Sunday, March 20, 2011
RE MERCILESS GLOBAL MARKETS THOMAS FRIEDMAN PICKING WINNERS THE WAR WITH NO NAME BEHIND THE COLD WAR HAS NOW BEEN LOST
Some globalist pundits are now talking about what the future holds for their kids, backpedaling fiercely against the global economic and military tsunami they extolled the virtues of for decades, now barreling down on them, and their children, and their childrens' children, and us, and ours.
I am going to spell out a few things that they should have been thinking about for a long long time, since the mid 60s at least.
Has it been wise, if you were worried about the world for your kids, to put off your domestic labor issues, to put government against labor as a class in favor of management, to favor foreign over domestically produced goods, to allow your corporations to offshore jobs, and then factories, and then major investments;
has it been wise to think mainly only in relatively short term profitability, as a criterion, for anything, anything, if you were worried, really worried, about your kids, or their kids?
Let's talk briefly about the issue of labor and unions.
Offshoring capacity, and buying foreign goods and services, not only puts your own domestic work force out of work permanently, but also puts the labor force and capital investments of your new global economy at the political, ideological, economic, ethnic, civilizational, and military command of foreign governments,
which can change, sometimes quite drastically, sometimes to a political stance contrary to your wishes, sometimes almost overnight,
always however, it seems, transforming fairly quickly, say in 20 years nowadays, the lapse of one generation,
from a cheap source of labor or materials into a more expensive, and adversarial, competitor.
That has been the pattern over and over again now for at least 50 years.
How do you 'bust', or for that matter, defend, a foreign labor force, when a foreign regime supports other pressing agendas; like taking over world domination; or dominating its neighbors where you also may have large investments; or dominating your other markets; or dominating your domestic market; or controlling, or taking over your domestic political system, against your own narrow corporate interests, just for a few little examples?
That all kind of starts to sound a great deal worse than would have been simply dealing with domestic management and labor issues in the first place, and trying to keep as much production and consumption as possible domestic, and to build a stronger well integrated domestic economy.
Many other implications beside labor or unions flowed from foreign investment, trade concessions, and offshored production. The process really started before WW II, and accelerated with the Marshall Plan, and then especially with Cold War trade and market concessions.
Most people (I mean mainly intellectuals now; almost no one reads Fukuyama in reality) do not know it, they read things like The End Of History And The Last Man, and follow people like Fukuyama, and actually believe that the US, and its ideology 'won' what it calls the Cold War.
Pundits like Thomas Friedman actually buy this 'Whig Interpretation' (see Butterfield's sense of the term);
and Prestowitz follows Fukuyama and Friedman in Rogue Nation, buying Friedman's foolish pronouncements, and giving a credibility to Fukuyama's bizarre idealogical positions.
Contrary to their rather puerile views, my view is that The War With No Name that has quietly been waged 'by other means' as Clausewitz so aptly had put it ("War is not merely a political
act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of
political relations, a carrying out of the same by other
means") simultaneously with the Cold War, call it 'The War For Picking Winners In The World Of The Future', has now been lost.
More on these themes shortly.
Terms search Krugman Thomas Friedman David Brooks Milton Friedman Fukuyama Chalmers Johnson Prestowitz Eckes Fallows Van Wolferen Ohmae George Friedman Meredith LeBard Maverick Executive Mise en scene cartoon Macaire
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