Van Jones and Naomi Klein Discuss OWT with Chris Hayes (video)

MEDIAite, with video from MSNBC,(07:11):

Former White House “green jobs czar” turned Glenn Beck frienemy Van Jones has recently reemerged calling for the left to take notes from the populist uprisings America saw with the Tea Party movement, so it was no surprise that he expressed approval of the Occupy Wall Street movement this morning on Up with Chris Hayes. What was somewhat surprising, however, was his insistence in viewing the protests through a prism of failure on the left, and not on the right, with the way the nation was being governed. MORE...

Naomi Klein on Occupy Wall Street: "The Most Important Thing in the World Now"

Naomi Klein (The Nation):

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological. MORE...

Ezra Klein on "Cash Warfare" with Naomi Klein (video)

Ezra Klein (The Rachel Maddow Show), with video (10:00).

"The world after 9/11: Naomi Klein prevails again"

Gerald Kaplan (The Globe and Mail-CA):

Osama bin Laden inflicted a terrible crime on the American people. America’s elites and their allies have done the rest. MORE...

Naomi Klein on Anti-Union Bills and Shock Doctrine American-Style: "This is a Frontal Assault on Democracy, It’s a Kind of a Corporate Coup D’Etat"

Democracy Now! with video/text (20:06):

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country following the wake of Wall Street financial crisis, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her 2007 bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In the book, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies. “The Wisconsin protests are an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine,” Klein says. [includes rush transcript]

"Naomi Klein: Building a Real Left" (with video)

GRITtv, with video (10:00):

"We have to build that independent left. It has to be so strong and so radical and so militant and so powerful that it becomes irresistible."

Who better to say such a thing than Naomi Klein, Nation columnist, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, and longtime rabblerouser? Naomi makes a special visit to the GRITtv studio to talk about the recent G20 meetings in her hometown of Toronto, about Obama's recent return to a kind of populism, the looming midterm elections in the U.S., her reporting on the BP disaster in the Gulf, and what we can do to channel the growing rage in this country and in the world into a true progressive movement.

Naomi Klein: "The G20: A Global Menace Invented by Larry Summers" (with video)

rabbletv on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

naomiklein.org, with video:

Here in Toronto we are getting the predictable lectures about how burning cop cars and smashed Starbucks outlets distract attention from “legitimate” protestors and NGOs with “important messages.” It’s a nice theory, except for the fact that the non-violent protests were being completely ignored by the international press until stuff started burning.

But they were taking place all over Toronto, timed with the G20 summit. This is a speech I delivered on Friday night, at a terrific event organized by the Council of Canadians. It is about why the G20 deserves to be derailed, interrupted and, ultimately, shut down.

Howie P.S.: Democracy Now! (with audio, video) looks back at the Toronto G20 held June 26-27, 2010.

Naomi Klein: "The Real Crime Scene Was Inside the G20 Summit" (with video)

Democracy Now! with video:

As thousands protested in the streets of Toronto, inside the G20 summit world leaders agreed to a controversial goal of cutting government deficits in half by 2013. We speak with journalist Naomi Klein. "What actually happened at the summit is that the global elites just stuck the bill for their drunken binge with the world’s poor, with the people that are most vulnerable," Klein says.

Howie P.S.: She has an op-ed in the Globe and Mail today, titled Sticking the Public with the Bill for the Bankers’ Crisis.

"In Deep Water: A Way of Life in Peril" (video)

AlJazeeraEnglish, video (23:21):

In the two months since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, millions of litres of oil have gushed out of BP's well into the water each day, slowly encroaching on the coastline. Fault Lines' Avi Lewis travels to the drill zone, and learns about the erosion in the wetlands from industry canals and pipelines, the health problems blamed on contaminated air and water from petrochemical refineries.

Howie P.S.: Naomi Klein's "Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world" is in the Guardian (UK):

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism.

