Naomi Klein

[_EAllusion]

I've of two-minds in response to the op-ed you linked Analytics. On the one hand, echoing Brad, this is as sensible as anything I've ever seen her write. It really isn't representative of the quality of her work or the point I was making.

On the other, it is still flawed on a few levels. The problem with fossil fuel divestment strategies is that fossil fuels are entangled in economic activity in a way that makes it difficult to draw the line. It's not just Exxon-Mobil or Dupont that is the issue; it's the whole economic system. Everyone either directly or indirectly supports fossil fuel use in a profound way. Short of being a hermit, it's hard to to get away from that. It is fundamentally different from the model of South African banking divestment it is trying to model in that respect. Likewise, the economic impact of divestment on those companies is likely not significant, which again is a crucial difference with apartheid based boycotting.

This serves to undercut the assertion that failure to participate in divestment is unacceptably hypocritical for a person or organisation that is interested in combating the ill-effects of carbon emissions and corporately-funded climate change propaganda. Characterizing failing to participate in a largely symbolic gesture as a with us or against us line seems like ovverreach. I also think dismissing the supporters of attempts at transitional solutions and emission reduction regulatory strategies as merely being the pasties for businesses stalling real climate change efforts is shortsighted. Bringing energy providers to the table to change their business activity in a cooperative way probably is a necessary step in solving the problem given the political power they wield. Presenting divestment as a more hardcore, effective approach seems silly since it is unlikely to have meaningful economic impact.

That said, her piece here is way above her typical standards of argumentation. There wasn't any opportunity for her to quote-mine or present cherry-picked, misleading data. I also cannot stress enough that Naomi Klein is notable not just for being a leftist with questionable methods - those aren't hard to find - but because she is so well-respected among a left-wing elite that tends be more discerning in its tastes. She's a darling of the Amy Goodman's of the world, which really shouldn't be.

[_EAllusion]

The Shock Doctrine rang a bell, but not the author. I never got the sense that this book was as important to Liberals as EA is leading on.

Naomi Klein is one of the most well-regarded left-wing public intellectuals in America. Inosofar as no public intellectual is that important to mainstream liberalism, it's fair to say that she isn't that important. But as far as public intellectuals go, she's a tier below a Paul Krugman or Noam Chomsky in status. There are maybe a handful public intellectuals in the country you can argue are as notable as her. I don't think you could name even one female who has an inarguable case for being more notable. You could name media personalities with a wide reach, such as Rachel Maddow*, but they serve a different function in political discourse.

FP/Prospect Magazine rated her the 11th most important public intellectual in the world in 2005. She was the highest ranked female in the list. The list was constructed via survey of a very sophisticated readership. The people before her?

Noam Chomsky
Umberto Eco
Richard Dawkins
Václav Havel
Christopher Hitchens
Paul Krugman
Jürgen Habermas
Amartya Sen
Jared Diamond
Salman Rushdie

Those aren't exactly lightweights. She found herself among that list because she has a dedicated following in intellectual liberal circles. She contributes to some of the most prestigious publications in the English language. The level of respect she receives is at odds with just how poor her output often is.

*Unsurprisingly, Klein has been a repeat guest on Maddow's show where Maddow fawned over her. Maddow also said, on her show, that The Shock Doctrine was an important influence in the American intellectual left.

[_EAllusion]

"This person I don't like is a leftist who is just as bad as brietbart and WND. I'm not going to address anything she says.

First, I reserved the thread to occasionally bump addressing things she's written. Second, in my opening post I linked two lengthy criticisms of the kind of arguments she offers - one from a liberal source and one from a conservative source.

[_Res Ipsa]

Kevin, you really need to hang out more at the Great Orange Satan. ;-)

[_EAllusion]

The central thesis of The Shock Doctrine is that moneyed elites in tandem with conservative political authorities have repeatedly engaged in a deliberate pattern of creating severe crises in societies in order pacify resistance to laissez-faire capitalist systems. A crisis is orchestrated, such as a military coup or economic depression, and/or exploited to instill radical free market reforms. These systems are favored to exploit and oppress the masses for the benefit of said moneyed elite. The name comes from a direct comparison between shock-therapy based torture practices where people were shocked to remove psychological resistance in an effort to rebuild their personality from scratch. The book paints this connection as less metaphorical than you might think.

