Free Republic

With a star-studded team of certified, dyed-in-the-wool progressive nutbars of every flavor, including Medea Benjamin, Tony Benn, Helen Caldicott, Linda Foley (yes!), Janeane Garofalo, Naomi Klein, Gore Vidal, and Howard Zinn, Independent World Television is poised to capture the enormous, heretofore-untapped global market for demented leftist raving. (Hat tip: Chrenkoff.) The network is raising a $7 million start-up budget from individual donors and foundations. The MacArthur, Ford and Phoebe Haas Trust foundations and the Canadian Auto Workers Union have contributed to a planning study. In its next phase, IWTnews will build the online community necessary for an international mass fundraising...

Naomi Klein, writing in The Nation magazine asks the question, "Can Democracy Survive Bush's Embrace?" Klein writes, “It started off as a joke and has now become vaguely serious: the idea that Bono might be named president of the World Bank.” Bono talks to Republicans as they like to see themselves: not as administrators of a diminishing public sphere they despise but as CEOs of a powerful private corporation called America. "Brand USA is in trouble...it's a problem for business." The solution is "to re-describe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values." Klein continues, “The Bush Administration...

VENICE (Reuters) - While stars sip martinis poolside at the Venice Film Festival, down the beach hundreds of activists are staging a "camp-in" to protest against Hollywood blockbusters and high ticket prices at the competition. The T-shirt and flip-flop wearing crowd has stormed the red carpet twice, marched down the Lido's main avenues in anti-war protests and on Sunday night they occupied the exclusive terrace at the Excelsior Hotel where actors go to see and be seen. "That was our masterpiece, our crowning achievement so far," said Luca Casarini, an anti-globalization activist and one of the organizers of the anti-festival...

Good news out of Baghdad: the Program Management Office, which oversees the $18.4bn in US reconstruction funds, has finally set a goal it can meet. Sure, electricity is below pre-war levels, the streets are rivers of sewage and more Iraqis have been fired than hired. But now the PMO has contracted the British mercenary firm Aegis to protect its employees from "assassination, kidnapping, injury and" - get this - "embarrassment". I don't know if Aegis will succeed in protecting PMO employees from violent attack, but embarrassment? I'd say mission already accomplished. The people in charge of rebuilding Iraq can't be...

The $500 billion fire sale In a shattered postwar Iraq, there are rich pickings to be had - and for US businesses at least, it promises to be a risk-free bonanza. Naomi Klein joins those at a trade show jostling for a stake Saturday January 17, 2004 The Guardian It's 8.40am, and the Sheraton Hotel ballroom thunders with the sound of plastic explosives pounding against metal. No, this is not the Sheraton in Baghdad, it's the one in Arlington, Virginia. And it's not a real terrorist attack, it's a hypothetical one. The screen at the front of the room is...

Permit me to put my comments upfront to reduce flammage. I'm posting this vomitous rant because of the violent, murderous, left-wing and/or islamist insurgencies and organizations that Klien lauds, glorifies or defends. This provides the beginning of a pretty fair rundown of the main terrorist outfits the hard-left is pushing as "liberation" movements. Please feel free to add to the list This is really a war on dissentersSeptember 8, 2003 The Marriott Hotel in Jakarta was still burning when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's Security Minister, explained the implications of the day's attack: "Those who criticise about human rights being breached...

My, my, my, the great Iraqi Gold Rush is on, and who should be there at the front of the line, right along with Halliburton and Bechtel, but our old friends at WorldCom -- perpetrator of the largest accounting fraud in American history. WorldCom, shortly to become MCI, has been given a contract worth $45 million in the short term to build a wireless phone network in Iraq. I learned via The Associated Press that Washington Technology, a trade newspaper that follows computing-related sales to the U.S. government, "found WorldCom jumped to eighth among all federal technology contractors in 2002,...

Glad to hear that George Bush is still lukewarm on the United Nations. It appears that the age of bending over for this crowd of quasi-legitimate, whining third-rate bullies is fast drawing to a close. The sooner the better, for the Third World especially, since you and I can dodge the UN quite well thanks. So to George W., I say, let them hand out food and organize medical aid. Anything else? You do it, you're competent. And for heaven's sake, if there are Canadians begging to be included, like I don't know, say, Stephen Lewis, how about a nice...

THE battle to save the world is an arduous and paradoxical one. Today's most visible scourge of globalisation and brands is herself an inexhaustible globetrotting brand: a 32-year-old Canadian journalist, armed with little more than a portable computer, a plane ticket and Internet access. Naomi Klein is the pre-eminent figure (she would deplore the term “leader”) in a worldwide protest movement against companies, free trade and global integration—in effect, against capitalism—that has no name or organisation, but is the most vigorous expression of leftist sentiment since the 1960s. The movement burst on to the scene in Seattle in December 1999,...