May 17th, 2000By Naomi Klein Is it strange to quote NBC characters at policy meetings? A few weeks ago, I participated in a serious roundtable discussion at the University of Toronto's venerable Massey College. The subject was whether a guaranteed annual income could be a viable campaign for the left. A group of political theorists, economists and activists debated the question, divided over whether the idea was too pie in the sky. Which is when the TV show came up. "Well, to quote a recent episode of The West Wing," one of the policy experts said, "we need to raise the level of debate in this country." The West Wing,which had its season finale last night, comes up a lot these days. It's especially popular on the left, where it serves as a kind of hallucinatory vision of how politics could be if Bill and Hillary Clinton weren't such sellouts to the business lobby. Writing in Salon, Jonathan V. Last has argued that The West Wing only works as drama because of its liberal bias. "There couldn't possibly be a Republican version," he writes, because conservatism, in its desire to preserve the status quo, is inherently undramatic. It's an interesting...

17 May, 2000

May 10th, 2000By Naomi Klein Toronto ravers are trying to be so reasonable. They have worked with City Council to draft the Protocol for the Operation of Safe Dance Events. The Toronto Dance Safety Committee has tried to make sure paramedic teams are at all the big parties. And this week, at the inquiry into the death of 20-year-old Allan Ho, ravers are explaining that the primary cause of ecstasy-related death is dehydration. Therefore, they say, most of the risk from the drug can be eliminated at raves simply by making sure there is unlimited access to water and proper ventilation. What the ravers are only just beginning to understand is that none of this matters. The rave uproar, like all drug wars, isn't about safety, it's about politics. It's about the fact that a lot of parents don't understand their own kids: the way they dress, the music they listen to, the thing with the pacifier lollipops. Which provides a great political opportunity for Toronto Police Chief Julian Fantino to step up for National Daddy Duty—to claim he knows exactly what those sinister lollipops and teddy-bear backpacks are all about. Drugs and violence, that's what. The only solution is...

10 May, 2000

May 3rd, 2000By Naomi Klein It was May Day when a leaked copy of the Retail Council of Canada's master plan to eliminate sweatshops came through my fax machine. London was rioting, two million people were protesting in Japan, and workers were smashing rice bowls in Hong Kong. As I read this feather-light document, designed, it proudly states, to assure "customers that the goods they buy are not produced under exploitative, inhumane or illegal working conditions," all I could do was laugh. Unlike tougher codes in Europe, and even the one just adopted by the University of Toronto, it said nothing about transparency, independent monitoring, or a living wage. The retailers of Canada, it seems, are going to stop the sweatshop epidemic with nothing but bad blood and good intentions. In June, 1998, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy was presented with a petition signed by 30,000 Canadians. It demanded that he convene a task force, much as the Clinton administration had done in the United States, to address the rise of sweatshop abuses in Canada and overseas. Representing a coalition of labour, human rights and church groups was the Ethical Trading Action Group (ETAG). Speaking for 8,500 Canadian retailers,...

03 May, 2000

April 26th, 2000By Naomi Klein Railing against the flawed methodology of polls published on the front page of The National Post is a little like pointing out that Leonardo DiCaprio's interview with Bill Clinton wasn't the proudest moment in journalistic history. True enough, sure, but must we really stare in gape-mouthed amazement at the obvious? And yet, last Thursday, my jaw went slack on me. "WTO protests fail to sway Canadians," read the banner headline in the Post. "Most support free trade talks, federal poll finds." It wasn't just that the Angus Reid poll in question proved no such thing. It wasn't even that the research was conducted last December. It was that the day before the Post published that old poll, the same agency released the results of a brand new poll, and its very different findings went entirely unmentioned. This new Angus Reid poll, based on interviews conducted in February, showed that Canadians are split down the middle in their support for unregulated free trade and that "opposition to [the] World Trade Organization may be hardening." In fact, the polling agency identified the anti-WTO campaign as a threat to the very future of deregulated markets, which might explain...

26 April, 2000

April 12th, 2000By Naomi Klein My friend Mez is getting on a bus to Washington, D.C., on Saturday. I asked him why, and he said with all this intensity: "Look, I missed Seattle. There's no way I'm missing Washington." I've seen people speak with that kind of unrestrained longing before, but the object of their affection was usually a muddy music festival where Beck shares a stage with the Beastie Boys, or a short-run New York play such as The Vagina Monologues. I've never heard anyone talk that way about a political protest. Especially not a protest against groaner bureaucracies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And certainly not when they are being called on the carpet for nothing sexier than a decades-old loan policy called "structural adjustment." And yet there they are: university students and artists and wage-free anarchists and lunch-box steelworkers, piling onto buses from all corners of the continent. Stuffed in their pockets and shoulder bags are fact sheets about the ratio of spending on health care to debt repayment in Mozambique (21/2 times more for debt) and the number of people worldwide living without electricity (two billion). All are heading to Washington...

12 April, 2000

April 5th, 2000By Naomi Klein Follow the logo. If there is a guiding principle in the current wave of student activism, that is it. At the University of Toronto, students are following their school's logo from T-shirts and sweatshirts to contract garment factories in Asia and Latin America. Last week, after a nine-day sit-in, students and administrators finally hammered out a strong code of conduct for the university's products. If it is approved by the U of T's governing council next month, the companies that license the school's insignia will have to pay their workers not only the legal minimum wage, but a living wage. Teenage students at Toronto's Linden School also followed the logo last week, these ones on their Nike sneakers and Victoria's Secret tank tops. They staged a "sweatshop fashion show" in the school gym. Doing their best Kate Moss impersonations, they strutted down a makeshift catwalk while listening to stories of the punishingly long hours and low wages endured by the workers who keep them in cotton and denim. The student anti-sweatshop movement, exploding on more than 200 campuses across North America, is taking student politics global and it is doing it by turning human rights...

05 April, 2000

March 13th, 2000By Naomi Klein Dear Mafiaboy, As I write this, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are closing in on your position. Maybe you are already behind bars, imprisoned for crimes against Yahoo. They say you had something to do with the rash of attacks that crippled some of the most powerful commercial sites on the Net this month. They overheard you bragging about your exploits in an online chatroom: "U just pin em so hard they can't even redirect," you wrote, calling yourself "mafiaboy." They're still not sure who you are exactly, but they have a few hunches: You are based in my hometown (Toronto), you are 15 years old and you have a preoccupation with Satanism. Nice cover. I know better, of course. Like so many who have secretly cheered your exploits (if indeed they are your exploits), I can see through the nihilistic pranksterism to another kind of Mafiaboy. My mythic Mafiaboy isn't a vandal but an anticorporate freedom fighter for the e-commerce age. But I'm afraid not everyone sees the precision with which you aim your electronic salvos, Mafiaboy. According to Steve Bellovin, an AT&T security guy, "sometimes kids walk...

13 March, 2000