Six years on . . .

NAOMI KLEIN is, IMHO, one of the most lucid and prescient political analysts to be found. Six years (how time flies) ago, as the Iraq elections ground to a conclusion after the invasion, Naomi made a number of acerbic observations.

Six years later, in the light of Arab Spring and OWS, they are even more trenchant, IMHO. "The Neoliberal Project" is a reprise of a spell-binding address she gave as part of the CBC's Massey Lectures, which I cannot seem to find, unfortunately. The litany of neocon abuse is mind-boggling. Paul Bremer the Threeth, or the Bugblatter Beast — which is the stupidest?

McKibben, Naomi Klein, Suzuki call for civil disobedience

on the tar sands :

"The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will likely get you arrested.

The full version goes like this ...

Signed ,
Maude Barlow
Wendell Berry
Tom Goldtooth
Danny Glover
James Hansen
Wes Jackson
Naomi Klein
Bill McKibben
George Poitras
David Suzuki
Gus Speth

h/t  Antonia Zerbisias

Released : "You, Me and the SPP: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule"

You'll remember Paul Manly as the guy who shot that video of CEP union president Dave Coles exposing 3 rock-toting agents provocateurs as Quebec police at the SPP protests at Montebello .

Paul has just finished his full-length feature film : ‘You, Me, and the S.P.P: Trading Democracy for Corporate Rule’, on "the latest manifestation of a corporatist agenda that is undermining the democratic authority of the citizens of North America".

Some choice quotes :
Naomi Klein :"

… after the shock of Sept 11 … that crisis was expertly manipulated by our political leaders to push through a range of policies they actually had wanted to push through before Sept 11, but didn’t have the political conditions that made that possible."

Gordon Laxer, Director, The Parkland Institute, Alberta :

"…if we go along with the Americans on their military, on their human rights, on their Patriot Act, on immigration and refugee policy, on energy, on all kinds of regulations over pesticides or whatever, then they will allow us access to their markets."

Murray Dobbin, Canadian author, journalist :

"… what the SPP really represents is a parallel government, so that the important decisions are either made outside of parliament and outside of legislatures or they make it impossible for those kinds of decisions to be made in those legislative bodies, so that democracy is slowly being gutted."

with more from Peter Julian, Michael Byers, and Maude Barlow. And that's just the trailer.

I posted a portion of the film this morning, but to purchase your own copy of the whole film - $20 well spent - and for listings of local screenings, visit Paul's website at manlymedia.com

If we want this quality of reporting from independent journalists, we're going to have to support it. If you can't afford the $20 for your own copy, recommend it to your local library, leave a message of encouragement on his site, and pass the word on. As Paul says : I made this film for all of you.
.
Cross-posted at Creekside

SPP : Tom Flanagan vs Naomi Klein

Tom Flanagan, US poli-sci prof at the University of Calgary; Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute; and all-round 'eminence grease' to Stephen Harper, this Tom Flanagan, writes in Saturday's G&M :

"In times of perceived crisis, a conservative party can win by positioning itself further to the right, as shown by the victories of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Ralph Klein, Mike Harris, and Gordon Campbell."

G&M, Saturday Sept 8 :

"In Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, she argues that an idea that began with Chicago School economist Milton Friedman has determined much of the course of recent history – that a time of crisis, whether a war or a hurricane, offers a strategic opportunity to overwrite the resulting “blank slate” with market privatization and corporatism."

She also argues that such a crisis can be a man-made destabilization of public infrastructure.

Flanagan too has a book out : Harper's Team : Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power.
I'm guessing it isn't going to be "behind the scenes" enough for us though, so I thought we'd have a look at a 2003 policy paper from the Fraser Institute, the think tank where Flanagan is a Senior Fellow.
All the following are direct quotes from the first five pages :

