EconomicsUSA: Communications: Naomi Klein, a Canadian, has exported her extremism to the news outlets of American Left

Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report (Mar9,2k11).

Extreme leftist praises Greece's widespread but equally extreme left slogan "We won't pay for your crisis" and jumps from falsifying and ideologizing to the extreme what's happening in Wisconsin.  We drew our conclusions, always tentative, about the Wisconsin particulars earlier today.  We did not have a grand récit poking out from our mundane news reporting and analyzing,  only a local story and its significance primarily in that locality.   Besides,  postmoderism has said grand stories are dead (Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge commissioned by the

                  

Quebecois govt in a Canadian province) -- but it ain't so -- neither in the case of dyed-in-the-wool Marxists like Klein, nor in the case of those who try to follow the Christian Scriptures, the scope of which is a veritable transhistorical story of the coming of the Kingdom of God.  Still, we weren't trying in the previous blog-entry to fit our perceptions of the Wisconsin local developments into our Biblically-based transhistorical horizon of hope and its narrative.  Yet, Klein is doing such "fitting," whole hog.  The video is long.  But sample it; and, if you can spare the time, even later on, view it thru to get a feel for what she erases so smoothly.   She's trying to set us up for her desire to legitimate Greek Riots whenever left-side demonstrations take place in America, shoud they occur in Madison, Wisconsin or in San Fransisco, California -- the rather anarchist terrorism that brawt Greece to a halt, after overspending itself into the depths of 'sovereign debt' and now being bailed out by the EU countries' taxpayers.

She blames what she calls "the shock doctrine" in her bestselling book of that title, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; it's ultimately a conspiracy theory.  Notice where she positions herself -- on the normative Left, not the extreme -- thus placing Obama in "the center" not the Left, a self-positioning which tells us she's in denial not only about herself, but also about Obama and about how public-employee unions have had a free ride for too long.  She oozes more than charm, if that's what you'd call it.  She speaks of "the pretext of crisis."  She correctly says that the teachers unions are, at the moment,  getting the brunt of the recoil from  previous decades when they made their stealthy gains at taxpayers expense, because they constantly threatened the public with strikes in order to bloat their pay and benefits, and protect the drones droning in the classrooms, elbowing good teachers out of the profession to permanentize the lousy teachers who can't be removed as a result of teacher's unions "collective bargaining rights."  Her simplistic characterization of the 2008 Meltdown according to which the capitalists on Wall Street are all bad and were the only factor in the financial crisis, is indiscriminating and cloying.  There certainly were seriously fast and loose greedsters, in some places on Wall Street (they shoud be in jail on Rykers Island), but she paints with such a broad brush that her conspiracy theory takes over her discourse and drives her into the mud-dled concepts she deftly smooths out.  A sad chapter in the book of her life, this Canuck now making it big on the American extreme left by writing Marxist smoothies for lefty consumers.



Hat Tip to Steve Bishop for pointing me to the video.  I alone am responsible for my refWrite comments / editorial here.

-- Politicarp