Naomi Klein

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Naomi Klein

Born:	May 5, 1970 Montreal, Quebec
Occupation:	journalist, author, activist
Subjects:	anti-globalization
Website:	NoLogo.org

Naomi Klein (born May 5, 1970 ^[1]) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist. She was born into a political family in Montreal, Quebec, and now lives in Toronto with her husband Avi Lewis.

Her grandfather was fired for labor organizing at Disney in the United States. Her father Michael, a physician, was a Vietnam War resister (draft dodger) who fled to Canada and became a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her film-maker mother, Bonnie, won fame with her anti-pornography film, Not a Love Story^[2]. Her brother Seth is director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Klein's writing career started early with contributions to The Varsity, a University of Toronto student newspaper. She served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper. She credits her wake-up call to feminism as the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of female engineering students.

Klein left university without taking a degree, deciding to pursue a career as a journalist. She wrote for This Magazine and reported on the 1993 Canadian federal elections for MuchMusic. It was in this latter role that she first met and interviewed the man who became her husband. Avi Lewis is a television journalist who, like Klein, comes from a political activist background, as the son of Canada's former ambassador to the United Nations Stephen Lewis (and present United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa) and Michele Landsberg, a journalist.

Klein became the editor of THIS Magazine and then weekly columnist for the Toronto Star. It was during this time that she began work on No Logo.

In 2000, Klein published the book No Logo, which for many became a manifesto of the anti-globalization movement. This movement had shut down the WTO Meeting of 1999 one month before the release of No Logo. The book lambasts brand-oriented consumer culture by describing the operations of large corporations. Their products, she argues, turn people into walking billboards. These corporations are also often guilty of exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of ever-greater profits, she writes. Klein criticized Nike so much in the book that it became one of the first publications to receive feedback from the company. ^[3]

In 2002 Klein published Fences and Windows, a collection of articles and speeches she had written on behalf of the anti-globalization movement (all proceeds from the book go to benefit activist organizations through The Fences and Windows Fund). Klein also contributes to The Nation, In These Times, Canada's The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, and The Guardian.

She has continued to write on various current issues, such as the war in Iraq. In a September 2004 article for Harper's Magazine entitled "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia"^[4], she argues that, contrary to popular belief and criticisms, the Bush administration did have a clear plan for post-invasion Iraq, which was to build a fully unconstrained free market economy. She describes plans to allow foreigners to extract wealth from Iraq, and the methods used to achieve those goals.

Also in 2004, Klein and her husband released a documentary film called The Take, which profiled a group of former employees of a bankrupt foundry in Argentina. The workers took over the closed plant and resumed production, operating as a collective. The first African screening was in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the South African city of Durban where the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement began.

In October 2005, Klein was ranked 11th in the The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll, a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals compiled by Prospect magazine [2] in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine. She was the highest ranked woman on the list. However, Prospect based the list and its rankings entirely on an Internet poll, and explicitly noted that the voters showed a heavy sampling bias toward young North Americans, and that the voting was dominated by active campaigning on the Internet by partisans for particular candidates, in some cases instigated by the candidates themselves. [3]

[edit] References

^ Date of birth [1]
^ Bonnie Klein movie: Not a love story
^ Web Archive: Nike's response to No Logo. March 8, 2000
^ Baghdad Year Zero

[edit] External links

Writings and Interviews

Positive writings about Klein

An Introduction to Naomi Klein's No Logo, a Flash animated movie
"Seattle to Baghdad" - A positive assessment of Klein's shift from analyzing 90's corporate culture to the War in Iraq, by Kim Phillips-Fein in n+1 magazine.

Criticism of Klein

Face Value: Why Naomi Klein needs to grow up, an opposing view by the Economist magazine

Persondata
NAME	Klein, Naomi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	journalist, author, activist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 5, 1970
PLACE OF BIRTH	Montreal, Quebec
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH