The New York
Times’ Thomas Friedman
A Columnist of
Awesome Vulgarity
by Vijay Prashad
Dissident Voice
October 22, 2002
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 criminals. [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
Associate Professor and Director of the International Studies Program at
Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is the author of Fat Cats and
Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism (Common Courage, 2002),
Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (Beacon Press, 2001), and The Karma of
Brown Folk (Univ. of Minnesota, 2000). Email: Vijay.Prashad@trincoll.edu