Naomi Klein making sense, as usual

Here's Naomi Klein last week at the University of Chicago, giving her take on current events (or watch the video here).  Excellent, insightful stuff that gets to the heart of the matter, as always for her.  An excerpt:

[W]hat we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks. I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty; I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.

Man, Naomi Klein has such a totally hot brain.  If I could ever manage to get her alone some evening, I'd make conversation with her all night long.

Comments

[Mike]

Well, when you get her alone, don't forget that 'Naomi' backwards is 'I moan'.

[IZOD]

Don't you mean Naomi Wolf?

[cemmcs]

Naomi Wolf wrote "The End of America".

Naomi Klein wrote "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".

[IZOD]

It's a joke, cemmcs. Note my name as well.

[strasmangelo jones]

That thread is pretty great - like watching the Pope get pantsed, repeatedly, by a class of second-graders, while the College of Cardinals sputters off to the side.