Cheers, Ken Hanly
"Peter K." wrote:
>
> [On page A6 today, there appears a rare installment of the Times's profiles
> in radicalism series. "The most visible face"? Kenneth Mackendrick, any
> thoughts?]
>
> New York Times, April 3, 2000
> Canada's Anti-Corporate Crusader
> By JAMES BROOKE
>
> TORONTO -- Cocooned in the spiral staircase of a downtown bookstore
> recently, Naomi Klein gleefully popped corporate marketing balloons as she
> brought her war on modern corporations to hundreds of office workers who had
> skipped lunch to hear a fire-and-brimstone treatment of their bosses.
>
> "Branding means selling us our desires," said Ms. Klein, whose new book, "No
> Logo," has made her Canada's 29-year-old media meteor and the most visible
> face of a sometimes scattershot anti-corporate youth movement, which is
> planning a show of force in Washington in mid-April.
>
> "If you listen to Starbucks," she said, "we long for community. If you
> listen to Barnes & Noble, we long for libraries. If you listen to Microsoft,
> we long for communications."
> Her book has become something of a movement bible here, staying on Canadian
> best-seller lists since its release in January, just weeks after days of
> protests at a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle thrust the
> complaints of her generation before a global audience.
>
> Mixing activism with analysis, she has filled university auditoriums, has
> won a column in The Globe and Mail and has been kicked off a television
> debate show by an angry conservative writer. In the first week of April, she
> will hopscotch from debates in New York to "counter-summits" in Washington,
> where protesters are preparing to demonstrate at meetings of the World Bank
> and the International Monetary Fund.
>
> While her book is being published simultaneously in Australia, Britain and
> the United States (Picador), translations are in the works in French,
> German, Italian and Spanish, and a documentary is being negotiated with
> British filmmakers.
>
> Her war on modern corporations boils down to a central theme: as companies'
> marketing budgets become more and more lavish, they maintain profit margins
> by farming out manufacturing to sweatshops in the poorest corners of the
> globe.
>
> In so doing, they break with a basic, Henry Ford principle of 20th-century
> manufacturing: create a mass market by paying workers well enough so they
> can buy the products they produce. At same time, Western consumers are the
> targets of what she calls "Big Brother branding."
>
> "My generation has grown up completely under the marketing microscope," she
> said.
>
> Energetic and optimistic, Ms. Klein incarnates that generation's reinvention
> of the North American left. One of Ms. Klein's grandfathers, a Marxist, was
> fired by Walt Disney for trying to unionize the animators of "Fantasia." Her
> parents left the United States in the late 1960's to protest the Vietnam
> War, her mother becoming a feminist filmmaker and her father, a doctor, a
> supporter of Canada's national health system.
>
> As an adolescent in Montreal, she rebelled against her socialist parents by
> becoming a self-described "mall rat," working after school in a chain
> clothing store.
>
> At the University of Toronto she edited the campus newspaper, becoming, in
> her words, "Miss P.C." She denounced campus violators of a lengthening list
> of "isms." Recalling that phase of "identity politics," she said, "I watched
> the left get smaller and smaller."
>
> After college she edited This Magazine, a leftist review in Toronto that
> limped along on dwindling circulation. Pulling dusty back issues from the
> stacks, she discovered that once upon a time there was "a movement on the
> left."
>
> At the same time, she remembered that when advertisements started to
> infiltrate bathroom stalls at the University of Toronto, students fought
> back, wielding felt-tip pens against the omnipresence of marketing.
>
> Four years later, her book contains some of her favorite "culture jamming"
> examples: perky models morphed into skulls; Nike's "Just Do It" slogan
> tweaked into "Justice. Do It"; Apple Computers' "Think Different" campaign
> mysteriously embellished with a photo of Stalin and the ominous slogan
> "Think Really Different."
>
> Gloria Steinem recalls watching Ms. Klein at a book promotion in New York,
> handing out little cutting tools to allow people to cut designer labels off
> their clothes.
>
> "In the women's movement, in the labor-left movement, we focused on how much
> money was earned and by whom," said Ms. Steinem, who has published Ms.
> Klein's essays in Ms. magazine. "Now, Naomi is focusing on the next step,
> which is how the money is spent."
>
> The resonance of Ms. Klein's ideas speaks volumes here about how Canada sees
> itself today.
>
> While Americans generally see Canadians as economic equals, Canada missed
> the American boom of the 1990's. After a decade of economic stagnation,
> Canadian per capita income fell in 1998 to $16,487, or 13 percent below that
> of Mississippi, the poorest American state.
>
> At the same time, Canada has moved away from the isolated, nationalist
> economy of years past. In the last 15 years, foreign investors have roughly
> tripled their holdings in Canada, controlling about 13,000 corporations,
> which are worth about $500 billion and responsible for about a third of the
> country's corporate profits. Once an economic hinterland, Canada became the
> industrialized world's most trade-dependent country in the 1990's, with 43
> percent of its economy tied to trade.
>
> In such an economy, Ms. Klein's anti-multinational message has appealed to
> people who complain of a loss of local economic control.
>
> "Canadians feel a little bit on the sidelines in the way the global economy
> is changing," said Paul Tough, who published many of Ms. Klein's essays in
> Saturday Night, an intellectual monthly here. "In the states you feel you
> are in the center. In Canada sometimes you feel you are in the center, but
> sometimes you feel you are in Indonesia, the Philippines or somewhere where
> you are being acted upon, not acting."
>
> It is that kind of anti-corporate, anti-marketing anger that boiled over in
> Seattle. "The real anarchists in Seattle," Ms. Klein said, "were the
> businessmen, who were saying, 'We don't want any rules.' "
>
> Then, warning that her generation's activists are not going to abandon their
> critique of laissez-faire globalism, she looked ahead to another meeting of
> World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, in Prague in September, and
> predicted with ill-disguised glee, "Prague is going to be nuts."