Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

On Thursday (May 10), Democratic lawmakers announced a new trade pact with the Bush administration. While details of the deal were kept secret, there were the inevitable leaks and Fair Trade activist David Sirota immediately hit the wires with his appraisal. Critics like Sirota characterize the agreement as a NAFTA clone that sells out the American worker while being heralded by the American political elite (on both sides of the aisle) as a victory for free trade. Though Wolves does not get too deeply into the details of trade agreements like NAFTA, I do cover this disintegration of party politics when it comes to issues of American foreign trade policy.

Woodrow Wilson famously said that “partisanship ends at the water’s edge,” meaning that when it came to the expression of American power abroad, the two parties would typically find consensus. Especially in war-time. But the same is true for the expansion of US interests to markets that offer cheap labor pools. This deal is no exception. As Sirota wrote:

“Republicans have been telling reporters that this deal is the first coordinated step in a process to secure congressional reauthorization of President Bush’s “fast track” trade authority - the authority that has allowed him to eliminate labor, human rights and environmental protections from deals like CAFTA.”

The New York Times was quick to applaud the deal, declaring that “partisan divisions need not stand in the way of the broader national economic interest.” They almost never have. This is the essence of American economic liberalism; seen in that context, all of America is liberal. The nation’s identity as a champion of “free trade” emerged as a reaction to the mercantile system which, over the 16th and 17th centuries, had become the dominant trade policy of the major imperial powers. It was based on the idea that nations had to compete for the world’s resources, which naturally pitted empires against each other. It also placed trade restrictions on goods from competitive powers, forcing colonists, like the Americans, to buy from England at rates higher than those of a free and open market with other national producers.

It was this system that Adam Smith ultimately sought to overthrow when he came to prominence with his Wealth of Nations. Smith’s economic philosophy argued that by freeing the market from government control, it would be guided by an ‘invisible hand’ that was essentially self-regulating, creating a natural harmony between supply and demand. More, it would empower individual merchants to pursue profits on their own terms, as free agents. In his view, economic, just as much as social life, was regulated by the market and not the state; hence, the “free” market.

The truth, however, is that America is just as mercantilist as any empire, only it uses tools like the WTO and IMF to force its goods on client nations while making its borders nearly impenetrable for theirs. Anyways… all this talk about globalization reminded me of an excerpt from Wolves that I wanted to publish. Fittingly, it concerns the writing of Thomas Friedman, one of the Times’ top editorial draws. I was flying back from the Guardian Hay book festival in Wales (which I will be returning to in late May to present Wolves on opening weekend) after conducting all the interviews for the first chapter of the book when the following took place:

[I have placed footnotes in square brackets.]

SITTING in the departure lounge at Heathrow, I sift through the notes from my various conversations over the past few days. Naturally, there are a spectrum of opinions about the virtues and authenticity of new millennial liberalism. But one consistent theme that threaded all of my interviews at Hay is that whatever the state of the liberal project, the capitalist one is doing just fine. Indeed, without any viable ideological competitor, as Christopher Hitchens declared, it has “embarked on another revolution.”

Now, every true revolution has a scribe. Someone who is able to channel the zeitgeist into a passionate, living chronicle that fuels the insurgency and propels it to its ultimate historical destiny. The French Revolution had Voltaire, the American had Thomas Paine. And, for the new capitalist revolution, there is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. I know this because as I walk through the business class cabin of my United Airlines flight, passing all the young legionnaires of the jet-set globalist contingent, I count four copies of his best-selling book, The World is Flat, and that’s just in the first three rows. Seeing the books reminds me that Friedman was the only major figure to refuse my interview request for this book. It’s a drag, because there is probably no other liberal who fits the description of a wolf in sheep’s clothing that America’s pre-eminent globalization advocate. But before I can get too bummed out, I hear a soft female voice calling my name.

“Back here, Mr. Marshall.”

I turn to see a familiar woman motioning to a window seat just two aisles from coach. Looking down at my stub, I remember that I had been unofficially upgraded by a couple of agents working at the United check-in counter. Arriving late and a little disheveled, they decided to have a little fun with me, sternly explaining that the flight was full and I would not be able to board. Too tired from the long drive from Wales to argue, I smiled and asked when the next plane went out.

