Moving The Center - Naomi Klein

In The New Yorker, scenes from the Left:

“We apologize for starting late, but it’s typical activist time, so I’m sure you’re used to it,” a young woman organizer said from the stage. The young woman wore a black necklace, black jeans, and black hoop earrings. She urged the audience to fight racism and poverty, and to work for education, international solidarity, justice for immigrants and refugees, and solidarity with Palestine and with the Mohawk of Tyendinaga and the Algonquin of Barriere Lake, on whose behalf the fund-raiser that night was being held...Naomi Klein’s words and her ideas are seen as a serious threat,” she said. “Her words are a source of inspiration . . . for those of us who were and are being radicalized by the anti-globalization, anti-colonial, and anti-poverty movements and the demands to change the system totally and completely.”

Klein ascended the stage. “It’s been an eventful few hours,” she said, smiling. The first bailout package announced by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had been voted down that afternoon by the House. “The President went on television and informed us that there would be Armageddon, essentially, if they didn’t get this deal . . . but it didn’t work!” she went on, over rowdy clapping. She was wearing dark jeans tucked into tall brown boots, a crisp white shirt, and a long black blazer. She was dressed for a fox hunt. She looked terrific.

She had spent the day curled up on the blue sofa in her living room, watching CNN while she waited restlessly to hear what would happen in Washington. She fortified herself with cups of coffee and a smoothie. She checked her iPhone for messages from an economist friend who was keeping her posted on what was going on behind the scenes...The past couple of weeks had been a giddy time. Since her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published last year, Klein, now thirty-eight, has become the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago. She speaks every few days, all over the world, and hundreds of people turn up to hear her. They visit her Web site and subscribe to her newsletter and send her passionate fan mail. She has become an icon’s icon...

and see the picture there.