Some of my friends refer to themselves as being much more "leftist" than I would say that I am. I am a bit of a mixed bag, really, I guess. I have never even read much of anything that Karl Marx wrote, and I did read once upon a time rad some of the novels of Ayn Rand, back before the Tea Partiers were even a glint in anyone's eye.
Over the past several years I have mentioned a number of times the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein (September 2007). It has been reviewed by many many people many many times.* Naomi Klien is, to begin with, a Canadian scholar.
On September 1, 2013, Naomi Klein spoke at "the founding convention of UNIFOR, a new mega union created by the Canadian Autoworkers and the Canadian Energy and Paper Workers Union." This is the text of her address:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/04
I do not know the percentage of workers that are unionized in Canada. In the United States that percentage is down to seven (7) percent now. I mention that because starting with such a small percentage of unionized workers could make Naomi Klein's ideas less practical for the United States than for Canada, and it is Canada that she was addressing this past Sunday.
But there is much food for thought there for those of us here in the United States, trust me, things that we might be able to use.
Again, repeating the top paragraph for you, this relates to my to me very obvious concern, heretofore left unmentioned, that more wars will make it even more impossible, both practically and financially, to do anything much toward the development of alternative energies and ways of living that might otherwise have a chance of slowing down the forthcoming climate disaster a bit.
Furthermore, there is not only an obviously huge conflict between funding more wars and paying for development of alternative energy and evolving our personal solutions, for most of us there is also a huge conflict between funding more wars and paying for health care either with public funding or privately! (And not to mention public education) If we're not already down the tubes, more wars will certainly do it. Do remember there is no one attacking the United States at the moment.
Larry
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Attorney Scott archives
* Briefly, Naomi Klein and a team of 26 researchers looked very carefully at sequences of events in over 200 other countries since the 1950s perhaps, at the earliest, but most since the 1970s. The countries are mostly tiny parts of the world that do not often come to our attention. Bottom line, super-rich individuals and small groups of individuals have made unimaginable amounts of money by first working hard to destabilize countries economically--turning them into places where people were starving where they weren't previously--and then "rescuing" those countries from complete starvation with loans whose terms of repayment made it impossible for their governments to put in place social safety nets as good as they'd had before that particular super-rich person or group of super-rich people came along in the first place. My understanding is that critics of The Shock Doctrine have not been able to undercut the massive research that went into it.
By the way, I wonder whether or not any relation between the events in the 200 or so countries detailed in The Shock Doctrine and the more recent events in Syria is obvious to anyone else. Those events did not just start, though I for one haven't paid much attention until now. In fact the U.S. military has been assisting other countries in feeding arms and other help to the rebels in Syria for the past two years or so. The U.S. basically started the whole thing, or at least got it off the ground. "Just sayin'."
