[R-G] Canada's star left-winger

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/587538
  OPINION
Canada's star left-winger
Naomi Klein, who shot to fame after her first book, is withholding  
judgment on Obama
Feb 15, 2009 04:30 AM
Haroon Siddiqui

She fits the cliché of the Canadian who is a celebrity abroad but is  
mostly ignored at home.

Naomi Klein shot to international fame eight years ago with her book  
No Logo, which has since sold 1 million copies.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published 15  
months ago, has already sold 800,000 copies and been translated into  
26 languages. Last week, a documentary based on the book was released  
at the Berlin Film Festival.

Her speaking engagements and political activism keep her on the road,  
around the world. Her newsletter goes to 30,000 subscribers.

No Logo charted the corporate commodification of youth pop culture and  
the casualization of labour (what's sold in the West are expensive  
brands, not products, which can be manufactured cheaply in the East).

The Shock Doctrine is about the globalization of the neo-conservative  
ideas pioneered by Chicago economist Milton Friedman and popularized  
by Ronald Reagan. There was the massive privatization – not only of  
public services at home but wars abroad (private security forces and  
contractors galore in Iraq and Afghanistan) and even disaster relief  
(post-tsunami and Katrina). There was the deregulation of the markets,  
which led, inevitably, to the current economic meltdown.

Critics attack her for seeing corporate conspiracies. They  
particularly sneer at her hypothesis, announced in the book's  
subtitle, that right-wing economic policies have faced such popular  
resistance that they can only be introduced in the jet stream of shock- 
and-awe wars and natural disasters (laying off tens of thousands of  
Iraqis in order to sell state enterprises; building tourist beach  
hotels in Southeast Asian fishing villages washed away by the tsunami).

Her admirers see the economic crisis as proof of her prescience.

The New Yorker magazine recently ran a 12-page profile: "She has  
become the most visible and influential figure on the American left –  
what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were 30 years ago."

She has campaigned against the University of Chicago's plan to build a  
$200 million Milton Friedman Institute to honour its former professor,  
who died in 2006. "The crash on Wall St. should be for Friedmanism  
what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism, an  
indictment of an ideology," she has said.

In a twist of fate, the economic crisis has dried up funding for the  
institute, and it has been put on hold – much to her delight.

In an interview Tuesday, Klein, 38, said she welcomes the election of  
Barack Obama. But she has two problems: his refusal to insist on  
accountability for recent American misdemeanours abroad and at home;  
and his "narrative that everything went wrong only eight years ago"  
with the election of George W. Bush.

It was Bill Clinton who periodically bombed Iraq and tightened the  
economic sanctions that killed 1 million Iraqis, including 500,000  
children, according to UNICEF. It was he who axed the Depression-era  
restrictions that had prevented investment banks from also being  
commercial banks. He and Alan Greenspan resisted the regulation of the  
huge derivatives industry.

If you develop amnesia about all that, "then you do exactly what Obama  
is doing. You resurrect the Clinton economic and foreign policy  
apparatus, and you appoint Larry Summers, the key architect of the  
economic policy that has imploded at this moment."

Obama's economic recovery plan, especially the bank bailout, is a  
disaster.

It is "layering complexity over complexity. What got us into this mess  
in the first place were these complex financial instruments that  
nobody understood. Now they have a bailout that nobody understands.

"The facts are easy to understand, namely, that these banks are  
bankrupt and they should be allowed to go under or be nationalized  
because there also needs to be a workable financial sector.

"The amount of money that's at stake in the bailout – if you include  
everything, the deposit guarantees, the loans, Fannie May and Freddie  
Mac and AIG – is now up to $9 trillion. The American GDP is only $14  
trillion. So they've put more than half the American economy on the  
line to try to fix a mess that actually cannot be fixed in this way.  
Just look at what happened to Iceland. The debt that their three top  
banks held was 10 times their GDP. You can bankrupt the country this  
way."

Obama's stimulus package is not big enough. Almost 40 per cent goes to  
tax cuts. "And to pay for the cuts, they had to drastically scale back  
much more important and stimulative spending, on such things as public  
transit."

Among the many parallels to the 1930s, the one Klein finds most useful  
is that president Franklin Roosevelt was under constant public  
pressure to improve the New Deal. That "history of resistance,  
struggle and community organizing" needs to be replicated to keep  
Obama honest.

"Obama is an important change from Bush, and the reason why he is  
important is that he is susceptible to pressure from everyone. He is  
susceptible to pressure from Wall Street, to pressure from the weapons  
companies, from the Washington establishment. But unlike Bush and  
(Dick) Cheney, I don't think he'd ignore mass protest.

"The irony is that just at the very moment when that kind of  
grassroots organizing and mobilization could have an impact, we are  
demobilizing and waiting for the good acts to be handed down from on  
high, whether it is the withdrawal from Iraq or the perfect economic  
stimulus package."

It is equally important that America come to terms with its recent past.

"So much of this moment for me comes down to whether there's going to  
be any accountability for what happened – whether it's the illegal  
occupation of Iraq or torture or the economic crimes that led to this  
disaster.

"The FBI believes that there's a huge criminality at the heart of the  
economic meltdown but they've made a decision not to prosecute because  
they were afraid that might send panic through the market.

"All this argument for impunity, amnesia is really corrosive."

Haroon Siddiqui's column appears Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq at thestar.ca