01.29.12
You are dirt (continued)
Tom Friedman’s answer to everything that’s wrong in the economy is to explain it away as inferiority in the face of the rest of the world.
The only answer is for all Americans to become inventor/entrepreneurs, since they can’t compete with no protections labor in other countries.
These columns forgive all corporate malfeasance in leveraging desperate conditions in foreign places for making shiny goods to sell to the haves.
So Friedman entirely misses the central point of the Apple exposures done on the news side in his own paper — that the company has built its huge fortune being abominable.
Think of all the people you pass in the supermarket or on the sidewalk every week. How many are capable of designing premium goods to sell to the rest of the world?
What should those who can’t do?
In Tom Friedman’s world, nothing really. Giant corporations shouldn’t be encumbered by them. Neither should the government. And they only themselves to blame, anyway, for being sub-mediocre.
The news furnished this week is that they can be deliverymen. There will always be a need for deliverymen to deliver the premium goods of the “innovators” to the rest of the haves. But there’s an eat-your-peas warning embedded in it. You may not even be good enough as a deliveryman if you make multi-corporation world mad and don’t get the proper skills fast.
From today’s column at the Times:
This is the world we are living in. It is not going away. But America can thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert, if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate??? in different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products, designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get our share, we’ll do fine.
And here’s the good news: We have a huge natural advantage to compete in this kind of world, if we just get our act together.
In a world where the biggest returns go to those who imagine and design a product, there is no higher imagination-enabling society than America
In a world where logistics will be the source of a huge number of middle-class jobs, we have FedEx and U.P.S.
Alert readers will have noticed last week’s Friedman wonderfulness was also labeled as from the loins of MIT. It was the MIT app-making engineers of Presto, the way to program iKit to get rid of minimum or sub-minimum wage workers in food service.
This week the wonderfulness is in the expert-minted knowledge of someone named Yossi: If you can’t make Presto things at least you might be able to carry boxes for FedEx or U.P.S.
Often it seems like I’ve made a song for every bit of cheer-leading for corporate predation and the excellence of using global sweat-shopping to find the biggest profit margin that comes out of Tom Friedman. Take, for instance, “That’s Logistics” song from a year or so ago.
It’s an accident.
Friedman’s columns are chapters for books that explain how the merciless corporate destruction of any social order devoted to economic justice and a good functioning nation is really only progress, the pursuit of innovation and serving the global appetite for consumer electronics and social networking software.
It’s purely coincidental that I hate all that stuff.
Christoph Hechl said,
January 30, 2012 at 12:33 am
Had your job outsourced to China? There’s a song for that!
Had some greedy bastard call you lazy and dumb? There’s a song for that!
… purely coincidental