Naomi Klein

atching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles in 2002: “You are Enron. We are Argentina.”

Its message was simple enough. You--politicians and CEOs huddled at some trade summit--are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course, we didn't know the half of it). We--the rabble outside--are like the people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They shouted, "¡Que se vayan todos!" ("All of them must go!") and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina's 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn't directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model--this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.

It's taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment.

The stoic Icelandic matriarchs beating their pots flat even as their kids ransack the fridge for projectiles (eggs, sure, but yogurt?) echo the tactics made famous in Buenos Aires. So does the collective rage at elites who trashed a once thriving country and thought they could get away with it. As Gudrun Jonsdottir, a 36-year-old Icelandic office worker, put it: "I've just had enough of this whole thing. I don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the political parties and I don't trust the IMF. We had a good country, and they ruined it."

Another echo: in Reykjavik, the protesters clearly won't be bought off by a mere change of face at the top (even if the new PM is a lesbian). They want aid for people, not just banks; criminal investigations into the debacle; and deep electoral reform.

Similar demands can be heard these days in Latvia, whose economy has contracted more sharply than any country in the EU, and where the government is teetering on the brink. For weeks the capital has been rocked by protests, including a full-blown, cobblestone-hurling riot on January 13. As in Iceland, Latvians are appalled by their leaders' refusal to take any responsibility for the mess. Asked by Bloomberg TV what caused the crisis, Latvia's finance minister shrugged: "Nothing special."

But Latvia's troubles are indeed special: the very policies that allowed the "Baltic Tiger" to grow at a rate of 12 percent in 2006 are also causing it to contract violently by a projected 10 percent this year: money, freed of all barriers, flows out as quickly as it flows in, with plenty being diverted to political pockets. (It is no coincidence that many of today's basket cases are yesterday's "miracles": Ireland, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia.)

Something else Argentina-esque is in the air. In 2001 Argentina's leaders responded to the crisis with a brutal International Monetary Fund-prescribed austerity package: $9 billion in spending cuts, much of it hitting health and education. This proved to be a fatal mistake. Unions staged a general strike, teachers moved their classes to the streets and the protests never stopped.

This same bottom-up refusal to bear the brunt of the crisis unites many of today's protests. In Latvia, much of the popular rage has focused on government austerity measures--mass layoffs, reduced social services and slashed public sector salaries--all to qualify for an IMF emergency loan (no, nothing has changed). In Greece, December's riots followed a police shooting of a 15-year-old. But what's kept them going, with farmers taking the lead from students, is widespread rage at the government's crisis response: banks got a $36 billion bailout while workers got their pensions cut and farmers received next to nothing. Despite the inconvenience caused by tractors blocking roads, 78 percent of Greeks say the farmers' demands are reasonable. Similarly, in France the recent general strike--triggered in part by President Sarkozy's plans to reduce the number of teachers dramatically--inspired the support of 70 percent of the population.

Perhaps the sturdiest thread connecting this global backlash is a rejection of the logic of "extraordinary politics"--the phrase coined by Polish politician Leszek Balcerowicz to describe how, in a crisis, politicians can ignore legislative rules and rush through unpopular "reforms." That trick is getting tired, as South Korea's government recently discovered. In December, the ruling party tried to use the crisis to ram through a highly controversial free trade agreement with the United States. Taking closed-door politics to new extremes, legislators locked themselves in the chamber so they could vote in private, barricading the door with desks, chairs and couches.

Opposition politicians were having none of it: with sledgehammers and an electric saw, they broke in and staged a twelve-day sit-in of Parliament. The vote was delayed, allowing for more debate--a victory for a new kind of "extraordinary politics."

