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To: Sam Hill
Naomi Klein* from The Nation is one of Buddy’s house guests and she said that 2 black people she interviewed both said they survived first the Storm, then the Looters, then the White Vigilantes, most of whom spoke with a Texas accent and basically had the Authority to go Hunting Black people with no accountability.


*
Naomi Klein/CBC Photo

From the age of six, growing up in Canada, Naomi Klein was obsessed with brand names, and what she could buy.

In her high-school yearbook - where some are labeled"most likely to succeed" - she was "most likely to be in jail for stealing peroxide". She was defined by the products she used to change the color of her hair.

But now, aged 30, Klein has written a book, No Logo, which has been called "the Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement". The teenager fixated on brand names has become a campaigner against our over-branded world, and a popularizer of the kind of anti-corporate ideas that are currently fueling protesters against the IMF/World Bank meeting in Prague. The book has been a word-of-mouth sensation, giving voice to a generation of people under 30 who have never related to politics until now.

As a chronicler of what she calls "the next big political movement - and the first genuinely international people's movement" - Klein writes that Nike paid Michael Jordan more in 1992 for endorsing its trainers ($20 million) than the company paid its entire 30,000-strong Indonesian workforce for making them; why, in her opinion, this makes people angry; and why that anger is expressed in rallies outside the Nike Town superstore, rather than outside government buildings or embassies. She shows how globalization has hit the poor the most, and how this new political movement is both historically informed and absolutely of the moment, like nothing that has gone before.

What's more, says Klein, people start to resent the colonization of their lives. Fine, they say, I'll buy my shoes from you, but I don't want you to take over my head. Young activists, says Klein, feel that their cultural and political space has been taken away and sold back to them, neatly-packaged, as "alternative" or "anti-sexist" or "anti-racist". So Seattle grunge (including its star, Kurt Cobain) implodes through commercialization, and the designer Christian Lacroix says, "It's terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people." So the Body Shop displays posters condemning domestic violence and Nike runs an ad saying, "I believe high heels are a conspiracy against women." So Nike signs up black stars such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, and then adorns the walls of Nike Town with quotes from Woods saying, "There are still courses in the US where I am not allowed to play, because of the color of my skin." It's anti-racism without the politics; 50 years of civil-rights history reduced to an anodyne advertising slogan.

And don't think, says Klein, that the developing world is the only place for exploitation by western industry. "Cavite may be capitalism's dream vacation, but casualization is a game that can be played at home," she writes. Europe and North America have played host to the most extraordinary rise in impermanence at work over the past two decades. The "McJob" is a contemporary template: low-paid, no benefits, no union recognition and no guarantee that your job will be there in the morning. At Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer which opened its first British shop in July after buying Asda, "full time" in its US branches means just 28 hours a week; the average annual wage is a barely-livable $10,920. "You can buy two grande mocha cappuccinos with my hourly salary," says Laurie Bonang, a worker in Starbucks. Microsoft, the gleaming testament to the hi-tech products of our future, has an extraordinary one-third of its workforce working as temps. As Klein says, "It was Microsoft, with its famous employee stock-option plan, that developed and fostered the mythology of Silicon Gold; but it is also Microsoft that has done the most to dismantle it."

Klein grew up with politics all around her. Her grandparents were American Marxists in the 30s and 40s; her grandfather was an animator at Disney who was fired and blacklisted for organizing the company's first strike. Her parents, who are also American, moved to Canada in protest at the Vietnam war. Her father is a doctor and her mother, Bonnie Klein, made the seminal anti-pornography film, This Is Not A Love Story, in 1980. "My mother was really involved in the anti-pornography movement, and when I was at school I found it very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother - it was a source of endless embarrassment. When This Is Not A Love Story came out, there was a lot of backlash against my mother. The headline in the Toronto Globe And Mail was "Bourgeois Feminist Fascist", and she was made Hustler magazine's asshole of the month; they took my mother's head and put it on the back of a donkey. It was not cool in 1980 to be making films about pornography. Not at my elementary school, anyway."

This, she says, is part of the reason she wanted nothing to do with politics when she was growing up. "I think it's why I embraced full-on consumerism. I was in constant conflict with my parents and I wanted them to leave me the hell alone." Her brother, who is two years older, did not go through the same kind of rebellion: "I don't think he was quite so much a victim of the 80s as I was. We had no culture growing up. We had Cyndi Lauper."

It was also at university that Klein learned what it's like to be attacked for her opinions. She is Jewish, and during the intifada she wrote an article in the student newspaper called Victim To Victimizer, in which she said "that not only does Israel have to end the occupation for the Palestinians, but also it has to end the occupation for its own people, especially its women". As a result of this one 800-word article, Klein received bomb threats at her home and at the newspaper office - "and to this day I have never been more scared for my life".

"After the article came out, the Jewish students' union, who were staunch Zionists, called a meeting to discuss what they were going to do about my article - and I went along, because nobody knew what I looked like. And the woman sitting next to me said, 'If I ever meet Naomi Klein, I'm going to kill her.' So I just stood up and said, 'I'm Naomi Klein, I wrote Victim To Victimizer, and I'm as much a Jew as every single one of you.' I've never felt anything like the silence in that room after that. I was 19, and it made me tough."

