TMO Tags: naomi klein
I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasieński – A review
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012In his 1921 “Manifesto on the Immediate Futurisation of Life” Bruno Jasieński called for Poland’s national poets – “the stale mummies of mickiewiczes and słowackis” – to make way from the “plazas, squares and streets” for the new: Futurists like himself. Many years later, as Soren Gauger tells us in the afterword to this excellent [...]
Join the club or else
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008There really is no such thing as a cloud without a silver lining. The crisis is now being used as a stick to beat Poles into accepting the euro as their national currency. “Look at Slovakia,” they say. They do not say: Slovakia’s central bank has surrendered its say in how to deal with the [...]
Rewarding Careers
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007During my extensive discussion of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, I mentioned how the author envisioned a new super-elite emerging from the wreckage of consensus capitalism. In such a scenario, “trickle-down” economics, first touted during the Reagan administration, amounts to creating a new servant class, scrabbling for the crumbs that fall from the top table. [...]
Clever Klein II
Friday, October 12th, 2007(Continued from Tuesday.) Klein adopts the age-old yet fashionable metaphor of the “body politic” to demonstrate parallels between electric shock treatment administered to individual “patients” (and, later, torture victims) and the “shock therapy” acolytes of Friedman diagnosed as a remedy for ailing societies. Commencing to build on this slightly over-extended analogy, Klein points to how [...]
Clever Klein I
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007To start on a superficial note: Naomi Klein, scourge of corporations and hollow brand iconography, is well-served by the publishing behemoth (Pearson PLC, as embodied by Penguin Books) charged with distributing her latest treatise, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Coming in a shade of yellow typically associated with radioactive and biological hazard [...]
