BioNaomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the international and New York Times best-seller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein's previous book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies was also an international bestseller. Klein is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia. For more information on The Shock Doctrine visit http://www.naomiklein.org/main
Comments from Registered Members | (Register or log in to make your comment.) | realone 2008-08-30
Ms. Klein is one person who has done a valuable service for Americans with her wake-up call regarding the on-going, behind-the-media manipulation of our country for the benefit of the rich. If she has failed to include some minutiae your tortured mind has fabricated in it's crisis state you may forgive her, or anyone, for their limitations. But the limitations of the American public in seeing and responding to the true state of our democracy are less than forgivable. While generations of Americans have been indoctrinated on the benefits of corporate domination from birth, change has never been about mass rebellion in this country. So where are all the well-educated young people who want to give back to their country for the priveleges and advantages they enjoy? The new Progressive debacle is just another outrage of corporate America co-opting people's views with raw cash to remain in power. That we in America want to be independent makes the challenge that much more difficult as each | Gregorio 2008-08-27
Maybe some people resonate with this "waste of time" commentary, but I don’t find it very useful. Here we are at the bottom of a fascist well, and its all about "Obama is a corporate shill". Klein makes a very valid point that progressives can't stop pressing for social and environmental justice issues from the Democratic party and its candidates, but I think by implication she is also advocating that we not STOP pressing the Obama campaign out of a resigned "they're just a pack of reformist fascists anyway." Kind of Trotskyist, isn't it? This rejectionist path isn't working for revolutionary change here and now, where it counts. Corporate pressure is inevitable but not insurmountable. After all, we are in the heart of the Capitalist beast.
But I find Klein to be a terrific analyst of our current conditions and I believe she is right. Progressives need to make their voices heard within the campaign now. Any of his progressive advisors might be the proper avenue fo | tbarj 2008-08-26
When we first rang the alarm about a merging of progressive interests with fascist ideology two summers ago, it was in response to the progressive marginalizing of alternative views and their adoption of other key parts of the fascist agenda. Over the past two years, progressives have continued down this destructive path.
We suspect that this capitulation by progressives is due largely to their failure to mount successful electoral or judicial challenges to the fascist regime, and while initially opposed to national aggression if not xenophobia, progressives are well on their way to endorsing the implementation of a total national security state.
While emotional weakness and psychological dysfunction led many progressives to this point of complete compliance, it is likely that mounting economic insecurity will seal the deal. As America's nervous breakdown intensifies, the progressive fascist alliance can be expected to make matters worse for all of us. | tbarj 2008-08-26
What Klein describes is the progressive fascist alliance, which actively excludes all sane points of view. Using the words progressive and integrity in the same sentence is wishful thinking at best. | wildpett 2008-08-26
What Naomi and TRNN fail to see is that Obama is backed by the same guys who back McCain, and that the elections are just a big media show. Why doesn't TRNN focus on this ? Naomi is hopelessly naive in wasting her time on this, as is Paul Jay.
I am sick and tired of listening to this dumb drivel. Obama has voted for funding the Iraq war since day 1, I have to credit Naomi for spotting that Obama has no plans for getting the US out of Iraq, but Obama also has said he wants to go into Pakistan and Iran.
