Wednesday, August 20, 2008

And While I'm on the NYT Columnists...

No, Tom Friedman, you're still completely ignorant.

Sorry, bud, but if you hadn't been flooding the zone with triumphalism about globalization back in the 1990s, you might have realized that it was going really, really badly in Russia.

You might have noticed that the privatization that you guys were so gleefully advocating had been turned into a game of "who can funnel resources out of Russian hands into private bank accounts the fastest" by Yeltsin's cronies and their American enablers. You might have figured out that your Lexuses and olive trees isn't going to impress somebody who hasn't been paid for months because his boss sold the factory for pennies on the dollar to a guy who was cutting said boss in on the take.

Had you done any of that, you might have also figured out that the Russian response would eventually be to say "blow this for a game of soldiers", kick out the thieving privatizers, and bring in someone who could restore their perception of national greatness. The "choking of Russian democracy" wasn't because of NATO, it was because Russians saw what elite citizens of the most powerful democracy in the world had done to them and thought "why would we want to emulate those assholes?"

But then again, all that would require you to admit that you were wrong about globalization. And I know that you'll never, ever do that. There's just too much money in pretending otherwise, isn't there?

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