Here in Canada, politics is markedly less YouTube-friendly--but it has still been surprisingly eventful. In October the Conservative Party won national elections on an unambitious platform. Six weeks later, our Tory prime minister found his inner ideologue, presenting a budget bill that stripped public sector workers of the right to strike, canceled public funding for political parties and contained no economic stimulus. Opposition parties responded by forming a historic coalition that was only prevented from taking power by an abrupt suspension of Parliament. The Tories have just come back with a revised budget: the pet right-wing policies have disappeared, and it is packed with economic stimulus.

The pattern is clear: governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale. As Italy's students have taken to shouting in the streets: "We won't pay for your crisis!"

---

About Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002).
 

---

Want your opinion to be heard? Make a comment and have it posted here, uncensored and unedited! as long as it's written in a civilized manner. Write me an email and put the same title in your email subject line as the name of the article you want to comment on. You can be anonymous if you like, or write under a pseudonym. Wes Penre.

---

Important Definitions:

[i] ^ The word Illuminati means 1. People claiming to be unusually enlightened with regard to a subject. 2. Illuminati: Any of various groups claiming special religious enlightenment.  Latin illmint, from pl. of illmintus, past participle of illminre, to light up. See illuminate.

These definitions are taken from "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language".

Like the definitions say, any group which considers itself "enlightened" could rightfully call itself the Illuminati. So is also the case. If you google "The Illuminati", you will find quite a few groups claiming this name.

It can be confusing, so before we continue, I want to make very clear that the Illuminati we are discussing here is NOT a benevolent secret society who wants to create peace and harmony in this world by helping to bring freedom to the people. Such a benevolent group DOES exist and happens to call themselves "The Illuminati", and is actually the original group using this name.

They have been working behind the scenes for a very long time to help humanity free themselves from the chains we have been stuck in for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the Powers That Be, the evil puppet masters running this show on war and destruction, infiltrated the truth movement already in an early stage by adopting  the term Illuminati to describe themselves, thus using the same name as the original benevolent group. This to further confuse the matter.

Now, almost all researchers (including myself) have adopted the term "Illuminati" to describe the Dark Side, and by doing so, we have to a certain degree unwittingly helped discrediting the benevolent group with this original name and made it harder for them to get the job done.

Therefore, I will let this definition follow each and every article posted on this website from now on in an effort to try to clear up the confusion. I apologize that so many people now have mixed up the groups, and I have partly, but ignorant to this fact until recently, been responsible for that.

The point is that the Illuminati I am exposing here is the super-rich Power Elite with an ambition to maintain the slave society they have been working so hard to accomplish over the millennia!

[ii] ^ The term "New World Order", just like the term "Illuminati", has been used by at least two different groups, meaning basically two different things:

1) A goal to put an end to the current Order (called "The Old World Order" - OWO), which is considered evil and anti-survival, and therefore the current power elite needs to be overthrown and their Old World Order to be destroyed and replaced with a benevolent "New World Order". The goal is a humanity-friendly One World Government. The means putting an end to the current Old World Order with violence, if necessary.

Personally, I don't agree with using violence to stop the Old World Order, as I am more into a spiritual solution (see elsewhere on my website), but I want to make my readers aware of that there IS a group calling themselves "The Illuminati", who want to replace the current Old World Order (the Rothschilds, Rockefellers etc.) with a benevolent New World Order, where people are no longer slaves to this Power Elite.

2) A goal to create a micro-chipped society, so that they more easily can maintain the current Order that they have created throughout the millennia. This is the "New World Order" the Bush's, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, Gordon Brown, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others are supporting and working on maintaining. This is also the "New World Order" I am fighting against via this website.

Just like in the case with the term "Illuminati", this second group has confused researchers and truth seekers by using the basically benevolent term "New World Order" for their negative and malevolent goals. This has made it harder for the Resistance to operate, because both "The Illuminati" and the "New World Order" have been used as a propaganda for the Dark Side and everything connected to these two terms now are perceived as negative.

If we really look at it, it's nothing "new" with what this Power Elite officially calls the "New World Order", but no more than an effort to hold on to the Old World Order they have already created.

I hope this to some degree makes things clearer.