How do we overthrow neoliberalism - we first admit that we don't know what we're doing

naomi klein offers what, imho, is some of the most solid wisdom i've yet heard on the magnitude of what we are facing... the part referenced in the post title starts at approximately 22:15...

Naomi Klein - interview with Occupy Vancouver from Ian MacKenzie on Vimeo.

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Next steps for Occupy

from democracy now...



highlights:

Michael Moore:

This is one of the most remarkable movements that I’ve seen in my lifetime, precisely because it really isn’t a movement in the traditional sense. And I think that it has succeeded because it hasn’t followed the old motifs that we’re used to, in terms of organizing.

[...]

It has been the most uplifting, heartening thing to see: so many Americans of all stripes deciding that they’re just going to occupy. And they don’t have to call in to central command for permission. There are no dues to pay. There’s no leader to get permission from. There’s no meetings, subcommittee meetings, you know, all these things you have to go through.

Patrick Bruner:

This isn’t a protest. This is a way of making a new space. We have taken Liberty Square. We have renamed it, and we have rebuilt it into something that we believe is a better model. Maybe it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s not what we’ll come out of this with. But it’s a way to at least start a discussion, a real discussion, about all of the things that ail us on a daily basis, the things that are never really discussed.

Rinku Sen:

I think that the Occupy movement has—needs to have some autonomy. It does. And I really think it was very, very smart not to have demands, you know, right out the gate. It’s not a campaign. So, organizations do campaigns, and movements do something else. They shift the public will. And so, the Occupy movement has to retain its ability to do its primary job, as I understand it, which is to keep shifting the public will and making that psychic break happen and supporting that psychic break.

William Greider:

[W]e know it’s a high-risk enterprise to try to build an authentic social movement. Many arise and fail, or get crushed. And the ideas are literally pushed back out of the public square. But they go back—they continue somehow and maybe come back a generation or two generations later. So we have to—I think we have to take that sort of long view of what we’re doing.

Naomi Klein:

[W]hat I find exciting is the idea that the solutions to the ecological crisis can be the solutions to the economic crisis, and that we stop seeing these as two problems to be pitted against each other by savvy politicians, but that we see them as a single, single crisis, born of a single root, which is unrestrained corporate greed that can never have enough, and that is that mentality that trashes people and that trashes the planet, and that would shatter the bedrock of the continent to get out the last—the last drops of fuel and natural gas. It’s the same mentality that would shatter the bedrock of societies to maximize profits. And that’s what’s being protested.

i hope we're all awake and paying attention...

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Naomi Klein speaking at Occupy Wall Street

she had a lot of good things to say which you can read for yourself here... her closing words are what stuck with me...

We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets—like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that’s easier to win.

Don’t give in to the temptation. I’m not saying don’t call each other on shit. But this time, let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.

Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.

it truly gives me hope to hear encouragement like that from someone like naomi klein who is someone i believe really "gets it"... that's why i've been posting comments from the likes of joe stiglitz and noam chomsky... the voices for this kind of a movement definitely need to be the voices of those who "get it"...

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We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans

david graeber on the wall street occupation...

from the guardian's comment is free via alternet...

We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.

Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

[...]

What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the "third world debt crisis". But the global south fought back. The "alter-globalisation movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity".

i'm surprised that he didn't once reference naomi klein and disaster capitalism, a topic i've posted on repeatedly here...

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Using the economic crisis the super-rich elites created to further enrich and empower the super-rich elites

among other tactics, the possibility of privatizing municipalities by fiat...

from democracy now...

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country in the wake of Wall Street financial crisis, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her 2007 best-selling book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." In the book, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies. Democracy Now! interviews Naomi Klein to discuss how the shock doctrine is being used by politicians pushing drastic cuts and reforms as a response to the financial crisis.

Naomi Klein on Anti-Union & Budget "Crisis" Bills and Shock Doctrine American-Style, Part 1



Naomi Klein on Anti-Union & Budget "Crisis" Bills and Shock Doctrine American-Style, Part 2



klein's point is very well-taken... this coup d'etat cannot be fought on a partisan basis... both the dems and the repubs are in cahoots here and it's clear that aligning with a party is only enabling the rape and pillage to continue...

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Naomi Klein

talking about how to build a strong left... (and that's making the very large assumption that it would make the slightest bit of difference...)

"We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible."

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Naomi Klein: BP cannot plug the hole in the earth that it made

a very sobering reflection on what surely must be the most horrific environmental disaster in history...

If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP's recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.

"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."

This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.

and al jazeera also offers a good overview...

In the two months since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, millions of litres of oil have gushed out of BP's well into the water each day, slowly encroaching on the coastline. Fault Lines' Avi Lewis travels to the drill zone, and learns about the erosion in the wetlands from industry canals and pipelines, the health problems blamed on contaminated air and water from petrochemical refineries.

i can't express my sadness...

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Tomorrow, the ACLU begins presenting oral arguments in its FISA Amendments Act (FAA) lawsuit

this should be interesting...

from the aclu...