So much goes wrong in attempting to defend this thesis that it probably would take a book longer than her book to fully explore it. See my original post for a taste of just how bad it gets.

Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics ends up being the central villain in her thesis. In doing so, she gets basic things wrong so consistently you'd think she heard about Friedman and the Chicago School from the back of a box of cereal. In one of my favorite, more minor mistakes, she somehow attributes neoconservative foreign policy to Friedman/Chicago school thought. Chait, in my link above, addresses this by saying,

Klein pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits at the heart of the Iraq war project, but she does not seem to know what neoconservatism is; and she makes no effort to find out. Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence:

“Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long associations–Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute–called itself ‘neoconservative,’ a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.”

Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the 1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the 1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism. The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject the New Deal. They favor what they now call “national greatness” over small government. And their foreign policy often collides head-on with corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with neoconservatism. (Russell Kirk delivered a famous speech at the Heritage Foundation in which he declared that “not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.”) And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.

Finally, there is the central role that Klein imputes to her villain Friedman, both in this one glorious passage and throughout her book. In her telling, he is the intellectual guru of the shock doctrine, whose minions have carried out his corporatist agenda from Santiago to Baghdad. Klein calls the neocon movement “Friedmanite to the core,” and identifies the Iraq war as a “careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology” over which Friedman presided. What she does not mention–not once, not anywhere, in her book–is that Friedman argued against the Iraq war from the beginning, calling it an act of “aggression.”

It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein’s mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism. Nor are the interests of corporations always, or even usually, served by war.

I think Chait is probably being overly kind in that assessment. Anyone with basic familiarity of libertarians and libertarian organizations like the CATO institute and the neoconservatives and their organizations should be able to catch that the groups tend to despise one another. The idea of CATO calling itself neoconservative is pretty funny. It goes beyond mere difference. This is because they often hold radically opposed ideas on a variety of topics. One such area is foreign policy. Libertarian-Conservative groups like what Friedman represents tend to oppose military interventions while neoconservatives are notorious for being frequent advocates of military intervention around the globe. They are at significant tension in this regard.

Neoconservatives are further from Milton Friedman than they are some forms of leftist thought. Neoconservatives are routinely preaching that libertarian philosophy is a poisonous element within conservatism. David Brooks, probably the most prominent neoconservative commentator, has called the libertarian "anti-government philosophy" "fundamentally un-American." Those harsh words are par for the course. Yet Klein just lumps this together as part of a coordinated philosophy of destroy and remake? That neoconservative-backed invasions like the Iraq war are part of a Friedmanite agenda to destroy a civil order to construct free market zones for corporate overlords? Holy Christ. You'd think she's never read anything by actual neoconservatives.

This is about as astute as when the Glen Beck's of the world declare Barack Obama a socialist while weaving a complicated conspiracy theory. The only difference is no one is putting Beck next to Umberto Eco on a list of the world's most important public intellectuals.

[_Kevin Graham]

Sounds like Noam Chomsky, except for the conspiracy theories.

[_EAllusion]

Sounds like Noam Chomsky, except for the conspiracy theories.

Chomsky is smarter and much more careful in what he argues. I can't recall off the top of my head a transparently misleading use of a quote from Noam Chomsky on anything. It's so frequent for Klein that I just think of it as her M.O.

One of the central problems for Klein that she cannot tell the difference between free market policies such as those that might be advocated by the American economists she paints as villains and corporate predatory behavior that exploits government power. Chomsky understands the difference. She ends up conflating laissez-faire capitalism and its aims with policies meant to advantage specific businesses that the free market reformers she is criticizing would never support.

She is simply lumping in everyone who disagrees with her under one umbrella and ignoring the serious distinctions that exist between them. This allows to craft an explanation for complex and divergent conservative motivations and behavior in a way that is spectacularly wrong. Chomsky really doesn't do this. He's similar in that he shares her critique of neoliberal corporatism as it has manifested through the IMF, World Bank, etc. They are both far left in their policy prescriptions. Similar outlooks - different ways of getting there.

