IBM to transfer scores of jobs from its UK headquarters in Portsmouth to Slovakia

IBM move work from Portsmouth HQ to Bratislava (IBM's Bratislava shiny and new building is shown in the picture, in central Bratislava)

IBM management seems to enthusiastically pursue a nearsourcing agenda it has in common with other large employers in the western world. Instead of focusing on innovation and improving service and quality or products and services or their marketing, to focus instead on identifying locations in europe that deliver no perceptible loss in quality but lower salaries than in overpriced UK locations.

The leaked email is black-and-white proof of an exodus of work from the firm's headquarters to cheaper sites in the EU, and has sparked fears of an informal drive to shed Portsmouth jobs.

The email reads: 'Starting now, until the beginning of quarter three (around July), we will be entering a period of transition where we will be transferring roles from the UK accounting centre in North Harbour to the Accounting Centre of Excellence in Bratislava.'

The letter is from Donna Wheeler, chief accountant of the team which deals with UK, Irish and Scandinavian accounts.

Note that these are white-collar jobs that were supposed to be the future for highly educated and renumaterated brits that would bestride the world closing deals and moving up the value chain to erm.. accountancy, law and other UK "strengths".

Ms Wheeler refused to comment when contacted by The (Portsmouth) News, and IBM's communications department refused to answer questions about the future of jobs on site.

One employee, speaking anonymously said: 'It's suggesting that the UK accounting centre is being moved to Bratislava wholesale, but in manageable chunks at a time and this was the first chunk.

'This isn't just the accounting department. If someone is paid a £50k package, and it can be done for £30 to 20k in Bratislava they'll move it.'

Sarah McCarthy-Fry, MP for Portsmouth North, said:'I always hesitate to get involved in commercial decisions. Without knowing the details of what protection they've got for existing staff, it's very difficult to comment.

The original article appeared in the Portsmouth news,

Slovakia vs. Czech republic - Economic development

Basically Slovakia had an abrupt crisis with a sharp contraction but also an equally large improvement.

Zdenek Tuma, the governor of the Czech National Bank, said being in the euro had helped spare Slovakia the worst of the economic disruption that affected the rest of the region including his country.

For example Slovakia’s cost of borrowing on international markets was cheaper than for the Czech Republic.

Slovakia’s economy is forecast to grow 3.1 per cent in 2010, far greater than the 0.3 per cent forecast by the Czech finance ministry.

As growth returns, investors are trickling back, with some saying they are tempted by the prospect of avoiding currency risk. “The euro allows us to make long-term plans and it eliminates exchange rate risks caused by the volatility of the Slovak crown,” says Vladimir Machalik, a spokesman for Volkswagen Slovakia, which is starting production of a new small car in its factory outside Bratislava.

In a further sign of confidence Taiwan’s AU Optronics signed a €191m agreement last month to open an LCD television component factory in Slovakia.

Although Slovak workers have become slightly more expensive than those of Poland and Hungary, they are still much cheaper than their rivals in western Europe, and investors already in the country are unlikely to make decisions to relocate based on possibly temporary changes in exchange rates.

Politically, joining the euro has proved to be a coup for Robert Fico, the prime minister. A survey shows that almost 80 per cent of Slovaks approve of their new currency, which Mr Fico has called Slovakia's “shield”.

It also proves that despite his faults Robert Fico is a commited left of centre politician that agrees with the overall development strategy of Slovakia, but wanted to make sure that where there are market failures or lack of competition this is rectified and that there are real rules in the game.

However, Czechs have maintained their reservation about rushing towards the common currency. Mirek Topolanek, former prime minister and leader of the centre right Civic Democratic party, says the Czech Republic may be ready in 2015 to begin discussing joining the exchange rate mechanism, a precursor to joining the euro.

But Czech businesses do not seem to share this assessment. “We (Czech republic) need the euro as soon as possible in order to be able to address the current problems caused by the world financial crisis,” says Jaroslav Cerny, spokesman for Skoda Auto, a Volkswagen subsidiary.

“A failure to introduce the euro may drive not only our current suppliers, but also all potential investors, out of the Czech Republic.”

The future

A superb lecture by George Soros in Budapest

http://www.ft.com/cms/668e074a-bf24-11de-a696-00144feab49a.html

The future...

The popularity of free markets at the moment

This is a survey for the BBC

A world trend that Slovakia needs to avoid being sucked into.

