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CounterPunch
October
21, 2002
The NYT's Thomas
Friedman
A Columnist of Awesome Vulgarity
by VIJAY PRASHAD
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is, as Alexander
Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair write, 'a columnist of awesome
vulgarity.'
A forthright mouthpiece for big business,
Friedman reveals how parochialism can pretend to be cosmopolitan.
No one doubts that the author of The
Lexus and the Olive Tree is well traveled. He was recently in
Iran where he, correctly, made a mockery of the Bush administration's
axis of evil speech, but with barely any analysis of contemporary
Iranian society (for a good discussion of today's Iran, try to
find the Summer 2001 issue of the Cyprus-based journal Global
Dialogue). Then he jetted off to India, specifically to Bangalore,
from where he offered a few tepid columns on subcontinental relations.
As a tourist-journalist, Friedman found a few corporate fat cats
and spilled their gospel. On one occasion, he reported that the
recent Indo-Pak fracas did not result in warfare because of the
power and intervention of  the software lobby in India.
Savvy about globalization and the power of software exports,
the government of India, by Friedman's estimation, tried its
best to hold off from an assault on Pakistan. No mention that
India and Pakistan went to war in 1999 when the software industry
was stronger than now, none that the two countries have been
in an endless state of war on the border for at least a decade,
and none that the US pressured both sides to stand down because
US troops sat on both sides of the border (in Pakistan, to continue
the Fifth Afghan War, and in India, to conduct a massive exercise
with the Indian army in Agra - the site of the last Indo-Pak
summit).
What was most insidious about Friedman's
argument, apart from the fact that he was wrong on so many points,
is that after Enron he has the temerity to argue for more not
less corporate control over government.
The very next column from him extolled
the power of Indian democracy, but now with no mention that 'democracy'
for Friedman and the fat cats means the interests of the corporate
classes alone. Indeed, in a startling column about Enron, it
was our globetrotting columnist who essayed perhaps the most
parochial defense of US capital: 'What distinguishes America
[from other crooked countries] is our system's ability to consistently
expose, punish, regulate and ultimately reform those excesses
[of capitalism] - better than any other. How often do you hear
about such problems being exposed in Mexico or Argentina, Russia
or China? They may have all the hardware of capitalism, but they
don't have all the software - namely, an uncorrupted bureaucracy
to manage the regulatory agencies, licensing offices, property
laws and commercial courts.'
As an exercise, let us stop at the four
examples and see if they do not have the capacity to 'expose,
punish, regulate and ultimately reform' economic criminalsS.
[the citations and more details are available in my new book,
Fat
Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism,
from Common Courage Press]
(1) Mexico. In 1995, the Swiss authorities
revealed that Raul Salinas, the brother of Mexican President
(1988-1994) Carlos Salinas de Gotari, had siphoned more than
$130 million of drug money into secret bank accounts (the sum
was later increased to between $500 million and $1 billion).
The Mexican media, notably La Jornada, had earlier detailed some
of the sleazy transactions, but it could not find support among
the plutocracy. Initially, the only scandal in the story was
for the Salinas family and for the Mexican plutocracy. Soon,
however, details of the story drew in the financial power of
Citibank who, it seems, worked to clean-up Salinas' money and
make it relatively untraceable. While his brother was President
of Mexico, Raul Salinas worked for the Mexican government's grain
monopoly, Conasupo, and drew an annual salary of $160,000. Yet
he was able to get his hands on hundreds of millions of dollars
that he took to Citibank in Mexico City who transferred it via
New York to Swiss banks. Amy Elliot, the agent in charge of the
Salinas money, vouched for the money and oversaw Citibank 'specialists'
who created Swiss accounts in the names of fictitious Cayman
Island corporations. When the scandal broke, Citibank quickly
said that it had done nothing illegal. Indeed, Elliot claimed
that to doubt the Salinases 'would be like asking the Rockefellers
where they had got their money.' In the context of how the global
system works, she had a point: the money of robber barons is
above suspicion. Especially when they are so closely connected
to our power structure. Citibank chairman John Reed had a close
friendship with the Salinases, spending his visits in Mexico
under the presidential roof of Carlos Salinas. But sections of
the Mexican press and some parts of the Mexican regulatory authority
broke ground and went after Salinas. One could argue that the
software of popular discontent produced the end to the one-party
rule of the PRI and brought the maverick Right (led by Vicente
Fox) to power a few years later.
