who saw/heard Naomi Klein's lecture on Democracy Now?

[Blue_Tires]

she was speaking to the American Sociological Association in New York...great, great stuff for those that missed it

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/15/1432250

sorry if repost

www.naomiklein.org

[billbuckhead]

1. Remember a certain unamed White House official sayhing they change reality?

"Now, we know what closed that window of possibility, that freedom that opened up in 2001, and it was September 11th in this country. And the window didn't close everywhere, but it did close, at least temporarily, in North America, that sense of possibility, that putting these issues and the people affected by these policies at the center of the political debate. Now, the shock of those attacks, I think we can see with some hindsight, was harnessed by leaders in this country and their allies around the world to abruptly end the discussion of global justice that was exploding around the world. There was a door that had opened, and it was suddenly slammed shut. We heard that phrase again and again: 9/11 changes everything. And one of the first things we were told that it had changed was that trade, privatization, labor rates, all the things we were fighting for just so recently no longer mattered. It was Year Zero. Wipe the slate clean. And it was another one of these rebooting history moments. History was apparently starting all over again from scratch, and nothing we knew before mattered. It was all relegated to pre-9/11 thinking.

Now, the Bush administration justified this by saying that all that mattered was security and the war on terror. And in Canada, we were told that -- by the US ambassador -- that security trumps trade. That became the new slogan, that before 9/11 it was economic priorities that drove the US administration, but post-9/11 the only thing that mattered was security. So talk of economic justice, corporate greed, the loss of the public sphere, the talk of Porto Alegre, was suddenly retro, so 2001.

Now, the irony that we can now see is that, while denying the importance of this economic project, the Bush administration used the dislocation of 9/11 to pursue the very same pre-9/11 radical capitalist project, now with a furious vengeance, under the cover of war and natural disasters. So forget negotiating trade deals at the World Trade Organization. When the US invaded Iraq, Bush sent in Paul Bremer to seize new markets on the battlefields of his preemptive war. He didn’t have to negotiate with anyone. He just rewrote the country's entire economic architecture in one swoop. But, of course, if you said that the war had anything to do with economics, you were dismissed as naïve. It was, of course, about security, about liberating Iraqis from Saddam."
---------------snip----------------------------
<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/15/1432250>

[CanSocDem]

2. On the positive side...

.....she also said this:

"The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather at events like this under the banner of building another world, a kinder more sustainable world."

Her optimism turns me on.


.

[onethatcares]

3. the economic project she was discussing has been used in

just about every Latin American country that doesn't bow to the corporate masters. The world bank comes in there goes the nation.