Slovakia has successfully developed a political system split between a credible centre right loose coalition and a centre left party. They might all be a bit too nationalistic overall owing to the past of Slovakia as a captive nation either to Hungary or the Austrohungarian empire, or then under communism in a shotgun wedding with the Czechs. This relishing of one's sovereignty can get a bit jarring at times, and is the reason for some superficial tensions with the Hungarians. However no borders are changing and the most extreme of the politicians of the far right in Slovakia are so unbelievably corrupt and their extremism so insincere, that he can never express more than 10% of the electorate.

Freedom (is not just economic)

The danger is not from the petty authoritarian tendencies of Robert Fico the PM of Slovakia as portrayed in some fairly US centric Slovak commentators on the right. It is true that power is exercised fairly strongly in Slovakia (but that was true of the Dzurinda administration which had a fairly radical and successful political agenda with some excesses).

That is actually to be welcomed as in Slovakia governments still have the power to change policy rather than trying to copy each other like in the UK or the US. Fico is an old-fashioned conviction politician who does seem to want to entrench some social democratic standards in Slovakia and actually believes in certain things and within the ability of the state budget he has provided some support to weaker people without for the most part restricting the ability of those who can take care of themselves from prospering. The fact that he doesn't seem to adore and suck up to rich people is not bad at all.

It is also understandable for example to hate tabloids (they have tried to disturb his personal life on many occasions with a unbelievable audacity) as he does because they do express the worst in a society and they do try to subvert the political debate to serve their owners interests (e.g. the Sun in the UK). Although i don't like the press law in Slovakia, I always thought that tabloid journalists engage in very murky circles. We need to draw a line between the financial times and the Sun. Tabloids are a caricature of journalism and a force for evil. Broadsheets however should not be put in the same bag. Fico should respect constructive and intelligent criticism and debate.

The decline of the business model of newspapers makes them even more likely to be bought by organised interests that want to have the upper hand in the political debate. Again this has happened in any country with thriving tabloids that express and represent the worst in human nature.

If one looks to the UK, the extreme consensus between Labour and the Conservatives has hollowed out politics of all relevance and has led to what feels like an ungoverned state. The result is that Britain, from a fairly well governed state, is ending up as an over-indebted country with an increasingly extremist electorate (Anti-EU, BNP growing, curtailed civil liberties through extreme anti-terror laws) and it certainly feels like it is the beginning of this process.

Free market economics has changed our democracies. Ironically these policies are bringing about authoritarianism back. The mechanism this works through are principally two.

1. Some citizens become very rich which allows them to influence the debate through their wealth (buying TV stations or other media), they are likely to influence it through entrenching the status quo that allowed them to become rich. Essentially some have a huge megaphone that allows them to promote their ideas irrespective of their value. Deregulation was one such idea and that led to the financial crisis.
2. The better off in society -even if slightly better off- do not vote taking into account the overall interests of the country, but simply seek to re-enforce the policies that keep them better off. Their prosperity is dependent on low social mobility and change. That is not a high quality democracy.
   

Ergo: Too much political consensus between left and right is a mistake

So where has this footballisation of politics and public life come from. Why are so many governments turning more and more authoritarian?

A review of a very interesting book about how increasingly the excesses of the right wing ideologues like Tony Blair (no mistake here) stemming from the time of Reagan have pushed the emergence of a feudal flavour of capitalism to be found in economically prosperous but culturally and democratically backward and stifling states like Malaysia or Singapore. Note that corruption is endemic in this sort of Fascistic regime. Its a fusion of tame consumer/citizens, propaganda, really low quality of democracy and essentially a well disguised oligarchy with some democratic traits.

Because there are no ideas or ideals in the debate, the debate becomes irrelevant. People don't vote so the extremists get bigger and bigger shares. Also a public fed a diet of tabloid news is likely to be far more susceptible to extremist politics. The stifling consensus where whatever one votes they get the same policies has brought about stability but also an erosion of democracy and brought about the politician who is popular not because he wants to do things that you as a citizen agree with, but because you like his dress sense, or you would like to be as rich as him. Berlusconi is in that mould at least partially.

Ironically globalisation and competition is now forcing European and American states to lose any flourishes of democracy and free speech they developed in the past to revert to gameshow host type of leaders (e.g. Berlusconi, Zapatero, Blair, Bush). The citizen is economically free (kind of because corruption is playing its part to skew even this). But policy is strictly set and permanent and not something that an elected leader can change. The countries that this is entrenched in the most are the US and the UK.

