Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein: Oppose The State, Not The People

July 2nd, 2009

Published in Ha’aretz

NOTE: Ha’aretz made a translation error in a previous version of this article. This is a corrected version [correction in bold].

Ramallah’s intellectual elite, foreigners and curious spectators gathered last Saturday at the Friends School in Ramallah to hear writer and political activist Naomi Klein lecture to a packed auditorium.

Following a musical interlude by a string quintet, one of whose members is blind, Klein took the stage. She chose to speak in Ramallah about her Jewish roots.

“There is a debate among Jews - I’m a Jew by the way,” she said. The debate boils down to the question: “Never again to everyone, or never again to us?… [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card…There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that say, ‘Never again to anyone.’”

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Naomi Klein

Author Naomi Klein calls for boycott of Israel

June 26th, 2009

BILIN , West Bank (AFP) — Bestselling author Naomi Klein on Friday took her call for a boycott of Israel to the occupied West Bank village of Bilin, where she witnessed Israeli forces clashing with protesters.

“It’s a boycott of Israeli institutions, it’s a boycott of the Israeli economy,” the Canadian writer told journalists as she joined a weekly demonstration against Israel’s controversial separation wall.

“Boycott is a tactic … we’re trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa,” said Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

“It’s an extraordinarily important part of Israel’s identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy,” the Canadian writer and activist said.

“When that is threatened, when the rock concerts don’t come, when the symphonies don’t come, when a film you really want to see doesn’t play at the Jerusalem film festival… then it starts to threaten the very idea of what the Israeli state is.”

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Naomi Klein

Why We Should Banish Larry Summers From Public Life

April 19th, 2009br /br /Published in a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/16/AR2009041603244_pf.html target=_blankThe Washington Post/abr /br /

I vote to banish Larry Summers. Not from the planet. That wouldn’t be nice. Just from public life. br /br /

The criticisms of President Obama’s chief economic adviser are well known. He’s too close to Wall Street. And he’s a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we’re told we shouldn’t care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain. br /br /

And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is the process wherein the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person is inflated and valued beyond all reason, creating a dangerous accumulation of unhedged risk. Larry Summers is the biggest Brain Bubble we’ve got. br /pa href=http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/04/why-we-should-banish-larry-summers-public-liferead more/a/p

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Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein’s Newsletter

Don’t Miss Naomi On Tour at the End of January

Naomi will be speaking at Northwestern University in Chicago on January 26, Washington University in St. Louis on January 28, and Loyola University in Chicago on January 29. February tour dates will soon be posted on Naomi’s websites: www.naomiklein.org andwww.shockdoctrine.com.

Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction
by Naomi Klein, The Nation, January 7, 2008

It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. 

In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—BDS for short—was born. 

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.85 This international backing must stop." 

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can’t go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren’t good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counterarguments. 

1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures—quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non96Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel’s exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem. 

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv …

Naomi Klein

Real Change Depends on Stopping the Bailout Profiteers

By Naomi Klein, November 4, 2008

 

To understand the meaning of the U.S. election results, it is worth looking back to the moment when everything changed for the Obama campaign. It was, without question, the moment when the economic crisis hit Wall Street.

Up to that point, things weren’t looking all that good for Barack Obama. The Democratic National Convention barely delivered a bump, while the appointment of Sarah Palin seemed to have shifted the momentum decisively over to John McCain.

 

Then, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed, followed by insurance giant AIG, then Lehman Brothers. It was in this moment of economic vertigo that Obama found a new language. With tremendous clarity, he turned his campaign into a referendum into the deregulation and trickle down policies that have dominated mainstream economic discourse since Ronald Reagan. He said his opponent represented more of the same while he stood for a new direction, one that would rebuild the economy from the ground up, rather than the top down. Obama stayed on this message for the rest of the campaign and, as we just saw, it worked.

The question now is whether Obama will have the courage to take the ideas that won him this election and turn them into policy. Or, alternately, whether he will use the financial crisis to rationalize a move to what pundits call “the middle” (if there is one thing this election has proved, it is that the real middle is far to the left of its previously advertised address). Predictably, Obama is already coming under enormous pressure to break his election promises, particularly those relating to raising taxes on the wealthy and imposing real environmental regulations on polluters. All day on the business networks, we hear that, in light of the economic crisis, corporations need lower taxes, and fewer regulations—in other words, more of the same.

The new president’s only hope of resisting this campaign being waged by the elites is if the remarkable grassroots movement that carried him to victory can somehow stay energized, networked, mobilized—and most of all, critical. Now that the election has been won, this movement’s new missions should be clear: loudly holding Obama to his campaign promises, and letting the Democrats know that there will be consequences for betrayal.

The first order of business—and one that cannot wait until inauguration—must be halting the robbery-in-progress known as the “economic bailout.” I have spent the past month examining the loopholes and conflicts of interest embedded in the U.S. Treasury Department’s plans. The results of that research can be found in a just published feature article in Rolling Stone, The Bailout Profiteers, as well as my most recent Nation column, Bush’s Final Pillage.

