Journalism

September 20th, 2000
By Naomi Klein

When I arrived in London on Sunday, the city was like a jittery heroin junkie who had just shot up. The panic that gripped Britain when a coalition of truckers and farmers blockaded the nation’s oil refineries had been replaced with an unreal calm. The gas was flowing again and, at the stations, dazed customers injected their tanks with rivers of unleaded.

As is the case with any powerful addiction, the fuel crisis hasn’t disappeared; it has been, momentarily, sated. Protests against oil taxes are cropping up across Europe and they may well return to Britain after the moratorium called by the truck drivers expires in two months. Canadian truckers are even threatening to mount copycat actions.

Watched from a distance, the oil blockades in Britain look like spontaneous popular uprisings: regular working folk, frightened for their livelihoods, getting together to say, "Enough’s enough." But before this David and Goliath story goes any further, it deserves a closer reading.

There’s no doubt that the fuel protests began when a couple hundred farmers and truckers formed blockades outside the oil refineries. But the protests became effective only when the multinational oil companies ...

September 13th, 2000
By Naomi Klein

One time, when I was on the phone with Sympatico customer service, I shamelessly abused my privilege as a writer for this newspaper. "Look," I said, "I’m a columnist with The Globe and Mail and I need e-mail access now."

Of course, this was an extreme situation: I had tried and retried the connection, reconfigured my settings, reinstalled my modem software, and shut down and restarted my computer 16 times. Only then, when I still couldn’t file my column, did I mention The Globe.

And let me tell you, things change. I wouldn’t dream of threatening journalistic retaliation in exchange for better service, but it seemed to occur to the person to whom I was talking that, if I’m a columnist with The Globe, I might just write one of those columns about Sympatico. And in this purely hypothetical column, I might ask some uncomfortable questions: Why is it that I have to dial long-distance to check my e-mail when I’m outside of Canada—and even when I’m in Vancouver? How come AOL customers are able to make a local call to get on-line in Uzbekistan? And why doesn’t the Sympatico toll-free service ...

September 6th, 2000
By Naomi Klein

In New York City today, leaders of 150 countries are gathered for yet another meeting on globalization. Unlike all the other high-level meetings on the same theme, there won’t be raucous crowds of environmentalists, workers and human-rights advocates outside, yelling about all the issues that have been bungled by the politicians inside. Why miss a perfectly protestable opportunity like this, in easily accessible, downtown New York?

Because the Millennium Summit isn’t hosted by one of the many international agencies whose sole mission is to open up markets for free trade, while assuring a wary public that economic growth will magically eliminate poverty and save our ailing planet.

This meeting is hosted by the United Nations, which, by its mandate, places human and ecological needs ahead of the voracious demands of the market. Imperfect as the UN system may be, it is generally viewed by critics of globalization as a ray of moral hope on the international stage. More significantly, many activists assume that when the time comes to stop pointing out the failures of corporate-driven globalization and to start advancing an alternative, the UN agencies will be there to help.

For ...

August 30th, 2000
By Naomi Klein

I wasn’t thrilled that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service quoted my book in its new report on the anti-globalization "threat." In some of the circles in which I travel, writing for The Globe is enough of a political liability, never mind being a de facto CSIS informant. But there it is on Page 3: No Logo helping CSIS to understand why those crazy kids keep storming trade meetings.

Usually, I welcome any and all readers, but I have this sneaking suspicion that, a few months from now, this report is going to be used to justify smashing in the heads of some very good friends of mine.

In April, Quebec City will play host to the most significant free-trade summit since the World Trade Organization negotiations collapsed in Seattle last December. At the Summit of the Americas, 34 states will meet with the purpose of launching the Free Trade Area of the Americas—a version of the North American free-trade agreement for the entire hemisphere (except, of course, Cuba).

The CSIS report is designed to assess the threat that anti-corporate protests pose to the summit. But, interestingly, it does more than paint ...

August 23rd, 2000
By Naomi Klein

When Mayor Mel Lastman distributed 326 naked moose statues to artists around Toronto, he imagined himself as a modern Medici. Just as the Medici family kept Renaissance painters in oils and canvases, he would hand out white fibreglass moose and coupons for Benjamin Moore paint, then sit back and let the magic begin.

Mr. Lastman was certain that his beasts would become a vast blank canvas onto which our city’s collective creativity, humour and ingenuity would be projected. This had allegedly happened in Chicago, where civic pride was boosted by a herd of painted plastic cows. Or so reported Mel’s friend, George Cohon. And Mr. Cohon is an expert in transforming cityscapes with iconic plastic monuments—he brought the Golden Arches to Moscow, as senior chairman of McDonald’s Canada.

As it turns out, most of the moose paint jobs wouldn’t even pass muster as ’70s van art—"too literal-minded," the owner of a shag-carpeted Dodge might sniff. But Mel was bang on about one thing. The moose have become a blank slate onto which this city projects its creativity. Only it turns out that most of that creativity involves some form of moose mutilation ...