-----------------------------

Review by Samuel Brittan

Published: November 2 2009 06:24 | Last updated: November 2 2009 06:24

Freedom for Sale: How We Made Money and Lost Our Liberty
By John Kampfner
Simon & Schuster £18.99, 304 pages

It is no longer a startling observation that the more western governments have spoken about freedom and democracy in the struggle against their enemies, the more the freedom part, at least, has been curtailed. In Britain, the Thatcher government tightened the screws on freedom of expression. The Blair government went further in curtailing historical rights such as habeas corpus and free speech.

In my view, the most profound study of this process in its historical context is Ben Wilson’s What Price Liberty? John Kampfner’s Freedom for Sale, on the other hand, makes up in breadth what it lacks in depth. While Wilson was mainly concerned with ­Britain, with a few glances across the Atlantic, Kampfner, a British political journalist, includes the US, Italy, Russia, ­Singapore, China, India and the Arab Emirates, and in nearly all he discovers similar erosion. Like Wilson, he attacks the ­thesis that capitalism inevitably leads to personal and political freedom as well as democracy. He cites Benjamin Franklin, who declared in 1755 that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”. The excuse has always been that freedom is sacrificed for prosperity and security. Kampfner is inclined to concede that there might be something in this.

If he had only included the Scandinavian countries, for instance, in his survey, he could have seen that personal and political freedom need not be an impediment to prosperity. Too many businessmen regard critics of the Chinese and Russian regimes as doctrinaire nuisances who impede their making of money.

Security is more difficult; but Kampfner has little difficulty in showing that the restraints imposed by the Blair government went far beyond the legitimate struggle against terrorism. During his term of office Blair “had bequeathed to his successor a surveillance state unrivalled anywhere in the democratic world”.

It seems to me that the problem with Blair was – to put it kindly – an aversion to abstract thought. Hence his sneering remarks about the liberal tradition. With Gordon Brown it is different. He believes the hallmark of progressive thinking is a positive attitude to the state against “right wing” laisser faire. While this attitude stems from a preoccupation with the economic and social arguments of the 20th century, it spills over into a carelessness about civil liberties as well. In practice both New Labour prime ministers were guided by the demands of the security chiefs and the desire to be seen to be “tough”.

Politicians and mandarins tend to confuse politically embarrassing leaks with threats to national security, as Kampfner points out. On a more trivial but revealing level, Kampfner quotes a French journalist writing from the UK: “Here you are actively encouraged to denounce your neighbour for not paying road tax or putting a bin out early … There are councils that spy on their taxpayers as if they were common criminals… the Home Office proposes to set up a database holding information on every telephone call made, every email sent and every website visited by every single British citizen.” Nor do the media, who value excessively their access to top government figures, come off much better. To get the point, you only have to hear or read that “Brown has decided” or “Cameron has decided” on matters where these politicians thankfully still have no such power.

Kampfner pessimistically accepts that an authoritarian capitalism on the Singapore model is spreading worldwide: the people have made their Faustian bargain. Yet I still cherish the hope, not that the masses will read John Stuart Mill, but that enough personal experiences of the basic inhumanity of this model will lead to some kind of liberal reaction in some countries and some times.

Workplace stress and suicide in europe

The financial crisis will touch all of us especially older workers with one
eye on retirement.

However while a LABOUR government is making very few noises about this big
adjustment in labour (in other words permanently less positions). France is
at least sounding concerned about its citizens..
Reading a title like the one below sounds alien in US & UK largely because
anglo governments tend to be dismissive of people in difficulties.
Certainly in this crisis most people losing their jobs are not lazy or bad
workers.. In fact people that should be downsized like traders arranging
for CDOs or derivatives are not & these people have cost our generation our
pensions.

Overall it would help a lot if the richest 1% of each country made many
more sacrifices as a patriotic duty to deal with a huge spate of private
suffering.

Anyway have a read & see what you think.