“Tomorrow morning,” replied the older of the two in a kindly cockney accent. She must have felt sorry for me because a few moments later she and another young United employee were busily working their computer, committing a random act of human kindness and giving me a seat in the front of the bus. Now here was that same young co-conspirator pointing at my seat. It’s the kind of deed that would make Thomas Friedman happy, proving his thesis that the world is, well, flat.

The central thesis of Friedman’s book is that with the rapid advances in technology and communication a new paradigm is emerging in transnational business. The old vertical (“command and control”) systems are being replaced by horizontal (“connect and collaborate”) ones and, in the process, blowing away walls and ceilings that were once integral to the rigid hierarchical structure of global commerce. He first made this discovery in Bangalore, India where menial data entry and phone operator jobs in the accounting and banking fields are now being performed by English speaking workers. This has been going on for years but, as Friedman explains, he was too busy covering the war on terror to notice. It’s not until Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys - India’s equivalent to Microsoft - tells him “the playing field is being leveled,” that Friedman realizes what he has stumbled upon.

So in the 21st century, Friedman argues in his trademark Alice-in-Wonderland pitch, anyone can rise up and challenge the once-dominant blue chip companies. Over and over again he exclaims: the world is flat, the world is flat, the world is flat! Capitalism is undergoing its new revolution, one that will be as transformative as “Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, the rise of the nation-state, or the Industrial Revolution.”

Like all revolutions, this one will have its winners and losers. Of the former, most obvious are corporate CEOs who will fatten their bottom line by tapping into the vast reservoir of cheap foreign labor. On the other side is Joe Six-Pack, who will suffer a net loss in American jobs. But Friedman smilingly balances this with news that a burgeoning Indian middle class will drive demand for US goods and services. And that’s about it for the upside. Much of the success of Friedman’s book lies in his dire warnings to Americans that they are on the verge of a major crisis. Not only are hard-working, low-wage Indian workers stealing their jobs, but hard-working, tech-savvy Chinese students are increasingly taking seats in top undergrad and graduate college programs. And, Friedman frets, if America doesn’t wake up, it will face a potentially disastrous decline. Or, as Infosys’ CEO Nilekani later explains, the American middle class “has not yet grasped the competitive intensity of the future. Unless they [do], they will not make the investments in reskilling themselves and you will end up with a lot of people stranded on an island.”

Slipping into my window seat, I laugh to my self. There, in the adjacent seat pocket, with a gold sticker shouting its status as “the best-selling non-fiction book in the world today,” is another copy of The World is Flat. I nod hello to the young female executive sitting next to me and pull out the book I have brought along. It’s a thin essay by the 75-year-old Marxist intellectual Samir Amin that issues its own grim warnings about the future of our globalized world. Titled The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, the cover photo shows a Chinese kid dressed in army fatigues, standing on the Wall of China holding a Coke can.

If Thomas Friedman is the prophet of 21st century capitalism, then Samir Amin is his anti-Christ. But to hear Amin tell it, Friedman is the only one leading humankind into the depths of Hell. Writing from Dakar, Senegal where he runs the Third World Forum, Amin’s thesis is essentially that liberalism, if allowed to continue on its path of creative destruction, will lead to an apocalyptic end. He likens the globalizing force of liberalism to a virus that has destroyed all ideological competitors and which is now making its final assault on its host species. According to Amin, the ethic of liberalism – “long live competition, may the strong win” – is now ravaging societies of the Third World, causing further “social alienation and pauperization of urban classes.”

It’s nothing new from the far, far left and there are shelf-fulls of books by anti-globalization writers from the developing world. But what made me pick up Samir Amin’s essay was the striking specificity of his warning. In Liberal Virus, he argues liberalism’s most decisive effect will be to divide the world into an apartheid system that sees 3 billion peasant farmers pushed from their land and forced into the cities where they will die. This, he explains, will result from the implementation of a 2001 World Trade Organization (WTO) mandate that all agricultural markets be opened to the expansion of commercial agribusiness producers. Without the ability to make a subsistence living from their own land, half the world’s population will have to migrate to the urban centers where there is no work for them. And thus, he concludes, they will be trapped in an “organized system of apartheid” on a global scale.

