October 10th, 2003By Naomi Klein Fighting AIDS was supposed to show George W. Bush's softer side. "Seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many," he said in his State of the Union address this past January. He has since reconsidered, deciding instead to offer a few more opportunities to the few. First he handed the top job of his Global AIDS initiative to a Big Pharma boss, then he broke his $3 billion promise of AIDS relief and now there are concerns that he may sabotage a plan to send cheap drugs to countries ravaged by AIDS. This past August, the World Trade Organization announced a new deal on drug patents that was supposed to give poor countries facing health problems the right to import generic drugs. But the deal seemed unworkable: the United States, at the behest of the pharmaceutical lobby, had successfully pushed for so many conditions that the agreement exploded from a straightforward fifty-two words to a sprawling 3,200-word maze. Countries wanting to import cheap generics must jump through multiple hoops to prove they are truly in need, unable to afford patented drugs and incapable of producing the medicines domestically. Meanwhile,...

10 October, 2003

September 23rd, 2003By Naomi Klein It used to be that if there was one thing you could count in matters of international trade, it was the desperation of the poor. No matter how bad the deal, it was always better than nothing. But all of a sudden, poor countries are busting up trade rounds, standing up to the International Monetary Fund, and turning down foreign investment. What's going on? Is it possible that when you've lost enough, desperation turns into defiance? Take the people of Esquel, a small city in Southern Argentina. A year ago, the U.S-Canadian gold mining company Meridian purchased Britain's Bancote Holdings, which owned a gold deposit in Esquel estimated at (U.S.) $1-billion. The time seemed to be right to build a huge open pit mine: gold was selling high and Argentina, with its ravaged economy, was selling low. The company informed the city of Esquel that it was about to be the lucky recipient of 400 mining jobs. It slapped together an Environmental Impact Assessment, assured the community that using 2700 kg of cyanide a day was no riskier than driving to work, and got ready to start digging. So did the community. Not for gold,...

23 September, 2003

September 11th, 2003By Naomi Klein On Monday, seven anti-privatization activists were arrested in Soweto for blocking the installation of prepaid water meters. The meters are a privatized answer to the fact that millions of poor South Africans cannot pay their water bills. The new gadgets work like pay-as-you-go cell phones, only instead of having a dead phone when you run out of money, you have dead people, sickened by drinking cholera-infested water. On the same day South Africa's "water warriors" were locked up, Argentina's negotiations with the International Monetary Fund bogged down. The sticking point was rate hikes for privatized utility companies. In a country where 50 percent of the population is living in poverty, the IMF is demanding that multinational water and electricity companies be allowed to increase their rates by a staggering 30 percent. At trade summits, debates about privatization can seem wonkish and abstract. On the ground, they are as clear and urgent as the right to survive. After September 11, right-wing pundits couldn't bury the globalization movement fast enough. We were gleefully informed that in times of war, no one would care about frivolous issues like water privatization. Much of the US antiwar movement fell into...

11 September, 2003

August 26th, 2003By Naomi Klein The Marriot Hotel in Jakarta was still burning when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's coordinating minister for political and security affairs, explained the implications of the day's attack."Those who criticize about human rights being breached must understand that all the bombing victims are more important than any human rights issue."In a sentence, we got the best summary yet of the philosophy underlying Bush's so-called "war on terror." Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism, real and exaggerated, has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.Many have argued that the war on terror is the United States government's thinly veiled excuse for constructing a classic Empire, in the model of Rome or Britain. Two years into the crusade, it's clear that this is a mistake: the Bush gang doesn't have the stick-to-it-ness to successfully occupy one country, let alone a dozen.Bush and the gang do, however, have the hustle of good marketers, and they know how to contract-out. What Bush has created in the WoTâ„¢ is less a "doctrine" for world domination than an easy...

26 August, 2003

August 13th, 2003By Naomi Klein What does it take to become a major news story in the summer of Arnold and Kobe, Ben and Jen? A lot, as a group of young Philippine soldiers discovered recently. On July 27, 300 soldiers rigged a giant Manila shopping mall with C-4 explosives, accused one of Washington's closest allies of blowing up its own buildings to attract US military dollars — and still barely managed to make the international news. That's our loss, because in the wake of the Marriott bombing in Jakarta and newly leaked intelligence reports claiming that the September 11 attacks were hatched in Manila, it looks like Southeast Asia is about to become the next major front in Washington's War on Terror.â„¢ The Philippines and Indonesia may have missed the cut for the Axis of Evil, but the two countries do offer Washington something Iran and North Korea do not: US-friendly governments willing to help the Pentagon secure an easy win. Both Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Indonesian President Megawati Soekarnaputri have embraced Bush's crusade as the perfect cover for their brutal cleansing of separatist movements from resource-rich regions — Mindanao in the Philippines, Aceh in Indonesia. The Philippine...