Labour minister urges companies to prevent staff stress

French Labour Minister Xavier Darcos (photo) asked firms with more than
1,000 employees to lead talks with unions on reducing workplace stress. At
former state-owned monopoly France Telecom, 24 employees have committed
suicide in 18 months.
By News Wires (text)

REUTERS - French companies must prevent stress in the workplace to stem a
wave of suicides, Labour Minister Xavier Darcos said on Friday.
At France Telecom, Europe's third-biggest telecoms firm and a former
state-owned monopoly, 24 employees have committed suicide since the start
of 2008, and others have attempted to kill themselves. An employee of car
maker Renault committed suicide on Wednesday.
"We have long underestimated psychological risks, as it is easier to spot
someone falling into a blast furnace than someone who is suffering," Darcos
told a council on work conditions. "And yet (psychological risks) are real,
as the situation ... at France Telecom has shown in a particularly tragic
way."
Darcos urged 2,500 French firms with more than 1,000 employees to conclude
talks with unions on reducing stress, which labour leaders say is the
reason for the spate of suicides, by Feb. 1 next year.

France Telecom has already begun negotiations which are based on a 2008
agreement with unions.
The government, which is France Telecom's biggest shareholder with 27
percent stake, has been closely involved in trying to manage the fallout
from the suicides.
Unions blame restructuring and work pressure at France Telecom for the wave
of suicides, saying that some staff are being left behind in the firm's
transformation from a staid government agency to a private company with
profit targets and intense competition.
Darcos also called on small and medium-sized companies to put together
measures to provide information on psychological risks and spot problems
with support from workplace health services.
He also called on regional heads of firms in the process of restructuring
to take into account the psychological risks of the transition.
A dedicated advisory body will be created to advise firms and monitor those
which are slow to act.
A report will be made public on a dedicated website,
www.travailler-mieux.gouv.fr. France will put forward a second plan on
workplace health by the end of this year.

and ever relevant video oldie but goodie :)

what the USA wants to become

What most countries want their future to be like...

This new American economy, Larry Summers hopes, will be “more export-oriented” and “less consumption-oriented”; “more environmentally oriented” and “less energy-production-oriented”; “more bio- and software- and civil-engineering-oriented and less financial-engineering-oriented”; and, finally, “more middle-class-oriented” and “less oriented to income growth that is disproportionate towards a very small share of the population”. Unlike many other economists, Summers does not believe that lower growth is the inevitable price of this economic paradigm shift.

the problem ofcourse is that everyone wants the same things and in the end nobody wants to import, the end game of which will probably be protectionism of various forms.






note: Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist and the Director of the White House's National Economic Council for President Barack Obama.^[1] Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He is the 1993 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal for his work in several fields of economics and was Secretary of the Treasury for the last year and a half of the Clinton Administration.

Meanwhile in Obama's USA...

Poverty as a mass phenomenon is back. The statistics are starkly different to europe.

About 50 million Americans have no health insurance, and more people are added to their ranks every day.

More than 32 million people receive food stamps

13 million are unemployed

The homeless population is growing in tandem with a rapid rise in the rate of foreclosures, which were 45 percent higher in March 2009 than they were in the same month of the previous year.

steps necessary to solve the crisis

The following are the steps regarded as necessary by Germany's top governmental economic adviser Herr Sinn to get out of the mess we are in.

The necessary steps are as follows:

1. The USA must finally participate in international agreements on the harmonisation of banking supervision. These agreements can be based on the Basel-II system, which must be under government control.
2. Europe needs a common system of financial supervision. Every state must pay for the losses of its own banks.
3. Investment banks, hedge funds and private equity firms must be subjected to the same rules as commercial banks.
4. Personal liability limitations for mortgages and other real-estate loans must be lifted in the US and wherever else they exist.
5. Conduits and other constructs for the shifting of investment banking business from the bank balance sheets should be limited in such a way that the risks that the banks take on are transparent in the bank balance sheets.

Free market advocates that argue against these remedies, without which a market economy cannot survive, confuse the market economy with anarchy. The market economy can only function when it is subjected to traffic regulations. Civil codes in many countries are full of rules that limit private contracts. Only a portion of the contracts that an uncontrolled market economy would develop is allowed, and because of this the system functions. Europe and the world need stricter rules for financial traffic. Such rules do not constitute a systemic break. They are vital for the functioning of the financial capital markets.

we are all this bear, we need to turn much more to cooperation rather than competition for future prosperity

The financial crisis was not an accident

Marx has partially won

We live in a time that there is a chaotic thud from the collapse of free marketism which is going the way of communism

this fantastic advert advertises a firm of insovency consultants here :) the victory signal by Marx is obviously photoshopped :)



"Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity."