Haiti :"A Creditor, Not a Debtor " (The Nation-Naomi Klein, with video)

Naomi Klein (The Nation) with video (23:25):

If we are to believe the G-7 finance ministers, Haiti is on its way to getting something it has deserved for a very long time: full "forgiveness" of its foreign debt.

In Port-au-Prince, Haitian economist Camille Chalmers has been watching these developments with cautious optimism. Debt cancellation is a good start, he told Al Jazeera English, but "It's time to go much further. We have to talk about reparations and restitution for the devastating consequences of debt." In this telling, the whole idea that Haiti is a debtor needs to be abandoned. Haiti, he argues, is a creditor--and it is we, in the West, who are deeply in arrears.

Our debt to Haiti stems from four main sources: slavery, the US occupation, dictatorship and climate change. These claims are not fantastical, nor are they merely rhetorical. They rest on multiple violations of legal norms and agreements. Here, far too briefly, are highlights of the Haiti case.

§ The Slavery Debt. When Haitians won their independence from France in 1804, they would have had every right to claim reparations from the powers that had profited from three centuries of stolen labor. France, however, was convinced that it was Haitians who had stolen the property of slave owners by refusing to work for free. So in 1825, with a flotilla of war ships stationed off the Haitian coast threatening to re-enslave the former colony, King Charles X came to collect: 90 million gold francs--ten times Haiti's annual revenue at the time. With no way to refuse, and no way to pay, the young nation was shackled to a debt that would take 122 years to pay off.

In 2003, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, facing a crippling economic embargo, announced that Haiti would sue the French government over that long-ago heist. "Our argument," Aristide's former lawyer Ira Kurzban told me, "was that the contract was an invalid agreement because it was based on the threat of re-enslavement at a time when the international community regarded slavery as an evil." The French government was sufficiently concerned that it sent a mediator to Port-au-Prince to keep the case out of court. In the end, however, its problem was eliminated: while trial preparations were under way, Aristide was toppled from power. The lawsuit disappeared, but for many Haitians the reparations claim lives on.

§ The Dictatorship Debt. From 1957 to 1986, Haiti was ruled by the defiantly kleptocratic Duvalier regime. Unlike the French debt, the case against the Duvaliers made it into several courts, which traced Haitian funds to an elaborate network of Swiss bank accounts and lavish properties. In 1988 Kurzban won a landmark suit against Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier when a US District Court in Miami found that the deposed ruler had "misappropriated more than $504,000,000 from public monies."

Haitians, of course, are still waiting for their payback--but that was only the beginning of their losses. For more than two decades, the country's creditors insisted that Haitians honor the huge debts incurred by the Duvaliers, estimated at $844 million, much of it owed to institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. In debt service alone, Haitians have paid out tens of millions every year.

Was it legal for foreign lenders to collect on the Duvalier debts when so much of it was never spent in Haiti? Very likely not. As Cephas Lumina, the United Nations Independent Expert on foreign debt, put it to me, "the case of Haiti is one of the best examples of odious debt in the world. On that basis alone the debt should be unconditionally canceled."

But even if Haiti does see full debt cancellation (a big if), that does not extinguish its right to be compensated for illegal debts already collected.

§ The Climate Debt. Championed by several developing countries at the climate summit in Copenhagen, the case for climate debt is straightforward. Wealthy countries that have so spectacularly failed to address the climate crisis they caused owe a debt to the developing countries that have done little to cause the crisis but are disproportionately facing its effects. In short: the polluter pays. Haiti has a particularly compelling claim. Its contribution to climate change has been negligible; Haiti's per capita CO2 emissions are just 1 percent of US emissions. Yet Haiti is among the hardest hit countries--according to one index, only Somalia is more vulnerable to climate change.

Haiti's vulnerability to climate change is not only--or even mostly--because of geography. Yes, it faces increasingly heavy storms. But it is Haiti's weak infrastructure that turns challenges into disasters and disasters into full-fledged catastrophes. The earthquake, though not linked to climate change, is a prime example. And this is where all those illegal debt payments may yet extract their most devastating cost. Each payment to a foreign creditor was money not spent on a road, a school, an electrical line. And that same illegitimate debt empowered the IMF and World Bank to attach onerous conditions to each new loan, requiring Haiti to deregulate its economy and slash its public sector still further. Failure to comply was met with a punishing aid embargo from 2001 to '04, the death knell to Haiti's public sphere.

