March 27th, 2003By Naomi Klein As a kid, I had trouble understanding why my parents and siblings lived in Montreal and the rest of my family — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — were scattered across the United States. On long car trips to visit relatives in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, my parents would tell us about the Vietnam war, and the thousands of US peace activists who, like us, snuck across the border to Canada in the late sixties. I was told that the Canadian government not only stayed officially neutral during the war, it offered sanctuary for US citizens who refused to fight in a war they believed was wrong. Derided as "draft dodgers" at home, we were welcomed in Canada as conscientious objectors. My family's decision to emigrate to Canada was made before I was born, but these romantic stories planted an idea in my head when I was far too young to fend it off: I believed that Canada had a relationship with the world that was radically different from that of the United States; that despite cultural similarities and geographic proximity, more humane and less interventionist values guided our dealings. In short, I thought we were...

27 March, 2003

March 13th, 2003By Naomi Klein On a muddy piece of squatted land in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Florencia Vespignani is planning her upcoming tour of the United States, where she will be speaking with students and activists about Argentina's resistance movements. "I'm a bit scared," she confesses. "Of the war?" I ask. "No. Of the plane. We have wars here all the time." Vespignani, a 33-year-old mother and community organizer, is a leader in the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (MTD), one of dozens of organizations of unemployed workers, known as piqueteros, that have emerged out of the wreckage of Argentina's economy. When Florencia describes life as war, it is not a metaphor. In a country where more than half the people are living in poverty and 27 children die of hunger each day, she has simply learned that to stay alive, you have to go to the streets and fight-for every piece of bread, for every student's pencil, for every night's rest. From the perspective of the International Monetary Fund, the piqueteros are the collateral damage of neoliberalism-a fluke explosion that happened when rapid-fire privatization was mixed with "shock" austerity. In the mid-nineties, hundreds of thousands of Argentines suddenly...

13 March, 2003

February 27th, 2003By Naomi Klein At the Pentagon they call it the "Voila Moment." That's when Iraqi soldiers and civilians , with bombs raining down on Baghdad, suddenly scratch their heads and say to themselves: "These bombs aren't really meant to kill me and my family, they are meant to free us from an evil dictator!" At that point, they thank Uncle Sam, lower their weapons, abandon their posts, and rise up against Saddam Hussein. Voila! Or at least that's how it is supposed to work, according to the experts in "psychological operations" who are already waging a fierce information war in Iraq. The "Voila Moment" made its first foray into the language of war last Monday, when a New York Times reporter quoted an unnamed senior U.S. military official using the term. This peppering of military jargon with bon mots could be Colin Powell's latest plan to win over the French on the Security Council. More likely it's the product of the Bush administration's penchant for hiring advertising executives and flaky management consultants as foreign policy advisors (doesn't the "Voila Moment" sounds suspiciously like the "Wow Factor"—sold to millions of corporate executives as the key to building a powerful...

27 February, 2003

February 13th, 2003By Naomi Klein Poor Endy Chávez, outfielder for the Navegantes del Megallanes, one of Venezuela's big baseball teams. Every time he comes up to bat, the local TV sportscasters start in with the jokes. "Here comes Chávez. No not the pro-Cuban dictator Chávez, the other Chávez." Or "This Chávez hits baseballs, not the Venezuelan people." In Venezuela, even color commentators are enlisted in the commercial media's open bid to oust the democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez. Andrés Izarra, a Venezuelan television journalist, says that the campaign has done so much violence to truthful information on the national airwaves that the four private TV stations have effectively forfeited their right to broadcast. "I think their licenses should be revoked," he says. It's the sort of extreme pronouncement one has come to expect from Chavez, known for nicknaming the stations "the four horsemen of the apocalypse." Izarra, however, is harder to dismiss. A squeaky clean made-for-TV type, he worked as assignment editor in charge of Latin America at CNN en Español until he was hired as News Production Manager for Venezuela's highest rated newscast, El Observador on RCTV. On April 13, 2002, the day after business leader Pedro Carmona...

13 February, 2003

January 30th, 2003By Naomi Klein The key word at this year's World Social Forum, which ended yesterday in Porto Alegre, Brazil, was 'big.' Big attendance: more than a hundred thousand delegates in all! Big speeches: more than 15,000 crammed in to see Noam Chomsky! And most of all, big men. Lula da Silva, the newly elected president of Brazil, came to the Forum and addressed 75,000 adoring fans. Hugo Chavez, the controversial president of Venezuela, paid a 'surprise' visit to announce that his embattled regime was part of the same movement as the forum itself. "The left in Latin America is being reborn," Mr. Chavez declared, as he pledged to vanquish his opponents at any cost. As evidence of this rebirth, he pointed to Lula's election in Brazil, Lucio Gutierrez's victory in Ecuador and Fidel Castro's tenacity in Cuba. But wait a minute: how on earth did a gathering that was supposed to be a showcase for new grassroots movements become a celebration of men with a penchant for three hour speeches about smashing the oligarchy? Of course, the forum, in all its dizzying, global diversity, was not only speeches, with huge crowds all facing the same direction. There were...