[_EAllusion]

Johan Norberg wrote a shorter, less rigorous critque for Reason Mag than the one I initially linked. I think that is a good primer for some of the issues I talked about re Friedman. Here it is:

In the future, if you tell a student or a journalist that you favor free markets and limited government, there is a risk that they will ask you why you support dictatorships, torture, and corporate welfare. The reason for the confusion will be Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

In a very short time, the book has become a 21st-century Bible for anticapitalists. It has also drawn praise from mainstream reviewers: "There are very few books that really help us understand the present," gushed The Guardian. "The Shock Doctrine is one of those books." Writing in The New York Times, the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called it "a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries."

Klein's basic argument is that economic liberalization is so unpopular that it can only win through deception or coercion. In particular, it relies on crises. During a natural disaster, a war, or a military coup, people are disoriented, confused, and preoccupied with their own immediate survival, allowing regimes to liberalize trade, to privatize, and to reduce public spending with little opposition. According to Klein, "neoliberal" economists have welcomed Hurricane Katrina, the Southeast Asian tsunami, the Iraq war, and the South American military coups of the 1970s as opportunities to introduce radical free market policies. The chief villain in her story is Milton Friedman, the economist who did more than anyone in the 20th century to popularize free market ideas.

To make her case, Klein exaggerates the market reforms in question, often ignoring central events and rewriting chronologies. She confuses libertarianism with the quite different concepts of corporatism and neoconservatism. And she subjects Milton Friedman to one of the most malevolent distortions of a thinker's ideas in recent history.

Exhibit A against Friedman is a quote from what Klein calls "one of his most influential essays": "Only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." This, says Klein, is "the shock doctrine." In a not-very-subtle short film based on the book, the quote appears over images of prisoners being tortured.

The quote is not, in fact, from one of Friedman's most influential essays; it's from a very brief introduction to a reprint of his book Capitalism and Freedom. And it is not a rationale for welcoming disasters; it's about the uncontroversial fact that people change their minds when the old ways seem to fail. Friedman provides a telling example, which Klein neglects to quote: Young Americans joined him in opposing the military draft after the Vietnam War forced them to risk their lives on another continent.

She also distorts other Friedman quotes to support her case. She pretends that Friedman's concept of "the tyranny of the status quo" refers the tyranny of voters, and that he believed crises were needed to bypass the democratic process. But for Friedman, the tyranny was something entirely different: an iron triangle of politicians, bureaucrats, and specialinterest groups (businesses, for example) that deceive voters.

Discussing Friedman's proposal to reduce inflation through sweeping market reforms, Klein writes, "Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that ‘facilitate the adjustment.' " This gives the impression that Friedman wanted to disorient people through pain in order to push through his reforms. But the quote in its entirety shows that Friedman had something very different in mind. If a government chooses to attack inflation in this way, he wrote, "it should be announced publicly in great detail....The more fully the public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment." In other words, if voters are not ignorant and not disoriented, but fully informed of the reform steps, they will facilitate the adjustment by changing their saving, consuming, and bargaining behavior. Friedman's view was the opposite of what Klein claims.

Not content to misrepresent Friedman's opinions, Klein blames him for various crimes committed around the world. Most notably, she links him to Augusto Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s, writing that Friedman acted as "adviser to the Chilean dictator."

In fact, Friedman never worked as an adviser to, and never accepted a penny from, the Chilean regime. He even turned down two honorary degrees from Chilean universities that received government funding, because he did not want to be seen as endorsing a dictatorship he considered "terrible" and "despicable." He did spend six days in Chile in March 1975 to give public lectures, at the invitation of a private foundation. When he was there he met with Pinochet for about 45 minutes and wrote him a letter afterward, arguing for a plan to end hyperinflation and liberalize the economy. He gave the same kind of advice to communist dictatorships as well, including the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia.

Klein twists this relationship beyond recognition, claiming Pinochet's 1973 coup was executed to allow free market economists ("the Chicago Boys," as the economists from Friedman's University of Chicago were called) to enact their reforms. This false link is crucial for giving the impression that the Friedmanites have blood on their hands, since the most violent period of the regime came right after the coup. But Friedman's visit, which Klein claims started the real transformation, came two years later. Klein insists on having it both ways.