This history needs to be confronted now, because it threatens to repeat itself. Haiti's creditors are already using the desperate need for earthquake aid to push for a fivefold increase in garment-sector production, some of the most exploitative jobs in the country. Haitians have no status in these talks, because they are regarded as passive recipients of aid, not full and dignified participants in a process of redress and restitution.

A reckoning with the debts the world owes to Haiti would radically change this poisonous dynamic. This is where the real road to repair begins: by recognizing the right of Haitians to reparations.

Naomi Klein on SOTU (Demcracy Now!) (with audio/video)

Naomi Klein, via Democracy Now! with audio/video (13:07):

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, right now—well, you just flew into Park City, Utah just before President Obama’s State of the Union address. Your reaction to it?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I mean, we knew the spending freeze was going to come, but to me, it’s really striking. I think what this moment represents is the decision, which we all feared would come, to pass the bill on from saving Wall Street, from saving the elites of this country from their own mess, a bill worth trillions of dollars, to regular people in need in this country. I mean, that’s what a spending freeze really means.

And we have to look at it in the context of the debt crisis that is occurring at the state level. There’s deficit—huge deficits being run up. California is the most dramatic example, but you’re already seeing how students are facing things like 30 percent tuition increases. Women’s shelters are being closed. So, you know, when the President says freeze spending, that’s saying to the states, “We’re not going to help you. We’re not going to bail you out.”

So this is really—this, to me, all comes back to the top-down bailout that should never have taken place in the first place, the decision that was made to throw the taxpayer dollars at the banks, at the elites, no strings attached, not to help the people losing their jobs, losing their homes. And now the bill is being passed on, because the debt crisis, the private-sector debt crisis, which started this, the banks racking up these huge debts, was never solved. It was just moved. It was just moved to the public coffers.

And now Obama is—this is a Hoover move. This is a Herbert Hoover move. And I think we have to say very clearly, he is not FDR. And, you know, in the spirit of Howard Zinn, who passed yesterday, I keep thinking, you know, what would he say about the State of the Union? And I think he would tell us to refuse to pay this bill, that we need a debtors’ revolt.

Haiti: "Exploitation Nation?" (Newsweek)

Is This Looting?

What's the difference between desperation and danger

Newsweek:

Naomi Klein worries Haitians won't have a role shaping their future.---Bottom feeders follow closely on the heels of disaster. After Hurricane Katrina, private security contractors landed in New Orleans, hired to guard against looters. After the Indian Ocean tsunami, governments in Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, and the Maldives pushed aside coastal villages to make way for resort developers. That kind of profiteering is standard fare. But is it organized? That's what author Naomi Klein says in her book The Shock Doctrine, arguing that "disaster capitalists" take advantage of post-crisis chaos to push through a set of free-market reforms that further their own interests, rather than those of the victims. Is that the case in Haiti right now, even as rescue operations are still underway? NEWSWEEK's Katie Paul chatted with Klein about what she—and the 20,000 people who have already joined the No Shock Doctrine for Haiti group on Facebook—are watching out for this time around. Excerpts:

You've noted in Shock Doctrine how disasters like this earthquake are perfect opportunities for so-called disaster capitalists to move in and profit. Are you seeing evidence of that so far in Haiti?

The shock doctrine is the use of disasters to avoid democracy—using the state of dislocation following a disaster to say that people aren't able to make decisions, so someone else needs to do it for them. But that means policies are pushed through very quickly—unpopular policies that were often on a wish list for elites anyway, but that can suddenly be implemented because people are either traumatized or literally wiped out. In the case of Haiti, the Heritage Foundation didn't even wait 24 hours before they called for the Obama administration to reform Haiti's economy. They also suggested that George W. Bush be appointed and, lo and behold, he was appointed the next day. So they appear to have an audience.