Socrates

The future of capitalism

Well worth seeing



http://www.ft.com/cms/3cf2381c-c064-11dd-9559-000077b07658.html?_i_referralObject=1079742267&fromSearch=n

other signs of the times

the new US treasury secretary on how management salaries..

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Bonuses for American financiers are in the firing line, and other news | The week ahead | The Economist

This model of society organisation is bankrupt ethically as well as financially, but even more so from an efficiency point of view. Failure and incompetence is rewarded. Boom and bust is rewarded.
We need to change all that in every country.

"BONUSES paid to employees at AIG, a big insurer rescued by America’s government, will stay under the spotlight. Public outrage and lawmakers' anger have steadily mounted as it has become clear that executives will share $165m in bonus payments, even after AIG received $170 billion of aid to keep it afloat. On Monday March 23rd the Senate will consider a House proposal to tax bonuses awarded to financiers at insitutions in receipt of bail-out cash at 90%. The next day the House Financial Services Committee will grill both Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, over AIG's bail-out and bonus packages. Mr Geithner is under particular pressure, not only because of AIG’s bonuses but his botched unveiling of a bank-rescue plan."

capitalism yes, but not free market capitalism

Back to the 1970s??

For most of our american friends this would be unimaginable but it seems that worldwide we are heading towards systems that have the following characteristics:

1. state heavy economy, maybe 50% of GDP
2. banks all nationalised with a utility-like function
   (run for the public good)
   
3. private equity, leverage, off balance, investment banking all outlawed
4. Stock market abandoned as a concept
   
5. high taxation

Gunther Verheugen - a grand old man of EU politics seems to suggest that moderated capitalism is the way forward.

"Circumstances have certainly forced a paradigm shift. A new, ruthless form of capitalism evolved when the competition between capitalist and communist systems ended.

The end of communism may have led some to think capitalism could suddenly get away with everything. But it may also be that the dangerous tide of events in the financial world today would have come about regardless of this change. "

Greed is not good after all

One of the fundamental things capitalism got right was marketing. It has spread the illusion that everybody or at least most of us can rise up and be rich. The reality is that a tiny proportion of people do.

Sadly it can't be true that all 6 billion of us can afford the good things in life, being rich is all about having more possessions than the average person. Somebody has to lose somewhere in the end, there is ofcourse some truth that overall increased economic activity raises all boats, however for the most part we have become more unequal societies, and while hard working people should be rewarded and those not working shouldn't this should not be taken to extremes.

In short in the last 40 years the things we sacrificed in order to afford more status symbols and cheap consumer goods are:

1. Real friendship and family relationships and community because of an increasingly transactional and competitive nature in the way we relate to other people because of the way we "consume" others as products. This mentality harms our emotional health.
   
   
2. Safety: No good quality pensions in our old age by removing the state from the pension system.
   
   
3. Safety of good quality healthcare in our old age by removing the state from healthcare.
   

For some people this tradeoff may make sense, although i suspect this is only because most think that their "investments" will mean that they will not need the state for the above as they will be rich...

The market turmoil shows that certain things should be left to the state which is the only institution that can have the long term horizons, the necessary balance-sheet and the incentives necessary to support pensions and healthcare. It has proven impossible to align the interests of business/shareholders and their customers.

Fico & labour standards

Robert Fico seems to continue his moderate reign. He is pushing through some measures that amend the labour code so that it is not heavily skewed to favour employers. His labour minister said that this simply puts slovakia on the same level of labour regulation as capitalist darlings like UK or Ireland. Quite how giving slovaks mainstream standards in the workplace is being dangerously left wing is not explained.

I think that people who think that maternity leave is a threat to capitalism makes me wonder if some employers have any humanity left. Moderate social standards and capital can coexist and produce balanced & democratic societies like those found in Scandinavia and elsewhere where the fruit of capitalism is used to underpin enlightened societies and not go down the path of unstable militaristic taliban-esque regimes like the one plagueing the United States at the moment. The social ills that the US has accepted in order to gain a couple of percentage points of growth are an unacceptable trade-off. Only psychopaths can truly want societies that don't care about the fate of the individual i.e. without safety nets.

The richest irony of all is that in this century of the Self the checks and balances on capital that are being undermined everywhere, are the basic foundation upon which the social contract that allowed the prosperity of the past 70 or so years (i.e. after the war).

