10 March 2004

Selling novelty T-shirts is not a replacement for a decent paying job with health benefits

Thomas Friedman, the globalist hack who's found it profitable to shill for the corporatists, is at it again. That is, engaged in the act of playing a dunce and then suffering a smackdown for his blatherings. On Sunday, Friedman, the New York Times foreign correspondent penned another column gushing over the gooey goodness of global outsourcing.
I just read about a guy in America who lost his job to India and he made a T-shirt that said, `I lost my job to India and all I got was this [lousy] T-shirt.' And he made all kinds of money." Only in America, she said, shaking her head, would someone figure out how to profit from his own unemployment. And that, she insisted, was the reason America need not fear outsourcing to India: America is so much more innovative a place than any other country.

Friedman bloviates further, using the T-shirt anecdote to tout American superior innovation that renders these outsourced job losses as trivial.

But once again, the reality detached scribe is exposed again. This time, famed progressive cartoonist Tom Tomorrow got the straight dope on Friedman's "Americans profiting from their unemployment" spiel. It turns out, that the savvy entrepreneur highlighted in Friedman's piece is neither American nor unemployed.

Then, Friedman fired off a missive to the skeptical cartoonist in defense of his corporatist claptrap:

First, all one has to do is Google that phrase and you will discover that it is not only a British Web site offering this t-shirt for sale, but that a U.S.-based Web site, indeed one located in Palo Alto where so many jobs have been lost, has been selling the same T-shirt for some time. It is the online design-your-own t-shirt and apparel store, Zazzle.com

Mr. Tomorrow treaded on and located the enterprising zazzle.com proprietor, eager to discover if his tech career unemployment had led to new found riches. Here is how Mr. Gary Young answered the query:

Wow! So that WAS my shirt Friedman was talking about. I had seen the article and laughed...

1. No, I didn't lose my job YET. My department has been told month after month for the last 6 months that we'd be next in line to be offshored. Several peers at my work have had their jobs sent to India, and my partner had his job offshored.

2. Have I made all kinds of money? This is where I laughed the hardest. I've made about $10 profit total.



Comments

You and Pat Buchanan should get together. Your views on trade seem very similar.