The reality was that Chile's military officials were initially in charge of the economy. They were corporatist and paternalist, and they opposed the Chicago Boys' ideas. The air force controlled social policy, for example, and it blocked market reforms until 1979. It wasn't until this approach led to runaway inflation that Pinochet belatedly threw his weight behind liberalization and gave civilians ministerial positions. Their success in fighting inflation impressed Pinochet, so they were given a larger role.

Klein could have used the real chronology to attack Friedman for visiting a dictatorship that tortured its opponents-a commonly heard criticism of the economist-but that's not enough for her. To find support for her central thesis that economic liberalism requires violence, she has to make it look like torture and violence were the direct outcome of Friedman's ideas.

Klein also blames Friedmanite economics for the Iraq war, for the International Monetary Fund's actions during the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, and for the Sri Lankan government's confiscation of fishermen's property to build luxury hotels after the deadly tsunami of 2005. In a 576-page book about such evils, why wasn't there room to mention that Milton Friedman opposed the Iraq war, thought the IMF shouldn't be involved in Asia, and believed governments should be prohibited from expropriating property to give it to private developers? Klein quotes from some interviews in which Friedman voiced these views, but she declines to mention Friedman's longheld positions that directly undermine her thesis.

Even though Klein is dead wrong about Friedman, she may well be right in her broader thesis that it's easier to liberalize in times of crisis, and that there is a close connection between economic liberalization and political violence. It's true that several dictators have liberalized their economies in recent years and that some of them have tortured their opponents.

But how strong is this connection? If we look at the Economic Freedom of the World statistics assembled by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian free market think tank, we find only four economies on the planet that haven't liberalized at all since 1980, so obviously reform has taken place in all sorts of countries. But the statistics clearly show that most classical liberal reforms happen in democracies, not dictatorships. Klein never talks about such rapidly liberalizing democracies as Iceland, Ireland, Estonia, or Australia, where reforms were given renewed support in several elections. Presumably these countries just aren't undemocratic and brutal enough. She does discuss Britain under Margaret Thatcher, but only to argue that Thatcher too relied on shocks and violence.

The Iron Lady won re-election in 1983, Klein says, because of the boost she got from the Falklands War. She doesn't mention another reason for Thatcher's growing popularity: The British economy was improving rapidly at the time. A 1987 study in the British Journal of Political Science looked in detail at the timing of events and British voters' perception of them, and made a strong case that the Tories gained only three percentage points from the war; the vast majority of the gain came from improved economic prospects. And the Falklands War certainly cannot explain why Tories won two more elections after that, nor why Tony Blair's New Labour had to dress itself in Thatcherite clothes to be elected.

Naomi Klein usually exaggerates the economic liberalization that has been carried out by brutal dictators. She needs to demonstrate that Pinochet's interest in market reforms was typical of authoritarian regimes-otherwise, her archvillain Friedman might have been right when he said that the surprising thing in Chile was not that the market worked but that the generals allowed it to work. So Klein ropes in the Argentinean dictatorship of 1976-1983. Based on those two examples, she claims the southern part of Latin America is where "contemporary capitalism was born." She even calls the countries "Chicago School juntas."

There were indeed advisers from the University of Chicago in Argentina; since there is strong global demand for Chicago economists, they have visited many countries. But their influence in Argentina was barely noticeable. In the Fraser Institute index of economic freedom, which gives scores from 1 (the least free) to 10 (the most), Argentina moved from 3.25 in 1975 to 3.86 in 1985. Compare this with the countries Klein mentions as superior alternatives to the Chicago Boys' brutal "neoliberal" models: Sweden went from 5.62 in 1975 to 6.63 in 1985; Malaysia, one of the "mixed, managed economies" Klein prefers, went from 6.43 to 7.13. In 1985, after Argentina allegedly applied Friedman's ideas, the country's economy was less marketoriented than all the Eastern European communist economies tracked by Fraser, including Poland, Hungary, and Romania. But Argentina tortured people, so in Klein's mind it must have been on the fast track to free markets.