I also have a deep suspicion that most people who call for privatisation of healthcare or short-term contracts as the way of the future either are rich enough to not need the societal safety nets (and are therefore in a small atypical minority) or they are deluded fools who think they are the next Gordon Gekko... We are not all going to be rich.. Its impossible. Many will waste their life chasing these illusions and in the process they are creating a selfish cruel & consumeristic world to live in.

Cubicle world

Let's get some things straight, in alot of blogs there seems to be a strong neo-liberal viewpoint (Slovak or otherwise), so although i consider myself a centrist I feel obliged to put the case for the other side of the argument.

Historically treadmills were big wheels, like old-fashioned water wheels, powered by the weight of prisoners endlessly walking forward and, of course, getting nowhere.

Today we're virtual prisoners, chained in our cubicles, toiling to further corporate profits.

To compensate for the boredom and futility of work we chase the 'rewards' of consumerism, the existential emptiness inside is filled up with huge quantities of food and comfort snacking as well as borrowing more money to buy status symbols, and then have to work harder to pay off our debts

Just compare the obesity statistics between USA and Canada (a country with much more left wing policies and an emphasis on quality of life) Prisoners used to know all about treadmills. They were big wheels, like old-fashioned water wheels, powered by the weight of prisoners endlessly walking forward and, of course, getting nowhere.

The turning wheel held several prisoners, all treading forward for hours on end. It was used to power other machines.

But really it was a form of punishment.

Has much changed? Today we're virtual prisoners, chained in our cubicles, toiling for 'the man'. We're replacable pawns to further profits. Yet, there's no revolution, no anger, no challenge to the status quo. We accept our lot, programmed to obey authority.

Wasn't that what school was all about? Sitting behind a desk for six hours, mindlessly bored. Just being 'trained' to fit into the new-style treadmill of work.

Got to work hard in school and get good grades so you can get a good job so you can buy everything you want... and if you don't get a 'proper' job, you're a 'failure'.

To compensate for the boredom and futility of work we chase the 'rewards' of consumerism, borrow more money to buy status symbols, and then have to work harder to pay off our debts. Life is a bitch and then you die. [1]

Management by Stress
Bosses and neoliberal ideologues tell us modern capitalism has changed our lives and the way that we work.

According to them, the world of work has changed dramatically since the years of poverty, lack of control and constant work that characterised the lives of workers at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But the world of work hasn't changed that much, as many workers could testify.
How many of us have had to put up with Human Resource Management? Workers have become used to "key performance indicators", "team working', "appraisals" and a whole battery of measures that go under the rubric of "flexibility" and "modernisation".

Modernisation means more exploitation. Karl Marx described this process as the bosses' desire to "fill up the pores of the working day".

He wrote in the mid-19th century about the brutal effect this has on people's lives: "It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight.

"It haggles over a mealtime, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself. It reduces the sound sleep to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential."

That is a description which is just as relevant today, whether you are a slave to a factory production line or to a computer in a call centre. [2]

The World Isn't Flat
The vision of the globalized world that Thomas Friedman offers in his book [The World is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century] is a rose-tinted, cheery, bullish version, one that has little to do with reality, according to the authors.

Friedman's 'golf course account' of globalization revels in accounts of successful businesses and people. Friedman proffers a vision of a globalized world that has an essentially 'flat' meritocratic global playing field, and provides limitless opportunities for profit for people who are intelligent or who choose to invest in schooling.

He seasons his 'analysis' with accounts of his unmitigated fascination with gadgetry, and unbridled confidence in technology. Friedman's conjuring of this globalized world is in fact so utopic that even the familiar hindersome 'olive tree' is missing.

Only rearing up its head in the Middle East to let you in on the fact that its only the backward culture that's holding the Arab civilization back from the wonderful riches of the flat world.
There are no losers in Friedman's flat world - only people for whom it may take a little longer to get their piece of the pie, for example the Chinese sweatshop worker who saves up to educate his kids who then go on to get better jobs and better pay. Of course, Friedman is wrong.

Globalization is a highly complex interaction of forces. Not only does it exhibit integration, it also exhibits disintegration. It is rooted in cooperation--and it is rooted in violence.
For some, it represents the triumph of free-market capitalism over communism, ushering in democracy, world peace and universal prosperity.

For others, it represents conflict, unbridled greed, deregulated corporate power, and an utter disregard for humanity."