Wait, isn't that standard—
Right, but that idea was first floated on the Heritage Foundation Web site.

—that he's appointed alongside President Clinton?
It's unclear who Bill Clinton is working for. Is it the U.N., the Obama administration, his own foundation? We've already heard talk of a Marshall Plan for Haiti—by Haiti's largest foreign investor, a cell-phone company, at a meeting in Florida with Bill Clinton. Now, they may have very good plans. But the point is that Haitians are not being included in the planning.

Wouldn't cell-phone service be important right away? Lack of communication is a big problem in the relief effort.
Absolutely. When it comes to distributing aid, speed is of the essence. But it's entirely inappropriate to be setting priorities that Haitians will have to live with for decades, like with this Marshall Plan. When it comes to rebuilding, speed can be very damaging—and can be an excuse for avoiding citizen participation. If there's anything we know from New Orleans and Iraq, there needs to be transparency. I don't usually do this, but I'll quote John McCain: early on with Iraq, he said that Iraq is a big pot of honey and there are a lot of flies. Right now, Haiti is the pot of honey. Billions of dollars are going to be allocated for reconstruction. If we want to make sure that whatever gets built is what Haitians want built, then let's lay down that principle now. Once contracts are handed out, there's no going back. Are you actually seeing contracts being handed out already? It's so early.
There's a huge amount of lobbying going on already. But there are really core questions about what Haiti's postquake economy should look like. So, for example, the garment sector wants the new economy to give them shiny new export zones, tax breaks, public money to rebuild their factories—but we also know that they don't pay taxes that build Haiti's public sector, which is part of what deepened this disaster.

In order for any of these big decisions to be truly representative of Haitian desires, wouldn't they need to be made after democratic elections? Given the damage, it seems like that would be a long way off.
That should be built into the cost of reconstruction. We're months away from any actual rebuilding, so there's no need to hand out contracts now. In fact, I think there should be a freeze on contracts until there are mechanisms in place to allow Haitians to participate in a national reconstruction plan. We're talking about designing a country. It isn't about rebuilding it exactly as it was, because everyone would agree that's unacceptable.

How can reconstruction be done without replicating the existing power structures, which have been so problematic for so long?
There should be line items for community-development plans, even referendums. And no contract should be handed out without guarantees that the work will be done by Haitians, at a living wage. People who are donating money right now should be asking a lot of questions about how their money is being spent.

Can you give an example of a country that has managed a disaster economy well?
The community-based responses to the tsunami in Thailand were amazing. Communities set up councils, then worked with architects and planners who actually asked them they wanted their own communities to look like. So often, there's an assumption that a 22-year-old from the Kennedy School knows more about what's best for a country than someone in their 60s who's lived there his entire life. But that's an infantalization of a country.

You've noted that the relief effort so far has been overly militarized. Given that the military is responsible for coordinating much of the aid, why do you think that's inappropriate?
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every day that people are not receiving food, it becomes harder to maintain order.

What we're hearing from U.N. and aid agencies is that they're afraid of going out without military escort. And what we just saw during the quake is that some foreign investors had their own parallel privatized disaster infrastructure. Citigroup sent in private-security SWAT teams equipped with medical supplies and satellite phones to save their people, but not their neighbors. That's dehumanizing. Aid should be prioritized over security. Any aid agency that's afraid of Haitians should get out of Haiti.

"Naomi Klein: Don't Let The Disaster Capitalists Get Their Hands On Haiti" (with video)

Susie Madrak (Crooks and Liars) with video (04:12):

[H/t Heather.]

Haiti was a nation of farmers, but thanks to the strings attached to U.S. aid, government policies made profitable farming unprofitable. So the farmers were pushed to the cities to provide a cheap manufacturing labor force. All those people you see on the TV in their shattered shantytowns? We helped put them there. With exploitative loans and yes, even a classic CIA-backed coup, we helped create this mess.

