! 

That's pretty spectacular apologism. If Tom didn't mean it, why did he write it? If he meant something like what you think he did, why didn't he have the president say "My top economic priority is to keep American jobs in this country. Tell me what would make you keep your jobs here."?

Furthermore, Tom's biggest problem is that the answer to his hypothetical question is pretty obvious: "$5 a day wages".

Okay, I went over the top in that last graph. (It didn't seem as harsh as that when I was typing. Honest. But sheesh, Alterman is insufferable.)
Glad to see I rebounded from an early 1.5/2 rating, though!

I saw one 5. You CAN tickle his fancy; it's just hard.

I don't have a problem with posters rating comments in their own threads.  It's rare that someone abuses it and, if they do, other raters can come to the rescue and adjust the scores.  And banning the practice would eliminate two uses I enjoy:  Josh rating comments to acknowledge that people's concerns about the site will be considered and Yglesias's use of the ratings as meta-comments.  My favorite of the latter being the "3" rating Matt gave to the person on the Dark Water thread who wanted him to spill the beans on the in-joke he alluded to, which essentially said "Yes, I heard your request and, no, I'm not going to tell you."

I heart every last word Matthew writes, but in the end this is the only thing that needs to be said about Thomas Friedman:

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

The answer isn't to say:  What do we need to do to keep you here?  But say we will make war with your lobbyists and pet legislative interests (as well as sleazier corporate welfare) if you don't start helping out the home country a little.

Not that I agree with this being a free-trade market-force oriented Democrat, but if this is your policy goal, there are ways to achieve it without kowtowing to business.