The only thing Friedman could do that would impress me is to resign from his job. He is an embarrassment to the Times (and that's a pretty hard thing to be!)

Yeah, no shit you were wrong! That's some real fucking insight!
- jim 5-13-2004 5:57 pm [add a comment]

Despite his complete loss of credibility after baying for war all these months, he still has to get in that globalist message: "Let's close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training — with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P. and Microsoft."

- tom moody 5-13-2004 6:32 pm [add a comment]

• Microsoft??! Oh dear god. Haven't the Iraqis suffered enough?
  - mark 5-14-2004 12:29 am [add a comment]

and yet his last column was repeatedly referenced by democratic talking heads as insightful. he is the proverbial canary in a coldmind. i wish he would freeze to death.
- dave 5-13-2004 6:47 pm [add a comment]

heres the part of neoliberalism that i dont entirely comprehend but certainly is at the heart of the globalisation issue and what is likely the driving force behind our incursions.

(found on an eschaton thread)

By the "neoliberals" I mean the particular group of people who rose to power in the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s in response to the debt mess; who were schooled at Chicago during the debate over OPEC petrodollar recycling; and who established, between those two institutions and a web of public and private lending institutions, a regime of "interlocking conditions" for debt extensions that focused on the sale of state-owned monopolies to the global private sector without regard to whether those firms remained monopolies when privatized. This, and currency devaluation, was the core of the "structural adjustment" prescription aimed at bleeding public coffers dry, which has had the primary effect everywhere of bleeding dry any hope for building working systems of public accountability across the global South.

The "reconstruction of Iraq" has been modeled after structural adjustment regimes and not after post-WWII reconstruction efforts.

I'm not saying that free markets are the problem--I'm saying that people who believed the neoliberals when they said that they were simply trying to nurture free markets are the problem.