Live Event Review:’The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein @ The Bloor Cinema, Toronto, Sept. 29/08

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Live Event Review: Naomi Klein The Bloor Cinema, Toronto, Sept. 29/08

Location: The Bloor Cinema, Toronto
Date: Monday September 29th, 2008
Time: 7pm-9pm
Sponsor: Ontario Public Interest Research Group, The University of Toronto
Event held for: Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory and the Algonquins of Barriere Lake.

  Naomi Klein’s visit to the Bloor Cinema on Monday night in support of her latest book “The Shock Doctrine” couldn’t have been more timely or pertinent.  We are in the midst of what Klein would describe as ‘disaster capitalism’ at its finest, with many of us worried that the greatest shocks of the US financial bailout crisis are yet to come.

  Klein defines a state of shock as an event without a narrative - events that are perceived as too difficult for the average person to understand, and therefore don’t warrant any truthful or serious explanation.  Instead, these events are co-opted by the government and big corporations who fill in the narrative for us with ideas, concerns, concepts and explanations that serve their needs, not ours.

  Speaking on the US financial crisis, we keep hearing about how the $700 billion bailout is the only way we can save the country and the world from complete and utter financial disaster and catastrophe. America is calling for unity and solidarity among its people, urging them to come together around a common goal to save themselves through saving the  banks and financial institutions.  We’re being fed the trickle-down hypothesis again, that if we bail out the top, those of us at the bottom will be saved too.  But yesterday we received news that the bailout had been rejected by Capitol Hill once again.  American citizens are rejecting this bailout because they know that the trickle-down effect is nothing more than theory, rarely delivering on its promise to liberate those at the bottom.  Those in congress may have different motivations Klein says such as their need to hold on to their highly contested seats, but the sentiment is clear: Americans do not feel comfortable with lending $700 billion to save greedy banks and CEOs.    

 (editors note  -U.S. Senate have passed a pork-filled version of the bill on Sept. 30 - what wil hapen now? Now it heads back to the House)

  Klein called North Americans a generally ahistorical people, easily forgetting the past.  She says we need a different sense of history, a different narrative to explain these shocks both past and present, to explain this society of greed and crisis of capitalism. It can be said that this rejection of the Bush administration’s bailout plan comes because Americans are finally paying attention to their history and the false promises of yesterday.  Klein told us of a group of activists who descended upon Wall Street last week with the following slogans: “You broke it, you buy it”  “No socialism for the rich until we get some” and “I have a $90,000 student loan; bail me out!”  It is in the power of these citizens to effect the actions of those who run the country that Klein sees hope and promise.

  Speaking of the market crash of 1929 and the social reforms that ensued during the following years, Klein urges us to see beyond the “great men” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tommy Douglas to the actions of the citizen activists who demanded these reforms.  She says that we need to know about this citizen movement, this history if we are to get though today; it is the people’s history that we are missing.  While FDR will always be remembered as a great leader, ushering in great economic and social reform, Klein says that for some the New Deal was a disappointment.  Many people didn’t think it went far enough, these people were much more radical than their politicians.  For them, The New Deal was a compromise, a way of pacifying the socialist revolution that was bubbling beneath the surface, led by those who were losing faith in their country’s government.

Today it is likely that we are on the cusp of another economic transformation.  We cannot, as Klein warns, let this crisis be used as a democratic avoidance strategy.   We cannot allow those in power tell us that this is too complicated to understand or that we should leave this in the hand of the “experts.”  We cannot forget the conservative reforms of the Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney era and the failed attempts of Liberal governments in both the United States and Canada to make a significant, long-lasting difference in the rates of poverty in their countries.

  It seems more and more likely each day that the promises made by Liberal politicians like Barack Obama or Stephan Dion on health care, poverty reduction, minimum wage, or education will fall to the wayside as the economic crisis continues to take centre stage.  And so if we are to avoid this continued disappointment we will have to make fundamental changes to the ways that our economy and our governments perform.

  Klein predicts a nationalization of banks and the oil industry.    Profits are going to have to be put in the public trust if we are to avoid future failures and disappointments like the one Americans have on their hands now.  Today, Naomi Klein says, this argument is being made for us – as other systems fail, the probability that new systems will come in to replace them rise. 

  We are living through a volatile moment when many people will be thrust deeper into poverty and despair. Defining poverty as the number of individuals with disposable incomes less than 50% of the median income of the entire population, 10.3% of Canadians and 17% of Americans are living in poverty.  That is approximately 3.3 million and 51.1 million people respectively. (note: from “Poverty and Policy in Canada” by Dennis Raphael -2007). 

admin @ September 29, 2008