Here's Naomi Klein, the author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," speaking Wednesday night at the Ethical Culture Society to warn us against it happening again:

But as I write about in The Shock Doctrine, crises are often used now as the pretext for pushing through policies that you cannot push through under times of stability. Countries in periods of extreme crisis are desperate for any kind of aid, any kind of money, and are not in a position to negotiate fairly the terms of that exchange.

And I just want to pause for a second and read you something, which is pretty extraordinary. I just put this up on my website. The headline is “Haiti: Stop Them Before They Shock Again.” This went up a few hours ago, three hours ago, I believe, on the Heritage Foundation website.

“Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S. In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the image of the United States in the region.” And then goes on.

Now, I don’t know whether things are improving or not, because it took the Heritage Foundation thirteen days before they issued thirty-two free market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. We put that document up on our website, as well. It was close down the housing projects, turn the Gulf Coast into a tax-free free enterprise zone, get rid of the labor laws that forces contractors to pay a living wage. Yeah, so it took them thirteen days before they did that in the case of Katrina. In the case of Haiti, they didn’t even wait twenty-four hours.

Now, why I say I don’t know whether it’s improving or not is that two hours ago they took this down. So somebody told them that it wasn’t couth. And then they put up something that was much more delicate. Fortunately, the investigative reporters at Democracy Now! managed to find that earlier document in a Google cache. But what you’ll find now is a much gentler “Things to Remember While Helping Haiti.” And buried down there, it says, “Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.”

But the point is, we need to make sure that the aid that goes to Haiti is, one, grants, not loans. This is absolutely crucial. This is an already heavily indebted country. This is a disaster that, as Amy said, on the one hand is nature, is, you know, an earthquake; on the other hand is the creation, is worsened by the poverty that our governments have been so complicit in deepening. Crises—natural disasters are so much worse in countries like Haiti, because you have soil erosion because the poverty means people are building in very, very precarious ways, so houses just slide down because they are built in places where they shouldn’t be built. All of this is interconnected. But we have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy, which is part natural, part unnatural, must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti, and, two, to push through unpopular corporatist policies in the interests of our corporations.

And this is not a conspiracy theory. They have done it again and again.

"Obama rejects criticism on health-care reform legislation"

WaPo:

President Obama rejected in an interview Tuesday the criticism that he has compromised too much in order to secure health-care reform legislation, challenging his critics to identify any "gap" between what he campaigned on last year and what Congress is on the verge of passing.

"Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between the perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health-care bill," Obama said in an Oval Office interview with The Washington Post about his legislative record this year. "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill."

As the Senate prepares to pass its version of health-care reform, Obama has come under sharp criticism for the size and shape of the legislation, including most recently from the left wing of his own party.

Former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, for one, has said he would prefer that the Democrat-controlled Senate defeat the bill rather than have what he considers to be weak legislation pass into law.

In the interview, Obama offered a vigorous defense of the legislation and the priorities he set out in shaping it, saying he is "not just grudgingly supporting the bill. I am very enthusiastic about what we have achieved."

He said the Senate legislation accomplishes "95 percent" of what he called for during his 2008 presidential campaign and in his September speech to a joint session of Congress on the need for health-care reform.

In listing those priorities, Obama cited the 30 million uninsured Americans projected to receive coverage, budget estimates of more than $1 trillion in savings over the next two decades, a "patients' bill of rights on steroids" to protect consumers from being dropped by insurance companies, and tax breaks to help small businesses pay to cover employees.

Those elements are in the House and Senate versions of health-care legislation, whose competing elements will have to be reconciled in conference committee early next year. The House bill includes a public option, the government-run plan favored by Dean and other progressive Democrats, but the Senate version leaves it out.

Obama said the public option "has become a source of ideological contention between the left and right." But, he added, "I didn't campaign on the public option."

"We don't feel that the core elements to help the American people have been compromised in any significant way," Obama said. "Do these pieces of legislation have exactly everything I want? Of course not. But they have the things that are necessary to reduce costs for businesses, families and the government."