By Klein's account, China is another country that violently imposed Friedmanite reforms. To make this case, she rewrites the history of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, claiming the protesters were primarily opposed to economic liberalization, instead of one-party dictatorship. According to Klein, the Communist Party, led by Deng Xiaoping, attacked them to save its free market program and advance yet more sweeping reforms while people were still in shock.

If the students were indeed protesting economic reform, they seldom expressed that grievance at the time. Instead, they demonstrated in favor of democracy, government transparency, and equality before the law, and against bureaucracy and violence. The protesters first gathered to mourn former Secretary General Hu Yaobang, one of China's most important economic reformers. The protests soon grew to include everybody who wanted liberal democracy-both those who wanted more economic reform and those who wanted less. Klein equates the second element with the whole protest.

Chinese officials suppressed the demonstrations because they wanted to protect the party's power, not because they wanted to liberalize the economy. The majority were economic conservatives who were skeptical of markets; some even refused to visit Chinese free trade zones on principle. And the economic reforms did not accelerate after the massacre, as Klein claims. For the first time since their inception, they stalled.

The most consistent free marketeer in the leadership, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, was purged because he supported the protesters, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. (Friedman had met him in Beijing in 1988 and wrote him a letter of advice. For Klein, this is yet another meeting with a tyrant.) Zhao's rivals-including Premier Li Peng, who was pushing for a violent crackdown on the protesters-then tried to roll the market reforms back and reintroduce economic controls. The conservatives blamed the unrest on the openness associated with economic liberalization, and Deng's position in the party was weakened. Far from being the start of "shock therapy," Tiananmen Square was almost the end of China's economic liberalization. Klein writes that "Tiananmen paved the way for a radical transformation free from fear of rebellion," but according to the Fraser statistics, China was actually less economically open in 1990 than it was in 1985.

Klein writes that Deng opened the Chinese economy "in the three years immediately following the bloodbath." This is true only if "immediately" means "three years later." Reform faltered so much in the years following the crackdown that Deng felt he needed to go outside normal channels and jump-start liberalization in the spring of 1992, even though he was 87 years old and had formally retired. His "southern tour" was a trip filled with speeches and networking aimed at saving the reform program. The tour was not initially reported in the national media, since they were controlled by Deng's rivals. Deng even found himself forced to write articles supporting his agenda under a pen name to get access. But he was eventually successful in winning local support and building alliances with provincial governors who favored liberalization. Only then did President Jiang Zemin reluctantly support Deng's reforms.

To show that radical economic liberalization can happen only in dictatorships, Klein compares China to democratic Poland in the late 1980s and early '90s: "In China, where the state used the gloves-off method of terror, torture and assassination, the result was, from a market perspective, an unqualified success. In Poland, where only the shock of economic crisis and rapid change was harnessed-and there was no overt violence-the effects of the shock eventually wore off, and the results were far more ambiguous." Once again, the statistics tell a different story. According to the Fraser data, Poland actually took reform farther and faster. In 1985 its economy was much less open, with a score of 3.93 versus China's 5.11. In 1995, both scored 5.3. In 2005 Poland was way ahead, with 6.83 to China's 5.9.

Klein also exaggerates the free market elements in anything she can associate with a crisis. She writes that politicians used Hurricane Katrina to introduce "a fundamentalist version of capitalism" in New Orleans. The "fundamentalist" reform in question? The introduction of more charter schools. Not satisfied to exaggerate just the nature of the change, Klein also stretches its extent: She writes that the school board used to run 123 public schools but after the hurricane ran only four, whereas the number of charter schools increased from seven to 31. She doesn't mention that these figures date to the period immediately after the hurricane, when the school board was much slower to reopen its schools. As of September 2007, ordinary public schools again outnumbered charter schools, 47 to 44.

The strangest thing about Klein's suggestion that crises benefit free markets and limited government is that there is such a long record of the exact opposite. World War I led to communism in Russia; economic depression gave us Nazi Germany. Wars and other disasters are rarely friends of freedom. On the contrary, politicians and government officials often use crises as an opportunity to increase their budgets and powers. As one prominent economist put it while explaining his opposition to war in Iraq: "War is a friend of the state....In time of war, government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do." The economist? Milton Friedman.