13 August, 2003

July 16th, 2003By Naomi Klein In sports, as in life, "security" trumps peace. That's what happened when the International Olympic Committee faced a choice between Pyeongchang, South Korea and Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games. South Korea pitched itself as the Peace Candidate: with the world in turmoil, bring the games to the very border of George Bush's "Axis of Evil" and make a gesture of reconciliation. Vancouver, on the other hand, sold itself as the Safety and Security Candidate: with the world in turmoil, hold the games somewhere you can be almost certain that nothing will happen. The Vancouver-Whistler Olympic bid presented the province of British Columbia as a model of harmonious, sustainable living, a place where everyone gets along: Native and non-Native, rural and urban, rich and poor. Before the vote, IOC President Jacques Rogge tipped his hand by declaring South Korean's peace theme to be "secondary" and telling the Los Angeles Times that his top priority was "the best possible security." But two weeks after the euphoric celebrations, the new-age sheen on Vancouver's harmony sales pitch is already wearing off. "I'm going to stop them," Rosalin Sam of the Lil'wat Nation told me. "I'll lay in the...

16 July, 2003

July 2nd, 2003By Naomi Klein Canadians can't quite believe it: Suddenly, we're interesting. After months of making the news only with our various communicable diseases-SARS, mad cow and West Nile-we're now getting world famous for our cutting-edge laws on gay marriage and legalized drugs. The Bush conservatives are repulsed by our depravity. My friends in New York and San Francisco have been quietly inquiring about applying for citizenship. And Canadians have been eating it up, filling the newspapers with giddy articles about our independence. "You're not the boss of us, George," Jim Coyle wrote in the Toronto Star. "So much for nice; we're getting interesting," wrote conservative columnist William Thorsell in the Globe and Mail. Polls are showing that it's not just that Canadians are becoming more forward-looking and groovier, it's also that the United States is lurching backward, retrenching into more conservative values. According to Canada's summer bestseller, Fire and Ice: The United States and Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, by pollster Michael Adams, Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 are twice as likely to worry about crime, "moral decline" and ethnic conflict as their Canadian counterparts. Four events have contributed to Canada's newfound status...

02 July, 2003

June 20th, 2003By Naomi Klein The Bush administration has found its next target for pre-emptive war, but it's not Iran, Syria or North Korea — not yet, anyway. Before launching any new foreign adventures, the Bush gang has some homeland housekeeping to take care of: It is going to sweep up those pesky non-governmental organizations that are helping to turn world opinion against US bombs and brands. The war on NGOs is being fought on two clear fronts. One buys the silence and complicity of mainstream humanitarian and religious groups by offering lucrative reconstruction contracts. The other marginalizes and criminalizes more independent-minded NGOs by claiming that their work is a threat to democracy. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is in charge of handing out the carrots, while the American Enterprise Institute, the most powerful think tank in Washington, D.C., is wielding the sticks. On May 21 in Washington, Andrew Natsios, the head of USAID, gave a speech blasting US NGOs for failing to play a role many of them didn't realize they had been assigned: doing public relations for the US government. According to InterAction, the network of 160 relief and development NGOs that hosted the conference, Mr....

20 June, 2003

June 4th, 2003By Naomi Klein The streets of Baghdad are a swamp of uncollected garbage and crime.Battered local businesses are going bankrupt, unable to compete with cheap imports. Unemployment is soaring and thousands of laid off state workers are protesting in the streets.In other words, Iraq looks like every other country that has undergone rapid fire "structural adjustments" prescribed by Washington, from Russia's infamous "shock therapy" in the early nineties to Argentina's disastrous "surgery without aesthetic" a few years later. Except that Iraq's so-called reconstruction makes those wrenching reforms look like spa treatments.Paul Bremer, the U.S. appointed governor of Iraq, has already proved something of a flop in the democracy department in his three weeks there, nixing plans for Iraqis to select their own interim government in favour of his own handpicked team of advisors. But Bremer has proved to have something of a gift when it comes to rolling out the red carpet for U.S. multinationals. No wonder George Bush looked so pleased when he met Bremer in Qatar. For two weeks, Bremer has been hacking away at Iraq's public sector like Chainsaw Al Dunlap in a flak jacket. On May 15, Bremer banned up to 30,000 senior Baath...

04 June, 2003

May 21st, 2003By Naomi Klein Jessica Lynch and Rachel Corrie could have passed for sisters. Two all-American blondes, two destinies forever changed in a Middle East war zone. Private Jessica Lynch, the soldier, was born in Palestine, West Virginia. Rachel Corrie, the activist, died in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Corrie was four years older than 19-year old Lynch. Her body was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza seven days before Lynch was taken into Iraqi custody on March 23. Before she went to Iraq, Lynch organized a pen pal program with a local kindergarden. Before Corrie left for Gaza, she organized a pen pal program between kids in her hometown of Olympia, Washington, and children in Rafah. Lynch went to Iraq as a soldier loyal to her government. In the words of West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, "she approached the prospect of combat with determination rather than fear." Corrie went to Gaza to oppose the actions of her government. As a US citizen, she believed she had a special responsibility to defend Palestinians against US-built weapons, purchased with US aid to Israel. In letters home, she vividly described how fresh water was being diverted from Gaza to Israeli settlements, how death...

21 May, 2003