Tomorrow, we’ll be in court presenting oral arguments in our challenge to the unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act (FAA) — the law passed by Congress last year that gave the government virtually unchecked power to intercept Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls. As you may recall, we filed a lawsuit to stop the government from spying under the FAA less than an hour after the Act was signed into law by President Bush on July 10, 2008.

here's the skinny on the lawsuit...

1. The defendants in our lawsuits (e.g. the people we’re suing) are John (Mike) McConnell, Director of National Intelligence; Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, Director of the NSA and Chief of the Central Security Service; and Michael Mukasey, Attorney General.

2. We’ve filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

3. Our superstar roster of plaintiffs (e.g. the people and groups we’re suing on behalf of) include The Nation magazine, journalists Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges, attorneys David Nevin, Scott McKay, Dan Arshack and Sylvia Royce, and a whole bunch of orgs that run the gamut from Amnesty International to the Global Fund for Women. (You can check out the full list of our plaintiffs online at www.aclu.org/faa.)

4. Three of our main points:

* The FAA violates the Fourth Amendment because it allows the government to gobble up the constitutionally protected communications of American citizens and residents without getting individualized warrants, and without specifying the time, place or length of the surveillance, and not specifying how the info gathered will be disseminated, or how long it’ll be kept. (You know, the who/what/where/when/why.)

* The FAA also violates the First Amendment by chilling lawful expressive speech without adequate justification by authorizing the government to intercept constitutionally protected communications without judicial oversight.

* The challenged law violates the principle of separation of powers by allowing the government to continue surveillance activities even if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has deemed those activities illegal. (Good idea, right? Asking the government to obey the law?)

this youtube clip, posted a year ago, gives a nice summary...

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¡Que se vayan todos!

¡Que se vayan todos! (All of them must go!)

naomi klein opines that the disgust with capitalism that toppled four presidents in succession here in argentina may at last be spilling over to the rest of the world...

The stoic Icelandic matriarchs beating their pots flat even as their kids ransack the fridge for projectiles (eggs, sure, but yogurt?) echo the tactics made famous in Buenos Aires. So does the collective rage at elites who trashed a once thriving country and thought they could get away with it. As Gudrun Jonsdottir, a 36-year-old Icelandic office worker, put it: "I've just had enough of this whole thing. I don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the political parties and I don't trust the IMF. We had a good country, and they ruined it."

[...]

Similar demands can be heard these days in Latvia, whose economy has contracted more sharply than any country in the EU, and where the government is teetering on the brink. For weeks the capital has been rocked by protests, including a full-blown, cobblestone-hurling riot on January 13. As in Iceland, Latvians are appalled by their leaders' refusal to take any responsibility for the mess. Asked by Bloomberg TV what caused the crisis, Latvia's finance minister shrugged: "Nothing special."

But Latvia's troubles are indeed special: the very policies that allowed the "Baltic Tiger" to grow at a rate of 12 percent in 2006 are also causing it to contract violently by a projected 10 percent this year: money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia.)

Something else Argentina-esque is in the air. In 2001 Argentina's leaders responded to the crisis with a brutal International Monetary Fund-prescribed austerity package: $9 billion in spending cuts, much of it hitting health and education. This proved to be a fatal mistake. Unions staged a general strike, teachers moved their classes to the streets and the protests never stopped.

[...]

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"

unfortunately, argentina's outburst only produced a temporary stay of execution... today, you can find the same elites, dressed in their faux populist finery, still lining their pockets and feeding from every available trough... the good news is that it's happening without imf and world bank debt... the bad news is that the poor are still poor and getting massively poorer by the day...

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Looting Iraq - Naomi Klein talks with Keith Olbermann

thanks to raw story...

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Two Naomi's

h/t DU:

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Oh, Lord...! The rapidly emerging market of emergency services for those who can pay...

i just read naomi klein's article in the nation about privatized disaster response services (reprinted here in signs of the times), not exactly the kind of reading you want to do to start off a weekend... some highlights...

• Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn't the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group (AIG)--but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company's Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the "mobile units"--racing around in red firetrucks--even extinguished fires for their clients.

• During last year's hurricane season, Florida homeowners were offered similarly high-priced salvation by HelpJet, a travel agency launched with promises to turn "a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation." For an annual fee, a company concierge takes care of everything: transport to the air terminal, luxurious travel, bookings at five-star resorts. Most of all, HelpJet is an escape hatch from the kind of government failure on display during Katrina. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience."

• In northern Michigan, during the same week that the California fires raged, the rural community of Pellston was in the grip of an intense public debate. The village is about to become the headquarters for the first fully privatized national disaster response center. The plan is the brainchild of Sovereign Deed, a little-known start-up with links to the mercenary firm Triple Canopy. Like HelpJet, Sovereign Deed works on a "country-club type membership fee," according to the company's vice president, retired Brig. Gen. Richard Mills. In exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000 followed by annual dues of $15,000, members receive "comprehensive catastrophe response services" should their city be hit by a manmade disaster that can "cause severe threats to public health and/or well-being" (read: a terrorist attack), a disease outbreak or a natural disaster. Basic membership includes access to medicine, water and food, while those who pay for "premium tiered services" will be eligible for VIP rescue missions.

this is so wrong on so many levels... but, hey... if you aren't nauseous yet, try this...