Mandate for Leadership for the New Prime Minister
Bank of Canada : Create a currency union modeled after the European Monetary Union through agreement with the United States and Mexico.
Exchange Rates : Remove the Bank of Canada’s power to set interest rates and leave as its main responsibility the convertibility of Canadian into US dollars at par.
Environment : Withdraw from Kyoto protocol
Labour : Increase flexibility in labour market by, for example, introducing worker choice legislation for those covered by federal labour laws.
Int Trade & Foreign Aid : Remove Canadian regulations that restrict free trade (unilaterally if necessary), such as the Wheat Board.
Health : Repeal or change the Canada Health Act to remove limits on provincial autonomy over health care, as recognized by the constitution. Allow competition in health-care delivery, including, private insurance, for-profit and non-profit hospitals, and private surgery and other treatment facilities.
Defence : Work for inter-operability with NATO and US for air, naval and ground forces.
Judiciary : Abolish the Court Challenges Program to discourage special interest groups from bypassing the political process to obtain special privileges.
Aboriginal Policies : Restructure aboriginal policy to empower the individual, not band elites.

And skipping down a bit :

"When Canada did not agree to take part in the US ballistic missile defence (BMD) program, the US worked around it, locating the necessary radars in Alaska and Greenland. Space-based assets have made Canada’s geographic position less important than that of Poland or Rumania.

All of these issues (and there are many others) must be addressed in the very near future. They all point in the same direction: Canada can preserve its sovereignty and its prosperity only by a closer relationship, particularly in military and security policy, with the United States."

Gosh, those all seem so familiar to us now, don't they?
From Flanagan and the Fraser Institute's lips to Harper's ear.
And he who has the ear of the king is more important than the king, yadda, yadda.

Actually the above disaster capitalism wish list is so complete a description of Harper's SPP policies, I'm somewhat disappointed to find no mention in it anywhere of the infamous jelly beans.
Cross-posted at Creekside

The SPP and "The Shock Doctrine"

Chet Scoville of Vanity Press, blogging at Shakesville :
"...the SPP is an especially dangerous example of the privatization of government that neoconservatism has been demanding and putting into place for a quarter of a century: the sort of thing Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine. It's especially dangerous because, being multinational and happening as it is below the radar, it will be extremely difficult to undo once it's done."

Stephen Lendman in an excellent review of Klein's book at Mostly Water :
"The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" explodes the myth of "free market" democracy.

On Milton Friedman's Chicago School revolution of rapid-fire economic transformation he called "shock treatment" :
"Its central tenets are structurally adjusted mass-privatizations, government deregulation, unrestricted free market access for foreign corporations, and deep cuts in social spending with repressive laws."

On "the whirling revolving door between government and business taken to a new level" :
"That's the whole idea in a get rich quick environment - get an impressive government title, stay in office long enough in a department handing out big contracts, collect insider information with market value, then quit and cash in. Klein calls public service now "little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex."

"Fighting "terrorism" is big business. September 11 unlocked the potential, a huge new growth market was created, and protection from terror became more important than big brother watching."

Klein calls it "an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison."

The Security and Prosperity Partnership : the North American merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is being released today. Accompanying the release is the short film Shock Doctrine, by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein.

In the film, Cuaron and Klein make a compelling link between both engineered and natural disasters and the immediate shift in policy by governments to push through changes which, under normal circumstances, would have been met with widespread opposition.

The actions of the Bush administration serve as an example of how a population, having been left in a state of incredible shock after the September 11th, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, allowed their government to enact draconian legislation, engage in illegal surveillance, neuter the mechanisms designed to curtail government corruption and secrecy, and move power out of the hands of the people into a small group of elites. Without the leverage of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration could never have imposed the form of authoritarian rule on the United States that they have gotten away with. Without the effect of shock, the population of the US would have railed against the blatant destruction of their civil liberties and lack of input into a decision to start a Middle East war.

Here is the short documentary.


I've already heard a couple of interviews with Naomi Klein in the past day or two. In one she was accused of being a conspiracy theorist. Here's the rub. There are conspiracies out there. The Bush administration, particularly where Cheney and Rumsfeld were involved, is a body attempting to hide a vast conspiracy which is now unraveling. It was only by pursuing theories and getting past the shock of a single event that the bits of evidence come together to expose the depth of such things.

We'll be posting a review of Naomi Klein's book in the near future.

To find more information on Shock Doctrine and how to get a copy, go here.