This interview is hopeless, Naomi and Paul Jay are naive in believing that Obama can be pressured into changing anything if he wins the election, it will be business as usual. If voting would make any dfference, it would have been forbidden long ago. | Asperin 2008-08-26
Who cares if Obama is a camouflaged NeoCon? We care, We are trying to expose him so people don't vote for him, and yes, he will "win" but what would be the percentage of people voting for him? 20% or 15% of Americans. Is the rest going to like that? I don't think so. | abcrane 2008-08-26
Klein makes many excellent points. But she is flawed in thinking that the answers are political. She is wasting her breath in this sense. She is better spending her time creating her own green agenda than complaining about the lack of some kind of green political hero. The answer is to accelerate the green free market, and to do this one needs not one politician. Beware of politics, engage in green business--the answer is really this simple. We need more green entrepreneurs and less political commentators. | gegenwarst 2008-08-26
I start to question the credibility of the Real News Network; who cares if Barack Obama is a camouflaged neoconservative or a double-standard politician. For your information, the Presidential elections in the United States have already been decided in favor of Obama you like it or not, hence all the ongoing media coverage is pure political entertainment targeting to keep distracted the brute and ignorant American populace. I'm still surprised about the exiguous coverage that TRNN has given to the ongoing events in the Caucasus and their geostrategic implications (i.e. why TRNN doesn't analyze the movement of Russian warships heading to Syria or the increasing presence of NATO's warships in the Black Sea). In the end, seems that the Real News Network is not "REAL" at all... | burningice17 2008-08-26
Nice interview. Klein's observation of liberal organizations giving Obama a free pass along with the uncritical voters is exactly on target. Liberal voters can't make demands on Obama unlesss they can threaten to vote for someone else. Unfortunately, the alternative choice candidates we have are crippled by media blackouts, an election system without instant runoff voting, and an organized effort to keep third parties from the debates. We need more coverage of those third party handicaps in order to address the problem Klein speaks of. |
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: Welcome back to the next part of our series of interviews with Naomi Klein. Hi, Naomi. NAOMI KLEIN, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: Hi.JAY: At the media reform conference in Minneapolis, you gave a speech which created a certain number of ripples. Let me play a part of the speech for you.KLEIN: What will the people who helped win his historic victory ask of Obama now? I hope that we, that you, will demand that he earn the incredible trust that he has been given, because the hard truth is this: Obama may have the energy and the anger and the networks of the antiwar vote, but he does not have a plan to get us out of Iraq. What he has is a plan to downsize the occupation of Iraq, not to end it. He may have the very real rage at the income inequality that has opened up in this country and around the world, but I am sad to say that he does not have a real plan to close that gap. And he may have the incredible, inspiring idealism of young environmentalists who are terrified about the future of this planet, but he does not have a green agenda that is a match to our climate crisis.JAY: Is the progressive movement in the United States telling the hard truth?KLEIN: I don't think there is one progressive movement. But a huge amount of the progressive infrastructure, in terms of policy institutes, think tanks, magazines, blogs, is pretty much part of the Obama machine and is sort of suspending a fair bit of their critical thinking. They're kind of in war mode, they're in crisis mode, and it's "We have to keep McCain out, and if we have to sacrifice some of our honesty and integrity to do that, then so be it. We'll deal with it after the vote."JAY: So the argument they give is McCain would be a dangerous presidency, a continuation of Bush, perhaps even more dangerous. He's surrounded himself with people like James Woolsey and Randy Scheunemann, who are the hardcore of the hardcore in the neocon right. So first step is beat McCain, and then you can start your critique. Not now.KLEIN: Look, it's a persuasive argument. Whether or not McCain is crazier than Bush, just taken just strictly from a climate perspective, we have an emergency. We have a real crisis. So just continuing with more of the same isn't status quo; it's spiraling into climate chaos. I mean, we are at a turning point. There's a really important climate conference coming up in 2009 in Copenhagen. It matters. It does matter.JAY: How does the progressive movement deal with this, caught in a bind? Those people who are critical particularly say Obama's foreign policy statements, which are becoming indistinguishable from McCain's on many issues, at the same time in a real battle that polls are relatively tight. It could be another very close election. People are talking about even Nader's candidacy might start to matter in a couple of states. Do the progressives, like, shut up for awhile, or try to make sure that people go into this with their eyes open?KLEIN: Well, my concern is that you can't shut up for a little while. It doesn't really work that way. And look at the antiwar movement—where is it? There are really important exceptions, like Iraq Veterans Against the War, who are just decidedly independent and have such a clear position about immediate withdrawal. But then, if you look at an organization like MoveOn, this is an organization that built its huge membership—it wasn't born out of the Iraq War, but it built its huge membership out of the opposition to the Iraq War and really was a huge part of the antiwar movement. And now it is a huge part of the Obama machine, and they are telling people to vote