Butting Heads with the Darling of the Globalizers

The Lexus and the Olive Tree, by Pulitzer prizewinning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, is a recent and popular bit of propaganda boosting economic globalization. It is also a distinctly odd piece of work.

Friedman acknowledges a few of the dangers inherent in what the WTO is overseeing, and we shall share some of those insights as the week goes along. On balance, however, he sees the mallification of the world as inevitable and good.

One telling feature of the book is his deliberate ignoring of all reasoned criticism of globalization. He quotes bankers, diplomats, politicians, and industrialists at great length. Search the index: Ralph Nader, David Korten, Herman Daly, and scores more we could name are nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, just for flavor, here are a few annotated extracts. (And if you want to read this work, we suggest you borrow it from the library and save your money.)

The one thing you can say in favor of the globalization system is that it doesn’t discriminate—it leaves both the weak and the powerful feeling a loss of control and under the thumb of unelected and at times uncontrollable forces.

This is good? Was Hurricane Floyd good because it wrecked homes of both the rich and the poor?

Governments that want to avoid globalization not only have to prove that their alternative can still produce rising standards of living but—and this is critically important—they have to do it in an environment in which we all increasingly know how everyone else lives.

Hardly. Through television we think we know how people in New York or Los Angeles live, but it’s a one-way street. Do we know how people in Chile live? In Holland? In Pakistan?

The Thatcherite-Reagan revolutions came about because popular majorities in these two major Western economies concluded that the old government-directed economic approaches simply were not providing sufficient levels of growth. Thatcher and Reagan combined to strip huge chunks of economic decisionmaking power from the state, from the advocates of the Great Society and from traditional Keynesian economics, and hand them over to the free market.

How’s that again? Reagan won because he was a polished liar. He certainly did try to destroy much of the federal government. The exception was the military, upon which he lavished so much money (most to private defense contractors) that he ran up the national debt to catastrophic heights.

Being green, being global, and being greedy can go hand in hand.

Indeed. And how far? For how long?

It would be naïve to think that somehow we can stop the global juggernauts of McDonald’s or Taco Bells from opening franchises everywhere around the world. They proliferate because they offer people something they want.

They want heroin too. And decent jobs. Do we (whoever we is) give them those?

My concern is that without environment there is no sustainable culture and without a sustainable culture there is no sustainable community and without a sustainable community there is no sustainable globalization.

This makes me dizzy. Leave off the last part and it makes sense. Otherwise it’s bafflegab.

Now that [communism, socialism, fascism] have been discredited, I doubt we will see a new coherent, universal ideological reaction to globalization—because I don’t believe there is one that can both truly soften the brutality of capitalism and still produce steadily rising standards of living.

Optimistic, aren’t you?

Because we tend to think of globalization as something that countries connect to outside themselves, or something imposed from above and beyond, we tend to forget how much, at its heart, it is also a grassroots movement that emerges from within each of us.

What planet are we speaking of here?

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