Friedman's globalized world isn't flat;
It's a gigantic mountain

Economic absurdities that
Democrats must expose:


...because it's wrong to penalize success and hard work.


...therefore, we should eliminate the capital gains tax.


...After all, they came from, and understand, business.


...even though it is based on pitting the worlds' workers against each other.


...union bosses are only out for themselves.


...and the more the rich have, the more will trickle down to everyone else.


...Democrats are communists, or at least, socialists at heart.


...so when we tax wealthy investors, we lose jobs.


...so investors, not workers, create wealth.


...so we should give them all the tax breaks possible.


...Democrats just want to tax and spend today.


General Issues:

...check out this 2-minute video.


...It's a mountain, and a terrible defense of globalization.


...for those of Indonesia, Mexico, China and India.


...and how not to do it again.


...and the "crisis" is just a ploy by those who want to destroy it.


...Republicans' most important propaganda technique.


...and get the media on your side




This Site

    Thomas Friedman’s “flat earth” analogy is clever, attention getting—and wrong. It’s actually a not-too-subtle defense of globalization, and it suggests that there is a level playing field in which countries compete with each other to produce the best products and services at the lowest cost.

    Actually, globalization has created a single mountain, with the world’s investors and CEOs at the top, and the world’s workers in the middle and at the bottom. Those at the top are in total control of the world’s labor markets, and those in the middle and the bottom compete with each other in a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. The competition is not nation against nation—it’s the world’s investors and CEOs against the world’s workers—and the investors and CEOs are winning big time.

    Of course, that’s just considering globalization as an economic phenomenon. As a political issue, we’re beginning to see it as an important factor in the ideological struggle between nations. China increasingly is using its industrial and technological might to strengthen its military, and to increase its political negotiating power with America’s trading partners, such as the Philippines, India, and most of the rest of the developing world.

    Friedman’s solution for making the U.S. more competitive is for leaders in education and politics to build a “more focused, motivated team [which] always beats a collection of more talented but complacent individuals.”

    How absurd. There is no way American manufacturing workers can compete with workers making one-tenth as much—and no way engineers and scientists can compete with teams of engineers and scientists making one-third to one-fourth as much—no matter how focused and motivated they are.

    Face it. Our country’s economic, social, and political problems today are the result of shortsighted government policies that created this globalization monster.

    Check out some of the recent articles in our conservative financial publications.

    The Wall Street Journal noted that Chinese factories are competing with each other to provide products to corporations like WalMart that give contracts to the lowest bidder. Of course, the most effective way to compete, even in China, is to pay workers as little as possible.

    As has been widely reported everywhere, because of the voracious appetite of industrial China, the prices of virtually all raw materials—from steel to oil—are skyrocketing. So Americans are now paying higher prices for gas, but are not benefiting from more jobs that the consumption of the world’s supply of gas enables.

    Our chemical industry is following its client industries to China and elsewhere, because that’s now where their market is. Same with pharmaceutical research; it’s going to India where corporations can hire three scientists for the price of one in the U.S.

    Business Week said it best in a cover story, “Outsourcing Innovation.” (March 21) “When Western corporations began selling their factories and farming out manufacturing in the '80s and '90s to boost efficiency and focus their energies, most insisted all the important research and development would remain in-house. But that pledge is now passé.”

    All pretensions are gone. It’s now out in the open. To enrich themselves, investors and top corporate executives are willing to outsource all jobs—no matter what the skill level.

    Apologists for globalization have conned Americans into believing that the free market—without any government protections of workers—will improve everyone’s standard of living. It’s simply not true today, and never has been.

    Although advanced education can help individuals improve their standard of living, the standards of living for classes of citizens are always determined by government. This is especially true when it comes to investors vs. workers.

    For example, orderlies in nursing homes and agricultural laborers have all the education they need to do their necessary and important jobs. But they—and others like them—make less than a living wage, simply because our politicians want it that way.