Friedman was right about the Iraq war: The Bush administration has used that conflict and the larger War on Terror to dramatically expand the federal government's powers and expenditures. Bizarrely, Klein points to the U.S. after 9/11 as a major illustration of her thesis. She claims the terrorist attacks gave the Bush administration an opportunity to implement Friedman's ideas by benefiting friends in the defense and security industries with new contracts and unprecedented sums of money. Klein never clearly explains how this could possibly be Friedmanite. In the real world, Friedman "had always emphasized waste in defense spending and the danger to political freedom posed by militarism," in the words of his biographer Lanny Ebenstein. Somehow, Klein has confused Friedman's limited-government liberalism with corporatism.

As Klein sees it, in Bush's America "you have corporatism: big business and big government combining their formidable power to regulate and control the citizenry." This sounds like a healthy libertarian critique of the administration-something Friedman himself might say. But Klein thinks that Bush-style corporatism is the "pinnacle of the counterrevolution launched by Friedman" and that the team that implemented it is "Friedmanite to the core."

So even when the U.S. government breaks all the rules in Milton Friedman's book, Klein blames Friedman. At one point she writes about the lack of openness in the Iraqi economy: "All the...U.S. corporationsthat were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot-all at taxpayer expense." This would be an excellent Friedmanite critique of how governments enrich their friends at the expense of competitors and taxpayers-if it weren't for the conclusion to the paragraph: "The Chicago School crusade...had finally reached its zenith in this corporate New Deal."

For Klein, tax-funded corporate welfare is the zenith of Chicago's free market revolution. The idea seems to be that Milton Friedman likes corporations, so if governments give corporations contracts, subsidies, protection, and privileges, that must be Friedmanite. At times it seems like Klein thinks any policy is Friedmanite if private companies are involved. But you would have a hard time finding an economist more persistent than Friedman in warning how corporations and capitalists conspire against the public to obtain special privileges. As Friedman wrote in reason in 1978: "Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the
chief sources of danger....Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy."

In the absence of serious arguments against free markets, we are left with Klein's reasonable critiques of torture, dictatorships, corruption, and corporate welfare. In essence, her book says that Milton Friedman's limited government ideals are bad because governments are incompetent, corrupt, and cruel. If there is a disaster here, it is not one of Friedman's making.

I think this is par for the course in her broader writing and advocacy.

[_Res Ipsa]

Sounds like Noam Chomsky, except for the conspiracy theories.

Chomsky is smarter and much more careful in what he argues. I can't recall off the top of my head a transparently misleading use of a quote from Noam Chomsky on anything. It's so frequent for Klein that I just think of it as her M.O.

One of the central problems for Klein that she cannot tell the difference between free market policies such as those that might be advocated by the American economists she paints as villains and corporate predatory behavior that exploits government power. Chomsky understands the difference. She ends up conflating laissez-faire capitalism and its aims with policies meant to advantage specific businesses that the free market reformers she is criticizing would never support.

She is simply lumping in everyone who disagrees with her under one umbrella and ignoring the serious distinctions that exist between them. This allows to craft an explanation for complex and divergent conservative motivations and behavior in a way that is spectacularly wrong. Chomsky really doesn't do this. He's similar in that he shares her critique of neoliberal corporatism as it has manifested through the IMF, World Bank, etc. They are both far left in their policy prescriptions. Similar outlooks - different ways of getting there.

I agree. Chomsky is much smarter and much more careful in his writing.

And the really bad news is that she's taken up climate change as her latest cause. Sigh.

[_Analytics]

FP/Prospect Magazine rated her the 11th most important public intellectual in the world in 2005. She was the highest ranked female in the list. The list was constructed via survey of a very sophisticated readership. The people before her?

Noam Chomsky
Umberto Eco
Richard Dawkins
Václav Havel
Christopher Hitchens
Paul Krugman
Jürgen Habermas
Amartya Sen
Jared Diamond
Salman Rushdie

Those aren't exactly lightweights. She found herself among that list because she has a dedicated following in intellectual liberal circles.

Not that dedicated--she didn't make the list in 2008, while every single individual you list here did.