Obama used the interview to outline his legislative achievements this year, a record dominated by the $787 billion stimulus measure passed in February and the eight-month health-care debate. But his record also includes a number of lesser-known measures.

Those include bills to ensure equal pay across gender lines, an expansion of hate-crime legislation and children's health insurance, stronger tobacco regulation, military procurement reform, and consumer credit-card protections.

Together, he said, these bills, many of which are highly popular among his party's left wing, "will make life better for many Americans."

On taking office in the midst of a severe financial crisis, Obama, a former U.S. senator whose senior staff includes many Hill veterans, settled on a legislative strategy that departed from those of his predecessors.

He decided that, rather than pursue big pieces of legislation one at a time, his administration would seek health-care reform, a cap-and-trade bill, financial reform legislation and other measures simultaneously.

"In some ways, we just didn't have an option," Obama said. "Because of the financial crisis, we had to make a series of decisions that, back in 2007 when my presidential campaign began, were not at the top of our list."

"What I thought was very important not to do was further delay work on some of the big-ticket items that I had been elected to achieve and that were critical for our long-term economic growth," he continued.

Obama said he "could have put off" health-care reform, adding that "there are some people who would say that wouldn't be such a bad thing -- the opponents of reform."

But he said delaying on that issue, which has been tied to the country's future fiscal and financial health, would have continued the "double-digit" rise in health-care costs and increase the burden on businesses paying for employee coverage.

"Given how difficult fighting the special interest has been on Capitol Hill, it's clear that, if we hadn't decided to make a bold step forward this year, we probably wouldn't have had the political capital to get it done in the future," he said. "Sooner or later we had to take that on, even though we knew it would be politically difficult."

But Obama acknowledged that cap-and-trade legislation and financial reform -- bills the House passed this year but the Senate did not -- would carry over into the mid-term election year when political calculations always slow down measures before Congress.

"I think there's no doubt that energy legislation is going to be tough," Obama said. "But I feel very confident in making an argument to the American people that we should be a leader in clean energy technology, that that will be one of the key elements that will drive growth for years to come."

Howie P.S.: Naomi Klein takes Obama to task for missing three Blown Opportunities "to transform the US into something that doesn't threaten the stability of life on this planet."

"President Obama, Outdoing John Bolton, Blows Up the UN by Remote Control from Copenhagen" (video)

Progressive Alaska, video (17:27):

Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein address reporters yesterday evening on Obama's Copenhagen sellout to polluters.

Howie P.S.: The video is by UpTakeVideo. They give it this title: "Klein & McKibben: Take off the kid gloves with Obama" and this description:

In a late evening interview, Naomi Klein of The Nation and Bill McKibben of 350.org react to President Obama's Copenhagen speeches from earlier in the day. UN Climate Change Conference. Copenhagen. December 18, 2009. Distributed by Tubemogul.

"Climate Crackdown: UN Bars Friends of the Earth and Other Environmental Groups From Climate Talks" (video)

Democracy Now! with video:

The crackdown around the UN climate talks in Copenhagen is intensifying. Earlier today the United Nations suspended several mainstream environmental groups and barred members from re-entering the conference. Organizations targeted include Friends of the Earth, Tck Tck Tck, Avaaz, World Vision and Via Campesina. Democracy Now caught up with Nnimmo Bassey, the prominent Nigerian environmentalist, just as he was being removed by security from the conference.

Howie P.S.: More from Democracy Now! live in Copenhagen: here and here and here and here. Naomi Klein says "US Politicians, Don't Come to Copenhagen" (The Nation, with video from GristTv). Like US health care, the message from the activists is "no deal is better than a bad deal."

Naomi Klein: "Memo to Danes: Even You Cannot Control This Summit" (with videos)

Naomi Klein: The Nation, with videos from InvestigateWest:

On Saturday night, after a week of living off of conference center snack bars, a group of us were invited to a delicious home-cooked meal with a real live Danish family. After spending the evening gawking at their stylish furnishings, a few of us had a question: Why are Danes so good at design?

