Town Hall Meeting

If you have some time, check this speech out, I think she represents the best of the future for the Left. She was asked by faculty to speak at the University of Chicago last week to counter the proposed $200 million “Milton Friedman Institute.” The speech is excellent, and directly relates the Milton Friedman ideas with what is happening to the economy today. You may have run across her before. Here are some really good excerpts:

His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don’t mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them.

…what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology.

Read the transcript here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/naomi_klein#
Or watch the video here. Her speech starts about 11 minutes into the program.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/6/stream

One of my biggest worries about Obama is that his economic policies will be as right wing as Bill Clintons. And the fact that Obama taught at the University of Chicago and has some “chicago boys” on his economic team is scary. But of course Obama is miles ahead of McCain on most issues, even economic ones, so what can we do?