Three Cheers for Naomi Klein

29° 20' North; 48° 00' East

And not just because she's Canadian (but take that anyway CBC, and take your stinking 'Top-10 List' with you too!).

No.

Mostly it's because Ms. Klein kicks Neandercon Butt every chance she gets.

For example, in the last six months alone she has:

1) Exposed the disaster of post-war Iraq for what it truly is, a failed Neandercon scorched earth policy.

2) Told nouveau-Neandercon dandies Nick Cohen and Christopher 'Hanging From My Forelock' Hitchens to go to hell while detailing how Jerry 'Suits in Boots' Bremmer, John 'IranContra' Negroponte, Ayad 'Don't Call Me Puppet' Allawi and their CIA-trained thugs have managed to turn free-election touting theocrat Muqtada al-Sadr into the country's one true democrat in the eyes of the Iraqi population.

3) Detailed how occupied Iraq is being forced to pay hundreds of million of dollars to multinational corporations for no good reason at all. In the last round of 'reparations' dozens of companies received huge payouts for no other reason than the fact that they may have had a possible decline in business and/or profit due to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. As a result Haliburton received $18million, Pepsi(!) received $4million and even Kentucky Fried Chicken(!!) and Toys 'R' Us(!!!) received hundreds of thousands of dollars. This at a time when many, many Iraqis have open sewers in the streets, inadequate potable water, and a disappearing hope.

4) Outed Poppy Bush's former Secretary of State and George II's current Debt Leverager James Baker as a cheap-jack influence peddling extortionist. This one is huge. Essentially, the Carlyle Group, in which Baker has a $180 million stake, was set to make a $1 billion windfall by fronting for a 'Consortium' that was simultaneously portraying Baker as the 'fixer' that would make like Bono to convince the world that it should forgive all Iraqi foreign debt/reparations and as a 'lobbyist' for Kuwait that would make sure the latter got all of its debt/reparation payments from Iraq. How's that for a Neandercon Con of Cons?


So how do Klein and her side-kick Avi Lewis do it? Clearly they don't have any bigtime/bigmoney media sugardaddy backing them, which is probably just as well because, as such, their loyalties are not for sale. What's more, when they went to Iraq they didn't spend their time driving around in white SUV's in Baghdad's green zone like most of the other other N. American journos. Instead, they actually got out into the countryside and talked to real Iraqis.

Funny how journalism can be so powerful when somebody follows their own nose and the 5W's.
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Update: Klein's latest work has borne fruit, because the Carlyle group has indicated that it has "pulled out of a scheme to recover billions of dollars from Iraq, following the publication..... of documents detailing the secret proposals of a consortium with which it was involved". Wow!