There are the shrinking white collar jobs, the vanishing health and retirement benefits, and the simultaneous mass exploitation of the poor in the global third world.

This attrition, this slide to the bottom, on both sides of the globe, argue the authors, is due to one single mechanism - the transnational corporations whose gargantuan profits have been fuelled by leeching the job security from the white collar workers in the west and extorting labor and resources from the unprivileged.

The Profits of Exploitation
Wal-Mart—the largest private retailer in the United States—is about to completely change the system it uses for scheduling workers’ shifts.

Last year, the company implemented the new system for a portion of its workers, including cashiers and office personnel. This year, Wal-Mart will begin using the system for all of its 1.3 million workers.

The system, developed by Kronos Inc., uses data from previous years along with new information on individual store sales, transactions, units sold and customer traffic to create a "cost-cutting" schedule.

Workers will now be asked to work shifts during those times in which potential profits are the highest.

Wal-Mart is not alone in implementing the so-called scheduling optimization system. Payless Shoe Source expects to have this system in 300 of its 4,000 stores by the end of January 2007. RadioShack and Mervyns are also implementing the new system.

Nikki Baird of Forrester Research said, "There's been a new push for labor optimization."
"Labor optimization" is a euphemism for an attack on worker rights. While the implementation of this system is a new tactic in the bosses’ constant drive to increase the exploitation of workers, it is anything but a new push.

The bosses must compete with each other to constantly increase the rate of profit. They consistently work to undermine workers’ job stability, wages and benefits while increasing their workloads.

Wal-Mart is also an example of the criminality of the entire capitalist class. Along with hundreds of other companies like it, Wal-Mart is guilty of stealing millions of dollars in unpaid wages and benefits from workers. [4]

The Corporate Cube-Farm
It is the right of working people to have jobs free of exploitation.
The sweat shop of old has now become the corporate cube-farm where employees are still required to work long hours without sufficient pay.
Instead of paying workers by the hour, the corporations came up with the ego-assuaging idea of designating nearly all positions as "salaried" which means they are free of overtime costs.
Workers are laid off, their pensions diverted to deceptive "401K" plans that often means they will not be free to retire ~ ever.

CEOs of corporations drive Jaguars and send their kids to Harvard while low-wage workers wonder how to feed their kids and get medical care.

Most people at all ranges of the socio-economic scale work long hours, denying them adequate time to nurture their family lives.

Kids are stuck in impersonal day care centers where mothers and fathers have little input into their upbringing. Day care workers promote capitalistic and consumerist values to the children.
Now we go into the next phase of worker exploitation called "globalization". Worker security is forfeited in the name of corporate profit while workers in third world countries are exploited without even the minimal protections of workers in the US.

The propaganda machine cranks out endless justifications, all of them cloaked in positive language, to make this sound like "progress". [5]

The Unending Benefits of Capitalism [for a Few]
In December, 2006, Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street financial services company, announced a sixteen and a half billion dollar bonus for its 26,500 employees, an average of $623,418 per employee. Their newly appointed CEO received a bonus of $52,000,000.
With the rain of riches falling upon Wall Street these days, the practice of distributing rewards at the top is picking up steam.

CEOs and executives at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley are receiving bonuses as high as $60 million. The manna from heaven continues to fall, and the optimists just want to let the good times roll. They see the benefits of Capitalism unending. Halleluiah! We're on a bonus march!
If Karl Marx were alive and well today, and living in America, he might not even recognize the economic system that he critiqued and analyzed in Das Kapital, when he wrote it in 1867. It wasn't a bad call.

Starting with primitive capital accumulation to feed the Industrial Revolution, small commodity production developed. It was a snowball rolling down hill. Mergers and acquisitions were the inevitable result.

Monopoly, imperialism and war followed, stimulated by the grab for raw materials from less developed areas around the world. The creation of surplus value and profit, of course, was the key to it all.

Marx might not have believed the working class would have allowed it to have gotten this bad. The amount of profit being raked in by the corporate class is obscene. It certainly would have boggled his mind.

The coming world economic crisis is long past due. It wouldn't be just a stock market crash. It would be the total collapse of the house-of-cards still called "capitalism" today.
All that is needed is a single spark-like China calling in its paper-the debt that the US has accumulated to finance the Iraq war and other catastrophes.

When the collapse comes, the question is, will there be enough time and enough of the natural world left to start rebuilding a new kind of society that has been demonized for generations called "socialism".