"We're control freaks," our hostess replied instantly. "It comes from being a small country with not much power. We have to control what we can."

When it comes to producing absurdly appealing light fixtures and shockingly comfortable desk chairs, that Danish form of displacement is clearly a very good thing. When it comes to hosting a world-changing summit, the Danish need for control is proving to be a serious problem.

The Danes have invested a huge amount of money co-branding their capitol city (now "Hopenhagen") with a summit that will supposedly save the world. That would be fine if this summit actually were on track to save the world. But since it isn't, the Danes are frantically trying to redesign us.

Take the weekend's protests. By the end, around 1,100 people had been arrested. That's just nuts. Saturday's march of roughly 100,000 people came at a crucial juncture in the climate negotiations, when all signs pointed either to break down or a dangerously weak deal. The march was festive and peaceful but also tough. "The Climate Doesn't Negotiate" was the message, and western negotiators need to head it.

When a handful of people starting throwing stones and setting off sound grenades (no, they weren't "gunshots" as the Huffington Post breathlessly reported, the marchers handled it themselves, instructing the people responsible to leave the protest, which they promptly did. I was in that part of the march, and it barely interrupted my conversation. Calling this a "riot," as the British Telegraph absurdly did, really isn't fair to serious rioters, of which there are plenty in Europe.

Never mind. The Copenhagen cops used a little shattered glass as the pretext for detaining almost a thousand people, picking up another hundred the next day. Hundreds of those arrested were corralled together, forced to sit on the freezing pavement for hours, with wrists cuffed (and some ankles too). According to organizer Tadzio Müller, these were not the people who threw rocks but "the treatment was humiliating," with some of the detainees urinating on themselves because they were not allowed to move.

The arrests, part of a pattern all week, felt like a warning: deviations from the "Hopenhagen" message will not be tolerated.

Inside the official summit, delegates apparently gathered around flat screen TVs and watched the police push protestors against walls and break up the march. For some it must have felt familiar. After all, that's pretty much what the Danish government and other Western powers have been doing here all week: trying to break up the G77 bloc of developing countries by using classic divide and conquer tactics, including pushing especially vulnerable states up against the wall with special offers.

Having learned nothing from the "leaked Danish text," this evening featured a meeting of 40 states invited to hash out a deal; the rest of the ministers from the 192 states represented have no idea what they decided--hardly the democracy promised by the UN.

The real test of Danish control issues will come on Wednesday, at the Reclaim Power action. In the morning demonstrators are going to march to the Bella Center to demand real solutions to the climate crisis, not the fuzzy math and carbon trading on offer inside. The delegates on the inside who feel the same way--and there are thousands--are being invited to join the demonstrators.

If all goes well, somewhere in the vicinity of the Bella Center will be a "people's assembly," a chance to highlight some of the many common sense solutions that have been shut out of the official negotiations, including keeping Alberta's tar sands in the ground and paying climate "reparations."

The organizers of Reclaim Power have stated clearly that they are committed to non-violent civil disobedience. Even if attacked by police, they will not respond with violence. Still, the specter of unscripted dissent upstaging the official conference on Wednesday no doubt has our Danish hosts deeply freaked out.

Let's hope they don't deal with their control issues by trying to hoard everyone into pens: the protestors kept far from the Bella Center; the delegates locked inside. Because this action--more than anything that has happened so far--has the potential to send a clear and much-needed message to the world: only a deal that is dictated by both science and justice will do.

So memo to our Danish hosts: sure, Copenhagen is your city, and we love you for your bicycles and windmills. But it's everyone's planet. Stop trying to design us out of the picture.

"Sudden death: Give Obama time?" (video)

UpTakeVideo (01:19):

Naomi Klein, columnist for The Nation, asks: "A lot of people say, give Obama time. The guy was just elected - what do you say to that?"

