FLY ON A THINK TANK WALL

So long as she keeps on having them on Democracy Now I will be Amy Goodman’s town crier in my part of cyberville to raise awareness of people who have inspired me by their clarity, passion and compassion. This post is to draw attention to Naomi Klein’s speech at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. She grabbed my attention when speaking of a third way, using the best parts of democracy and capitalism to defeat the evils in the excesses of both. She spoke of the examples of June 4 1989 Poland (Solidarity elected) and Tiananmen Square (Student democratic up rising) and South Africa’s (election of the ANC to end apartheid) to demonstrate the power of elections being turned to profit by shock capitalism.

"We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks."

I am reminded of a line delivered by Prot to his psychoanalyst when asked how people on K Pax could know the difference between right and wrong if they didn’t have any laws, “Everyone in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong, Doctor.” Such a laying bare of the reality that laws and leaders are designed to obfuscate our better nature to further their profit taking in the expedient shearing project has never been stated so clearly.