[I]n Peru this summer, there was an earthquake, and there was another one of these breakthroughs in disaster capitalism, where after the earthquake an American company, an American service company called Aramark, got the contract to build evacuation camps, which is something that's traditionally done by the UN, traditionally done by NGOs. Now it's a private contractor, a for-profit company that actually provides food for prisons, going in there and seeing disaster response as -- internationally -- as an emerging market. And these are the first evacuation camps in the world, that I know of, that come with many McDonald's outlets.

ya know, just when i think i've passed the red line on my outrage meter and the internal mechanism has simply frozen up due to execessively out-of-tolerance rpm's, something like this comes along, unfreezes the mechanism, and the meter gets recalibrated to an entirely new - and much higher - level...

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"It still looks like a government -- . But pull back the curtains and there is nobody home."

naomi klein in today's la times...

[I]f any given job can't be outsourced, it can't be done.

This philosophy, so central to the Bush years, explains statistics like this one: In 2003, the U.S. government handed out 3,512 contracts to companies to perform domestic security functions, from bomb detection to data mining. In the 22-month period ending in August 2006, the Homeland Security Department had issued more than 115,000 security-related contracts.

If government is now an ATM, perhaps the war on terror is best understood not as a war but as a sprawling new economy, one based on continued disaster and instability. In this economy, the Bush team doesn't run the venture exactly; rather, it plays the role of deep-pocketed venture capitalist, always on the lookout for new security start-ups (overwhelmingly headed by former employees of the Pentagon and Homeland Security).

[...]

It still looks like a government -- with impressive buildings, presidential news briefings, policy battles. But pull back the curtain and there is nobody home.

it's interesting to note, however, that the areas of government that are working day and night to increase and solidify executive power, remove our civil liberties, and trash the constitution, there always seems to be plenty of people at home...

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The free market isn't free "for anybody but the contractors" who use the government as "an ATM machine"

more from naomi klein, talking about her book, shock doctrine, on bill maher...

from raw story...

"In New Orleans,it's the privatization of the school system, the public housing. After September 11th, it was the launching of a new economy in privatized homeland security, and in Iraq it's the Blackwater economy--The worse things get in Iraq, the more privatized--and profitable--this war becomes.

"So it's not about the corporations taking advantage; we expect corporations to do that. It's about the politicians who think the government should be an ATM machine and just transfer wealth to their friends in exchange for a deposit in the form of campaign contributions.

[...]

"You could call it crony capitalism, you could call it corporatism; but it certainly not the free market.

"And, the irony is,it's the free market ideology that gets used to propel this vision forward which has absolutely nothing to do with--it's not free for anybody but the contractors..."

i think most of us of are pretty well aware of what a tremendously profitable thing war is (for the right people, of course), but ms. klein delivers a valuable new way to understand the overall mechanism of HOW it's as profitable as it is... i've always claimed that the chaos and breakdown created by war offer unbounded opportunity to those whose aim is to profit from them... ms. klein not only shows how that works but also expands the concept to natural disasters, an arena that previously served to pull people together and make communities stronger, but are now being used to tear them apart so that the profiteering vultures can rush in to fill the gaps...

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Naomi Klein, in her book "Shock Doctrine," looks at Milton Friedman and government manipulation

from the toronto star via WantToKnow...

[Naomi Klein in her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism] argues persuasively that over the last 40 years, no single thinker has shaped the economic and political policies of corporate CEOs, military dictators, presidents, prime ministers and bankers more than [Milton] Friedman. His thesis was simple: The job of governments is to facilitate the free flow of capital across national borders by removing any impediments to trade [and establishing] a drastic regimen of market deregulation, free trade treaties, spending cuts to social programs, the breaking of labour unions and mass privatization of publicly owned resources and industries ... chiefly through the careful manipulation of collective crises such as wars, military coups, natural disasters and economic recessions and depressions. For Friedman's ideas to be implemented, a nation's existing economy and civic society must first be reduced to a state of tabula rasa before being rebuilt according to the [Chicago School] model. [Klein contends] that this capitalist doctrine also has its roots in a series of mind-control experiments performed on often unwilling patients by psychiatrist Ewan Cameron, working out of McGill University in the late 1950s. He imposed a sustained regimen of sensory deprivation, isolation, enforced sleep and a cocktail of LSD, PCP, insulin and barbiturates [and] a barrage of electroshock therapy. The CIA, which paid for Cameron's experiments, modified these techniques for use in prisoner-interrogation sessions. The results were so good that the CIA taught the methods to the Latin American security forces in charge of reprogramming anyone who dared resist the devastating free market "reforms" that swept through South and Central America after Augusto Pinochet's successful, Chicago-School inspired (and CIA-sponsored) coup of populist leader Salvador Allende in 1973.

chilling shit, but no news to anyone who's been paying attention...

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