30 January, 2003

January 25th, 2003By Naomi Klein How do you celebrate the anniversary of something that is impossible to define? That was the question faced by tens of thousands of Argentinians on December 20 2002 as they marched from all corners of Buenos Aires to the historic Plaza de Mayo. It was a year ago to the day since the first "Argentinazo", a word that is completely untranslatable into English or, for that matter, Spanish. The Argentinazo was not a riot exactly, although it sure looked like one on the television, with looters ransacking supermarkets and mounted police charging into crowds; 33 people were killed across the country. It wasn't a revolution, either, although it sort of looked like one on the face of it, with angry crowds storming the seat of government and forcing the president to resign in disgrace. But unlike a classic revolution, the Argentinazo was not organised by an alternate political force that wanted to take power for itself. And unlike a riot, it pulsed with a unified and unequivocal demand: the immediate removal of all the corrupt politicians who have grown rich while Argentina, once the envy of the developing world, spiralled into poverty. In reality, the...

25 January, 2003

January 15th, 2003By Naomi Klein Well, it could have been true. That's what Senator Hillary Clinton had to say after finding out that five Pakistani men did not actually sneak into the United States through Canada so they could blow up New York on New Year's Eve. Because they were never in the United States at all, and they weren't terrorists, and the whole thing was dreamed up by a man who forges passports for a living. At the height of the search for the professional liar's imaginary nonterrorists, Clinton had blamed Canada and its "unpatrolled, unsupervised" border. But even when the hoax came to light, Clinton didn't rescind the accusation: Because the Canadian border is so porous, she reasoned, "this hoax seemed all too believable." It was, in other words, a useful hoax, helping US citizens to see how unsafe they really are. And that is useful, especially if you are among the growing number of free-market economists, politicians and military strategists pushing for the creation of "Fortress NAFTA," a continental security perimeter stretching from Mexico's southern border to Canada's northern one. A fortress continent is a bloc of nations that joins forces to extract favorable trade terms from...

15 January, 2003

November 11th, 2002By Naomi Klein A bunch of people have written to the site and asked me if I planned to respond to the attack on me in the current issue of The Economist. Frankly, I think the article is so nuts, it's not even worth responding. But I would like to add some context that might help explain why an article so personal and childish was allowed to go to press in a publication that prides itself on being a cool voice of reason and authority on all matters economic. It's an editorial policy of The Economist not publish bylines on most of its articles. The article about me, though unsigned, was written by a reporter named Sameena Ahmad. I have had several previous encounters with this reporter, most recently, on September 25 2002, when I debated Ms. Ahmad in New York at the Centre for Ethical Culture. The debate was moderated by Brian Lehrer and an edited version was broadcast on WNYC. The debate was called "Pro Logo vs. No Logo" because one year earlier, Ms. Ahmad has written a cover story for The Economist attacking the ideas in my book, No Logo. Her story was called "Pro...

11 November, 2002

April 24th, 2002By Naomi Klein I knew from email reports that something new was going on in Washington D.C. last weekend. A demonstration against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund was joined by an anti-war march, as well as a demonstration against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. In the end, all the marches joined together in what organizers described as the largest Palestinian solidarity demonstration in U.S. history, 75,000 people by police estimates. On Sunday night, I turned on my television in the hopes of catching a glimpse of this historic protest. I saw something else instead: triumphant Jean-Marie Le Pen celebrating his new found status as the second most popular political leader in France. Ever since, I've been wondering whether the new alliance displayed on the streets can also deal with this latest threat. As a critic both of the Israeli occupation and of corporate-dictated globalization, it seems to me that the convergence that took place in Washington last weekend was long overdue. Despite easy labels like "anti-globalization," the trade-related protests of the past three years have all been about self-determination: the right of people everywhere to decide how best to organize their societies and economies, whether...

24 April, 2002

March 19th, 2002By Naomi Klein On Tuesday in Buenos Aires, only a few blocks from where Argentinian President Eduardo Duhalde was negotiating with the International Monetary Fund, a group of residents were going through a negotiation of a different kind. They were trying to save their home. In order to protect themselves from an eviction order, the residents of 335 Ayacucho, including 19 children, barricaded themselves inside and refused to leave. On the concrete façade of the house, a hand printed sign said: "IMF Go To Hell." What does the IMF, in town to set conditions for releasing $9-billion in promised funds, have to do with the fate of the residents of 335 Ayacucho? Well, here in a country where half the population now lives below the poverty line, it's hard to find a single sector of society whose fate does not somehow hinge on the decisions made by the international lender. For example, librarians, teachers and other public sector workers, who have been getting paid in hastily printed provincial currencies (sort of government IOUs) won't get paid at all if the provinces agree to stop printing this money, as the IMF is demanding. And if deeper cuts are made...

19 March, 2002