Today is primary day and 3.5 million Flori

Monday, May 08, 2006

Tom's Party

The Hankster welcomes guest columnist Michael Klein. Michael is a long-time activist in New York City and national independent politics. He is the author of Man Behind the Sound Bite: The Real Story of the Rev. Al Sharpton, and is the resident sound designer of the Castillo Theatre.


The New York Times' international columnist Thomas Friedman has (somehow) been making a living for as long as I can remember proffering banal "truisms" (usually along the lines of "the world is getting smaller!" "there are people in the world who are angry at America") which then (again, somehow) achieve a sort of status as profundities. He juggles these regular insights with his other role as the resident expert on Israeli/Palestinian/Middle Eastern affairs, where he cranks out a dizzying stream of "proposals" for solving the irretractable decades' old conflicts there in the hope that one of them will (in a sort of infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce "War and Peace" sort of way) will be "right." His most recent efforts, as a sort of self-proclaimed "guru of globalization" have been aimed at singing the praises of outsourcing low wage jobs to the underdeveloped world as a cure all for global poverty and the rapidly widening worldwide chasm between rich and poor, using (without a shred of evidence but much rhetoric and catchphrasing) India as an example. And, as an added bonus, offering the claim that the economic windfall globalization will bestow upon the Third World will also nip terrorism in the bud, as a slew of IT help-desk jobs offer the world's masses a feeling of hope for the future. The fact that this globalization is the very source of the anger against American corporate carpetbagging of the non-western world that Friedman discovered in his column the day before is of little concern--each of Friedman's columns have a logic of their own, as random as one of those monkeys at their keyboard.

As reported here in the Hankster a few days back, Friedman has now turned his attention to domestic politics and has made a bold new discovery. In his own words, "I'm hoping for a third party. The situation is ripe for one: America is facing a challenge as big as the cold war.." Once more, Friedman has discovered a truism that may perhaps come as no surprise to readers of this blog, as well as the tens of millions of American voters represent the plurality of the electorate by identifying themselves as independents--the voting public is fed up with the logjam created by Democratic and Republican self-interested partisanship. But, like most of Friedman's truisms, its in the words following its statement that anything bearing a similarity to reality ends. What Friedman detects is a longing on the part of the disaffected millions of American voters to see--not democracy, voting reform, participation on the process of governing, or an end to poltical corruption--but rather, well, Tom's ideas on globalization. As perhaps the last pundit to take note of the independent upsurge in America of the past decade and a half, Friedman somehow feels that the situation is ripe for Americans to rally around his latest scheme--letting oil prices go through the roof, which will then somehow force the energy industry to explore alternatives to oil, return the environment to a pristine state, break the stranglehold of corrupt, anti-democratic oil-producing Arab regimes on the economy, and (in the obligatory Friedman bonus) "stimulating more young people to study math and science."

Not surprisingly, Friedman, despite his insistence on the paramount dangers to the environment oil dependence creates, wants nothing "green" about his party, either in name or substance. "I would not call it the "Green Party," he offers. "The name's been taken, and it connotes an agenda that is too narrow and liberal." Somehow, the heterogenous outpouring across the globe against American and multinational corporatism run amok that, in some form or another, constitutes at least some aspect of the mindset of much of the planet, is "narrow," while Tom's Party--which will subsidize corporate America's creation of a new miracle energy source by bleeding the average American at the gas pump and in their home heating bills--is "big, strategic, centrist and forward-looking."

So there we have Tom's Party. In Tom's world we have not only the impoverished of the planet longing to find hope working in a Microsoft boiler room or a Gucci factory, but we now have millions of discontented American voters eager to cough up ten bucks a gallon at the pump to help usher in the new American century. And thus establishing Friedman as the poor person's Francis Fukuyama, a fella who will lead the discontented masses behind the banner of corporatism as the best of all possible worlds and the solution to the malaise and anger at political corruption that has rocketed independent politics to its current plurality standing among the voting public. I'm not sure if an infinite number of monkeys typing away could have come up with a better plan than that offered by Tom's Party. Maybe an infinite number plus one...

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