ustxtxb_obs_2005_07_22_50_00035-00000_000.pdf

www.koop.org oh we’re out there koop Olmsted, continued from page 23 of the Civil War. It’s all brilliant, and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. once called Olmsted’s book “the nearest thing posterity has to an exact transcription of a civilization which time has tinted with hues of romantic legend.” But time didn’t do all the tinting. As Journey shows, Texas was romantic from the start, and while romance usually starts sweet, it can leave a rancid aftertaste. True then, true today. Still you keep spreading your butter in Houston, Austin, and beyond, hoping for something fresher, trying to find the churn. Contributing writer Debbie Nathan is a native Texan. She now lives in Manhattan, where you can’t get a decent breakfast taco. Friedman, continued from page 25 up to be knocked down by Friedman. Anti-globalizationists in the flat world are: upper-middle class Americans who feel guilty because they are so wealthy and privileged, rear-guard Old Leftists a.k.a. the Coalition to Keep People Poor, anti-Americanists around the world, and serious, well-meaning, but overwhelmed and misguided NGOs. According to Friedman: You don’t help the world’s poor by dressing up in a turtle’s outfit and throwing a stone through McDonald’s window. You help them by getting them the tools and institutions to help themselves. It may not be as sexy as protesting against world leaders in the streets of Washington and Genoa, and getting lots of attention on CNN, but it is a lot more important. Just ask any Indian villager. Curiously, Friedman himself did not ask any Indian villager anything. He talked instead to the CEOs. And like a good scout, he seems to have believed everything they told him. Besides, who wants to talk to Indian villagers? They don’t play golf. Any serious effort to talk about globalization should include an informed assessment of analyses done by organizations that oppose unrestricted, corporate-driven access to the markets and investment possibilities in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. These organizations include global union federations, Transparency International, Consumers International, Public Citizen, and many accessible others. All of them point out that corporations are neither charitable nor democratic institutions. They need regulation by national governments with comparable authoritygovernments that are also representative of the interests of citizens, workers, and future generations. Institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, that now set the rules for international commerce and investment from behind closed doors in favor of corporate capital need a countervailing force that protects people from the worst excesses committed in the name of moneymaking. Friedman at one point quotes Karl Marx, surprised that the old German foresaw globalization from his distant post in the 19th century: All old established industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life or death question by all civilized nations. For industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose production is consumed, not only at home but in every quarter of the globe. Marx was a visionary economist, that much is certain. He was also an astute, if uncharitable judge of character with an eye for the opportunistic intellectual personalities spawned by capital to explain its expansion in deceptively benign terms. He called them “sniveling sycophants of the ruling classes.” He would have made short work of Tom Friedman. Gabriela Bocagrande, a native of Houston, who now lives in Washington, D.C. is the Observer’s first line of defense in the battle against flat-headed, knee-jerk globalizers. JULY 22, 2005 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 35