Tom Friedman's Faith-based Free Trade-ism

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 12:43 PM on July 24, 2006.

David Sirota skewers the media's "go-to trade guy," Tom Friedman, for his free-trade fundamentalism. You won't believe this quote till you watch it for yourself below.

Sirota writes: "Friedman actually went on record admitting he advocates for specific trade deals without knowing anything about what’s in the trade deals he is writing about."

Here's a passage from a review of Nobel-Prize-winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz's critique of the Free Market. This is a man who not only worked for the World Bank for three years but who READS THE TEXT OF WHAT HE REJECTS OR PROMOTES.

Stiglitz questioned the [World] Bank so much that he was always in the middle of one dispute or another about the purposes, goals, and efficiency of the Bank's agenda. Most galling was the insistence of policymakers upon following the same decision patterns and project goals that had already failed many times over. Stiglitz even found some of these officials conceding that his criticisms were right. But then they would proceed to act as though they had never participated in such a discussion.

... it is also fair to assume that a major part of this concern lies with the unfortunate conditions that third world nations and their peoples must face year in and year out. The tradition of obeisance to outdated and irrelevant market economics taken by the policy elites and bureaucracies dealing with trade and aid--the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and certainly the U.S. Agency for International Development, among others--forced Stiglitz at a very early point in his Bank career to reject the nostrums of "free trade" which, after all, are closely tied to the old religion of "free enterprise."

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.