Both these pieces argue that the $700-billion “rescue plan” should be regarded as the Bush Administration’s final heist. Not only does it transfer billions of dollars of public wealth into the hands of politically connected corporations (a Bush specialty), but it passes on such an enormous debt burden

…

Naomi Klein

A Night When The People Holding Open the Doors Were Happier Than The Ones Walking Through Them

Since I already sent my

Naomi Klein

Real Change Depends on Stopping the Bailout Profiteers

To understand the meaning of the U.S. election results, it is worth looking back to the moment when everything changed for the Obama campaign. It was, without question, the moment when the economic crisis hit Wall Street.

Up to that point, things werenrsquo;t looking all that good for Barack Obama. The Democratic National Convention barely delivered a bump, while the appointment of Sarah Palin seemed to have shifted the momentum decisively over to John McCain.

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Naomi Klein

The Halliburton-ization of the Treasury

$700 Billion Bailout: The Halliburton-ization of the Treasury
<http://www.rollingstone .com/issue1065>  Don’t miss Naomi’s Rolling Stone feature article, “The Bailout Profiteers.” Naomi examines how the Bush administration’s $700 billion plan for Wall Street is starting to mirror Iraq’s Green Zone, with private contractors running the show and conflicts of interest run rampant. On newsstands this Friday.

In the meantime, those looking for analysis of the bailout and the financial crisis can listen to Naomi on The Brian Lehrer Show <http://www.w nyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2008/10/22> . She lays out how the US Treasury bailout is vastly inferior to the deal struck in the UK 97and listen up for her recommendation for the next U.S. Treasury Secretary.

You can also watch Naomi’s recent appearance at the Commonwealth Club <htt p://fora.tv/2008/10/16/Naomi_Klein_Disaster_Capitalism>  in San Francisco. In this onstage conversation with author Stephen Elliot, Naomi discussed how the financial crisis will impact the next U.S. president, and what people can do now to get ready for the next dose of the shock doctrine. After next Tuesday, Naomi says, “what 92s going to happen is we are going to be asked to sacrifice the dreams of actually moving to a sustainable ecological model on the altar of this crisis.”

Sandy Springs: You Read About It, Now See It!

 <http://www.youtu be.com/watch?v=dOI9yrKGAV4>  Readers of The Shock Doctrine know the name Sandy Springs. It is the city in Georgia, discussed at the end of the book, that has outsourced its government to military contractor CH2M Hill 97the cutting edge of total privatization. Recently, Naomi’s husband Avi Lewis went to Sandy Springs and reported about the way this experiment is pitting rich against poor in the suburbs of Atlanta. It aired on the show he hosts on Al Jazeera English, Inside USA <http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/insideusa/2 008/10/20081020131956718877.html> . Watch the segment <http://www.youtu be.com/watch?v=dOI9yrKGAV4>

And to refresh your memories, here is what Naomi wrote about Sandy Springs in Harper 92s magazine last year:

“Another glimpse of a disaster-apartheid future can be found in a wealthy Republican suburb outside Atlanta. Its residents decided that they were tired of watching their property taxes subsidize schools and police in the county’s low-income African-American neighborhoods. They voted to incorporate as their own city, Sandy Springs, which could spend most of its taxes on services for its 100,000 citizens and minimize the revenue that would be redistributed throughout Fulton County. The only difficulty was that Sandy Springs had no government structures and needed to build them from scratch 97everything from tax collection to zoning to parks and recreation. In September 2005, the same month that New Orleans flooded, the residents of Sandy Springs were approached by the construction and consulting giant CH2M Hill with a unique pitch: Let us do it for you. For the starting price of $27 million a year, the contractor pledged to build a complete city from the ground up.

A few months later, Sandy Springs became the first “contract city.” Only four people worked directly for the new municipality 97everyone else was a contractor. Rick Hirsekorn, heading up the project for CH2M Hill, described Sandy Springs as “a clean sheet of paper with no governmental processes in place.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that “when Sandy Springs hired corporate workers to run the new city, it was considered a bold experiment.” Within a year, however, contract-city mania was tearing through Atlanta’s wealthy suburbs, and it had become “standard procedure in north Fulton.” Neighboring communities took their cue from Sandy Springs and also voted to become stand-alone cities and contract out their government. One new city, Milton, immediately hired CH2M Hill for the job 97after all, it had the experience. Soon, …

Diary, Influences

Naomi Klein

I’ve been a fan of Naomi Klein (fellow Canadian) I’ve read - NO LOGO and I’m reading her new book- THE SHOCK DOCTRINE- I’m also watching a film she was involved in called THE TAKE- tonight- She and another favorite of mine-Naomi Wolff (THE BEAUTY MYTH) are fantastic, insightful food for thought/people authors, minds_- to say the least- I’ve always loved politics or fascinated anyway- The world is our children’s- and there is a way to make it a better place- it’s overwhelming the information and the perceptions- but in the end its bottom line and simple- what is best for our kids? Lets do the right thing.