Obama, and they're, you know, sending Obama bumper stickers. Well, Obama doesn't have a plan to end the war in Iraq, and MoveOn should be telling their members that. And instead you have this conflation, because if MoveOn is saying "vote Obama" and MoveOn is the voice of the antiwar movement or one of the key voices of the antiwar movement, then it creates a great deal of confusion. So I don't really blame Obama. You know, Obama's actually quite clear: he does not have antiwar position, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq; he wants to keep the Green Zone intact, you know, which is what I was talking about at the media reform conference. So I actually don't think this is about Obama-bashing. It's really about the intellectual integrity and the political integrity of progressives in our organizations, because if Obama is elected, then that is the most crucial point to apply pressure to this administration. So how do you actually segue from being a cheerleader to being a grassroots pressure? That's a very hard trick.JAY: And that's what those who are Obama advocates in the progressive movement are saying: you build the independent movement later; you don't do anything to jeopardize the candidacy now.KLEIN: And the trick is that so much is lost in the early days. And I think my feeling is, actually, that it's less about bashing Obama now. You know, I think it's important to tell the truth, obviously, but I think there needs to be a post-election strategy that understands that it has to kick in immediately after the vote and that it can't be building from scratch immediately after the vote. And what people need to remember is what happened after Clinton was elected in '92, that everything was lost in the transition period. But in the period after Clinton was elected and before he was inaugurated, there were key meetings. He was under intense pressure from people like Bob Rubin. And this has all become public now, that there were meetings in this period. Clinton, like Obama, had run on an economic populist platform, saying he was going to reopen NAFTA, which had already been negotiated but hadn't been implemented yet, that he was going to get environmental and labor standards—all the things we're hearing from Obama. And there was, you know, a full-court press from Wall Street as soon as he was elected, and they said, "Look, we've got an economic crisis. You can't do anything drastic. You actually need to impose austerity. You need to go in the opposite direction [inaudible] cut social programs." And Clinton was converted in this period. So the corporate funders of these campaigns know that they're going to be applying pressure. They're applying pressure now and are going to be applying pressure in that transition period, and there has to be a plan.JAY: Who advises the president, especially the new president, who's going to be the transition team, who's going to be the new administration, is in that critical period you're talking about, but it's also now, the kind of team he's building around himself. And you wrote a piece where you talked about one of his economic advisors, a guy by the name of Jason Furman. Can you talk a bit about him, and maybe what that represents of what an Obama presidency might look like, and why there may need to be some pressure applied during this period?KLEIN: Jason Furman was appointed immediately. As soon as Hillary Clinton dropped out, conceded, endorsed Barack Obama, Jason Furman was appointed as the chief economic advisor for Obama. And this is very significant. Jason Furman is a young economist. I think he's 37 years old. And he's actually best known for his defenses of Wal-Mart. He's written papers, taken on people like Barbara Ehrenreich, saying that Wal-Mart is actually a force of progressive good because of its low prices, and that people who are demanding a living wage for workers at Wal-Mart are actually doing more harm than good. This is his argument. And in terms of this dynamic, I mean, without going into that debate itself, I think it's really striking, because a major base of support for Obama is the SEIU, is the Service Employees International Union, which has been taking on Wal-Mart, and trying to organize Wal-Mart workers, and getting shut down and so on, and has a very strong anti-Wal-Mart campaigns. So you can really see, when the more left-wing forces line up behind Obama in an uncritical way, you can just see how they're taken for granted. I mean, to appoint Jason Furman as your chief economic advisor is a complete slap in the face to Andy Stern. But has Andy Stern spoken out against it? I haven't heard it. So why is it? Because, you know, I've spoken to some of the hedge fund guys who are funding Obama, and they are more than willing to say that they think that his tax plan is a disaster, that it will make America uncompetitive. And if they're willing to say that to me, I'm sure they're saying it to Obama. So, you know, there is an incredible double standard, where the corporate funders for Obama, they make it very clear they have somewhere to go—it's called the Republican Party—and that they want him to soften his policies. This is not a secret. And then what you have from the left is just "go, go, go."JAY: And I guess the difficulty is, once you build your political alliances to get elected, it's natural to govern for those same political alliances. It's not like you're going to go through some enormous catharsis, which is, I suppose, what everyone's reading into it.KLEIN: If you put it in a relationship context, if you've proven that you're a doormat, you can pretty much expect to get stomped on.JAY: Thank you for joining us. And if you'd like to see the entire series of interviews with Naomi Klein, you can see it all here in this episode. If you click this button; and if you click that button, you'll see the word "donate." Thank you for joining us.DISCLAIMER:Please note that TRNN transcripts are typed from a recording of the program; The Real News Network cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. |
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