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Thomas Friedman

Travel Blog

Thomas Friedman’s Underpants
[New York] Von Eckardt, our chief investigator, joined me and Krugman in the green room. She’s a big fan of Paul’s and couldn’t wait to hear two of her favorite economics writers talk privately about the great issues of the day.
“I wring them out as absolutely tight as I can,” said Krugman, “and by the morning they’re just a little damp but you can still wear them.”
I had a different technique for stretching the supply of underwear on book tours: Wear them into the shower or, in a pinch, turn them inside out.
“There’s one guy that has a clean pair Fed-Ex’d to him every day and he puts the dirty ones in a return envelope.” The “guy,” of course, had to be Thomas Friedman.

French Fried FriedmanThe Nouvelle Globalizer

Vicente Fox got a well-deserved boot in the derriére for saying Mexicans come to America for taking jobs “not even Blacks want to do.”
But Thomas Friedman earns plaudits and Pulitzers for his column which today announces that East Indians are taking jobs the French are too lazy to do. [See, “A Race to the Top,” New York Times.] Friedman’s fit of racial profiling was motivated by his pique over France’s rejection of the globalizers charter for corporate dominance known as the European Constitution.

Sell The Lexus, Burn The Olive Tree

Globalization and its Discontents
I was getting myself measured for a straitjacket when I received an urgent message from Bolivia.
The jacket was Thomas Friedman’s idea. He’s the New York Times columnist and amateur economist who wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which is kind of a long, deep kiss to globalization. I was in Cleveland to debate Friedman at the Council on World Affairs meeting in May 2001. Globalization, he told the council, is all about the communications revolution. It’s about the Internet. It’s about how you can sit in your bedroom, buy shares in Amazon.com and send e-mails to Eskimos all at the same time, wearing your pajamas.