Klein became an outspoken feminist activist at college, campaigning on issues of media representation and gender visibility that constituted feminism at the end of the 80s - she received rape threats as a result - and, rather than finish her degree, she dropped out to work as an intern on the Toronto Globe And Mail. She left to become editor of an alternative political magazine, This Magazine. "When I was there [in the early 90s], I did not feel that we were part of a political movement in any way - in that there was not a left. We had to kind of invent it as we went along. The stress of it was the stress of the left. It burned us out." The left that did exist Klein found depressing. "The only thing leftwing voices were saying was stop the cuts, stop the world we want to get off. It was very negative and regressive, it wasn't imaginative, it didn't have its own sense of itself in any way."

Klein went back to university in 1995 to try to finish her degree, and something very clearly had changed. "I met this new generation of young radicals who had grown up taking for granted the idea that corporations are more powerful than governments, that it doesn't matter who you elect because they'll all act the same. And they were, like, fine, we'll go where the power is. We'll adapt. It didn't fill them with dread and depression.

As a popularizer of the movement's arguments, does Klein consider herself an activist or a journalist? "I see myself as an activist journalist," she says. "I became a journalist because I'm not comfortable being an activist. I hate crowds - I know, great irony - and I'm physically incapable of chanting. I'm always slightly detached, so I write about it to feel more comfortable. I like to believe that I can be part of this movement without being a propagandist. There's a really strong tradition of this, like Gloria Steinem, Norman Mailer, Susan Faludi. I do think that there's so much fragmentation in this movement that if someone tries to work out a coherent thesis - even if you don't agree with all or even much of it - it can be helpful by making something more solid."


******



* Naomi Klein (born 1970) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist. She was born into a political family in Montreal, Quebec, and now lives in Toronto with her husband Avi Lewis.

Her grandfather was fired for labor organizing at Disney. Her father Michael, a physician, was a Vietnam War resistor who fled to Canada and became a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her film-maker mother, Bonnie, won fame with her ground-breaking anti-pornography film, Not a Love Story. Her brother Seth is director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Naomi Klein's writing career started early, contributing to The Varsity, one of the University of Toronto's student newspapers. She credits her wake-up call to feminism as the 1989 massacre of female engineering students by Marc Lépine.

In 2000, just one month after protesters shut down the WTO Meeting of 1999, Klein published the book No Logo, which for many became a manifesto of the anti-globalization movement. The book lambasts the negative effects of brand-oriented consumer culture by describing the operations of large corporations which exist only to peddle a brand. Their products, she argues, turn people into walking billboards. These corporations are also often guilty of exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of ever-greater profits. Klein criticized Nike so much in the book that it became one of the first publications to receive feedback from Nike.[1]

In 2002 Klein published Fences and Windows, a collection of articles and speeches she'd written on behalf of the anti-globalization movement (all proceeds from the book go to benefit activist organizations through The Fences and Windows Fund). Klein also contributes to The Nation, In These Times, Canada's The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, and The Guardian.

She has continued to write on various current issues, such as the occupation of Iraq. In a September 2004 article for Harper's Magazine entitled "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia", she argues that, contrary to popular belief and criticisms, the Bush Administration did have a clear plan for post-invasion Iraq, which was to build a fully unconstrained free market economy. She describes plans to allow foreigners to extract wealth from Iraq, and the methods used to achieve those goals.

Klein gave the annual Dalton K. Camp Lecture in Journalism on October 28, 2004 at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She also spoke at the tenth anniversary celebration of Stauffer Library at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario on November 4, 2004, and at the Navigating A New World Conference on November 6, along with Lloyd Axworthy, Linda McQuaig, Roméo Dallaire, Thomas Homer-Dixon, and Irshad Manji.

Also in 2004, Klein and her husband, Canadian television journalist Avi Lewis, released a documentary called The Take, which profiled a group of laid off auto-parts workers in Argentina who took back control of their plant and turned it into a cooperative.

136 posted on 09/20/2005 10:55:33 PM PDT by kcvl
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Naomi Klein

Born in Montreal in 1970, Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international best-seller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Translated into twenty-five languages, No Logo was called by the New York Times "a movement bible." In 2000, the Guardian newspaper short-listed it for their First Book Award, and in 2001 No Logo won the Canadian National Business Book Award and the French Prix Médiations. Naomi Klein's articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The New Statesman, Newsweek International, the New York Times, the Village Voice and Ms. magazine. She writes an internationally syndicated column for The Globe and Mail in Canada and The Guardian in Britain. A collection of her work, titled Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in October 2002. For the past six years, Klein has traveled throughout North America, Asia, Latin America and Europe, tracking the rise of anticorporate activism. She is a frequent media commentator and university guest lecturer. In the fall of 2002, Klein was a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics.

137 posted on 09/20/2005 10:59:27 PM PDT by kcvl
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