Nnimmo Bassey, the Nigerian-born chair of Friends of the Earth International, says: "Give Obama time? The world cannot afford to give any more time. Now we've come to the brink. It's time for decision." Bassey compares our current situation to a soccer game. We've had plenty of chances to address global warming, but now we're at the moment of "sudden death."

Produced by Chuck Olsen for The UpTake. Special thanks to Naomi Klein and Jacob Wheeler.

Live from Copenhagen: "Naomi Klein and Martin Khor on The Growing North/South Divide" (video)

Democracy Now! with video:

The secret draft climate agreement leaked to the Guardian newspaper yesterday sets unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050. This means that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much as those in poor countries. The document also proposes a $10 billion a year fund to help developing nations cut emissions and tackle the effects of climate change. But the fund is far smaller than what many delegates advocate.

Howie P.S.: More from Naomi Klein in Copenhagen: "Where Africa Took On Obama" (The Nation).

"Naomi Klein kick-starts the activism at Copenhagen with call for disobedience" (with video)

Guardian UK, with video from Democracy Now!:

The Copenhagen deal may turn into the worst kind of disaster capitalism, Naomi Klein said last night.

In her speech to Klimaforum09, the "people's summit" she told the thousand or so campaigners and activists that this was a chance to carry on building the new convergence, the movement of movements that began "all those years ago in Seattle, fighting against the privatisation of life itself". Here was an opportunity to "continue the conversation that was so rudely interrupted by 9/11".

"Down the road at the Bella Centre [where delegates are meeting] there is the worst case of disaster capitalism that we have ever witnessed. We know that what is being proposed in the Bella Centre doesn't even come close to the deal that is needed. We know the paltry emissions cuts that Obama has proposed; they're insulting. We're the ones who created this crisis... on the basic historical principle of polluters pays, we should pay."

Around the city, opening events were kicking off a fortnight of negotiations, debate and protest. In the morning Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC, and Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark, opened the conference with a plea for action.

Later, in the centre of town special UN envoy Gro Harlem Brundtland and climate change UN chief Yvo de Boer declared the heavily branded Hopenhagen open, as a globe bearing a large Siemens logos was illuminated. The popular Danish band Nephew kicked off (to bigger cheers than Brundtland or de Boer).

And in the evening Klein joined with Henry Saragih, the general convenor of the Via Campesina movement, and international Friends of the Earth chair Nnimmo Bassey, to declare Klimaforum09 the "real event in Copenhagen".

Saragih called for food sovereignty - greater power for small farmers - and said that changes to agricultural practices could reduce carbon emissions by up to 50%.

Bassey said that crude oil only appeared cheap because we do not pay the true price, and told the audience; "Leave the oil in the soil, leave the coal in the hole, leave the tarsand in the land".
And Klein finished up:

We have to be the lie detectors here. Let's not restrict ourselves to polite marches and formulaic panel discussions. If Seattle was the coming out party, this should be the coming of age party. And, as a friend of mine called John Jordan says, I hope that we have grown up to be even more disobedient. Why are thousands of us burning fossil fuels to get here? Because we have to build a global mass movement that will not allow leaders to get away with what they are trying to get away with.

Think of it as the mother of all carbon offsets.

Howie P.S.: Meanwhile, "Ahead of Copenhagen Talks, Tens of Thousands Protest Across Europe Calling for Climate Justice" (Democracy Now! with video). Locally, "Seattle's greenhouse gas emissions in 2008 were below 1990 levels" (Seattle Times). But don't get too happy:

But while Seattle has made strides in trying to stem the growth of the emissions that scientists say contribute to global climate change, it's not at all clear how or if the city will still meet the goal three years from now.

Overall, emissions have actually grown since 2005, thanks to population growth, new development and at least one particularly cold winter. Emissions from the single largest polluting sector — cars and trucks — rose 5.5 percent just since 2005. The recession likely prevented them from climbing higher.

In fact, without significant changes vehicle transportation may prevent the city in 2012 from holding emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels.

"We still have substantial challenges ahead," said Mike Mann, director of the city's Office of Sustainability and Environment.