Dear Thomas Friedman

Dear Thomas Friedman,

I read your stupid drivel far more than I should and normally just shake my head, but your recent grand proclamation that “capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty” is the proverbial straw.  How dare you write such a patented lie!  Have you no sense of honor or shame?  On what possible evidence do you make such a thoughtless assertion?  Global capitalism’s been around for hundreds of years – it has a track record you know.  Take a look around, my stupid friend!  Are you blind?  Six million children die of hunger each year and 925 million are classified as “hungry” by the FAO.  Virtually every mega-city in the world is a massive slum.  In the United States, the hegemonic capital of this obscene system, 5% control a staggering 72% of financial wealth and the bottom 80% just 7%.   Poverty is rampant.  Median wages today are less than they were 40 years ago despite tremendous advances in productivity and they’re headed even lower.  Just 500 corporations lay claim to 40% of global revenue and monopolize the entire world.  People everywhere are angrily rising in desperate protest.  You have the gall to praise this system and associate it with the word “free”?!  How dare you, Thomas Friedman!

Our technology’s so vast it could easily provide quality living standards for everyone, yet majorities in the “first world”, not to mention the third, live in constant insecurity if not shameful squalor.  Capitalism’s simply unable to provide secure humane living standards and its absolute lunacy to think human greed, animal spirits, and the profit motive could ever do so.

You praise brutality, greed, and avarice, Thomas Friedman, and therefore must be condemned in the strongest of terms.  You’d have us believe night is day, evil good, and the lowest of our nature the highest.  All who seek a better world must utterly reject the barbarity you stand for.

Sincerely,

Jim O’Reilly