Author Thomas Friedman of the New York Times tells us the World is Flat- meaning commerce and the workday is evening
out someway under his term "flatteners".
He also integrates the phrase "level playing field" but changes the connotation to apply to his "flatteners" concept.
The "level playing field" was used in debates over Globalization and Free Trade relating to sports where there are checks
and balances by rules and umpires. In Friedman's Flat World with Free Trade being the tool of Globalization there is no "level
playing field".
If the World is Flat it is riding on flat wheels on unlevel playing fields of broken dreams. The Global economy
is now upside down. Local value added economies in balance geopolitical settings are being chopped up into pieces and spread
around the world. Friedman is an evanglelist for the Globalist Free Traders who do not tell it like it is. They use words
of history but the historical connotations do not apply. Take the term Free Trade. Historically it meant the trading of products
where one country traded for something they did not have. Today, the main commodities being traded are human beings as workers.
It is a new rendition of the slave trade with wage slave labor being its base. Workers are put on a world trading block
to compete with one another based on the cheapest labor possible. In Friedman's Flat World everyone competes for the same
job.
The World is not Flat but vertical. It is controlled from the top down and certainly not from the bottom up. Workers
have no voice in the process of Globalization and international entities like the WTO run the show outside on any democratic
process while discounting the sovereignty of individual nations. ( See
http://www.experiencedesignernetwork.com/archives/000636.html "Communications by rank" - Workers having no voice- and if you are not part of any "network" , you do not exist. )
The only thing flat is the flat railroad cars that carry the big shipping containers full of cheap sweat shop imports for
shoppers to shop their way out of their jobs. Friedman also ignores the historical reference - the balance
of trade and ignores the record breaking trade deficits. The U.S. is buying much more than it is selling and no business can
last this way.
Many of the large shipping containers are owned by COSCO which is a large Chinese shipping company. COSCO is owned
in part by the Chinese Liberation Army. In essence this army is rolling across our land on these flat railroad cars. This
is the reality of Friedman's Flat World.
Friedman does not tell us how the overhead of long haul ocean, rail, air and highway shipping and the packaging that
goes with it offsets the costs of local production and farming. Obviously it is the cost of labor. He does not tell us how
eateries in places like Mexico can not compete with the giant trans national corporation that need the services of long
haul shipping, packaging and things like refrigeration. The eateries are perfect examples of efficient ecology. The
food comes to the tables direct from harvest, fishing and slaughter with very little need for shipping, refrigeration and
packaging and yet these family businesses find they can not compete with the giant companies who have loads of overhead in
handling.
Thomas Friedman also does not tell us how the giant supermarkets of today sell more packaging and plastics than food.
We see a pretty desription of the food with more packaging than food. He should tell us how this all links
to his Flat World economy.
There is another old phrase, he ignores. The phrase - water seeks its lowest level should be somewhere in his flattening
of the world. There will always be someone who will do work for less. The supply of destitute workers in the world
is endless. There is no even ground. Production and farming has been made mobile ready to be moved again and again for to
take advantage of the cheapest labor possilble. As water seeks its lowest level, the cheapest labor is pursued. The factories
do not stay in one place for very long. Every time a factories moves it leaves behind a burn out communities or societies
with most worst off than before they came.
As far as the world wide web and computerization is concerned the old computer saying still applys "Garbage in and Garbage
out" - if the input is garbage, the output is garbage too. It all depends on human intervention. The world wide
web now is like the Wild West where anything goes. And no one yet has really come up with good protection against virus and
other attacks. I do not know anyone you trusts the internet. When things are centralized both the good and bad come. However
if the bad is decentralized as it is off line, there is better control. The internet is just a supension bridge in the sky
with no connections to the real world and real economics. Another saying is "you get what you pay for" and a throw away
$150 computer adds up to about the same value for a general society that uses it.
The core questions to ask Free Traders like Friedman are just these two. Who is the largest supplyer
of weapons in the world and why? Is this a "flattening" and how does it affect everything else?
