Latest on Global Research Latest on Dandelion Salad Latest on Black Agenda Report Latest on Stop NATO Latest on John PilgerIn no particular order
9 February 2013 – Global Research – ROARmag.org
Thomas Friedman may praise the emancipatory potential of online university courses, but are they really capable of producing more than docile workers?
21 December 2011 — Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/21/11) gives readers a sense of what the Iraq War was all about: Continue reading this...
7 November 2011 — UPDATE FROM THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
LATEST OPINION AND FEATURES FROM THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
Israel’s vandalism of Palestinian heritage
By Abe Hayeem, 7 November 2011
Amongst the fallout of Palestine’s admission as a member state, Israel’s warning that it “will now reconsider its cooperation with UNESCO” is the biggest irony.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-vandalism-palestinian-heritage/10564
15 December 2009 — SolidarityEconomy.Net
Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. $27.95. Pp. 438.
Thomas Friedman is always the head cheerleader for the next big thing. At first it was globalization and now it’s the green revolution. Friedman’s instincts are good, it’s just his analysis and politics are lacking. There are certainly valuable and interesting insights in his work, but his adolescent enthusiasm for capitalism often turns his critique to shallow propaganda.
The book’s title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded is a good indicator as to how Friedman understands environmental problems. Underline that word crowded because the book takes us on a Malthusian ride through the Third World. It’s overpopulation, not capitalism and its need for every expanding accumulation that is destroying the world’s environment.
Friedman marches us through China, India, Brazil and Nigeria offering a myopic view that only occasional refers to the developed countries and their use of energy and resources. When it comes to energy markets transnationals such as Exxon and Shell disappear as does any discussion of imperialism and its history in the Middle East. Instead Friedman targets “petrodictorships” and “Sheikhs…with bags of cash” indoctrinating madrassa students to “breed like rabbits” and “swarm” over the Islamic world. (p.88)
The Stupids are back. You remember that fictional family who appear in series of books portrayed as incompetent to the point of confusing the most simple concepts and tasks. The books were themselves denounced as irresponsible and inspired films which were dismissed as stupid plus.
But now the Stupids seems to have inspired a column by none other than Thomas Friedman of the not your father’s New York Times. In a new column by this best selling hero of all serious media, we finally have a easy to read explanation of the financial crisis—namely the nerds on Wall Street were just plain dumb, or to use an overused term, “stupid.”
Reading his “Letter From Baghdad” column in the New York Times on Wednesday, you’d never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States — “everyone loves seeing us tied down here” — stuck in the “madness that is Iraq.” And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis “if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”
The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America’s most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can’t bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.
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