“What is going to become of these billions of human beings, already for the most part, the poor among the poor?” Amin asks. You don’t have to be a red-blooded socialist to intuit his answer. “Capitalism,” he concludes, “has become barbaric, directly calling for genocide.” In this drive to satisfy the insatiable hunger for new markets of its Western clients, the WTO is sanctioning a process that will “destroy – in human terms – entire societies.” Writing in a style that starkly contradicts Friedman’s cheery cartoon of the flat world, Amin paints an ominous image of capitalism as a force that is in constant need to consume itself and the communities that lie in its path. Through his eyes, the agents of globalization bear an eerie resemblance to the Borg that battle Star Trek’s Jean Luc Picard and his Enterprise crew. American liberalism echoes the Borg with the claim that it only seeks to “”improve the quality of life for all species” through the spread of democracy while simultaneously warning the world that “resistance is futile – you will be assimilated.” But that is not to say Amin views liberalism as the victor. Rather, he describes it as a “senile system” that ultimately cannot stop the horror of its destiny.

Now, again, it isn’t hard to find doomsday prophecies about the evils of capitalism. Especially from red diaper socialists living in the heart of Muslim Africa. But what is interesting about Amin’s book is that he offers an explanation for the phenomenal success of Friedman’s book. Expanding his metaphor, Amin describes the liberal virus as one which “pollutes contemporary social thought and eliminates the capacity to understand the world, let alone transform it.” So there is a kind of delusional episode occurring within the mass American psyche, one that has obscured what Amin terms “really-existing capitalism” and replaced it with a fictitious model based on an “imaginary capitalism.” According to Amin, liberals like Thomas Friedman conjure the illusion of a system that is inherently just and self-regulating while, in reality, it only creates permanent instability and requires constant intervention and protection by the armored shield of the state. “The globalized ‘liberal’ economic order,” he writes, “requires permanent war – military interventions endlessly succeeding one another – as the only means to submit the peoples of the periphery to its demands.”

[Perhaps it’s fitting that Friedman places his journey in the tradition of the great explorers’. He begins his book by citing a passage from the diary of Christopher Columbus which states: "Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy Christian faith, and are enemies of the doctrine of Mahomet, and of all idolatry and heresy, determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the above-mentioned countries of India, to see the said princes, people, and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our holy faith…”]

I started reading Amin’s book a few weeks after finishing The World Is Flat. And what struck me was that his description of the forces driving globalization was far closer to that of Sergeant Hollis - the tank commander I met in Iraq who told me that “when Americans say ‘liberation,’ we mean capitalism” - than to Thomas Friedman’s. What’s more, his theory about the impact of the liberal virus on our ability to interpret the world drove me back into Friedman’s book, where I found a quote that basically mirrors Amin’s. Just before the halfway mark, Friedman writes: “The perspective and predispositions that you carry around in your head are very important in shaping what you see and what you don’t see.” Of course, he’s not applying this to himself. Rather, it’s a blunt critique of the fearful, knee-jerk reactions that American politicians and union leaders have thrown up to “protect” the US economy from a genuinely “open” market. But the point is that, as we well know, everyone is the captive of their perspective. It frames and defines our worldview. Hence, for Friedman, the liberal business columnist, globalization = good, while for Amin, the African Marxist intellectual, globalization = bad. And for millions of readers who aspire to be a part of the new capitalist revolution, Friedman’s vision is far more appealing than Amin’s. Who can blame them?

But what if he’s wrong? What if Friedman is as short-sighted and ill-informed as the military and government leaders who claimed to have had no forewarning of the September 11 attacks? Beyond the sheer tactical breakdown of that day, much of the blame for the failure rests in a kind of voluntary blindness assumed by a great majority of Americans. It was that myopia that prevented so many brilliant and influential foreign policy analysts, defense experts and journalists from foreseeing the coming threat. And they continued to ignore the messages being sent from the developing world, collectively evading the difficult work of questioning what aspects of American foreign policy might have brought on such an attack, even after thousands of Mexican soccer fans chanted “Osama” at a post-911 match against the United States. Proving how little he has learned from his worldly travels, Friedman repeats the hollow mantra in his book, describing the terrorists as “angry, frustrated, and humiliated men and women.” And not far behind them, in his estimation, are the anti-globalization protesters - comprised mostly of Trotskyites, anarchists and old hippies – who are influenced by a heavy dose of anti-Americanism and defined by their denial of the inevitable triumph of flatness, arguing over the moot point of “whether we globalize.” Naturally, Samir Amin is one of these people.