August 17th, 2000
By Naomi Klein

Tonight is the finale for insiders and outsiders in Los Angeles this week: In a few hours, Al Gore will be giving his acceptance speech at the Staples Center. A few feet away, thousands of activists will hold a rally outside. Yet at the Community Convergence Center, a four-story warehouse on Seventh Street in the Pico-Union neighborhood, the mood is more melancholy last day of camp than first day of the revolution. In the rooms upstairs, activists are collapsed on their knapsacks, sleeping. Downstairs, pacing up the middle of the floor, is a cranky punk with a bullhorn: "Somebody took my black hoodie," she booms, referring to that indispensable anarchist accessory, the black hooded sweatshirt. "I want it back now." She pauses to shoot a death stare at a reporter from Channel 22.

Nearby, the antisweatshop banner-making sessions seem to be taking place in slow motion, and the mood isn’t improved with the return of a handful of activists, back from a demonstration outside Citibank. "How was it?" asks Yuki Kidokoro, one of the LA organizers of the Direct Action Network.

"Lame," someone replies.

During the Democratic convention, protesters attempted to ...

August 9th, 2000
By Naomi Klein

Last week, I ended my month-long technology fast: no e-mail, no cellphone, no voice mail. Don’t worry, I won’t be smug. No extolling the virtues of face-to-face interaction over the vastly inferior, mediated one you’re having right now. No sermons on the Zen-like rewards of the media cleanse (such as the ones we’ve become accustomed to hearing from those who have just had their colons irrigated).

Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to make these self-satisfied assertions, but it wouldn’t be right. First, I cheated. Second, it wasn’t even my idea.

In June, on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver, the person in front of me decided to take a nap. Since we were both enjoying the decadent luxuries of Air Canada economy, his reclining chair instantly crunched my laptop monitor, felling the machine for good. The next day, barely recovered from the loss, I was politely asked to return the borrowed cellphone I had been abusing for, oh, about seven months.

As a freelancer, it was obviously time once again to spend all my earnings on new technologies to allow me to earn an income—the only question was when. Since ...

August 2nd, 2000
By Naomi Klein

"This rice could save a million kids a year."

That was the arresting headline on the cover of last week’s Time magazine. It referred to golden rice, a newly market-ready variety of genetically engineered grain that contains extra beta-carotene, a property that helps the body produce vitamin A. All over Asia, millions of malnourished children suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to blindness and death.

To get their supposed miracle cure off the ground, AstraZeneca, the company that owns marketing rights for golden rice, has offered to donate the grains to poor farmers in countries such as India, where, perhaps not coincidentally, genetically engineered crops have met fierce resistance.

It’s possible that golden rice could improve the health of millions of poor children. The problem is that there is no way to separate that powerful emotional claim (and the limited science attached to it) from the overheated political context in which the promise is being made.

Genetically engineered foods, originally greeted with rubber stamps from governments and indifference from the public, have rapidly become an international repository for anxiety about everything from food safety to corporate-financed science to ...

June 28th, 2000
By Naomi Klein

‘The entire premise of the show is antithetical to the hunter-gatherer principles. It’s a nightmare vision of primitive life! And the worst part of it is that now you hear people saying: ‘You are so off the island.’ " Like the rest of us, Richard B. Lee is talking about CBS’s new hit "reality" series, Survivor. Unlike the rest of us, he actually knows of what he speaks.

Co-editor of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers and a world-class anthropologist specializing in African Bushmen, Dr. Lee is a forager expert. And the folks on Survivor—while they may gnaw on beetle larvae, hunt rats, run around with torches, go to a pseudo-primitive "tribal council" and paint their faces with mud—just don’t cut it.

At his cramped office at the University of Toronto, Dr. Lee helps me sort out the differences between Survivor’s tribes and the real thing. "Hunter-gatherers believe in sharing, inclusivity, and in making it all work together," Dr. Lee explains. In traditional Iroquois cultures, if food was scarce, whoever had food would share it equally among other tribe members.

And then there is the fact that, in many primitive cultures, ...

June 21st, 2000
By Naomi Klein

How do you organize a riot?

That is an important question right now for John Clarke, the most visible member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. After OCAP’s demonstration at Queen’s Park turned into a pitched battle between protesters and police last week, Mr. Clarke was instantly singled out as a Machiavellian puppeteer, pulling the strings of a limp, witless rent-a-mob.

But what started as retro red-baiting quickly became more serious. Several unions have threatened to pull their funding from the anti-poverty group, and now Mr. Clarke himself may face police charges for allegedly inciting a riot.

Most commentators took it as a given that the demonstrators could never have decided all on their own to fight back when the police stormed the crowd with clubs and horses. After all, they came armed with swimming goggles and vinegar-soaked bandanas, so clearly they were ready for battle (never mind that they were meant to ward off the inevitable pepper spray). Someone must have orchestrated the violence, told them to pick up bricks, held Molotov cocktail-making workshops.

Why would someone do this? Apparently, to seek fame and fortune.

In half a ...