(2) Argentina. Argentina suffered the
woes of neoliberalism when $130 billion fled the country in 1997
as a result of an end to capital controls. This figure was equivalent
to the state's debt at the time. The country, once the economic
pride of South America, went into a deep recession that, by 2001,
had transmuted into a depression. One Prime Minister after another
took office to stem the meltdown (de La Rua, Saa, Puerta, Camano,
then finally Eduardo Duhalde). From mid-December of 2001 to late
January 2002, the people filled the streets in what they call
caerolazos, or pot-banging protests by the piqueteros, the picketers.
Demanding that the country heed the will of the people and not
of transnational firms one hundred thousand people went to the
Plaza de Mayo. These people follow a decade of anti-liberalization
movements that developed amongst the unemployed in Argentina's
main cities, a movement that took action in the working-class
suburbs of Buenos Aires in the late 1990s against the high electric
rates charged by Enron. Statistics are imprecise in the midst
of such a collapse; stories circulate that the unemployment figure
is somewhere between thirty and eighty percent. 'We are not Peronists
or Radical [Party] members or socialists,' said the leader of
a Buenos Aires neighborhood assembly. 'We are just the hungry
people who for the first time have organized themselves and know
their strength.' In response, Duhalde has freed the peso from
the dollar (after he allowed Argentina to default on $142 billion
of its debt at a cost of forty percent of the peso's value).
Again, the software of popular discontent forced the elite to
re-bridle corporate power, even if for a moment.
(3) Russia. Since 1991, when the Soviet
Union dissolved, Russia has become the font of jokes about crony
capitalism. We know about the disasters, again, because of a
citizenry that is actively on the streets against corruption,
Enron-style. Gazprom is Russia's largest company, with sales
of $20 billion in 2001, accounting for 8% of Russia's gross domestic
product, 20% of its export revenues and taxes - all this mainly
because Gazprom controls about a quarter of the planet's known
gas reserves. When Rem Vyakhirev took power over this state enterprise
in 1992, he reduced state ownership to just under forty percent,
installed his friends and family to senior positions and bilked
the assets of the firm by between $1-2 billion per year (this
for a decade). The Russian and German media showed how Gazprom's
leadership created shadow companies to siphon its funds to those
who ran the vast enterprise. An active media and citizenry, again,
provided the software to overthrow the Vyakhirev dynasty. The
new CEO from 2001, Alexis Miller, vowed to make severe changes
to the accounting practices of the firm
(4) China. The Chinese government is
by far the most aggressive agent against corporate corruption,
with executions of corrupt officials now the norm. I'm opposed
to capital punishment like most of my neighbors, but by Friedman's
standards, the PRC certainly punishes its fat cats. In mid-September
2000, for instance, the state executed a former vice-chairman
of the Chinese Parliament and former member of the Communist
Party's Central Committee, Cheng Kejie. Premier Zhu Rongji had
started a campaign against corporate corruption in 1999 that
revealed dozens of scandals including, again in 2000, the arrest
of two hundred police and customs officials in Fujian province
for a $10 billion smuggling operation in the port city of Xiamen.
Some of those arrested come from the families of China's senior
leadership. In February 2001, the Chinese state executed seven
men convicted for graft, the largest such execution at one time.
Even as tales of corporate corruption
transform the business pages into tabloid sheets, the mouthpieces
of imperialist globalization like Friedman turn on their America
First boosterism to high volume. Here, in a typically modern
racist fashion, we hear that despite the fluctuations in the
Dow, thank god we live in Free Market USA! There is no need to
dredge up the offensive Middle America stereotype: Mr. Frequent
Flyer is the poster boy for parochialism. His is a new kind of
insularity, a cosmo-parochialism, well suited to a columnist
of awesome vulgarity.
Vijay Prashad
is an Associate Professor and Director of the International Studies
at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His latest book is: Fat
Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism. Prashad
can be reached at: Vijay.Prashad@trincoll.edu
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