And herein lies the most troubling aspect of Friedman’s popularity. He, and his readers, assume that anyone who opposes globalization from the side of the developing world - either violently or ideologically - is driven by a deep sense of shame at their poverty and inability to keep up with the West. But, at least as it applies to Samir Amin, nothing could be further from the truth. What Amin is articulating is a detailed warning about the same globalized world for which Friedman is such a wide-eyed proponent. But Friedman, and the millions who buy his books, is immune to it, because from his perspective, the forces of liberalism have only left enriched and industrialized societies in their wake. And this is precisely the kind of shortsightedness that crippled the West’s ability to understand, or indeed prevent, the 9/11 attacks. In the somber days after al Qaeda hit New York and Washington, DC, Americans like Friedman were unwilling to identify the causal forces that had inspired the terrorists. “Why do they hate us?” Friedman rhetorically asked in his column. Because of our freedom, he answered. Because, the liberal answered, we are liberals.

It would be easy to attribute Friedman’s blockbuster sales to his orgiastic, gee-whiz, look-ma-no-hands celebration of all things corporate – he never fails to name-drop his favorite brand names, from eating a Cinnabon while waiting to board a Southwest Airlines flight on the way to see his daughter at Yale to the 3M logo’d cap being worn by the caddy of an Indian executive who uses a distant HP skyscraper as a marker. Or to the fact that it is easy and very profitable to scare the shit out of an entire generation of baby boomers by essentially telling them their kids are in a neck-and-neck race to the top of the global food chain and, guess what, they’re losing. In those respects, the book is a brilliant and well-conceived product. But I believe there is a much deeper significance to Friedman’s success. And it has to do with the fact that America has reached a stage in its quest for global dominance in which it has no choice but to aggressively and openly tap these impoverished countries for cheap labor. And Thomas Friedman has come to put a lipstick smile on that old, twisted visage.

[To avoid the backlash that his ideas are sure to inspire, Friedman has to keep churning the water to obscure the bottom line. Like when he tries to brush off the obvious ethnocentrism in his report that Indian telemarketers and call-center employees Anglicize their names to “make their American or European customers feel more comfortable.” In an attempt to pre-empt the obvious protest, he explains that “most of the young Indians I talked to about this were not offended but took it as an opportunity to have some fun” – as if anyone at the company, which turns away 94% of its hundreds of thousands of annual job applicants, would tell The New York Times pre-eminent business columnist that they thought the scheme reeked of neo-colonial re-identification!]

Scribbling notes on a drink coaster as the plane climbs past 10,000 feet, I think of Thomas Friedman writing his book in his own spacious business class seat on Lufthansa. Looking out of my window, I suddenly realize how he came so easily to his revelation. There, below me, the dark blue Atlantic Ocean stretches west for 1000 miles and darn if it doesn’t look flat. I wonder how much of Friedman’s worldview has been shaped by the rarefied company of billionaire CEOs he keeps. Perhaps he has fooled himself into thinking that the invisible hand of liberal economics still softens to caress the weary shoulders of the poor, offering the opportunity for all people to reach the heights of corporate domination. We’ll never know. What we do know is that it’s been a long time since the champions of free market capitalism pretended to have any priority other than their quarterly profits and year-end bonuses. Of course, many of them have started making noises about the environment and poverty, but never in a way that will actually bring them to analyze root causes of these global ills. Until that happens, we can assume that it’s mostly PR. And in this regard, Friedman plays a very important role as a kind of useful idiot. If capitalism is the sport of wolves, then the kind of happy-go-lucky globalization heralded by Thomas Friedman is the sheep’s clothing. It’s a sheath to cover the glint of their blade.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.