Is Tom Friedman the Most Overrated and Disgraceful Journalist in America?
http://www.alternet.org/media/tom-friedman-most-overrated-and-disgraceful-journalist-americaWhen ranking which multi-millionaire American pundit is the most overrated, there are, without doubt, many worthy contenders, but one near the top of any list must be the New York Times’ Thomas L. Friedman – with his long record of disastrous policy pronouncements including his enthusiasm for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Friedman, of course, has paid no career price for his misguided judgments and simplistic nostrums. Like many other star pundits who inhabit the Op-Ed pages of the Times and the Washington Post, Friedman has ascended to a place where the normal powers of gravity don’t apply, where the cumulative weight of his errors only lifts him up.
Indeed, there is something profoundly nonsensical about Friedman’s Olympian standing, inhabiting a plane of existence governed by the crazy rules of Washington’s conventional wisdom, where – when looking down on the rest of us – Friedman feels free to cast aspersions on other people’s sanity, like the Mad Hatter calling the Church Mouse nuts.
Friedman describes every foreign adversary who reacts against U.S. dictates as suffering from various stages of insanity. He accepts no possibility that these “designated enemies” are acting out of their own sense of self-interest and even fear of what the United States might be designing.
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But that one was howling funny 
This article just goes into his war cheerleading. He's also a free-traitor mark who loves offshore outsourcing and very superficially glosses over the supposed great it's doing for other countries, all the while ignoring the zero-sum hurt it's putting on worker progress in America.
In previous columns and in his numerous books about the wonders of globalization, free trade (and, implicitly, offshore outsourcing of American jobs,) Friedman celebrates the movement of industrial and high technology work out of the United States to nations such as India and China. He considers this situation a "win-win" for Americans but he can't point to "21st-century jobs" created in the U.S. for Americans as a consequence of offshore outsourcing. (Sorry Tom, the growing number of low-skilled and low-paying nontradeable services jobs in the U.S. economy are not the "21st-century" jobs you imagine.)
He fails to either acknowledge or comprehend the fact that the very outsourcing and "free trade" policies he has breathlessly praised are at the core of why Americans cannot compete for the "21st century jobs". The "flattening" of which Friedman speaks is the result of political action -- laws which have enabled American corporations to simultaneously move work offshore while continuing to sell goods and services produced by foreign workers in the U.S. market without restriction. Businesses are able to offshore jobs and pay Third World wages while continuing to sell the goods and services at "American prices".
What are OUR new 21st century careers? Hate to break it to you, Tommy, but these careers are going to require training. YEARS of training, not months. I need to know NOW what they are and make sure they're stayin' put for a while . . . at least until corporate America ships THAT overseas as well. Until you have something better than the mediocre-paying service industry (like Davy Dreier stupidly espoused in that report of his during the Bewsh years), you're pretty much buyin' into a gamble.
The thing about it is, I don't need to hear "solutions" from a guy who's pretty much never really had to work hard to get where he is in life, never really had to struggle, has networking skills and fell into all the right jobs (and eventually, married the right person). I don't think a person such as that should deem himself such an authority as to what American workers have to do to better themselves. I might as well listen to an Ovarian Lottery winner like Steve Forbes on the subject; it'd make about as much sense.
Friedman always tends to ignore the giant-elephant factors of wage stagnation, astronomical college costs, unrealistic expectations of Corporate America, unrealistic odds of "Horatio Alger" type success and just plain-and-simple bad luck.
Outstanding outsourcing info...
... With humor! Always, with humor!
Tommy kind of exposes himself here. Economic absolutism is as classic a right-wing fallback as "Who ever told you life was fair?"
"It's either THIS or THAT, no happy medium." Yes, let's completely ignore much of Europe. Let's completely ignore Scandanavia. Let's completely ignore Iceland and how they're bouncing back from the free marketz mistakes they made. Let's completely ignore Canada. Hell, I'll go so far to say let's completely ignore Argentina and Chile, who've slowly but surely reformed for the better after ending their neo-lib experiments and put money in the hands of the people who spend it. Let's completely ignore all of these countries that thrive by NOT using the predatory system that escaped from Pandora's box, but rather are ideal examples of balanced and mixed markets, something his winner-burn-everything corporate masters aren't even remotely interested in. Competition has killed development.
And it also sickens me that he insists the problem is education, as if we're just not smart enough and too average. He has no idea whatsoever that a great deal of people in America today have some form of post-HS education. If there aren't enough decent, high-paying, skills-applicable jobs to go around, all this is going to mean is that you're going to have the most college educated shelf-stockers and cashiers a country can handle. The problem is NOT education, the problem is an epidemic of underemployment and wage stagnation that's not meeting a never-decreasing cost of living. The problem is offshore outsourcing and insourcing, which doesn't result in higher paying jobs here, as data truly indicates. The problem is the breaking of the social contract between corporations and workers for the quest of short-term profit over long-term stability and cycle. If the problem is education, then why are people with bachelors and masters degrees getting laid off of their jobs?
The whole interview made him sound like an unfortunate soul who just rolled around in fiberglass insulation. Obviously uncomfortable and way out of his element, his continued back-walking of his free-traitor screeds and "Don't shoot the messenger!" pleas only add to the hilarity of it all. I think about ten minutes in, he REALLY wishes he was back on American safe havens like CNN or CNBC.
I also like how he repeatedly insists he's never heard of the term "neoliberalism".
